/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>19775306
Not my drawing, just a recolor.

>>19543659
Add the profit motive to any human relationship, and you alter how all parties to the relationship benefit from it.

Most participants within a non-profit/volunteer community are probably going to benefit from their work through emotional rewards. They feel proud to have contributed to a group effort, they feel needed, they feel more secure as a member of a community or subculture with its own identity, rituals, and so on. Within this kind of relationship, camaraderie and cooperation are incentivized: there are no drawbacks for competitive behaviour, sharing with others contributes to the group's collective success, and antisocial or disruptive activity harms group efforts and may lead to expulsion. Through such an environment, artists and other creators can more easily learn from one another through constructive criticism, education and mutual assistance given freely. Creators can also easily leave and create alternative communities if in-group drama threatens a project.

When the content created is commodified (i.e. becomes something to buy and sell) the main benefit from creation becomes the profits from selling the content. Emotional rewards may still exist, but will compete or be supplanted by profit-seeking as a motivator for participation in the community, depending on the needs and wants of the creator(s). Group efforts will suffer unless profits are distributed in a way that optimally satisfies most members, creators now have incentives to withhold assistance from each other or go solo. This accelerated the atomization that >>19539037 describes. Help given to newbies is now time that could be spent promoting a patreon, fulfilling requests or polishing a portfolio. Finally, and I think most importantly, creators turn themselves into competitors, a relationship that is more likely to be or turn hostile as some creators seek ways to violate the norms and customs of a group for material gain.

I could be wrong: I might be overstating the importance of profit-seeking in western fandoms or Japanese communities may be just as competitive as westerners. But I am providing a theory that I have yet to see posited in this thread, and my theory is based on roughly fifteen years of observing and participating in such communities.

Youmu because I'm a dork