May 03, 2009 by sharky
ShareA.org is conducting an impartial independent research survey of filesharing communities (torrent trackers in particular). The purpose of the project is to gather data pertaining to torrent usage, demographics, sociological information and other trends of BitTorrent users; in relation to both public & private trackers. You can find the survey at http://en.sharea.org (there’s no advertising, it’s private & anonymous, and not connected to any organization) and at just 20 questions - very easy to complete.
Our take on the survey:
All-in-all, the survey has been carefully crafted to reflect the "majority" of BitTorrent users, and is successful to allow for an unbiased opinion of both public & private tracker usage. Questions are not specific to actual trackers (sites), but be prepared to answer how many trackers you’re a member of.
Expect to answer some demographical & sociological questions (your age, occupation, political leaning, and an estimate of your financial situation). Your views on copyright laws, illegal downloading & fear of prosecution are also inquired, and whether or not you take precautions to protect yourself online. Having said that, the survey doesn’t pigeonhole illegality as the nature of BitTorrent in general - and allows for a more licit opinion of the protocol.
More specific inquiries pertain to private vs. public tracker preference and your opinion of whether or not you would donate money to (or support) a tracker, as well as if you’ve ever created a .torrent file (however; uploading it - publicly or privately or not at all - is not suggested).
Seedbox usage is not directly implied, although your download speed is also asked; however it’s not discernible to either ISP or seedbox downloading (both of which are often related to demographics, sociology & geographical location in many cases). There’s also a question that asks about tracker ratio - which could be construed as somewhat vague, mostly since users of private trackers likely have more than one favorite with various ratios on each. Our suggestion would be to try to answer this as a general or global average ratio as intended to keep on all trackers.
In any event this questionnaire is unobtrusive, thorough, and unbiased; yet strives to define and explore our growing subculture of filesharers & BitTorrent users. We highly recommend you take the survey. If concerned about privacy - use a web proxy or TOR.
Survey Results:
Results of the research project will be available on their website. Preliminary results can be found below (although these are not ‘live updating’ statistics).
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