6 ms·

Previous discussion on HN: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074062 https://news.ycombinator.com/i

Previous discussion on HN: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074062

JumpCrisscross 2y ago
What is the distribution bottleneck that keeps artists from self organising?
- rightbyte 2y ago
  Burning passion?
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  What prevents any group of workers from self organizing?
  - whoknowsidont 2y ago
    rent
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > What prevents any group of workers from self organizing? Some combination of skill, capital and ambition. Running a company is hard, and a specialised skill. Just look at restaurants to see how unevenly distributed administrative skills are.
- rincebrain 2y ago
  Sort of the same problem as game testers. If there are so many people willing to work for pennies _for the sake of working there_ that even a significant fraction of you organizing a stop-work won't make a dent other than a one-off blip if you arrange so much disruption it hiccups production visibly, there's only so much leverage to exert, since you have nothing they can't just source elsewhere.
  - imtringued 2y ago
    What I have noticed is that very often the problem with these "fun" jobs isn't that there is limited demand for them on the employer's side, rather the problem is that the profession of a game tester requires game developers. Some of the jobs are more popular than others. If you need two testers for every software developer working on a game and game testing is far more popular than game development, then game testing becomes a sweatshop activity because there aren't enough game developers to absorb all the people willing to become game testers.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > there's only so much leverage to exert, since you have nothing they can't just source elsewhere That they’re making peanuts is unsurprising. That someone else isn’t, is. My question is what value the executives provide. In gaming, it’s distribution expertise—a random band of artists probably can’t negotiate distribution on a major console.
    - BowBun 2y ago
      Anime is much the same. Licensing into the west only started in earnest in the last 10-15 years, which late by a lot of standards. I'm sure there are still a small slice of folks who can ink these deals, therefore giving anyone a job at all. Also let's be real - most 'animators' are just tracing masters into different scenes. There's a small subset of them that are highly skilled, especially on non-original shows that use source material. I'd support paying true character artists and scene artists well, but not copy-pasters which seems like busy-work.
      - anigbrowl 2y ago
        Any kind of media production involves a lot of grunt work. In general, you don't get anywhere in the arts without putting in a lot of hours on that sort of thing, during which you still need to eat and pay rent. Critiquing the production process over which they have no control to justify paying subpar wages is pretty mean-spirited.
  - 2y ago
- rickdicker 2y ago
  Just based on my own experience and knowledge of the animation industry, it seems to be more of a risk-aversion/lack-of-imagination problem. It is true that getting onto major streaming platforms requires insider knowledge/connections, but there sure are a lot of people using free platforms that anyone can upload to, like YouTube.

Previous discussion on HN: Anime is a $25B industry that pays its animators pennies https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074062 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39074062

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

What is the distribution bottleneck that keeps artists from self organising?

rightbyte 2y ago
Burning passion?
bongodongobob 2y ago
What prevents any group of workers from self organizing?
- whoknowsidont 2y ago
  rent
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > What prevents any group of workers from self organizing? Some combination of skill, capital and ambition. Running a company is hard, and a specialised skill. Just look at restaurants to see how unevenly distributed administrative skills are.
rincebrain 2y ago
Sort of the same problem as game testers. If there are so many people willing to work for pennies _for the sake of working there_ that even a significant fraction of you organizing a stop-work won't make a dent other than a one-off blip if you arrange so much disruption it hiccups production visibly, there's only so much leverage to exert, since you have nothing they can't just source elsewhere.
- imtringued 2y ago
  What I have noticed is that very often the problem with these "fun" jobs isn't that there is limited demand for them on the employer's side, rather the problem is that the profession of a game tester requires game developers. Some of the jobs are more popular than others. If you need two testers for every software developer working on a game and game testing is far more popular than game development, then game testing becomes a sweatshop activity because there aren't enough game developers to absorb all the people willing to become game testers.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > there's only so much leverage to exert, since you have nothing they can't just source elsewhere That they’re making peanuts is unsurprising. That someone else isn’t, is. My question is what value the executives provide. In gaming, it’s distribution expertise—a random band of artists probably can’t negotiate distribution on a major console.
  - BowBun 2y ago
    Anime is much the same. Licensing into the west only started in earnest in the last 10-15 years, which late by a lot of standards. I'm sure there are still a small slice of folks who can ink these deals, therefore giving anyone a job at all. Also let's be real - most 'animators' are just tracing masters into different scenes. There's a small subset of them that are highly skilled, especially on non-original shows that use source material. I'd support paying true character artists and scene artists well, but not copy-pasters which seems like busy-work.
    - anigbrowl 2y ago
      Any kind of media production involves a lot of grunt work. In general, you don't get anywhere in the arts without putting in a lot of hours on that sort of thing, during which you still need to eat and pay rent. Critiquing the production process over which they have no control to justify paying subpar wages is pretty mean-spirited.
- 2y ago
rickdicker 2y ago
Just based on my own experience and knowledge of the animation industry, it seems to be more of a risk-aversion/lack-of-imagination problem. It is true that getting onto major streaming platforms requires insider knowledge/connections, but there sure are a lot of people using free platforms that anyone can upload to, like YouTube.