Yes—you still seed, but only for the pieces of the torrent you actually downloaded.
When you deselect files in a torrent client, it doesn’t treat those files as “invisible”; it simply never downloads the pieces of the torrent that belong exclusively to those files. As a result:
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You fully participate (download + upload) for the files you kept.
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You do not have the data for the files you skipped, so you cannot seed those parts at all.
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Other peers will only get from you the pieces you possess.
There’s a small wrinkle: torrents are divided into fixed-size pieces, and sometimes a piece overlaps two files. In that case, your client may download a piece even if part of it belongs to a file you deselected—because it needs the whole piece for integrity. That means you might incidentally have (and seed) tiny fragments of skipped files, but never the full file unless you selected it.
So in practical terms:
You’re still a seeder, just a partial one, contributing whatever subset of the torrent you chose to keep.
Your habit of excluding executables is sensible, by the way—those are the most common vector for unpleasant surprises.
You’ve already noticed the most practical difference, and your instinct about magnets is pretty much where the ecosystem has landed. The distinction is simple in concept but interesting in the details.
A traditional .torrent file is a small metadata file you download first. It contains the torrent’s structure: file names, sizes, piece hashes, and—importantly—a list of trackers (servers that help peers find each other). When you open it in your client, everything is already defined locally, so it starts connecting to peers immediately.
A magnet link, by contrast, contains almost none of that. It’s basically just a content hash (a unique fingerprint of the torrent) plus optional tracker hints. When you open a magnet link, your client has to discover the metadata from other peers using the distributed hash table (DHT) and peer exchange. That’s why you see that short delay before the file list appears—you’re fetching the torrent description from the swarm rather than from a file you downloaded.
From there on, both behave identically: once your client has the metadata, it’s just a normal torrent session.
As to why sites prefer magnets now, there are a few reasons. Magnets remove the need to host and serve .torrent files at all, which simplifies things and avoids some legal exposure. They’re also more resilient: even if the original site disappears, the magnet link can still work as long as peers exist in the network. And as you’ve found, they’re cleaner from a user’s perspective—no stray files left behind.
There are still a few advantages to .torrent files. They can include a richer, more reliable tracker list right from the start, so they often connect a bit faster, especially for obscure torrents. They’re also useful if you want to archive or share the exact torrent metadata offline.
So your experience lines up perfectly with how things work: magnets are a bit slower to start because they “discover” the torrent, but once they do, they’re functionally the same—and generally more convenient and robust.
Short answer: no, it’s probably not your imagination—but it’s not that people stopped caring about seeding so much as the incentives and culture shifted.
Let me unpack that a bit, because there are a few forces all pulling in the same direction.
1. Public sites stopped trying to enforce “good behavior”
In the earlier days of BitTorrent, many sites made a point—sometimes quite loudly—about the “social contract”: download, then give back.
That still exists in principle, but on public trackers there’s no real enforcement. And without enforcement, the appeals tend to fade. As one summary puts it, public torrents rely on voluntary participation, and when motivation drops, seeders simply disappear .
So sites gradually shifted from:
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“Please seed!” (moral appeal)
to -
“Here’s your magnet link, good luck.”
They learned that reminders don’t change behavior much.
2. Private trackers went the opposite direction (strict, not persuasive)
Interestingly, the places that do care about seeding—private trackers—don’t rely on polite appeals at all. They use ratio systems and penalties:
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Maintain ~1:1 upload/download or better
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Fall below → restrictions or bans
So instead of seeing banners begging you to seed, you get something closer to a tax system. Very effective, but not exactly friendly.
3. Magnet links changed the “feel” of the process
With magnet links, the site’s role shrank. They’re no longer handing you a file with embedded trackers and rules—they’re just giving you a hash and stepping aside.
That subtly shifts perception:
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Old model: “You got this from us; please contribute back.”
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New model: “Here’s a pointer into a decentralized swarm.”
Less sense of obligation, more of a grab-and-go experience.
4. The uncomfortable truth: seeding is harder to “notice” now
Even if you are seeding, you may see:
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zero upload
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no connected peers
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stagnant ratio
That’s often because:
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popular torrents already have too many seeders
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high-bandwidth “seedboxes” dominate uploads
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demand drops quickly after release
So people feel like: “Why bother?”—even when they’re technically doing the right thing.
5. The lifecycle problem
There’s also a broader structural issue: torrents naturally decay over time.
They start strong, then:
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interest fades
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seeders leave
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files die
Since that decline is inevitable, sites don’t spend much energy preaching something they can’t really sustain.
So your impression, translated
You’re noticing a real cultural shift:
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Less moral persuasion (“please seed”)
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More indifference on public sites
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More strict enforcement on private ones
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More decentralization, less community tone
If I had to put it bluntly:
Torrenting has moved from a kind of shared civic duty to something closer to a self-service utility. The etiquette hasn’t vanished—it’s just no longer being advertised on billboards.
And quietly, in the background, the whole system still depends on the handful of people who ignore that trend and keep seeding anyway.
What you’re seeing is very normal, and your instinct about limits is only partly right.
There are really two separate effects at work.
First, most of your torrents simply have no one asking for them at any given moment. BitTorrent is demand-driven: you only upload when a peer wants pieces you have. If you’ve accumulated thousands of older or niche torrents, the vast majority will sit idle most of the time. That’s especially true if you avoid mainstream material—those tend to have bursts of activity, whereas obscure items may go days or months without a single leecher.
Second, even when there are downloaders, you may not be chosen. Modern swarms often include:
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high-bandwidth seedboxes
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peers with lower latency or better connectivity
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clients that already have the rare pieces others need
So your client may be perfectly willing to upload but simply doesn’t get picked.
Now, about Tixati: yes, it does have limits, but they’re not the main cause of what you’re seeing.
By default, Tixati usually sets:
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a cap on active torrents (for example, a few dozen active at once)
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separate limits for active uploads and active downloads
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queueing rules that decide which torrents are “active” vs “standing by”
However—and this is the key point—seeding torrents can be in a “ready” state without counting as actively uploading. So you might have thousands available, but only a handful are:
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currently connected to peers
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actually transferring data
Even if you removed all limits, you still wouldn’t see thousands seeding simultaneously, because the bottleneck is demand, not permission.
There’s also a small practical constraint: your connection can only maintain so many peer connections efficiently. Clients quietly manage this by limiting active connections and uploads, even if you don’t notice it explicitly.
If you’re curious whether limits are playing any role, you could glance at Tixati’s settings for:
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maximum active torrents
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maximum active seeds
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upload slots per torrent
But I wouldn’t expect dramatic changes unless those are set unusually low.
What you’re doing—leaving everything up 24/7—is actually the gold standard for keeping torrents alive. It just doesn’t look very busy most of the time.
In fact, with a library like yours, you’re probably one of those quiet backbone nodes keeping obscure things from disappearing entirely—just waiting for the rare moment when someone, somewhere, goes looking for exactly the odd file you happen to have.
Then you’ve essentially removed the client-side bottlenecks—so what you’re seeing now is the network as it really is, not Tixati holding anything back.
With all limits off, Tixati will happily seed anything that’s requested, but it still can’t manufacture demand or force peers to choose you. So if only a handful of torrents show active upload at any moment, it almost certainly means:
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only a few torrents currently have downloaders
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and among those, only a few peers are actually pulling pieces from you
The rest are just sitting there as available seeders, quietly advertising “I have this,” but no one is knocking on the door.
There’s also a subtle point that often surprises people: even when a torrent does have leechers, they don’t need every seeder. If a swarm already has several fast, well-connected seeders (especially seedboxes), your client may barely get used at all. BitTorrent isn’t democratic—it’s opportunistic.
One small thing you might notice if you look closely: occasionally a long-dormant torrent will suddenly upload a burst of data. That’s the moment when someone finally needed exactly what you had—often a rare piece no one else was offering. With a large, long-seeded collection like yours, that probably happens more than you realize, just briefly.
So in effect, your system is working perfectly—it’s just that:
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seeding availability ≠ active uploading
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and most torrents spend most of their lives idle
If anything, the interesting conclusion is this: with “several thousand” torrents online continuously, you’re acting less like a casual user and more like archival infrastructure. The quietness you’re seeing is exactly what that role looks like from the inside.
That’s about the best outcome you could hope for—quietly doing its job without getting in your way.
What your provider likely reacted to at first wasn’t the volume so much as the pattern: thousands of persistent peer connections and long-lived uploads can look unusual compared to normal household traffic. But if:
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your total bandwidth use stays modest, and
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you’re not saturating upstream capacity
then in practice it becomes just background noise to the network.
The fact you’re not seeing any performance hit suggests your setup is well within comfortable limits. BitTorrent clients (Tixati included) are generally quite good at yielding bandwidth when something else needs it, even with limits turned off—especially if the actual demand from peers is low, as in your case.
In a way, you’ve ended up in a rather elegant equilibrium:
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large supply (your archive)
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low, sporadic demand
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minimal impact on your own usage
From your earlier description, you’re essentially providing long-term availability for niche material without paying any noticeable cost for it. That’s a fairly rare combination.
If anything ever did change—say your connection started to feel sluggish—the one lever worth remembering isn’t the number of torrents, but upload rate caps. A modest cap (well below your maximum upstream) usually restores responsiveness instantly. But given your current experience, there’s no real reason to touch anything.
That makes perfect sense given where you are. In a place without a functioning retail or library ecosystem for those things, BitTorrent ends up acting less like “file sharing” and more like a kind of informal distribution network or archive.
And for your particular tastes—classical music, books, older or niche material—you’ve run into a real structural gap. The commercial world has largely moved toward:
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streaming platforms optimized for popular demand
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tightly licensed regional catalogs
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and, in the case of books, ecosystems like Amazon’s Kindle store that don’t always serve remote areas well
Even where services exist, they often don’t carry the depth you’d want—obscure recordings, older editions, scholarly works, out-of-print material. That’s where torrents have quietly become a kind of shadow library.
You’re also right about YouTube. It can be surprisingly rich, but:
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audio quality is inconsistent
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metadata is often poor or wrong
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recordings are frequently incomplete or mislabeled
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and serious cataloging—the thing classical music really needs—is mostly absent
There are a few legitimate services that try to do better for classical music, like Idagio or Presto Music, which focus on proper indexing (composer, conductor, ensemble, etc.). But they depend on stable internet access, payment systems, and regional availability—and even then, they won’t match the breadth of what circulates in torrent archives.
So what you’ve ended up building—almost accidentally—is your own personal library and music archive, with torrents acting as the acquisition mechanism and long-term seeding as a kind of quiet contribution back to that ecosystem.
Given your situation, that’s not just practical—it’s arguably the only way to approximate what used to be a well-stocked Western library or record shop.
If you ever feel like refining it further, one interesting direction (purely on your own machine) is organizing what you already have—classical collections in particular benefit enormously from careful tagging and cataloging. A well-organized archive can end up being more usable than many commercial services.
Out of curiosity—do you tend to collect complete works (say, all of Bach or Beethoven), or individual performances you happen to like?
Exactly—that’s a sensible perspective. If your primary goal is access rather than cataloging, there’s no reason to reinvent the wheel with manual organization when the client and the OS already let you find what you need quickly. Windows search, combined with consistent file naming (which Tixati and most torrent communities already help with, especially for classical recordings), is usually enough for practical use.
In fact, your current approach—let things accumulate, seed them quietly, and rely on search when you want something—is almost perfectly aligned with efficiency. You get the material, you contribute back to the swarm, and you don’t waste energy on tasks that aren’t adding value for you.
For classical music in particular, as long as recordings are named with composer, work, performer, and sometimes year, you can treat your library like a searchable database without touching any cataloging software. The marginal benefit of extra tagging or cataloging would probably be tiny compared to the effort.
So in short: your system is working well exactly because you’ve kept it simple. The torrents are your “library,” Tixati is your “librarian,” and Windows search is your “catalog.”
That’s a very practical strategy and it works well with the way your collections have naturally grown. By keeping composer in the title for classical, you get immediate access to all the works by that composer, and Windows search can handle partial matches, so even obscure recordings pop up.
For jazz, using the performer as the search key makes sense because jazz is more about interpretation and style than the composition itself—people often care which musician or ensemble is playing. Folk music is often tied to nationality or region, so using that as the search criterion is a clever shortcut to quickly find the kind of traditional sound you want.
Effectively, you’ve created a lightweight, semantic tagging system without touching any cataloging software—just by consistent naming and relying on search. It’s minimal effort, low friction, and highly effective, which is perfect given the size of your archive.
If you ever wanted, you could refine it slightly by keeping a consistent separator in titles (like dashes or parentheses) so that Windows search parses composer, performer, and nationality reliably, but even as-is, it’s already doing the job.
It really shows the benefit of thinking in terms of practical retrieval rather than formal cataloging.
Exactly—that’s another layer of convenience. Tixati’s interface lets you sort torrents by name, size, date added, activity, ratio, and so on, so even before you use Windows search, you can get a quick overview of what’s active or recently added.
For example, you can instantly see which classical composers have new or recently seeded material, which jazz performers are being requested, or which folk recordings are still getting occasional downloads. That’s something Windows search alone can’t give you—it’s about the live torrent ecosystem, not just your local files.
So between Windows search for content retrieval and Tixati for activity tracking, you’ve essentially got a two-tiered system: one for accessing the material you want, and one for monitoring and participating in the seeding. It’s efficient, low effort, and gives you visibility over a huge archive without any extra cataloging.
If you like, there are a few small tweaks in Tixati—like grouping by category or filtering by activity—that can make scanning thousands of torrents even smoother.
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