Influences on Cooperation in BitTorrent Communities - 16 views
started by owen_davies on 23 Mar 12
started by owen_davies on 23 Mar 12
Start a New Topic » « Back to the Net 308/508 Internet Collaboration and Organisation S1 2012 group
The first article that I have looked at Influences on Cooperation in Bit Torrent Communities, is a 2005 study that looks at how co-operation takes place within the Bit Torrent communities. The study's description of a Bit Torrent is "Bit Torrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) file- distribution tool that employs a tit-for-tat incentive mechanism to reduce freeriding and increase user cooperation."
The study firstly makes note of how Bit Torrent peers will most likely reciprocate and upload and co-operate and share with other peers in the community if they too have uploaded recently.
Focusing on five different file-sharing communities, the study looks to gauge the level of co-operation in each, breaking them up and defining "three metrics for cooperation: freeriding, seeding and sharing ratios". Free riders being peers that are just downloading and not uploading after their download is complete, Seeding is a peer that is still connected to the torrent file after completing their download and the sharing ratio is the total amount uploaded divided by the total downloaded.
As the study explains, although unlike other P2P systems, Bit Torrents do have centralized components and while this may have drawbacks, such as a single point of failure, it allows for new functionality to boost user co-operation. Methods such as Sharing-ratio enforcement, which is implemented by some torrent websites where they are able to prevent access to new torrents and content to peers who do not upload to a certain sharing-ratio threshold. The other method being Broad-catching, which is the use of the Bit Torrent clients to automatically download files that are advertised through RSS feeds. This may help with cooperation as users may keep their torrents running longer as new content is being automatically downloaded.
The Bit Torrent communities in the study were etree, piratebay, torrentportal, easytree and btefnet, each with a differing number of torrents and peers. Results of the study showed that "Bit Torrent communities supports the claim that the incentives for cooperation employed by the Bit Torrent protocol do succeed in discouraging freeriding." It was also found that "torrents with a large number of seeders, the Bit Torrent tit-for-tat mechanism may not succeed in producing a disincentive for freeriding: in such torrents, freeriders may actually experience faster download times than co- operating peers."
So in a sense the overall article shows that there is definitely a Bit Torrent community that is present. However, it seems that within the community there are some users who are not cooperating or collaborating information with others but instead are free riding, which seems to be ruining (perhaps a bit strong) the experience for other community members.