What do we think of
Ethereal's new post?
Hmm.
Having EN make the post is a curious choice. There are a few ways to read that - upper management stands behind her, or she's being made to read the statement and be the face of this as penance, or neither of those and it's just business as usual. Not sure which way to interpret this, though I doubt it matters much from a practical standpoint. I have made the point that I believe the kneejerk reaction of 'she's calling the userbase pedos!' is logically inaccurate, but I also agree it was an...
unfortunate... choice of words and shouldn't have occurred to begin with. (For any staff from the site reading this, I was serious about needing userbase PR - you should really look into this.)
.054% of titles have been affected in this. I do expect there will be further titles with at least some chapters removed, but this isn't really approaching 'catastrophic' in any practical sense. The overwhelming majority of content continues to be available.
If they are going to be tracking removals going back to the May 25 purge, this does provide some ability for people to account for the removals, which is both beneficial and somewhat overdue. It may not be the most practical way, but it's better than nothing. (Even at 7K affected titles in that, that's something like 6.4% based on the roughly 110K total, and though there are some affected titles that are going to be hard or impossible to find elsewhere, it's certainly not nearly as severe as many people made it out to be at the time.)
I do hope the non-chapter-associated corners of the forums continue to have some distance from the mainsite regardless of how the future updates incorporate comments - given the unpleasantness of this past week dealing with
literal forum tourists in that thread (and them spilling over to here and elsewhere), I feel no shame in a certain amount of gatekeeping of our little community. Particularly as a number of those folks came here soley because of social media latching onto and hyperbolizing the story, then insisted they
were the community and tried to gatekeep/bully both the site and some of us who were disinclined to agree with their mob mentality. (Also,
some of those people are dumb as hell and really should not be allowed to operate computers unsupervised.)
On the other side of the coin, I am a bit puzzled at the idea that MD is somehow going to be profitable for its investor(s). I don't think the current model of 'check this box, nudge nudge wink wink' is going to pay off long term, since I expect very few legal publishers have interest in commingling their official releases with scanlations. But aside from licenses and revenue sharing from paid subs, I don't see how the site can turn a profit (or even break even) in something that largely resembles its current form. It seems I'm pretty clearly in the minority when it comes to people's willingness to send money to support a site where almost any content is under perpetual threat of removal if the rightsholders decide to act. I still take the 'not becoming CR' claim at face value, but I don't see a path to turn MD into a self-sufficient entity financially, which is a paradox - I have a hard time believe the investor(s) paid for an asset that they believed had no path to profitability.
I will say that my thinking on this entire situation has been predicated on the idea that it's better to have
some content on a site that is stable and functional than to have
all content on a site that has to change addresses every six months - with the latter situation, someone critical inevitably eventually gets tired (or arrested/sued into oblivion) and the whole thing disappears, as has been demonstrated already a number of times. It's a cousin of Pascal's wager, I suppose, hinging on my own personal benefit (enjoyment) being the deciding factor - some certain enjoyment vs. the potential of no enjoyment.