[Ledgem]

Originally Posted by Hanxue

Actually, to stop skirting around the issue: can you people stop it with the passive-aggressive elitism? I'm mostly talking about Ledgem here. I know you've been around for ages and that you deserve some amounts of respect for that, but implying that everyone who hasn't been along for as long as you have is an egosubber and/or isn't "contributing to the community" (however you want to define that) is definitely not being a nice member of the community in my opinion.

Since you singled me out, I'd just like to point out that I haven't been around for ages - I was an active fansubber for two, maybe three years. There are some discussions where I'd like to think that I'm worthy of a lot of respect for that, but I'm really just a baby in that sense. And I left the fansubbing scene - it doesn't matter to me anymore, in all honesty. It's all about the nostalgia and the fond memories.

I wasn't saying that anyone joining the scene today must be an egosubber. I was merely musing over my own experience and comparing it to today's scene. Egosubbers definitely existed in my time, don't get me wrong. I'm just remarking that it does seem to me like it'd be a lot less likely for people to want to join as fansubbers out of a desire to give back to the community. Look at BitTorrent: as ScR3WiEuS has remarked, it's a faceless means of distribution. Even worse, it tracks numbers of downloads. For the first few episodes that I helped to sub I'd run to the tracker stats and look at those numbers. I would not classify myself as an ego subber, but when I was new to the game, knowing that my alias and part of the work that I'd contributed to was being seen by hundreds of people was thrilling. I think that by the tenth episode I'd worked on, at latest, it didn't matter to me anymore.

BitTorrent isn't harmful to the community, but what does it mean when people are brought into the scene in such a way? If a person wants to join as a subber is it because they saw the numbers of downloaders, or something else? I'm not being passive aggressive in this, either. I'm genuinely curious. Most likely the answer is that it hasn't changed much. Most of my old groups seem to be having difficulty replacing retired members, though. Do less people want to join as subbers? Is it just natural that groups eventually die out? Do new people wanting to sub just want to make their own groups (whether for ego reasons or not) and disregard the old ones?

Those are honest questions. I know that many subbers get very prideful about how long they subbed, how much they subbed, how many groups they were in - anything to sound like they're deserving of respect. I'm guilty of occasionally doing it too, but I'm not doing it here. With this conversation I feel rather detached from my history of a fansubber. There's no pride about it for me, and I don't mean to sound like I'm putting down newer subbers. I'm merely sharing my experiences and musing over how the scene is changing.