The problem with InflateChan

I've always been big on the word "community." That's because I really believe in it. When I got involved in this stuff, it was to find other people who were into what I was into so I could discuss it and feel better about it. It clearly wasn't going away, so I wanted to find a way to come to terms with it. Having no options in real life, I turned online. The rest is history, and it's kept me sane.

As a result, I am pretty serious about the network of people that has evolved over the last several years. Some of us need the community (and the human beings in it) more than others. But that, to me, is the point -- people having discussions and interacting with people who understand this weird thing and don't judge. The fetish stories, drawings, and morphs have all cropped up around that community; the sites began as mailing lists and discussion forums, and the galleries appeared later. That's like dessert to the meal, in my mind.

I try to support and post in as many inflation communities as I can. If I have nothing to say, I won't post until I do, but if I can add something constructive to a conversation, you'll see my name. The return of InflateChan struck me as one of those opportunities, a community that was making a fresh start. I posted several images from my 25GB of inflatosmut to help the cause.

I was wrong to do that. I have come to see that InflateChan is not a community; it's just a porn dumping ground. In a community, you pick a name and stick with it. There's persistence of the members so conversations can happen. On InflateChan, 90% of the posters are named Anonymous and the only words exchanged are retarded shorthand quips like "MOAR" (for "keep posting free stuff so I can leech it") and "sauce?" (for "where did this come from, for I am too lazy to Google it or participate in any other communities"). The site is a one-way door of content flowing out. And a lot of time, the anons posting the content don't have the right (legal or ethical) to post it in the first place.

Mind you, I made that same mistake. I posted a bunch of stuff from an artist that I really like, but foolishly I'd completely blocked out a pretty dramatic situation ending in "don't post my stuff anywhere." I went back and deleted it all, but the damage was understandably done. I posted a few more things before someone said "Hey, that's also from a private archive, dude." Stupidly, I'd mixed up my files and lost track of which stuff was not to be distributed publicly. I deleted stuff again.

And then I started to think...why am I trying so hard to be part of this site anyway? I don't have anything to gain from it. It's not a discussion board; there's no discussion going on. New content is expected, not really appreciated, and it's not generated by the people posting it (that obvioulsy includes me). There's not much respect for the actual artists whose work is being posted, there's a huge sense of entitlement, and several content creators that I really like (Johnny Swell, Bambi Blaze) have had to fight to protect their basic artistic copyrights. Bootleg stuff shows up as often as legit freebies, and more and more (and MOAR) artists are coming out, expressing displeasure that their stuff is distributed in this context.

A site like that goes away when people stop posting images for the people who anonymously and immaturely demand them. So that's my plan. It's kind of a shame, because in theory, I think a site like that could work, but there is so little respect among the users that this one never will grow to be more than it already is. It makes DeviantArt look absolutely brilliant.

I tried to repair my mistakes by deleting the sensitive stuff I posted, and while even that was likely too late, I'm not going to be part of the problem going forward. I have close to 15 years of really good smut on my hard drive, and InflateChan pretty much convinced me to lock it down.

But we can always have a good discussion.