Paywall by David Revoy
# Sankaku Complex is a booru website. But it’s a funny place. They charge you to access other people’s art. They don’t own the art. But exclusivity doesn’t care about ownership. That’s what’s funny about all this. People simply flock to whatever provides the most convenient or cheapest access to something. Exclusivity can just as easily work against the original artist as it can work for them. The moment you put your work behind a paywall, another competing paywall can compete against you.
# Nevermind the absurdity of trying to sell a JPEG on the internet, or the fact that other free booru websites already exist. Sankaku Complex is absurd for many reasons.
# The moment a picture is seen, it’s usually downloaded, and the moment it’s downloaded it can be uploaded somewhere else, so there is no such thing as exclusive art. The only truly exclusive art is lost media. A forgotten file on a hard drive that nobody ever saw. Art like that can never outlive the artist because nobody else is able to preserve it.
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Online “exclusivity” is artificial. Copying data is a basic feature built into every CPU ever made. It takes considerable effort and complexity to “disable” a built-in feature. You either add complexity to make something viewable while blocking access to the file that your computer has already downloaded (so-called “streaming” media), or you sabotage your own software by choosing to add an external dependency so that it unexpectedly breaks in the future when that external piece inevitably vanishes. All of these have to be added on purpose. It takes extra effort to remove built-in features. It takes effort to make things worse than the default.
# And it’s hilarious to watch. Browsing Sankaku Complex is a pretty lousy experience. Banner ads everywhere, blurred or hidden thumbnails, pop-ups demanding that you sign up… all trying to “compete” against free booru websites that simply show you the pictures. Usually the same pictures. They wasted all this effort just to make everybody else look better. Tirelessly snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
# Paywalls are absurd, and they make people do absurd things.
