Banned artists/paid rewards should only be accessible to Moderator+ users

blindVigil said:

If Danbooru was 100% against piracy and for respecting the wishes of artists it wouldn't even exist. That's the point. Lines need to be drawn somewhere or Danbooru is just another sketchy hentai repository. A lot of users, or at least very vocal ones, don't agree with paid rewards being uploaded, for various reasons that have already been detailed in this thread.

Looking through this and past threads on this topic I see many of the same users posting, so there a definitely some very vocal ones against paid rewards. Saying "a lot of users" though is meaningless. How many is a lot and what percentage of the users is that? That kind of wording can be used dishonestly to make it seem like there is a larger support for something than there really is.

Most of the reasoning I see for the ban can be easily applied to other categories of uploads. You said on page two of this thread that "doujinshi are not inherently for profit" and "You can't reasonably argue that hosting Game CG would seriously impact a game's ability to sell." So your logic is that you can turn a blind eye to that kind of content because the financial impact is too hard to figure out compared to paid rewards. And turning a blind eye to some categories based on that is hypocritical to me.

blindVigil said:

If Danbooru was 100% against piracy and for respecting the wishes of artists it wouldn't even exist. That's the point. Lines need to be drawn somewhere or Danbooru is just another sketchy hentai repository. A lot of users, or at least very vocal ones, don't agree with paid rewards being uploaded, for various reasons that have already been detailed in this thread.

It's LITERALLY ALWAYS the vocal ones. I mean, when is it ever not? Just look at politics these days. I do not ever see people like this in regular communities - or at worst there is one or two out of a hundred.

The vocal minority should ALWAYS, ALWAYS be ignored. Why should the 1-2% ignore the happy and silent majority?

Dalamar said:

The vocal minority should ALWAYS, ALWAYS be ignored. Why should the 1-2% ignore the happy and silent majority?

Because the silent majority never speaks up? I mean it's pretty obvious what happened in this thread. If nobody ever argues against something then all it takes is one malicious individual to fuck things up for everyone else.

What makes paid_reward special enough to warrant a specific ban? There is plenty of paid content from game_cg, doujinshi, and artbook scans. Seems arbitrary.

pentaerythritol said:

What makes paid_reward special enough to warrant a specific ban? There is plenty of paid content from game_cg, doujinshi, and artbook scans. Seems arbitrary.

Because it hits closer to artists than other forms of paid content. The case of the latter mentioned is that, though they're commercial use,
first, visual novels and doujinshi aren't as accessible to anyone outside Japan and so we have to rely on sites like this (plus others like e-h) to view them, especially since the market for these kinds of material is very minimal outside Japan.
second, artbooks can be gotten through legal avenues in your typical Japanese specialty bookstore, but it depends on where you live (SEA, CN, EU, NA, AU/NZ) and if you can afford the price tags for it.

Paid rewards that come out of Patreon, Fantia, Fanbox, Gumroad, etc. are material released by the artists themselves as a way to earn revenue for their own needs by making exclusive content meant for you to shell out a buck or five per month to sustain these artists to show support and watch their progress.

pentaerythritol said:

What makes paid_reward special enough to warrant a specific ban? There is plenty of paid content from game_cg, doujinshi, and artbook scans. Seems arbitrary.

I would say that acquiring Game CG or doujin scan is more difficult for western users, as most of them are only available in Japanese and/or in Japan. This being the case, and the user base of Danbooru being mainly foreigners, the financial impact should be nil.
However, Patreon or the likes can be accessed easily by everyone. We are way more likely to compete with them.

That being said, I'm more in favour of, as the title was suggesting, remove the banned_artist for the gold/platinum users only as they were (until now) behind a paywall (I care about piracy only when there are obvious financial gain, I don't really know if this is hypocritical or not). However, as I have the builder rank and quite often upload paid_rewards, I prefer to keep a low profile on this subject (basically, because of conflict of interest).

Dalamar said:

It's LITERALLY ALWAYS the vocal ones. I mean, when is it ever not? Just look at politics these days. I do not ever see people like this in regular communities - or at worst there is one or two out of a hundred.

The vocal minority should ALWAYS, ALWAYS be ignored. Why should the 1-2% ignore the happy and silent majority?

The silent majority doesn't get to make decisions, that's the consequence of being silent. Can't really claim that everyone who didn't speak up was complicit, either, not everyone is even aware they have a say in these things.

I know of several people who refuse to even touch Danbooru specifically because it freely hosts paid rewards.

Why does everyone who talks about the "silent majority" ALWAYS assume that the majority agrees with them?

I'd be absolutely shocked if that were genuinely the case in this situation.

You can't argue with the silent majority anyway. You don't know more than every other person.
It's an argument that should never be brought up since it only derails the topic.

skylightcrystal said:

Why does everyone who talks about the "silent majority" ALWAYS assume that the majority agrees with them?

I'd be absolutely shocked if that were genuinely the case in this situation.

Depends. Majority of whom?
All users, even those who just casually browse the site infrequently? Yes, of course they agree. Evazion already took this into account.
All active, regular contributors? Harder to say, but also not really that relevant.

skylightcrystal said:

I'd be absolutely shocked if that were genuinely the case in this situation.

I count 23 unique users uploading paid rewards in the past 5 days, from when the announcement that they were going to be banned happened. That's almost as many as the users in this topic, and this topic was pretty split on opinions. IDK about the silent majority but active users surely seem to not care about the "moral" side of the issue (there's 316 unique users who upped at least one patreon reward on site btw).

And there are 19223 unique users who upped at least one image on the site in total (not sure how you would find the number in the past 5 days).

(edit: this is just to put the above numbers in perspective, not to make some claim about the views of these users)

skylightcrystal said:

(not sure how you would find the number in the past 5 days).

You could get that from querying something like paid_reward date:2020-07-02.. status:any via the API, and then counting the distinct uploader_ids. I only count 14 though. Even at that though, users disagreeing with a rule doesn't mean we don't set that rule. Otherwise, we'd have no moderation or rules at all. It's a similar concept to how a high score on a post doesn't necessarily indicate that it is a good candidate to pass the queue.

In any case though, we're now talking in circles. I think Evazion's implemented policy changes strike a fair balance between independent artists' interests and our own interests and goals of archiving, annotating, translating, etc. You're never going to find a solution that works 100% for everyone, but I think where we're at is a decent compromise.

The slippery slope argument says the end point should be 100% on one side or the other, and that's not reasonable. Nothing in life is pure black or white, it's all shades of grey with various nuances involved, and finding a sensible balance between the two extremes is going to be the best solution if you consider all parties involved. I feel where we're at now fits that.

The policy changes have also just happened, so we should let it play out a while before even considering any further changes. This thread has probably run its course for now.

Hello I just read the new deal on Paid rewards and as polite as I'm being. Yes you have good intentions with the reason. But I think this might backfire heavily in the future. I'm not saying when it will happen but last I checked most people later would upload the Patreon versions of most posts. I am not agreeing to the idea but if I recall the builders, approvers and moderators always got us when it came to posting the Cutesexyrobutts (PS had to find the Patreon Artoria. I'm not going to post it as per your new rules) but this isn't the way and I might get flack for my statement. I'm aware of this but this is kind of why forums shouldn't be an echo-chamber. If by chance and we have a Patreon posting splurge (Like with Kuavera sometimes) we might see a different change where we can be OK to post Paid Awards.

Locking the thread per Shinjidude's suggestion, as the main points have been made clear and discussions seem to be going into circles.