I have so many series of tweets on my public account that it feels like my thoughts are fragmented and redundant. Adding more noise to an already noisy crowd, especially with the recent news of bato being taken down. Then there is one company taking credit for the downfall, arrogantly warning that more sites will follow.

When it comes to piracy, my stance has always been “do what you have to do.” Some people are not made of money. In an ideal world, we pay for what we consume. That is the right thing to do. But in capitalist reality, that is not remotely realistic. An ordinary person on a normal salary has to be strategic about where their money goes. As awful as it sounds, capitalism brought this. This is a systemic effect of it.

Some will say, oh, so you choose to be moral when it is convenient? Unfortunately, life is too hard to deal with everything strictly by the book. When the system itself is disadvantageous to ordinary people, you choose your battles, and sometimes that battle is your money’s worth. Literacy, in any form, should not be reserved only for the wealthy and able.

I sincerely think that if the system remains the same, nothing will change. I have seen the internet landscape from before popular social media even existed, and free digital content has always remained accessible. Webtoons in particular started as a low-effort narrative format, short entertainment for web engines, before becoming what they are today. But the current business model is just too steep for ordinary people.

Yeah, and that’s another issue I genuinely find frustrating: they churn many near-identical series, and then they just call it a day. I don’t think the quality justifies the pricing model. Since they were made as quick entertainment, the plot suffers and is too simple for audiences to care about or literally get invested in. If they want us to pay the same way I pay for manga or anime (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6), they need to step up. But that’s another conversation for another day.

In comparison, I pay around 800 PHP for an annual premium account on Bilibili, which gives me access to their entire anime catalog—it’s A LOT! That same amount gets me, what? maybe eight or nine episodes of a webtoon, which can be deleted or expire without notice. That is an unbearably steep price for something you can’t even truly own. Music piracy also has decreased significantly because piracy is no longer the default way people access music. They built a system that works. Unless something similar is built for webtoons, it just a hydra situation. You cut one head off and more grow back.

To be clear, I am not against creatives getting paid. They do deserve it. 100%!  In fact, in the bigger picture, creators are often the ones at a disadvantage, trapped in predatory industry practices where compensation works against them. But again, you choose your battles, and not a lot of people have disposable income. I feel like I keep yapping about all this just to rationalize reading for free, and when it comes down to it, yes, it is wrong. Of course it is wrong! But that does not make these reasons invalid, because they are all still true. There are bigger issues here than counting lost sales from readers who were never going to be customers in the first place.

But really, who knows how far these cease-and-desist actions will go. But in my humble opinion, this is a knee-jerk reaction. It is a temporary solution that does not do anything at scale or create lasting change. This cycle will never end unless something real is actually addressed.