system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Can someone explain how a torrent works?
gpt
You want a copy of a book you think you'll like. Some friends offer to photocopy pages from their own copy of that book. But that takes a long time to do for an entire book, so they split up the job.

Bob photocopies chapter 1.

Jim takes chapter 2

Anne takes chapter 3

Lauren takes chapter 4

Chris offers to bind all the chapters together.


This is good because one person making a big photocopy of the book by themself could get stuck, or their copier could break, and now you're waiting longer for the whole thing. Using the above example, if Bob gets hung up on copying chapter 1, the other chapters are still going to get done, and then maybe one of them can help Bob out.

To bring it all home, the book is the software, the friends are the people you download from on the torrent, and the advantage is the same sort of thing - if you download a big file from one server, and that server gets "stuck," then you're stuck too. But on a torrent, if one of the many download locations gets "stuck" you're still going to get your file almost as fast.