RARBG

The Golden Age of Porn

All things considered it is more than fair to say that we live in the golden age of porn. Never before has access to millions of pornographic videos and images been easier than it is today. When the mood strikes, all one has to do is click a couple buttons and, boom, a virtually endless supply of hot adult entertainment appears, almost as if by magic.

It is almost impossible to imagine going back to the dark ages, when pornographic content required actual work (and money) to access. And it was not even that long ago. Only about 20 years ago, if you wanted to get your hands on some high-quality smut, you had to jump through a number of hoops that are nearly inconceivable today. First, you had to put clothes on. Then, you had to leave your house (regardless of what the weather would be like). Next, you had to actually get in your car and drive to the nearest adult store (pity the fool who didn’t live in a city that had one within a reasonable distance). And, finally, you had to physically go into the store, pick out a title, and pay for it (sometimes at top dollar), only to get back into your car and work against the elements and unforgiving traffic once more before finally putting the video on your tv and enjoying yourself.

That is a lot of work! At least when you compare it to the process one goes through today of merely putting a URL into a web browser, clicking enter, and sitting back for hours of free adult entertainment, instantly. You can, of course, still choose to purchase physical copies of adult DVDs if you so desire, but even if that is the route you choose, you still don’t have to even leave the house to receive them. Just wait a day or two and, voila, your porn will be at your doorstep.

But perhaps the greatest advent of the internet when it comes to accessing porn is the amount of free porn that is now available. Not only do you not have to leave the house, but you do not have to spend a dime either. Whether you choose to stream your porn through one of the many free porn tubes, porn aggregators, or porn search engines out there to choose from, or you go with the tried and true method of peer to peer file sharing, there is certainly no shortage of free porn ready to be enjoyed in a matter of minutes.

Porn tubes, aggregators, and search engines are all great sources for browsing and discovering new porn and actresses, but they are not without their shortcomings. For one thing, most of these sites are usually riddled in advertisements that make the pornographic viewing experience much less enjoyable than it needs to be. Secondly, the majority of the videos you will find on sites such as these are excerpts … just clips of full-length scenes offered by professional porn studios as a teaser of sorts, meant to hook you into signing up for their sites in order to access the fill videos. Which is why many free porn enthusiasts prefer to go the torrenting route when it comes time to find some new smut.

What is Torrenting?

Torrenting, for those of you who are less familiar, is a type of peer to peer file sharing that is similar to (but essentially quite different from) older P2P programs like Napster, Bear Share, or Kazaa of the early aughts and late 90s. The idea is basically the same, though, in that numerous people from all over the world all share and download files amongst one another, sort of a communal means of file sharing.

The ways in which torrenting differs from these earlier forms of file sharing, however, are more technical in nature. In the old days, on, say, Napster, one person would have a file and offer it up for download by another. That second person, then, the downloader, would download the file directly from the uploader, in a one to one exchange. The uploader offered the file, in full, and the downloader downloaded it, all at once, closer to a standard download.

With torrenting, though, the system is further crowdsourced. Instead of one person simply giving you a whole file to download, numerous people share the burden. When you download your file from a torrenting site, such as The Pirate Bay or RARBG, you are not downloading the full file in one go. Instead, you are downloading “bits” of that file from multiple sources, each user giving you a different piece of the puzzle at a given time.

This is how torrenting has managed to stay afloat for so long … it exists in a sort of legal gray area as far as copywrite laws are concerned, seeing as no one user is directly pirating content in full. By the end of the download, though, your puzzle is complete, and all these pieces, these “bits” come together to make up the video in full. Then, all you have to do is sit back and enjoy.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

As is the case with any sort of site, though, not all torrenting sites are created equal. In fact, the best torrenting sites depend entirely on the most active communities of “seeders,” or the people who offer the files and “leechers,” the downloaders. The better the torrent site, the more seeders each file has. The trick is to find a site that has as many files as possible with more seeders than leechers. If leechers outweigh seeders, your download speeds will freeze up, and your video may not be able to be downloaded at all.

Which brings us to RARBG – one of the most popular torrenting sites on the web (after The Pirate Bay and 1337x, that is). There are some perks that RARBG offers, though, that these other sites do not, particularly when it comes to downloading porn. For one thing, when you conduct a search, each file that appears comes complete with a thumbnail preview, which materializes for you when you hover your cursor over the link. This could potentially save a lot of wasted time spent clicking through, file to file, and trying to hunt down screenshots before committing to a download. Plus, RARBG offers screenshots of the video directly on the video’s page, whereas TPB and 1337x rely on users linking to sometimes sketchy image hosting sites.

Really, the site design of RARBG is pretty superior – at least as far as torrent sites are concerned. These sites are not exactly known for stellar site design, though, so don’t expect anything too aesthetically stunning or streamlined. Still, though, on the whole, RARBG simply looks better, slightly more professional and easier to navigate than a lot of the other torrenting sites out there. For instance, there are icons that feature actual movie covers at the top of the site’s pages, making it feel less like a shady activity and more like a digital trip to the video store.

But let’s get into the meat and potatoes of this site, shall we? Let’s take a look at how accessible the files are and how active the RARBG community is. Well, as is the case with almost every torrent site, newer files are bound to have less seeders and leechers. But this is to be expected. That’s just the nature of torrenting. It is going to take a few days from upload to download solvency. The file has to catch on among the community. In other words, people have to download it in order for it to be seeded. So, the first page or two of XXX torrents on this site, the newest files, are going to be pretty hard to access. Fear not, though, in a day or two, they should open up.

That being said, though, it does not seem as if the ratios of seeders to leechers are all too great in general on this site. There are plenty of people trying to download videos, but not that many willing to seed. And that is rather unfortunate, because the quality of the titles and the quantity of videos on RARBG are both top-notch. If only the community was a touch more selfless and willing to seed more often, this could be one of the best porn torrent sites on the web.

All in all, this site has a great deal of potential. Pornsites.com’s advice to RARBG? Maybe make the site invite only for a few months, build up a solid base of active users who are willing to seed, and then open it back up to the general public. Happy pirating, folks!