[pyrale]

Cults are where people live off "fans".

Replacing customers with people emotionally engaged to support you is an exploitative process, involving the takeover of people's mindshare, in a way that can be compared to indoctrination.

People rationalizing the means of this indoctrination is deeply disturbing.

[reidjs]

Just because you can draw a parallel between the two doesn’t necessarily make it exploitative. Most of the time I’m sure both sides win, the creator gets to follow their passion, the viewer gets to feel they had a part in it by paying some money. There is certainly a potential for exploitation and indoctrination, but that’s really only in extreme cases.

[pyrale]

I don't mind people looking to get paid for what they do. There are plenty of models that let you pay artists more easily, I'm fine with those.

What I am talking about is the rationalization of making "fans", increasing engagement and the promotion of "whale" systems. Those lead to the problem I discussed.

[derfabianpeter]

You probably also don't mind consuming other people's work for free and for your own advantage. You're arguing from a very emotional and moral point of view. In the end, if the creator doesn't adapt to its audience (monetizing in a way that works) he will probably don't produce the content you value anymore. Nobody wins. People making up sales tactics for "artists" are just realistic. The reason content producers are drawn to manipulation is today's audience that is not able to decide between "valuable" and "worthwhile" content anymore. Everyone expects information to be free and then damns creators if they try to make a living off helping other people to succeed.

At the end of the day, you need to get by. If you want to live off the things you love you will most likely have to adapt to your audience and do sales like everyone else. Might not be an idealist's dream, but it's how humans work. Doing digital stuff doesn't make fans or customers change how they value things. Besides, giving away almost anything for free upfront raises the bar for people to pay anything at all. It's how we work.