Published: April 20th 2022, 12:44:47 am
While my audience and Patron count may not be large, I wanted to provide explicit assurance:
I truly appreciate @peacemaker-ic's post on the subject, and I hope it does launch a cultural shift in the way we consume custom content.
I have my own thoughts and responses to what he wrote, particularly about being a free creator, so this post is going to be a wall of text:
When I first read about the data collection, I was really worried for my own Patrons until I understood more about how it works (Thanks to posts by Trillyke and by faaeish). As far as I know, there is no way for this sort of thing to be done by accident, so the people who are doing this are intentionally choosing to be unethical to make money.
Being an ethical CC creator is about respecting other people:
It’s abiding by other creators’ terms of use and properly licensing and attributing art assets (like patterns or textures). It’s following the conditions EA has set out for making and monetizing third party content for a game made by a team of developers. It’s not betraying the trust of the people that support us.
Given how much effort already goes into making CC, it doesn’t take much more to do it in a way that respects the people we rely upon.
Creating CC can take a lot of mental, creative, and physical energy, and much of it can feel like invisible work: From developing concepts and sourcing art assets, making an attractive and informative post to showcase what you’ve made, designing and maintaining your hosting/sharing platforms—not to mention the actual act of creating and testing your CC— it can be a very time-consuming process.
Doing all of this for free is a big undertaking and it is disheartening to feel taken for granted.
There is a big disparity between the people that download my content and the people that take the time to thank or support me for the time I put into my work. And when I say “support”, I do mean monetarily, yes, but like Peacemaker says, even a reblog to share with others means so much to me (and I love reading some of the tags you add). I have seen different suggestions for increasing Patreon revenue and tumblr followers that boil down to less transparency, like hiding Patreon earnings, or actively annoying behavior like spamming self-reblogs. I don’t do that stuff because it doesn’t sit right with me, but it does mean that after devoting 2 years of my life to making cc, I am still a relatively small creator.
All of that is to say, that it is no surprise that people leave the community or go early access after feeling taken for granted. It is 100% within your rights as a creator to value your time and work and to ask that others do so as well. It is not okay to monetize the result of all that work in a dishonest way that affects the entire community.
My content is free and immediately available because I live with chronic mental and physical health conditions. I can’t guarantee content on a regular basis, which is why my Patreon tiers are explicitly stated as tip jars for people to donate to and cancel at any time, completely separate from access to my content. My intent is not to undermine support for early access creators, though I do hope that posts like Peacemaker’s encourage a more conscious consumption and valuation of custom content.