I’d like to propose awarding a torrent’s totaltraffic as bonus points to the original uploader to incentivize higher quality and especially viral content. Torrent economies tend to reward “seedboxing” over posting new content. But when new uploads are snatched by a seedbox that takes over the download traffic the original uploader misses out on all but the initial upload credit. Qui-Gon Jinn summarized the problem best: “There’s always a bigger fish.” So long as there’s a faster seedbox, the incentive to post new content is weak.

If one has 1GB of rare content, but lacks the upload speeds to compete with a seedbox, they could upload their content here in exchange for 1GB of credit before a seedbox takes over. Or, they could keep their content private and trade it for more. Perhaps private trading sites exist because it’s more attractive to bring new content there than here. Meanwhile, it’s more attractive here to post 10GB of crap that’s shared only once than 1GB of quality content that is shared 100 times.

I’ll be the first to admit my naivete, and that I’m in no position to declare how the site should be run. But I think it’s a good idea. This could be run as an experiment: select one week and announce ahead of time that this bonus will apply to all uploads that week. Then judge if the quality of uploads improves.