I kinda understand the frustration with aggregators, but also ‘respect our intellectual property rights’ is an incredibly silly position for your average scanlator to take
there’s so many scans on mangadex today that have only only survived because they were moved from aggregator to aggregator. plenty of series with “this was uploaded to xxx, if you see it elsewhere it was stolen” pages listing websites that haven’t existed for at least half a decade
The thing about scanlator culture is historically, a lot of scanlator etiquette is totally ridiculous. Like, some of the IRC logs I’ve seen about another team accidentally picking up the same comic as a team that was already working on it are just… totally overdramatic and juvenile.
And if someone does a bad job, you’re just supposed to not “poach” their title anyway. Like, “first come, first served” is a bizarre and childish approach here, if you ask me.
(Yes this is not related to the aggregator thing, I agree with everything above regarding them. Mostly just adding to the point that “Sometimes, scanlator etiquette is not actually good”)
As a scanlator, 98% of my grievances with aggregators would be fixed if they didn’t just download and present the first translation of any given chapter. This alone would fix:
me needing to rush it through if someone points out a mistake in the scans because if I don’t fix it within 15-30 minutes of initial upload, it will be forever immortalized on aggregators.
the “first come, first served” culture that is an artifact of the exact fact that if you’re the first one to release, your release will be read on aggregators, and if you’re second, well, the only people who will read it who are on MangaDex (much smaller audience).
the disdain among scanlators for good-willing people who are interested in the series, and in order to get someone to pick it up, release a chapter 1 ran through machine translation, hoping for someone to pick the ball from there, which while they know the translation is low quality, they hope that the group will eventually re-translate in higher quality (which likely won’t happen because only a small group will read it, so the priority is on releasing later chapters)
I don’t really care much for “ownership” here, but I do care about quality. The above problems create an environment where focusing on quality is discouraged. I don’t care if they “steal the chapters” or anything (reminds of this old bash.org.pl line of “hey, this guy stole your stolen and revamped script and revamped it”), in fact I’d rather see them doing a better job at “stealing” them.
(also: the worst scanlation drama is involved when (donation) money is involved. Then it gets really ugly.)
Yeah, I did bring that up in another post before this, and originally thought of it as a given when talking about less than great aspects of scanlator culture. Corrections are impossible to make, speedscans are prioritized, and both of these things are very good reasons aggregators are hated.
There’s just aspects where things overcorrect, or turn into absurd clique drama.
Oh yeah, most certainly. For some groups the “don’t read on aggregators” anger comes from the fact they serve the chapters on their own websites that serve ads and therefore have monetary interest to get people to read it there (again: money)
Thankfully most of the drama is avoided in the niche I scanlate in (the “genderswap” tag) because most of the time it’s hard to find even one group willing to do a chapter, let alone people willing to “compete” for one (also we tend to have each other on the metaphorical “speed dial” so we usually know who is interested picking up what). The more popular and mainstream the manga is, the worse the drama gets (from what I remember, there was some nasty stuff around Kaguya Love is War and Solo Leveling).