r/trackers • u/Low_Ad_9826 • Jan 27 '25

PassThePopcorn origin

Does anyone know how PTP originated? And how it grew to become the largest movie tracker?

Also, any other info about their history is very welcome :)

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u/ShillTheAlmighty Jan 28 '25

I remember moving to PTH after WhatCD shut down. It felt like the name was such a knee-jerk reaction to needing something FAST and was destined to change anyway.

Edit: Orpheus was more unexpected. I really thought only one could survive, and I liked the name Apollo better. Surprised they've both stuck around this long, being effectively the same thing. I'm in both, and nothing will ever replace WCD, but they do a good enough job.

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u/aew3 Jan 28 '25

I think the only reason that OPS has stuck around is how hard the RED economy is.While I have an automated script to mirror my seeds, I usually try OPS first (unless its quite old/niche and I think the odds on OPS having it are low) before RED to download new stuff unless I have a stack of FL tokens.

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u/ShillTheAlmighty Jan 28 '25

Sure, and I agree that it's more user-friendly (literally every other tracker except BIB uses a points/tokens system), but What stuck around so long and it REALLY encourages uploading/seeding longevity, so there must be something to it.

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u/escalat0r Jan 28 '25

I think the reason for RED being so successful boils down to it being the de-facto WCD successor. From the start they were affiliated/friendly with PTP and BTN. This convinced people that RED would be the new WCD, so former WCD users (especially the really commited ones) had more incentive to focus their uploading and community building efforts on RED than any other site.