you're not the only one who shares this sentiment
i've been in scanlation circles since ~2019
and its generally frowned upon for groups to do this sort of stuff
(one group I hate in particular is paradise because I'm pretty sure half their translations are MTLs anyways)
For novels, I have an issue when they charge a whole lot more than the original work
I remember one time on read hive they uploaded the whole novel at once but you had to wait like 3 years to read it all for free unless you bought each chapter. I tallied it up and if I bough everything it would have costed like 3 times the price of the raw volumes
I just bought the raws on ridibook and translated it myself atp…
I have been a cleaner and a raw provider for over a decade now and you should not support those kind of sites that make you pay/get coins to unlock stuff. Both manga/hwa/hua and novels. Yes, translating and scanlating is hard but we all do it as a hobby that we like to share to others, its not our job nor we want it to be and if people really have the money they should use that to support the original author/artist. I can only forgive ads in an actual website since it is expensive to keep a domain.
Also haha this mainly happens for korean webtoons and novels... for japanese and chinese ones there are more kinda unwritten rules that somehow people just dont follow in the piracy world for korean entertainment lmao from no type of warning for MTL to upload sniping to even fans not knowing how to pirate themselves (which we all know what it leads to)
u da goat
Grateful to translators and all but i can't help but be pissed whenever i see that readers have to pay to unlock the chapters they translate. Doesn't that beat the whole point for piracy? Might as well pay for the official. On the other hand donation to transalation group is very reasonable cause that's voluntarily, paying to read tho.... not so much