This is gonna be the thread where we talk about stuff

Except if they have to take more work on top of what they're already doing, it leaves them less time to actually produce what they want to. I have no problem chipping in a few bucks to people who I've been previously enjoying their work completely for free, and getting upset that people are in fact trying to get a little bit of money for what they want to do seems disrespectful.

I don't think it's dishonest to beg for money. I think it's degrading. I don't have any respect for artists who are willing to degrade themselves for money. I actually have much less respect for them than homeless people who have no alternative but to beg for money, because they are fortunate enough to have a living situation where they don't need to and have the resources to pursue their art on the side. If that's not entitlement I don't know what is.

At least artists who take commissions treat their skills as a marketable trade that people are willing to pay for without being prompted.

Welcome to Nightvale starts every episode by reminding the listeners that they can set up a monthly donation to help the creators out. That doesn't really strike me as "begging," but I guess since it's not a commission-based transaction it must be, and is therefore degrading. Well, unless they don't count as artists because of...some reason or another, I'm sure you could find one if you tried hard enough.

No. My complaint is the monetization of previously free entertainment and the subsequent entitlement a lot of content creators feel towards being paid.

Well, sure. The entitlement thing sucks. And while I don't think it's unreasonable to decide to monetize previously free entertainment, I'll agree it's disappointing if you're used to getting it without paying.

I dunno about this "degrading" thing, though. Where's the line between begging and mere compensation? Would you prefer if the artists didn't give anything away for free and charged for it all, instead of giving it away and asking for money alongside?

Begging is defined by me and most major dictionaries as requesting money, goods or services as a gift or gratuity. Asking fans to chip in if they like the content meets that definition as far as I am concerned, as innocent and good natured as it might be. I think there are other avenues for creators that do not involve begging or the ad revenue model, two things I really dislike. I greatly respect Matt and Mike Chapman for never polluting Homestar Runner with ads or begging for contributions for fans. Matt, at least, basically lived off of merch sales for something like 7 years. They were able to monetize something that was originally free and remained free in an enticing and unobtrusive way. I am aware that pretty much every big-name content creator already has merchandise ... but not every artist can make a living off of their craft. Sad but true. I would be surprised if I could.

As an artist myself, I of course believe that artists should be able to be compensated for their work, and that their fans should have a way to do that. I just don't believe that it should be at any cost, and certainly not at the cost of the dignity of the artist or their fans. Both parties should come out of the deal in the black. Nobody should be guilted into paying for enjoying something that cost them nothing.

"Innocent and good natured" doesn't really mesh with "degrading." You can't call it two different things.

Personally, I think everyone's entitled to money

As far as Patreon is concerned, it doesn't really require that its users release all of their content for free anyway. You can put it behind a pay barrier if you so desire.
I think it's sensible to release some content for free, so potential patrons have some idea what they're getting. But the free content is free, no strings attached.
For an example of this approach...

But even if they are releasing stuff for free and then asking for money, I'm not sure it's fair to call it a gift or gratuity. The money is for giving the artist more time to create art. It's not a direct purchase, but it's still a kind of purchase.

At the very least, we're talking about busking, not begging. Though even that's a little different since it isn't implied you'll ever see the busker again or benefit from their use of your money.

In an ideal world everyone would receive food and board and power and water and heating and healthcare for free and nobody would be forced to work eight hours a day five days a week to earn things which are actually required to stay alive, functioning and properly connected.
We don't live in that world right now. Money is unfortunately very important and this obstructs people from doing what they want to do, we don't have the automotive capability to replace manual labour that people probably wouldn't do with no incentive and currently there's a pervasive climate that giving anyone anything for free is inherently evil and should be avoided at all costs.

Patreon is not "legitimised begging", it is people trying to make money back for investing significant, enormous quantities of their own time into their passion. That is a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do. If you've been living your life thinking that you need to spend 40 hours of your own time per week doing something you quite possibly don't even like that much in order to provide things you should be entitled to just by virtue of being alive, then someone tells you that actually you could be making some of that by doing the thing you love doing, damn right you are going to seize that with both hands.
In a capitalist society, time equals money and people who spend significant amounts of time producing content that significant numbers of people enjoy are perfectly entitled to feel like it would be cool to get some compensation for it. Most people do not want to just straight up charge their users, not only because that wouldn't work but because it's nice to be able to let people see stuff for free. Advertising is also not a viable tactic for making sure you can live off your passion, not only do most of your fans hate it, at least two thirds of them will also just run adblocking software.

People who do creative works in their own time have a major tendency to undervalue that time. You can see this in people's commission prices, and the prices of tiny indie games made by groups of people who all have other full time jobs, and the fact that it's a shared feeling often turns pricing into a "race to the bottom". I've been to talks about this, people who make indie games often feel like because they are doing something because they enjoy it, in their free time, then it's ok that it is costing them money and then price their finished product accordingly. It's not.
People destroy themselves doing this. They can ruin their own lives pursuing their passions because people tell them over and over again that because they do this thing as a hobby then it isn't important enough to validate their existence on its own. It's awful.

Anything that makes people more able to earn a living through what they love is a good thing. Patreon is a fairly unobtrusive way of doing that, which allows people to keep providing things to you for free, on the backs of the more generous fans who don't think someone being paid for devoting hours of their time to making stuff for you is stupid. It is explicitly not the same as a subscribed service that requires every reader to contribute, unless that is what the author wants it to be (and most people don't, because that still results in unbridled hostility from their former fans and because they too have been brought up to treat asking for money as a dirty thing that should be avoided despite the fact that it's simultaneously extremely important to their actual lives).
If they can find an audience for it, everyone should have the chance to make a living out of doing what they love.

jac thats gay come on you hippie commie i bet you think rainbows grow on trees too

I don't think it's necessary to make people suffer to get people working

A lot of the shitty dangerous industrial jobs here get people willing to work because they pay really well

You can find nicer jobs that pay enough, but most people are kinda greedy and willing to put themselves in danger for stuff they want but don't really need

basically what I'm getting at is that food and housing and healthcare and utilities should all be absolutely free. It doesn't take a magical utopian wonderland, there are already more than enough resources to go around to keep people working regardless

No yeah I totally agree with that, that part was just meant as "there's still some people who are going to have to do stuff they don't particularly like doing because it needs to be done" but there's no reason they should have to do that on pain of not having a house or food. Presumably it would be done for generous compensation.

Ah, alright! Cool

Food and healthcare and housing should be free, nobody should die of preventable diseases or insufficient nutrition or regular weather. But they do, and they will continue to so do as long as people are more willing to invest in a webcomic or a sexy game or their favorite team's jersey rather than social programs. The majority of people who aren't starving would rather maximize their discretionary income than help provide for a world where those things aren't problems.

You can't lament the status quo while simultaneously doing nothing to change it and devoting all your resources to hedonism or fantasy. Not in an intellectually honest way, anyway.

e:

If they can find an audience for it, everyone should have the chance to make a living out of doing what they love.

Why? Why, in a world with insufficient nurses and engineers and social workers and philanthropists, should everyone have a shot at a career that contributes negligibly to society and reinforces wealth disparity by creating a sink for income with no return? Just because they like it? Lots of people like lots of things and we still tell them they can't do it because it negatively impacts society.

Draw a webcomic if you want. Write a book, do an adventure, do whatever. But those are hobbies, and once you donate all your time and resources to them and they become a career, you're not meaningfully contributing to the functioning of society with the majority of your time. If you think that capitalism is great and optimal and that profit equates to value, then you can do that and good for you, but you can't hold the viewpoint that essentials should be provided to everyone and still think that large groups of people should have careers that produce nothing meaningfully useful because the resources, time, and manpower to provide those essentials have to come from somewhere.

you can't hold the viewpoint that essentials should be provided to everyone and still think that large groups of people should have careers that produce nothing meaningfully useful because the resources, time, and manpower to provide those essentials have to come from somewhere.

Sure, but lots of people out there already have careers that produce "nothing meaningfully useful" AND aren't doing things they love, or even necessarily tolerate. If it's between making a webcomic and saving peoples' lives, then yeah, saving peoples' lives is pretty dang important. If it's between making a webcomic and sitting around in a cubicle all day writing sales reports for Coca-Cola or something, then that's a different story.

Our culture has this notion that "jobs" are inherently virtuous and everyone should be busy all the time, but obviously there are tons of people who aren't busy with anything seriously important. Perhaps we have the societal equivalent of twelve people all helping to carry a single brick. That, combined with the fact that under the current structure, those people might NEED to be brick-carriers in order to put food on the table, means that there starts to be an incentive for unnecessary brick-carrying to take place, for pointless walls to be built.

I suspect that our society isn't as high-maintenance as we all sort of assume. I suspect that if we cleared out the cruft and sorted things out a bit, we could make it run with minimal fuss and leave absolutely everyone with plenty of free time. Sure, everyone needs to pull their weight, but that might not actually work out to very much pulling. Particularly if we installed a block and tackle.

I have friends and family who are actually nurses & social workers and none of them (particularly the social workers) got into it because the pay was good rather than because it was something they wanted to do anyway, independently.
Especially the social workers. The compensation you get for doing that is trivial.

yeah all those shitty [webcomic] artists trying to make people feel good with fun and nice stories when they should devote all their efforts and time into PROGRESS how dare they attempt to use the skills they have and developed when they should have developed these other skills that certainly without a doubt would have changed things for sure you guys

the world is shit and so should you, title of book i would write if writing books was progressive

Spending money on things you enjoy is absurd, how dare you use your relatively tiny disposible income for anything that doesn't somehow change the entire way society is organized. After all, it's you that's the problem!

edit: seriously, you almost sound like a fox news reporter complaining about the poors owning tvs

like wow such disgusting excess, they should try spending their money on not being broke all the time instead

It's super shitty and lazy and quite frankly defensive and anti-progressive to respond to every instance of "You/some people/society waste(s) too much time and effort on trivialities*" by automatically generalizing it as "You should feel bad if you're ever doing something that doesn't somehow improve the plight of people less fortunate than you". That's not what I'm saying, and I'd wager it's not what anyone who has ever had a conversation with you has been saying, but if you don't want to actually respond to, you know, points that have been brought up, that's your deal. It's what I expected anyway, because very few people have any interest in actually examining criticism brought against them or their lifestyle; you can equate it to a personal attack and strawman it all you want until it sounds absurd which means you don't have to make any personal changes or even think about it beyond a dismissive reaction. Doesn't really change anything, though. A life lived with resources only devoted to oneself and one's interests is exactly that regardless of how one justifies it.

You will notice that no post even remotely responded to the central question I posed which pared down is: Why does anyone have a right to make a living doing what they enjoy? Why is that something anyone is entitled to?

More saliently, this bears responding to:

Spending money on things you enjoy is absurd, how dare you use your relatively tiny disposible income for anything that doesn't somehow change the entire way society is organized. After all, it's you that's the problem!

Aside from completely missing the point and misrepresenting "Devoting your life and career to entertainment does not meaningfully contribute to society or better anyone's life" as "Devoting any of your time or money to your hobbies is basically evil", this pretty succinctly sums up one of the most toxic attitudes that prevents significant progress being made at even a local or small level: "Why should I devote time and resources to improving things? Other people have way more than I do, they should be doing it.". As long as that thought is widespread, just about anyone can justify not doing anything that isn't self-serving; the majority of people could do something, even if it's as simple as political activism (Facebook and Tumblr don't count!) or volunteering (working in a soup kitchen or hospice or Habitat for Humanity costs nothing but opportunity), but choose not to because other people could do it more effectively or with less hardship.

I live well below the poverty line for a single adult in my part of the country. I'm forced to support myself with the income I have, and have to make choices about what I want and what I need and what I should spend my time and money on, as we all do. Despite that, the fact that I spend as much time on the internet as I do, and the fact that I have opinions about video games and webcomics, and the fact I've discussed hobbies of mine that cost money to indulge in means that I don't live or advocate a joyless life of bare minimums where all of the money I don't eat or shelter myself with goes straight to AIDS victims in Uganda. It would be genuinely stupid to suggest otherwise, because asceticism is both unsustainable and unhealthy. All I'm saying is that people shouldn't spend ALL their free time and money on things that serve no purpose but temporary enjoyment, but the reaction that position consistently gets (illustrated above) demonstrates how little people like to think about the opportunity cost of their actions and how ready they are to protect themselves from even the insinuation that they aren't doing as much as they could. Nobody likes to change and nobody likes to think of themselves as anything but a good person – and I'm no exception – but it's still worth considering what else could be done. Anything more than nothing is something. Don't give until you're broke but... don't be selfish.

*trivialities like, yes, webcomics and video games and TV shows and the majority of arts and entertainment. None of those things lack value because we as a species need stimulation and a measure of distance from our own lives, but Art As An Ideal is increasingly abstract and meaningless in a society where art is as commodified as it is in ours. Nobody needs a Nintendo, nobody needs a Picasso. Lots of people need lots of things, and art and entertainment will happen with or without significant portions of the population producing nothing but that.

From the United States Declaration of Independence:

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Spoiler"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

At best guess Slorange I'd shoehorn it in with the unalienable right to Pursuit of Happiness. If doing something makes you happy (and doesn't pervade on anyone else's rights) it is your God given right to pursue it. Mundane trivialities like food and shelter should not prevent that. Since we still live in a society that requires us to pay for these trivialities though, we should therefore have the right (or at the very least the opportunity) to make money via our pursuit of happiness. Denying us this entitlement denies the right, which by our own definition is inhumane.

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SpoilerIs this a sound rebuttal? I lost my train of thought like 5 times composing my argument.

Personally, I think Slorange's stance is a sound one. But, if you've already got a job, and you're making content as a hobby, what's the harm in running advertisements on your website, or asking for donations from your viewers? Or running a Patreon? Let's say you're already making your contribution to society. Is it wrong to try and make some money on the side off of what you're doing for fun?

Why does anyone have a right to make a living doing what they enjoy? Why is that something anyone is entitled to?

This is an interesting question. Here's what I think:

The first part of my answer is that I'm taking the enjoyment thing as a given. Wiped clean of any other assumptions, a lifeform should have the right to do what pleases it. Lots of caveats and conditions to that, but it's the base I'm working from.

Society should serve that. It should enable us to pursue our individual interests more effectively at the cost of whatever portion of our time and resources it takes to keep that society running. Otherwise, why even have one?

We do have duties to society. It's only right that we should pay our dues and spend time and resources to keep society running, if we benefit from its existence. What should those costs and duties be? At what point do they hamper to an unreasonable extent our ability to pursue our individual interests? I think in an ideal society, the burden should be minimized.

If you assume that "making a living" and "paying debt to society/keeping it running" are one and the same, then no, there's no reason to expect that for any given individual, they should be able to pay those dues by doing something they enjoy. It's nice if it works out that way, but it won't always, and that's just life.

But I think that's a faulty assumption if we're talking about our current society. "Making a living" in most cases seems to mean dedicating the bulk of one's life to things that overwhelm both the duties and the enjoyment. It all too often takes up too much time that could be spent doing important service to society OR pursuing interests, with activities that don't count as either and have little independent merit.
If enjoyment takes a back seat to this cruft, then something's gone horribly wrong. The "enjoyment" part of our lives should come first to the greatest extent possible. (Though "enjoyment" should be read here as broadly as possible, not just to mean mindless consumption of entertainment.)


So in short, I don't think everyone has the right to make a living doing what they enjoy. I think everyone has the right to do what they enjoy, and their need to make a living shouldn't impede that.
If people feel they can't do what they enjoy UNLESS they can also make a living doing it, because the need to make a living is burdensome enough that it requires the greater part of their time and energy, leaving too little for the enjoyment, then I think we have a problem.

EDIT: Supes, I think this is an extremely interesting subject, and I'm glad you broached it. (Aside from where people have gotten sarcastic and unpleasant towards each other. Don't do that, guys.)

ANOTHER EDIT: I think I'm kind of saying the same thing as Granolaman, except he didn't take three and a half hours to write it down.

You broached it in larval form.
Then it pupated, and now it's a Beedrill. Or something.

So as an econ person I think this line of discussion is super interesting not only as a normative question but as a descriptive one: what is labor, anyway?

One criticism of neoclassical (read: mainstream) econ is the artificiality of the "labor/leisure" distinction, which a lot of analysis is based off of. It devalues caring work, art and basically anything else that doesn't have an easily measurable monetary value. But how, then, should those things be counted for the purpose of analysis - if at all? This is a tough question and I don't have any good answer. I'm just glad to see people talking about this stuff.

edit: sorry Supes, I can't resist

All I'm saying is that people shouldn't spend ALL their free time and money on things that serve no purpose but temporary enjoyment

you complain about strawman fallacies and yet you characterize everyone disagreeing with you as contradicting the above

maybe the reason you suffer misinterpretation is because you frequently start on this favorite argument track in harmless situations where people are discussing sending a few dollars a favorite artist's way, or talking about what certain game developers could do better. it seems like you're contradicting these people, when really you're just hijacking their topic to segue back to the theme of "please contribute to society in a more meaningful manner."

which is a reasonable subject! no one's saying that people should spend their lives doing nothing but play. and much of your advice is reasonable. the reason people don't take to it well isn't just because they're uncomfortable with the implications, it's because you shoehorn these topics into casual discussions in a way that many would characterize as 'rude.' it's not exactly a good start.

furthermore, much of the advice disregards material realities. exceptions to your rules are offered as footnotes, and it's very easy to walk away from these essays with an impression of a "one size fits all" ideology. there are legitimate reasons why someone wouldn't want to be a construction worker/plumber/nurse/etc. other than "because they think those jobs are lower class." (I'd say most jobs either have very real drawbacks or are what you'd characterize as "unnecessary.") there are legitimate reasons why people wouldn't want to seek Therapy and Medication for the mental problems holding them back (not to mention the fact that if you have a problem more complicated than unipolar depression or anxiety, it's often VERY difficult to find a therapist that deals with your disorder(s), much less a free one.)

in conclusion: I agree with the point of what you're saying...that there are many ways we can and should help our communities (unless I've greatly misinterpreted things). but I think bringing this up during casual conversations is part of what confuses the message into "no fun ever" and that much of the wording implies that everyone's life fits into a certain box.

p.s. what is your view on housework/child-raising/familial affective labor re: "making good use of your free time" and also re: being compensated by th' gummint for such