What people fail to understand is that Kemono and related are not piracy sites, in the traditional sense; they are automated backup and sharing tools.
To illustrate my point, Alice supports one or two artists that she really loves and wants to see consistently. There will be twenty artists who Alice kinda likes, but cannot or does not want to support at listed rate.
The implicit understanding is that for every time Alice imports her top artists, Bob or Joe will bring in most of the others. As a bonus, if any of them wants to switch who they back, they never lose the old content after leaving, no disk space or CLI tools required.
People who don't import anything are only barely helpful, because they don't directly supply value to the system. In scale, however, they probably help through ad revenue for the "meta" cost of servers and development legwork.
The goal for a recommendation/requests system SHOULD be improved communication between members of the community so the system gets more efficient (better signaling of the "kinda-likes" from before)
There is also some altruism in highlighting creators who might not otherwise be noticed. I can definitely say that early Kemono requests introduced me to many people like Thanuki.
A free-for-all format was tried, and it did not work after a certain size. Many non-contributors who were only just barely useful before became complete leechers, clogging the line of discussion and increasing the cost of having the system open.
You either need automation based on database metrics or a full-on toy economy to determine how much of a say each type of member gets before they objectively become a burden.
>>379I advise against involving "real" currency, it will make things messy.