Sometimes I'm leafing through old scanlations and I see Stop Tazmo banners and it's like being slapped in the face with the knowledge that I've been doing this for a bit too long.

Tazmo, for those who somehow missed the drama back then, was the dude who ran NarutoFan. NarutoFan hosted not just Naruto content, but translations of manga and anime. Well, Tazmo had the idea to lock a chunk of the manga and anime content on the site behind a paywall, offering access to them through the NarutoFan Plus! memberships.

(There were also accusations that he was erasing the translator credits on some releases, but there's no way to tell how true that was. He was very heavily demonized for a long while.)

That said, he made quite a bit of money off of selling other people's work, without them ever seeing a dime.

Oh wow. I forgot about NarutoFan. I used to go to that site for scanlations

Yeah, eventually Viz took over NarutoFan.

Said that it was too easily mistaken for an official site, gobbled it up, and turned it into a redirect to their official page.

Tazmo himself just opened up a few other sites, but eventually shut them down when torrenting got big and a lot of fan translators started hosting their own direct downloads on, like, Mega.

(If anyone ever wonders why mid-late 2000s fansubs and fan-translated manga started putting "If you paid for this, you got ripped off!" it's because of that dude.)

early fan translators took their stuff super seriously, too. It was considered a legit taboo to start translating a project someone else was already working on.

sakljdfasl; Holy shit. I remember when I started seeing those PSAs and being confused where it was coming from

Like, it was considered polite to ask permission from the group already translating a work to do your own version, then you were expected to accept it if they said "No, we're working on this. Find your own series."

Yeah, it was all because of Tazmo and NarutoFan, ahaha

"Why would anyone pay? The translators always put them up for free right on their own sites."

LITTLE DID I KNOW. Whoops

Yeah, there was a bit of a knowledge barrier to consuming Japanese media before websites started hosting the content and direct downloads/torrenting became popular, because you had to go through things like IRC and a lot of folks didn't have the patience for that, ahaha.

I definitely remember torrenting for anime episodes and for scanlations a little later on. Haha

man, that is a fish slap from the past.

unfortunately, translation wank still exists.

Aw

oh I remember all this because I'm old

so old

Bill was on the front lines

Reading illicit shoujo comics

lol more like tryan find berserk