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I have to warn anyone who still comes here that the board is dead and you shouldn't expect much. Maybe it would survive if I posted more content, but I don't want to be the only one. Moreover, I'm not as passionate about TSF as I used to be, and whenever I think about working on a new project I can't help but think about all the other similar work I've already read or done and how this one is not special enough to bother. And though I have met some cool TSF fans, much of the fanbase is also crazy or stupid.
Way back it was different because there was less TSF on the internet and many of us took it on ourselves to catalog and save pretty much every page of TG that we could find. We valued everything. Today TSF is a super-mainstream fetish, and the younger generation don't care much if a few pages are thrown away, or if a new doujin never ever gets scanned.
And why should they? A young person would have decades of material to browse through and to them it would seem limitless. There are tens of thousands of TSF works in English, and they can be choosier about what they want to read than any other generation. They're also used to streaming, and have been indoctrinated to accept DRM and the idea that digital products are just services you don't get to possess. To them even video games are streamed as a service, and are not a physical product that you should own. Naturally they'll buy manga online and won't care that the manga can be removed from their account at any time, or that websites don't last forever. They now pay for old stories that were free on Fictionmania before, but which have been reuploaded with DRM to the Amazon marketplace for $5.
I don't think I can relate to the younger generation. Subconsciously I find myself disliking more manga and anime fans as the younger people discover TSF, and expect you to pay for streaming or else you're a dishonorable person. I know these kids are not backing up databases of TSF in preparation for when the DMCA dark ages happen. Perhaps we need to let the internet burn down every 20 years so that kids will realize why older people wasted so much time trying to save manga? And if that happens, they may have their speech codes and internet censorship, but at least we'll still have manga on our hard-drives.