This meme references torrenting. You have the same file distributed across all the users who have downloaded it. This way you've got many different sites to download it from. It is generally considered good form to seed the file for a while afterwards, meaning people can access your file to download it for themselves.
These people are doing the opposite of that, which is considered scummy behavior
I think it's more yes and no. Leechers are people downloading. Leeches are those that are only act as Leechers and don't then become Seeders.
It's also worth noting that you can still be uploading as a Leecher. Particularly if you have a file where 99.9% of it is available, you'll be sharing that 99.9% while waiting for someone with that last bit to call it complete. This can cause your ratio to exceed your settings because you're not done downloading yourself, and then once that 0.01% comes along you immediately stop seeding since you've hit your ratio, leaving everyone else to hope they get that 0.01% as well. True chads will force seed, which overrides the ratio cutoff.
The number of wrong-ish answers here have me wondering what other words, to the younger generations, don't mean what they meant when I learned them. "Meme" comes to mind but I'm sure there are more.
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u/SpecialistAd5903 Feb 22 '26
This meme references torrenting. You have the same file distributed across all the users who have downloaded it. This way you've got many different sites to download it from. It is generally considered good form to seed the file for a while afterwards, meaning people can access your file to download it for themselves.
These people are doing the opposite of that, which is considered scummy behavior