alt Hacker NewsI'm not too lazy to join a private tracker, I'm too lazy to maintain the presence necessary to use one. You're really signing up to be a part of a community. Mostly that's enforced through ratios, but those ratios are often set in such a way that you have to be uploading, or you have to be optimising what you choose to share in a way that gets you to those ratios. If the content you want is popular enough you just can't build ratio on it.
I've found the best way to do private trackers is to seed everything you download, all the time. If you seed enough of the long tail of things, ratio becomes easier. This also helps people get into a show that peaked a few years ago (after most of the seeders have moved on), which can be harder on public trackers.