jarodrussell (jarodrussell) wrote in scans_daily, |
"I [PAD] really can’t fathom it."Leave it in place. I think it it's better, easier to say "verboten" if there's any concern rather than to have to get written consent for a post.
Let me see if I can offer up an explanation. In the weeks since LiveJournal shut SD down, I've been trying to think of how to keep SD from being shut down again: ways to spread the comics across the web so even if Marvel hits one host with a DMCA, it won't cripple the community. Ultimately the conclusion I came to was while it was technologically feasible to build an impervious SD, no one would actually use it. The steps required to run it, coupled with the loss of speed and ease, make it too much of a pain to use.
That's the same reason it's easier just to excise PAD comics from the conversation. You say "snippets" are fine, but what constitutes a snippet? Is that snippet per post, per year, if you post eleven pages from a comic over the course of two years, is it still a snippet? In that case, the tension from never knowing what's too much diminishes the fun of wanton posting.
Similarly, contacting you, waiting for a reply, and (hopefully) reaching a compromise are too much work for too little return. If you can't just post when the mood strikes, that kind of kills the fun of posting. No other message board requires written consent from an author, why should SD have to put up with it? (Yes, I understand the legal reasons, but I'm not talking in terms of legalities, this is strictly a usability issue.)
Personally, I like the "No PAD" rule. It slightly lessens concerns about the community being shut down for treading on an artist's rights, it's a simple rule that's both easy to follow and easy to identify as being broken, and because of the first two points, it streamlines the community. Instead of having twenty conditional requirements to decide if pages can be posted for discussion, you have one, and in the world of user interfaces, less is quite often more.
To sum everything up, this isn't a "Rar! Evil PAD!" thing, it's just fine tuning the SD for optimal performance.