Influences on Cooperation in BitTorrent Communities. - 10 views
started by Chin Sing Wong on 25 Mar 12
started by Chin Sing Wong on 25 Mar 12
Start a New Topic » « Back to the Net 308/508 Internet Collaboration and Organisation S1 2012 group
This article collects the data of BitTorrent data cross multiple file-sharing communities and analyse the factors that affects users' cooperative behaviors. Three terms are important in this analysis article that is freeriding, seeding and sharing ratio. Freeriding refers to the behavior that the user that download without contributing at all, which means not uploading at all. The idea of seeding is a seeder that has finished their downloading but still connected to the torrent upload for the other peers. The definition of sharing ration is the total amount of data the peer has uploaded, divided by the total amount downloaded. The mention of sharing ratio is related to the two ideas above: freerider means zero sharing ratio and a seeder uploading content will thereby increase its sharing ratio.
The later stage of this paper collects data from two BitTorrent communities to measure the correlation between the peer who download in the torrent and the seeding ratio in torrent. Results show as the freeriders and other low-sharing peers are much rarer than freeriders are in other P2P communities. Besides, the seeding ratio is higher in torrents with small file sizes and, at all but one of the sites, is higher in younger torrents. At the two sites where we are able to rank torrents according to their sharing ratios, torrent rank is positively correlated with seeding ratio and with the number of peers in the torrent. In addition, authors believe that social and economic characteristics play a role in determining the amount of cooperation as well.
This paper is useful for my finding as it commentate how BitTorrent community working and the relationship between providers and receivers. However, some of the peers might be seem as freeriders.
Another similarity between these two articles is the importance they place on ensuring a high level of cooperation in order to achieve maximum collaboration (Reagle Jr, 2011, para. 103; Andrade et al., 2005, pp. 111-115). For example, Andrade et al.'s article describes how there is a minimum sharing ratio amongst some BitTorrent communities - which restricts those who are freeriders from downloading content - and how this strategy works in ensuring cooperation and reducing freeriding (Andrade et al., 2005, pp. 112-115). ). While Reagle Jr argues that good faith and a neutral point of view are the key to positive collaboration within Wikipedia (Reagle Jr, 2011, para. 103).
While Influence on Cooperation in BitTorrent Communities is reasonably old, having been published in 2005, I think the findings are still relevant to today. I think this resource is valuable for those studying BitTorrent specifically, or anyone looking at comparing the collaborative culture between different online communities in general.
References
Andrade, N., Mowbray, M., Lima, A., Wagner, G., & Ripeanu, M. (2005). Influences on Cooperation in BitTorrent Communities. In Proceedings of the 2005 ACM SIGCOMM Workshop on Economics of Peer-to-Peer Systems (pp. 111 - 115) New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery. Retrieved from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1080198&bnc=1
Reagle Jr, J.M. (2011). Good Faith Collaboration. In Good Faith Collaboration: Culture of Wikipedia (Online Edition, Chapter 3). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Retrieved from http://reagle.org/joseph/2010/gfc/chapter-3.html