“Somebody on one of the private trackers put out this call and said, I want this story. And anybody who uploads it gets a lot of upload credit for it. At some point the pool that you could gain by being the first uploader was like six terabytes of credit… Somebody actually found a copy on eBay, bought it, scanned it, uploaded it, and suddenly it spread everywhere. And the irony is they never were able to get that credit, because it got so popular so quickly that the tracker admins actually shut it down.”
The Vergecast · Tech Strategy & Big Tech · November 2026
Context
Roettgers tells a story from his reporting on private torrent trackers: an unpublished J.D. Salinger story that existed only in a university library got a bounty paid in upload credit, and spread too fast for anyone to collect it.
Transcript
…users. And so then it's hard to get into there. Or like maybe they only open their doors like once a year or something like that. So some of those, like some people I talked to were like, I still haven't been able to get access to that. I've been doing this for two years or something like that. And
…you encountered a bunch of people on adventures to do this very thing about like, how do I contribute something to this tracker that is not already here? And in doing so, raise my standard. Like this is a big part of these communities, right? They're actually hunting for the stuff in the trackers.
And it's almost a side effect of it then for that Rolex club. Somehow that Rolex becomes also sort of a repository or library for anybody who studies Rolexes, right? Totally. So you could go back and like, if you really want to have a good take at what's popular in the Rolex world, that's probably the best place to go to. And in a similar way, these private torrent trackers are also becoming these repositories of culture or repositories of movies and TV shows and whatnot. And some of that is actually purposefully fostered by them. So there's these things where people ask for certain things to be uploaded and then people can contribute credits to it. Oh,
yeah, wait. Can you tell the J.D. Salinger story? This is one of my favorite anecdotes that you found in your reporting. Can you explain that one?
That one has been reported before because it was a couple of years, a bunch of years ago. But J.D. Salinger, reclusive author, didn't publish anything for decades before the end of his life. And there had always been this one story that people were really interested in, The Ocean Full of Boarding…
very J.D. Salinger title.
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