It's fairly uncontroversial that the success of decentralized protocols can promote - and sometimes, even rely upon - centralized points of engagement.

But your experiences sound like what goes on in the public trackers. It's reasonable that folks who go to Pirate Bay to get their TV shows are not going to be as engaged as those who go to TVV, MS, or MTV. There's also the security risks of letting untrusted users upload files that may get consumed by thousands of people in the first hour.

In private trackers, I have often found that uploading is encouraged, going so far as to provide very detailed guides in their wikis showing how to rip the media, prepare the torrent, and upload it to the tracker. If a better quality version can be uploaded to trump the previous version, that is also encouraged. Learning, quality, and appreciation are cornerstones of the private tracker ecosystem, in my experience.

> earlier people ripped their own CDs, DVDs, magazine scans, digitized their VHS, recorded shows with their TV card etc. and shared these files.

For that, you want Direct Connect [0]. As a one sentence pitch: IRC for file sharing ;)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Connect_(protocol)

Or just share magnet links over IRC….

There's still an XDCC warez scene, too. Most of the servers are hacked computers, though, and some people have ethical issues with that.

There must be 1000 Pirate Bay mirrors. Many of which served malware or scams on their web properties through ad networks, but faithfully reproduced the torrent database. It was centralization in precisely the way your post doesn't suggest: nothing was irrevocably lost but one wished for a trusted source with curated links to content.

Well, no. If The Pirate Bay shuts down, you still have the hashes and the files are invariably somewhere else too. That, and thousands upon thousands of backups of their database made by thousands of different people.

There are reencodes, translations and unofficial batches.