Ridiculous Opinions #283
We're launching "The Sunday Comics Collective" to reclaim creative control from corporate platforms!
The Sunday Comics Collective, Part 1
As most of you know, I publish a webcomic called “Maurice the Beaver”. It’s great! You should read it. Spectacular stuff. But there’s a problem with webcomics (and internet content, in general) in that we are forever beholden to large corporations.
It works like this…a website like Facebook or Twitter or Reddit will offer a platform upon which we can post our content, which artists (and regular humans) do all the time. We comment. We post pictures. We give them content. And most of us (including me) have for years done this without thinking. We fill Facebook with all of our personal information; who we are friends with, where we are traveling, what we like to do in our spare time. You’ve heard the statement, “If something is free, then YOU are the product.” That’s the internet nowadays.
And we are used to getting things for free. Gmail is free. Facebook is free. Whatsapp is free. And when you venture into this world, you become a slave to the whims of that corporation. They control you. They get to make the decisions based upon the content that you created. Whatever they want to do, they can do.
For example, how many of you have those cheap-ass Amazon Echo devices in your home? A couple of weeks ago, Amazon made the announcement that everything that is heard from those devices will be sent to Amazon to process for their artificial intelligence programs. That wasn’t the case when you bought the device. Prior to this, it was private. Not anymore.
So, what are you going to do about it? Nothing.
Amazon knows this. There’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. Sue them? Good luck. Throw your device in the trash? Sure. Now, you’re out fifty bucks, but that’s the right call.
I’ve had my Gmail account for twenty years and I’m about to get rid of it. I simply don’t trust Google as a corporation anymore and I’ve seen many products I loved disappear because of corporate whims and my complete inability to do anything about it. What am I going to do? I’m going to start paying for an email service. That probably melts a lot of your brains, but quite frankly, when I pay, I control it.
That’s what happens when things are free. YOU are the product and YOU will pay the price for that free service. How many of you use Instagram or Facebook as your “address book” in this day and age? You can’t delete your account, because you would lose contact with hundreds of people. You’re stuck.
I’ve been through this many times before. I deleted Facebook in 2010, when they decided to make all accounts public. I got back on in 2017 for about three months but soon deleted it again because of their policies. I deleted my Twitter account when Elon ruined it. I’d had that account since 2008, and I loved Twitter. In January, I deleted my Instagram account I’d had since 2014 because of Zuckerberg’s lack of moderation.
The problem is that these are places where I publish my comics. Not that I had huge audiences there, but the “free” spots where I uploaded my comics were beginning to disappear. The archive of my strips are gone. My audience is gone. Just disappeared. That’s what I get for publishing on a free platform.
I am now down to publishing Maurice in three spots: Bluesky, Reddit, and Webtoons. Bluesky is a safe place (for now) because it uses the AT Protocol, which means I can take my followers and my content to other places. That, of course, may not last, but it is still safer than most places. Webtoons is a corporation, no matter what, so that’s not a safe spot, but I publish there anyway.
The last part of this is Reddit. I have had great success on Reddit and have a nice following there with great readers and a good comment section. Reddit seems safe.
But of course, it’s not. We’ve been having a lot of trouble on our end of the site because of anti-Trump, anti-Elon comics. You can read about it here. (The article is archived so you can read it behind a paywall). Basically, Reddit (and the specific place that I post, r/comics) is getting bombarded by bots and trolls who are mad because of the political stance of most of the comics on there. The mods do a fine job of putting the trolls out of commission, but it’s a thankless task and it won’t last forever.
Coupled with that is the release this week of ChatGPT’s ability to generate images. Prior to this, it was kind of difficult for your average person to create AI art. But now, it’s in the hands of everyone. Perhaps you’ve seen some of the AI things that have been created this week, or read some articles this weekend about how everyone is creating Studio Ghibli-type content, taking their own pictures and Ghibli-fying them. It’s cute, until you have the usual trolls creating Ghibli-fied porn and Ghibli-fied torture imagery. Expect the worst when it comes to humans.
Because of this, r/comics has been overrun with AI-generated comics. The mods there are battling it, but the whole site risks being overrun by AI slop, with non-creative folk just filling the site with junk and nonsense.
That’s what I fear will happen with the internet in general. It’s going to get filled with slop. It’s the Dead Internet Theory happening in real time. Soon, there will be no genuine human interaction on the internet. It will simply be self-generated crap.
So…how do we combat this?
Well, we came up with an idea to change things and we’re going back to the good, old fashioned method of using email. We’ve called it The Sunday Comics Collective and we’re going to start a publication called Sunday Comix.
But to learn about this, you’re going to have to come back next week, where we will be unveiling our latest offering.
Get in while you can, folks! This could be the start of something big!
