Many manga fans have a love/hate relationship with mangadex. On one hand, it's provided hosting for countless hours of entertainment over the years. Their "v3" version of the site was basically perfect from a usability point of view, to the point that the entire community chose to unite itself under its flag.
On the other hand, directly because of the above, their hasty self-inflicted take down earlier this year nearly killed the entire hobby. Many series essentially stopped updating for the ~5 months the site was down, and many more are likely never coming back again.
The decision to suddenly take the site down for a full site rewrite feels completely inexplicable from the outside. (A writeup the above or the previous one[1], both of which read like they were written by a Google Product Manager, especially don't help as they conspicuously avoid any comment to the one question on everyone's mind: "leaving aside the supposed security issues with the backend, why on earth also rewrite and redesign the entire front end from scratch at the same time?")
I didn't get that take at all from the why-rebuild link. It seems reasonable to me - legacy code base, hard to maintain, with security problems that led to the massive data leak a while back. They also don't owe anything to anyone, and as a hobbyist project, they wanted to try something new. I'm impressed as they seem to have managed it - and the new site feels a lot more responsive than the old one.
Yeah. This whole mess pushed me to moving everything I had (or could remember, anyway) to Tachiyomi¹, so I can hop between hosting websites freely without losing progress or access to old chapters (as long as I don't run out of local storage).
And while it works fine for reading, it kills any interaction with the hosting sites. No chance for monetization, socialization or anything else that can help sites survive long-term.
Before MangaDex we had Batoto (the old Batoto before some sketchy company bought the name), that was kinda of the same: serving high quality manga for most scanlators that wanted it (and also avoiding hosting pirated chapters from official sources, so kinda the same as MangaDex nowadays). As far I remember Batoto closed because of pressure from companies and also because of the high costs related to run the site.
So yeah, considering how fragile maintaining a site like this is, it is always a good idea to sync your progress in a third party so it is easier to migrate if something goes wrong.
> And while it works fine for reading, it kills any interaction with the hosting sites. No chance for monetization, socialization or anything else that can help sites survive long-term.
BTW, MangaDex doesn't have monetization because it is strict a hobby and also because it is a gray area to monetize about this kinda of work [1]. Also, their Tachiyomi client is official (MangaDex v5 API was tested primarily via their Tachiyomi client before they finished the Web interface).
[1]: both for companies (that has the copyright from the works hosted on those sites) and the scanlators (the fans that does actual work of translating those chapters). Sites that host those chapters and monetize are pretty much monetizing on work from other people.
It's obviously not at the same scale as MangaDex, as they provide actual hosting for scanlation groups, but if you want to support the scanlator sites that do have a site - check out Kenmei, which is my take on tracking series you read. It specifically built with scanlator-first approach, so that you actually go and visit their sites, helping them survive long term, instead of hogging the traffic, like Tachiyomi does
I never got the sense that the manga community hated Mangadex and I’ve been following their Dev of V5 and the rise of other sites to use in their absence.
It’s seems weird to attribute Mangadex taking their site down for valid security concerns to the end of scandalization of certain series. That seems like entirely a Scan team problem if they decide not to upload via Cubari like other teams have done. And it doesn’t even matter since a series can get sniped at anytime.
It’s makes entire sense that if you’re going to rewrite the backend and API from scratch , you might as well do the front end too since it was a Goal from the beginning.
> their hasty self-inflicted take down earlier this year nearly killed the entire hobby
It won't kill the hobby. Because these scanlators are making mad money from ads, patreon, crypto mining. I'll never get why they don't get more aggressive take down notices from Chinese/Japanese/Korean publishers.
Copyright enforcement is actually quite expensive, both for the litigant and the defendant. The only way for it to be actually profitable to sue someone who is stealing your work is if they immediately settle, which is how copyright trolls operate. Everything else is a massive money pit for everyone involved, even the lawyers. Since this is an international enforcement action, the costs go up more, because now you need multiple legal teams on the bar in each jurisdiction, translators qualified for interpreting laws in foreign languages, knowledge of local copyright quirks, and a lot more coordination than just asking your local counsel to send a takedown notice locally.
(Just as an example of a local copyright quirk that will probably confuse a lot of people in the audience from Europe: copyright registration. America really, really wants you to register your copyright, even though they signed onto Berne/WTO/TRIPS which was supposed to abolish that regime entirely. As a result, America did the bare minimum of compliance. You don't lose your copyright if you don't register, but you can't sue until you do, and if you register after your work was infringed, you don't get statutory damages... which means your costs go way up.)
Furthermore, every enforcement action you take risks PR backlash. The whole fandom surrounding import Japanese comic books basically grew out of a piracy scene. Originally, there were no English translations, and the scene was basically reusing what we'd now call "orphan works". There used to be an unspoken rule among most fansubbers of not translating material that was licensed in the US. All that's changed; most everything gets licensed and many fan translators absolutely are stepping on the toes of licensees. However, every time a licensee or licensor actually takes an enforcement action, they get huge amounts of blowback from their own fans.
They get plenty of takedown notices, but they mostly get to hide behind services like Cloudflare who won't take action regarding these notices anyway. From the publishers/creators side, there is simply no effective way to take scanlators down.
I suspect it's because the international market for print manga (the primary cash cow) is rather anemic, particularly compared to anime.
Publishers see the loss as minimal and creators see piracy as free advertising to drum up enthusiasm for anime adaptations, which actually do drum up decent profits internationally (the committee keeps the streaming licensing fees, not the animation studio).
Publishers definitely don't see it that way; that's mostly an extension of a myth in order to justify the piracy.
Most manga publishers will see relatively little revenue from international anime releases. Even for domestic anime releases of the vast majority of titles, the manga publisher is only a small part of the anime production committee, and the hope is mostly that popularity of the anime can lead to increased sales of the manga, merchandise, or other events. So when the anime is released internationally, they get an even smaller cut of that because the international licensee also has to take their profit.
But other than mega-hit titles where an international anime release may also lead to significant international manga sales, the popularity of an anime adaptation overseas is practically irrelevant to the original manga publisher.
On the other hand, directly because of the above, their hasty self-inflicted take down earlier this year nearly killed the entire hobby. Many series essentially stopped updating for the ~5 months the site was down, and many more are likely never coming back again.
The decision to suddenly take the site down for a full site rewrite feels completely inexplicable from the outside. (A writeup the above or the previous one[1], both of which read like they were written by a Google Product Manager, especially don't help as they conspicuously avoid any comment to the one question on everyone's mind: "leaving aside the supposed security issues with the backend, why on earth also rewrite and redesign the entire front end from scratch at the same time?")
[1] https://mangadex.dev/why-rebuild/