My complaint was directed at those who re-upload other people's work; I still pay for some cardmakers' Patreons. But only because of the affordable price.
The issue is that it's also affecting cardmakers and motivating them to leave Pixiv and go directly to Fanbox to sell everything.
I think what I said earlier could be misinterpreted.
Problem is, a creator that moves to paywall content was always going to do that
If a creator moves to Fanbox to stop their content from being reuploaded and they charge, I don't know, $5, that's not going to stop the Panda or Neto of this world. Even if you mark the card and ban them, your content still has to remain behind a paywall to stop them. So whoever says it's to "fight the reuploaders" is just lying in your face. It's mostly greed. The only caveat I would give here would be someone who would move to a paywall to then raise the funds to take legal action on their reuploaders due to Pixiv being absolutely fucking worthless at doing something about it, and force Pixiv to go scorched earth on them.
They see their cards get 5000 downloads, and even at $1 a piece it's still $5000, so for a guy like Harada living in SKorea where the median income is $2600 a month, they go "jackpot!". Of course, they realize a bit too late that the pirate to paying client ratio is like 1-5%, so that's 200 bucks at best.
Of course that's not a problem in itself, and most of these paywallers likely have hundreds of clients and so make quite a chunk of money. But the problems come when those numbers start going down because, as we see with creators like Harada, Imsayaa, Yarigguri, etc., it's been a while ever since we've seen a scene from them that makes you go "holy shit I need this" and by that time they've become used to the money they used to make.
First it's slightly increasing the prices. Then it's cracking down on leakers. Then it's putting in place insane anti-piracy meansures.
The "terminal" cases are people like Earthship and Ltsuki, where they've narrowed down the fact they have 5 to 10 loyal paypigs that will pay whatever they need to get their content, and move their prices to the $250+ a commission, and stop caring about any other potential client. These are also the "snitches" as we've come to know them from F95, and are why you see Harada links taken down in under 24 hours, to give examples.
The end of the road comes for people like Haxiom, AntY, etc. when the few loyal paypigs and commissionners leave because the creators gets too comfortable and low effort, and they can get better cards elsewhere, if not for free.
I wouldn't be surprised if we eventually learned the people reselling free cards are known paywallers doing it out of spite, as they seem to target only the creators like Rohss who step on the toes of people like Unagi and Suou whose bread and butter are FOTM seasonal waifus.
www.pixiv.net
Why are the only 2 cards of her made by the 2 absolute more paranoid creators here?
gofile.io
drgm03.fanbox.cc
kk.now.cc
