I too agree with the OP, there is little need for the elitist attitude so prevalent in the BT community.
I think too many BT users and site admins/owners are perhaps a little too envious of the scene and try a bit too hard to mirror them, which includes the elitist attitude.
The scene is legitimately exclusionary as there is a real concern for security because as a group they are the largest copyright offenders out there and they do engage in other unlawful activities as well (hacking private servers, etc). Whereas, many of the "top" private BT sites contribute little more than hosting for torrent files that point your computer to scene created material and offer little if any original content of their own. And, maintaining an anonymously owned site is much easier than maintaining an anonymous group, as a site will typically have only one owner. Anonymity is very easy to achieve when running a site utilizing private shells and numbered accounts, which are both cheap and easy to setup. However, there can be a real security concern once the user base reaches the size of, say, Oink or Demonoid or TPB.
And, Quality control is definitely not an excuse for this elitist attitude as most/all of their material is scene created in the first place.
So, perhaps this elitist attitude is akin to penis envy, as many of these private BT sites want so bad to be a part of the scene, but really do little more than leech from the scene. Now there's an irony for you....sites that actively deride or condemn leeching, leeching themselves to survive.
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