Originally Posted by paglaghora

Just want to make a few points. Some are already raised by others.
These are the few hurdles to raising one's ratio as I experienced.
1. Most popular DSL/Cable plan has much lower upload bandwidth (half or less) compared to download speed. So one has to wait quite a long time to
be at 1:1. This would be ok if it was just that.
2. In most cases, seeding opportunities are available only with the new releases. This creates a competition and hence further slows down or stops uploading altogether for some of the seeders, especially when Seeders > Leechers. I am not sure how bit torrent manages the uploading from many seeders, but I am sure it favors the ones with higher upload bandwidth, this further puts quite a few people with not so fast upload speed at disadvantage compared to the ones who already have good ratio due to better ISP.
3. Trying to seed older stuff doesn't work either. Unless there are people waiting to download, one cannot seed continuously given the huge number of files. This also depends on other factors as to how old the file is and whether one has it in his/her possession.
4. That leaves only one other viable way to raise ratio, which is to keep releasing new stuff. This is not always possible for known reasons such as availability and time it takes to convert videos and release new torrents.
Besides, not everyone lives in Jackson Heights and has a cousin with a Bengali video store. If people are to release everything they have regardless of good or bad just to raise ratio, the quality of average torrents will suffer greatly as was seen lately.
In my opinion, Bit-Torrent is a great platform to share many things. Given the fact that everyone lives in a unique situation, coercive measures to force everyone to follow a certain rule will work against the growth and robustness of the site and many people will turn away and move to other sites which are less rigid. As you can see seeding and leeching are now significantly down from what it used to be. Time limit placed on leeching for low ratio was a much better approach in my view to encourage seeding. Most releases were well-seeded and ban was not at all needed. Just my two cents...