[split] Quality vs Quanity - the state of expansion art

[Rakko]

It makes me laugh when people bitch about artists expecting to get paid for their work. As if somehow the community is owed free art because they want it. DA was a website designed for artists to share their personal works, to find inspiration and constructive criticism between one another, and to grow as artists. It was never designed to be, nor will it ever be, your free fap image farm. Pay for your porn like a normal member of society, or pirate it like an asshole. Either way, quit your bitching. As it turns out, the internet didn't in fact make everything free. Porn costs money, it always has.

That being said, on the flipside, these artists have no idea how to charge for what they're selling. Supply and demand seems a foreign subject to them. Go to any retailer and find me a comic that's charging 10 dollars for 5 images, let alone 5 pages. You can't, it doesn't exist, because art isn't worth that much on retail.

Commissions cost more because they're custom work, custom work is inherently more time consuming because it involves catering to a single individual or group of individual's needs, the required back and forth, and research/repetition to get exactly what the client wants out of it. With these art packs, they're just drawing whatever they want, that involves considerably less work.

Does that mean you have a right to bitch about artists expecting money? No. If you don't wanna pay them, don't. There's ways to pirate it. They'll drop their prices in accordance if they need to. Supply and demand wins out in the end. Look at Jollyjack, he charges 3 bucks for 10+ page porn comics and manages to make a decent buck off of it, because its a reasonable price. Its simpler to just buy it from his website than it is to go track it down somewhere off a pirate site for most people. This is also how steam managed to carve itself out a decent niche. Easy accessibility and reasonable prices >>> Loads of effort in pirating. Simple economics.

These communities fell apart for the same reason most forum based communities fell apart. Web 2.0. Social media, dissemination of close knit groups into mass social landscapes, its the progression of things. Tribes become city states, city states become nations. Yearning for the old tribal lifestyle is nice, and quite frankly, I also miss it, but I'm not going to pretend its anything but the natural progression of mankind. It sucks, but that's how it goes.

As for toxicity, the internet was always toxic, it just seems moreso now because things exist on more of a mass scale than they did before. People have a tendency to be borderline-sociopathic assholes when consequences are removed. Look at half the posts on this thread, they're bathed in the kind of vitriol that would likely get you decked in the face in reality. But you don't have to be afraid of a fist on a computer monitor. People are people.

I'll keep drawing fat art for furries and making a decent cash flow out of it either way. Its funny, I don't see any of this bitching in the furry community at all. It really says all that need be said when I actually see furries being more reasonable than regular folks about something like this. I suggest you guys check your entitlement. We are artists, not livestock.