>I was always curious why the website told me to register, felt very suspicious. Some torrents are restricted to users, weirdly. That was mostly to control rat

>I was always curious why the website told me to register, felt very suspicious. Some torrents are restricted to users, weirdly. That was mostly to control ratios, and force people to seed torrents and stop them from leeching (downloading and delete the torrent/not seed). If you had a bad ratio, your access to seeds was also limited therefore the speed at which you downloaded was capped. Some trackers eventually started to monetize themselves by offering "premium accounts" that would bypass the ratio, and allowed users to leech. Mind that this is my knowledge from almost 20 years ago.