(I've made this joke already but) You wouldn't pirate a pirate!

This is a reason why I'm not on any private tracker. When there are 200 seeds all with better connection than me, then my ratio isn't going anywhere. It creates this weird dynamic where you're sometimes wishing people would stop seeding stuff; and that is clearly counter-productive.

So by chance I was in university and invited into what by my roommate. I literally bought more internet bandwidth from my uni to handle an early freeleech event where I got to mega game the system (By accident! I didn't really know what I was doing. And good thing it was a private tracker because I was on a bare connection. I didn't know what A VPN was at that time, much less how to hide my identity online).

I thought my ratio was totally unfair so I never really abused it, but that's kinda the problem. Only by chance I had like a 500 ratio, whereas someone like you had no chance ever to catch up to the earlier established players. Even though I wasn't a victim of the ratio, the concept of your story is just another reason why I dislike private trackers.

That said, the best thing about what.cd was just how well organized and categorized it was. Library of Alexandria style shit, now lost to us. Plus the forums with some real music-heads were great, too, and you could really expand your music horizons by talking with those people. I liked that it was NOT a Reddit-style forum, so when something new dropped everyone had a say. Upvotes didn't influence that kind of conversation. At any rate, I stopped pirating music so much maybe beginning in 2013 or 2014, but every time I look now the uploads are either 320kbps (overkill bitrate, garbage ancient codec) or FLAC (nice for archiving, but not what I want). So I end up DLing FLACs and then converting them into 128kbps Opus. It works, but my music horizons aren't broadened without that what community. I guess all I mean is I don't miss the private nature of what, but I do miss the community.

I've been a newbie on a bunch of private trackers, and there's almost always some way to get ratio, you just need to figure out that site's method, and be patient in not-downloading-everything until you can afford it.

For example, like many sites, what.cd generally had freeleeches around the site birthday and the winter holidays: nothing you downloaded counted against you, and whatever you uploaded got added to your account. They also often had artist freeleeches when an artist died; if What was around today, the site would be going wild with Jimmy Buffett traffic. Other sites have bonus points, where you get points for seeding even if no one downloads from you; and then you turn in your points for upload credit. Still other places, you can cross-seed content to get past the newbie ratio restrictions, then move on from there.

It is incredibly frustrating to be new on a site that has a whole bunch of content that you want, but if you're patient or you figure out how the site does things, you can get a lot out of them.

What.cd was one of the hardest to seed well on, unfortunately.

although I've account on some private trackers but I never use them just for these reasons you've mentioned their economy doesn't treat all equally.

Sadly it's the only way old obscure stuff survives