Isn’t a torrent just, like…directly sharing a file from your PC? What’s all this business about “seeding” and “leeching”?
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seeders are people who have a copy of the file and are sharing it, leechers are people who dont have a copy of the file and thus arent sharing it.
if a leecher downloads the whole file and sticks around, rather then leaving and turning off their torrent client, they become another seeder helping to share the file.
now imagine you got some [banger wallpapers](https://www.reddit.com/r/EarthPorn/comments/10bfgch/deep_in_the_green_kings_woods_bedfordshire_oc/) and each of your 5 friends wants a copy of your collection, but you got really slow internet and it’ll take ages to send a complete copy to each of them.
so you send 20% of your collection to each friend, and then they share their copy with each other, and with the 5 of them combined they get the whole thing.
thats basically how torrents work in groups of users.
much easier for the uploader, only needing to send 1 copy worth of data.
much quicker for the downloader, being able to get the file from multiple places at once.
additionally they can also pause and resume ***really really well***, so you can just turn off the computer and go to bed in the middle of things, and as long as the file is still available later you can continue like nothing happened.
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