The Fandom - An Interesting State of Affairs

I had an interesting conversation with ironbadger and he had a couple interesting points that I felt merit an LJ entry, he made the point that some of the fandom feels entitled to free stuff, from artists to ordinary fanboys, he went to the FC scritch and bitch last year and heard to people get up and demand free food and board, and a prize I suppose for the convention being lucky enough to be graced with their presence, interesting I suppose, because although I cant say we have had something similar happen, its not something I see is unlikely, we have had artists ask for a free membership, that they felt they deserved because they were artists, now you people know me, I dont really collect art, the stuff I do have is usually stuff from VCL, but heck right now my desktop looks like this so that should show you were my interests lie, so here comes the interesting part, I wanna get your opinion... tell me what you think.

The Fandom - An Interesting State of Affairs Part II

Now that the Consensus is that there IS a problem, how do we go about fixing it, I know there are other people out there like me who want to improve the fandom, its gonna take alot of baby steps, and alot of work, but Im thinking that the first step for us as a group is to figure out what needs fixing, or is broken before we start work, now out some of the things I see as potential issues, is sustainable growth, the fandom functions much like the great American melting pot, new people come in and the fandom teaches them what is acceptable to the group, mostly in terms of behavior, I think this will become more important as time goes on due to the fact that the average age of someone new to the fandom is going down not up, and the new people coming in are much more likely to have less then no social skills, compared to the group that came in 5 years ago this is the issue we are going to need to work on, there are lots of self important, pious, pompous, assholes in the world some of them in this fandom (unfortunately) and even I have my self important pompous moments (well.. im sorry, again... ) anyways.. so what do you guys think we can do to improve things?