About those weird accounts sharing 50 folders and 1000 files..
I just popped in for my yearly check-in at r/Soulseek. Saw a few posts about users concerned about leechers with 50 shared folders, 1000 shared files -- oh!
So, a few years ago, I made a tool called slsk-batchdl (later sldl, now sockseek). Its original purpose was simply to fetch my Spotify playlist, have it find the tracks on Soulseek, prefer the right formats and bitrates, and do a one-time batch download. It grew considerably from there. I still use it myself, mainly for downloading albums and managing my wishlist, because its ranking and filtering is more useful to me than looking through a pile of search results.
This was never a project I made because I had nothing to share. I already had a substantial library shared and was regularly online before I started it. My assumption was that users would share through a normal client on a separate account, as the documentation urges them to do. I also (perhaps optimistically) thought that requiring a CLI would provide enough friction to filter out most of the "download Spotify now" teenagers.
The 50 folders / 1000 files thing came later. The tool was downloader-only, so its own share count was always zero, even when its user might be sharing a large collection through another client and account. Since some users automatically ban accounts reporting zero shares, I added hardcoded share counts as a workaround. My reasoning was essentially that users should not be punished for the inability to use the same account in two clients. It was not intended as a leeching feature. I thought that the worst that could happen was for aggressive auto-banners to be unable to do their thing, plus maybe some minor confusion from other genuine users. And under the assumption of good faith from users of slsk-batchdl, I think that would indeed be all.
Then a while later, mathiascode (core developer of Nicotine+) got in touch, asking me to remove these fake file counts. Formal reasons were given in the github issue, though no real "moral" reasons, at least as far as I could see. jpdillingham (developer of Soulseek.NET and slskd) also chimed in, calling it "bad faith". I wasn't too keen on burning bridges with the developer of the Soulseek library my project was literally built on, Plus, if those two told me it was bad, maybe it really was!
In any case, the hardcoded counts have since been removed. The current version defaults to zero shared files and folders. I won't pretend this fully solves the potential problem of rude leechers abusing this tool, and actual file sharing is not implemented yet, so the documentation still asks users to share through a separate regular client.
I hope that clears up these "suspicious" share counts you might have encountered. I think there is a decent chance these users had separate accounts with shared files, but I admit there is no way to prove that right now. Native sharing is part of where the project is heading. In fact, I hope to turn it into a full alternative client (with a GUI) soon, which is also why the project was renamed.