- Joined
- Jun 16, 2019
- Messages
- 1
Hm. I guess that's what happens when people let themselves entangle in moral dilemmas based on flawed premises.
I believe it's too late now for anything to be done about this as both sides have put up their acts of injured parties and need to prove to the world they are on the side of virtue.
But in my opinion, MDex has gotten the whole thing wrong.
As a small-time scanlator, I say: enough of this rubbish of "respecting the scanlators' wishes/rights".
Scanlators have no rights. They chose to pirate copyrighted work as a hobby, for heaven's sake. When did this cease to be about enjoying your hobby and releasing cool content to micromanaging where said content ends up? And Kissmanga will rehost everything anyway. How pointless can a temper tantrum get?
Aggregators exist for the readers. Their primary role is to supply a place where readers can converge and read manga without having to flit from a scanlator's site to the next, or manually setting RSS feeds for each one, while keeping track of new series they might like in every place. Secondarily, they supply a platform for discussion on the manga they like.
Scanlators are tangential to the whole matter. Before Batoto, Mangafox accepted direct uploads, but it forced uploaders to compress images because they had a cap of 40 MB ZIP file size. Anyone could upload, regardless of scanlators' wishes. And nobody complained. (Except perhaps scanlators, privately.)
We're so used to the post-Batoto world of no-compression and scanlator oversight that we forget this is a privilege, not an entitlement.
Here's my suggestion to MDex. Amend your rules this way:
i. No group has a right to stop their work from being re-hosted.
ii. Chapter removals are forbidden unless they are to be replaced by second versions, which need approval from a moderator. (Like it was with Batoto.)
iii. So your choice is whether you want to claim leadership of your group and have some control over your uploads (like second versions and perhaps short delays), or whether you want nothing to do with it and readers or staff will upload whether you want or not.
Problem solved. Drive a wedge between scanlators who don't give a damn where their work is (like myself and I suspect a majority), but would find the ability to upload corrections and keep native page size and resolution convenient (which was originally the only thing that distinguished Batoto from the older aggregators); and the scanlators who seem to give themselves more importance than you'd expect from the small-time crooks we all are.
Yes, Mangastream, too. And Easy Going, and LOLScans, and all those who had opted out from the beginning or more recently. Scorched earth, baby!
There are possible refinements. You could make it so that groups who behave upload second versions without moderation, and blacklist for moderation those who use the second-version right to sabotage your policy. Anything to cordon off the party-busters and discipline them.
Some of them might retaliate, like LOLScans and their silly huge watermark versions they used as decoys. No worries, let the readers do the quality control. Everyone hates a spoilsport, they'll upload the right versions eventually without your staff having to lift a finger. And if a group decides to increase watermark size for all their releases and blame it on you before the readers, that will only cause them to be sniped eventually. You can lean back and enjoy the show.
The problem is that you wanted to set yourselves apart from Kissmanga and the rest of the riff-raff. That's an attitude Batoto never had: they simply ignored the other aggregators, did their thing and did not for a moment think that their rules made themselves better or worse than the others.
And you know what? You aren't, either. The only thing that sets a Batoto-style aggregator apart from the rest is their sensible refusal to rehost rip-offs from official publishers, since that might invite legal retaliation. Everything else is like a code of honour between thieves - an utterly risible fiction nobody should give a second thought to.
Are you afraid that scanlators who don't particularly mind rehosting, but might take the side of the ones who do out of a misguided "principle" that scanlators should have the choice over it, will stop uploading to MDex? Again, let them. The readers will do the rest. Mangafox didn't have scanlator support and that never stopped the chapters from finding their way into it.
Or perhaps you fear readers will pull off their support (donations included) if you decide to appease the tantrum-throwers out of some "principle"? Don't make me laugh. The reason they support MDex is that you don't have malware or ads, keep native page size, have a neat interface with long-strip reading, resize options, and front page content filters; not this bilge of "by the scanlators, for the scanlators". It didn't work in the original document, and it won't work here. Heck, the more complete your collection is, the more likely you are to get loyal readers to contribute.
Or is it that you want to keep some moral high-ground over the tantrum-throwers? Are you afraid they'll say, "we knew it, it was all a farce!", is that it? Just tell them, "Yeah, got a problem with it?" You don't have a moral high ground, they don't, nobody does and never will.
Or perhaps it's because you were originally a scan group, Anidex, and thus feel sympathy towards the tantrum-throwers? Do you feel doing as I suggest would be hypocrisy? Well, more on hypocrisy below, but if you have that kind of scruple, why stop there? There's no qualitative difference from groups whose members are still around but are inactive over six months. What I'm getting at is that every single limit you impose yourselves is artificial. (Except official rip-offs, as I said, since these affect publishers, who are not pirates.)
I am aware of that silly PR exercise of yours from yesterday and that you may be wishing to keep the high ground. My point is, you don't have any, and neither do the tantrum-throwers. There's time to walk back on that nonsense. There always is. Just be honest and say, "We got wound up in our own stupidity, but the scales have dropped from our eyes now." You don't even need to thank me.
If you let yourselves climb this slippery slope, you'll end up exactly like Batoto, deleting chapters at the first DMCA, only you'll do it for scanlators. It's ironic that you rehost all the chapters of series Batoto didn't keep for that reason, and even official releases from publishers that no longer exist, but are all antsy about what a bunch of self-important people who forgot the meaning of "piracy" think. Isn't that like, textbook hypocrisy?
I can't believe you let yourselves into a corner by people who are absolutely powerless to stop you. "Might makes right" is only a poor option in systems where it's unclear where power lies. After you made this site and got your reader base, you hold all the cards. And that's true of any aggregator.
This is not to say you shouldn't listen to suggestions. I heard a case of a person who pulled off their content because it was BL porn with uncensored genitals and you didn't allow them to label it "hentai". They felt they didn't want someone to open it in work or a train without knowing it was NSFW content. That's the only sensible case for pulling work out of MDex I've ever heard. Seriously, listen to sense and do away with the hentai label, which is too vague. Create instead BL-porn, GL-porn and straight-porn so that people know where they're treading. Yaoi and Yuri are not clear enough for someone to know whether it's just tit-licking or… you get my drift. My point is, let your choices be guided by reason, not dogma. (By the way, this is totally unrelated to my central point, I'm just giving an example of necessary dialogue with scanlators.)
In summary: keep an open channel to scanlators, but don't let them dictate terms in a site that's aimed at readers. Your whole premise is nothing more than holier-than-thou flummery otherwise.
Or, you know, don't. Stick to your guns and do your nonsense, nobody's gonna stop you. But other than some staff resigning in protest (how many minutes would it take to replace them, I wonder?), I don't see what you have to gain conniving at the bastards' antics, or to lose by putting them in their place.
I believe it's too late now for anything to be done about this as both sides have put up their acts of injured parties and need to prove to the world they are on the side of virtue.
But in my opinion, MDex has gotten the whole thing wrong.
As a small-time scanlator, I say: enough of this rubbish of "respecting the scanlators' wishes/rights".
Scanlators have no rights. They chose to pirate copyrighted work as a hobby, for heaven's sake. When did this cease to be about enjoying your hobby and releasing cool content to micromanaging where said content ends up? And Kissmanga will rehost everything anyway. How pointless can a temper tantrum get?
Aggregators exist for the readers. Their primary role is to supply a place where readers can converge and read manga without having to flit from a scanlator's site to the next, or manually setting RSS feeds for each one, while keeping track of new series they might like in every place. Secondarily, they supply a platform for discussion on the manga they like.
Scanlators are tangential to the whole matter. Before Batoto, Mangafox accepted direct uploads, but it forced uploaders to compress images because they had a cap of 40 MB ZIP file size. Anyone could upload, regardless of scanlators' wishes. And nobody complained. (Except perhaps scanlators, privately.)
We're so used to the post-Batoto world of no-compression and scanlator oversight that we forget this is a privilege, not an entitlement.
Here's my suggestion to MDex. Amend your rules this way:
i. No group has a right to stop their work from being re-hosted.
ii. Chapter removals are forbidden unless they are to be replaced by second versions, which need approval from a moderator. (Like it was with Batoto.)
iii. So your choice is whether you want to claim leadership of your group and have some control over your uploads (like second versions and perhaps short delays), or whether you want nothing to do with it and readers or staff will upload whether you want or not.
Problem solved. Drive a wedge between scanlators who don't give a damn where their work is (like myself and I suspect a majority), but would find the ability to upload corrections and keep native page size and resolution convenient (which was originally the only thing that distinguished Batoto from the older aggregators); and the scanlators who seem to give themselves more importance than you'd expect from the small-time crooks we all are.
Yes, Mangastream, too. And Easy Going, and LOLScans, and all those who had opted out from the beginning or more recently. Scorched earth, baby!
There are possible refinements. You could make it so that groups who behave upload second versions without moderation, and blacklist for moderation those who use the second-version right to sabotage your policy. Anything to cordon off the party-busters and discipline them.
Some of them might retaliate, like LOLScans and their silly huge watermark versions they used as decoys. No worries, let the readers do the quality control. Everyone hates a spoilsport, they'll upload the right versions eventually without your staff having to lift a finger. And if a group decides to increase watermark size for all their releases and blame it on you before the readers, that will only cause them to be sniped eventually. You can lean back and enjoy the show.
The problem is that you wanted to set yourselves apart from Kissmanga and the rest of the riff-raff. That's an attitude Batoto never had: they simply ignored the other aggregators, did their thing and did not for a moment think that their rules made themselves better or worse than the others.
And you know what? You aren't, either. The only thing that sets a Batoto-style aggregator apart from the rest is their sensible refusal to rehost rip-offs from official publishers, since that might invite legal retaliation. Everything else is like a code of honour between thieves - an utterly risible fiction nobody should give a second thought to.
Are you afraid that scanlators who don't particularly mind rehosting, but might take the side of the ones who do out of a misguided "principle" that scanlators should have the choice over it, will stop uploading to MDex? Again, let them. The readers will do the rest. Mangafox didn't have scanlator support and that never stopped the chapters from finding their way into it.
Or perhaps you fear readers will pull off their support (donations included) if you decide to appease the tantrum-throwers out of some "principle"? Don't make me laugh. The reason they support MDex is that you don't have malware or ads, keep native page size, have a neat interface with long-strip reading, resize options, and front page content filters; not this bilge of "by the scanlators, for the scanlators". It didn't work in the original document, and it won't work here. Heck, the more complete your collection is, the more likely you are to get loyal readers to contribute.
Or is it that you want to keep some moral high-ground over the tantrum-throwers? Are you afraid they'll say, "we knew it, it was all a farce!", is that it? Just tell them, "Yeah, got a problem with it?" You don't have a moral high ground, they don't, nobody does and never will.
Or perhaps it's because you were originally a scan group, Anidex, and thus feel sympathy towards the tantrum-throwers? Do you feel doing as I suggest would be hypocrisy? Well, more on hypocrisy below, but if you have that kind of scruple, why stop there? There's no qualitative difference from groups whose members are still around but are inactive over six months. What I'm getting at is that every single limit you impose yourselves is artificial. (Except official rip-offs, as I said, since these affect publishers, who are not pirates.)
I am aware of that silly PR exercise of yours from yesterday and that you may be wishing to keep the high ground. My point is, you don't have any, and neither do the tantrum-throwers. There's time to walk back on that nonsense. There always is. Just be honest and say, "We got wound up in our own stupidity, but the scales have dropped from our eyes now." You don't even need to thank me.
If you let yourselves climb this slippery slope, you'll end up exactly like Batoto, deleting chapters at the first DMCA, only you'll do it for scanlators. It's ironic that you rehost all the chapters of series Batoto didn't keep for that reason, and even official releases from publishers that no longer exist, but are all antsy about what a bunch of self-important people who forgot the meaning of "piracy" think. Isn't that like, textbook hypocrisy?
I can't believe you let yourselves into a corner by people who are absolutely powerless to stop you. "Might makes right" is only a poor option in systems where it's unclear where power lies. After you made this site and got your reader base, you hold all the cards. And that's true of any aggregator.
This is not to say you shouldn't listen to suggestions. I heard a case of a person who pulled off their content because it was BL porn with uncensored genitals and you didn't allow them to label it "hentai". They felt they didn't want someone to open it in work or a train without knowing it was NSFW content. That's the only sensible case for pulling work out of MDex I've ever heard. Seriously, listen to sense and do away with the hentai label, which is too vague. Create instead BL-porn, GL-porn and straight-porn so that people know where they're treading. Yaoi and Yuri are not clear enough for someone to know whether it's just tit-licking or… you get my drift. My point is, let your choices be guided by reason, not dogma. (By the way, this is totally unrelated to my central point, I'm just giving an example of necessary dialogue with scanlators.)
In summary: keep an open channel to scanlators, but don't let them dictate terms in a site that's aimed at readers. Your whole premise is nothing more than holier-than-thou flummery otherwise.
Or, you know, don't. Stick to your guns and do your nonsense, nobody's gonna stop you. But other than some staff resigning in protest (how many minutes would it take to replace them, I wonder?), I don't see what you have to gain conniving at the bastards' antics, or to lose by putting them in their place.
