#art posting platforms use an algorithm and I'm nothing compared to that

[blu3bl00d3d]

once again reminded that our art is absolutely amazing and other people actually find it cool

[skidar]

At a bit of a dark gray low in my evening thinking about how I can't be bothered to sit at my desk long enough to draw much of anything anymore.

I love making art and sharing art. I have for decades, but now with all the scraping and stealing and hurdles artists have to go through to protect their stuff from getting ripped off and fed into the theft machine its almost too disheartening to share anymore.

I still make art, lots of it. I've tried cloaking, I hate what it does to my art even at the 'smoothest setting.' That's not what I wanted it to look like, that's not what I wanted to share with people.

I've tried uploading low resolution and it looks like garbage on mobile, where most folks tend to look at stuff.

My platform and reach has bottomed out since twitter died, and it feels like everyone is constantly yelling at and over the top of each other on what to do to not only protect their work but everyone else's as well.

With my platform a fraction of what it once was (still humble compared to many others) most of my engagement went with it. I used to love getting comments on stuff, sharing laughs and feelings with people that enjoyed my stuff. Now I feel like If I'm not constantly outputting art I won't see any sort of response at all. (I will say as much as I love tumblr it kinda sucks to share art on unless you're posting fanart in relevant fandoms. It just is, it has been since I joined in '11 and the other places I got more traction on actively suck now like twitter and dA).

I'm not designed to shit out 'content' for algorithms on other sites. I don't want to measure my worth in clicks and likes or whatever else the creative world has been boiled down and repackaged as.

I miss sharing art and making connections, building communities and sharing ideas, stories and personal projects in organic, messy stew of humanity. It all feels so shallow now.

Now artists are businesses and I get it, its a career, I'm groaning about my taxes even as I rant write this. You constantly have to promote, sell, paywall yourself for some sort of creative income. Studio work is immensely competitive to break into and projects are short term. You either chase every project and pray you can get in, or you dayjob it, side hustle and freelance every second.

It's exhausting. I've all but given up on ever working in a studio.

Constantly I think about my friends with successful long term careers and think of my struggling freelance business I support with my dull blue collar job and try and think back that I should have done something different. Something better to actually be good at and master.

I draw stuff and look at it and imagine all the hoops I now have to go through to post it for relatively nothing in return and wonder if its even worth sharing it. If its even good enough to share -.-

Not much engagement anymore, poor image quality, and the reach I had that used to afford glimpses of career opportunists feels gone.

I draw stuff, share it to private chats with friends, then flip the page and draw some more.

It hasn't made me want to stop creating, but it has sucked most of the joy out of sharing it with the world anymore.

It takes a lot of energy to drag my mind out of this muck and put myself back out there as an artist every day.

Just tired of feeling stuck and sinking.

[alicenpai]

Have you answered Q21 and 30 yet? Would love to hear your thoughts on those :o

21. Art styles nothing like your own but you like anyways

hi chiko!

I think I tried so many different styles over the years, and bc of art school I can probably draw in cartoony or anime styles pretty alright, so I won't pick any kind of animation adjacent styles for this one!

Edward Gorey, Ronald Searle

Norman Rockwell, J.C. Leyendecker

Dean Cornwall, Mead Schaeffer

30. What piece of yours do you think is underrated

this one is tough! as I haven't been drawing a lot of full pieces/posting very very sporadically this year.

like what is considered "underrated"? is it notes? funny enough I think before the pandemic my art used to get more notes, so, would someone consider my recent works "underrated" in that sense? it's tricky. 🤔 I know it's easy to blame the algorithm but there are so many factors at play that we cannot qualitatively control for. being on the right platform at the right time, drawing for the right fandom at the right time, catering to a suitable audience, how you format the post (like do you show closeups or just post the full illust or crop your art? do you just post a video instead??), and a suitable caption (e.g. something witty, relatable, funny, or just something basic like emojis or just 1 word)

for me I consider a work "underrated" or underperforming (I think is a better word for it), is if the drawing is not interesting enough that nothing is said about it. either about either subject matter or artistic techniques. for me connecting to others through art is so integral to the artist experience. if a post gets 1000 notes but it gets 0 comments, then i consider it a failure. if something gets 100 notes but it gets many comments, i would consider it the opposite of "underrated'.

like would original drawings be more underrated than fanart? 🤔 people have trouble connecting to ocs since they don't know the source material, so often those kinds of posts would get less notes or less comments. just interesting things to think about.

it's easy to go into the archive and look at the older stuff that possibly didn't get seen around as much, but i'll try to pull some more recent pieces.

I think this 6 fanarts did badly in comparison to other works because the trend appeared in 2020 but I wasn't able to complete this that year ^__T and the trend didn't come back in 2021... guess I'm not a trend setter..................... sighs 😔 haha

I do want to try this kind of fanart compilation again though! I'm bad at drawing under pressure though so I would have to come up with my own prompts...

this Kekkai Sensen x Trigun piece! I think the crossover alienated fans of both series bc you had to enjoy both T__T and I also didn't draw characters from either series interacting so I don't think it ended up that interesting? bc I wanted to make this a diptych (it's clear that there's a middle divide now that I mention it) but the triptych didn't end up happening!

besides both being created by Yasuhiro Nightow, I haven't come across that many fans who are fans of both, actually...? it's not in the case where the author's work is more or less similar in tone (or same universe), like Baccano x Durarara, Pandora Hearts x Vanitas no Carte, Higurashi x Umineko. I think something like trigun x cowboy bebop would have worked better because people are always unfortunately comparing the two hahahaha.

[jamiethebee]

Typing this up at 3am (roughly) so give me a little leeway/grace here anyways thinking about making art and motivation and sharing art (specifically in within online spaces) and how many different types (medium) of art their are

Like writers or draw-ers or painters or sculpture people or printmakers ceramicists fiber artists ect

And how each medium interacts acts with and produces art different simply based on the medium

Like I draw primarily fanart. I want to share it and have people find it and enjoy it. Yes I can draw it just for myself but based on the nature of what I create I want other people to be able and find and enjoy it to. And when it doesn't it bums me out.

I crochet but I've only just started talking about it more online. I will post about it and talk about the pieces (once I finish projects) but likes/notes/ect don't matter to me. It's something created for the purpose of me and what I'm doing with it.

I do ceramics. Have for about as long as I've been drawing "consistently". Ceramics exists within craft art circles and fine art circles. I post to document progress and share about it, but the primarily method of sharing/interacting happens outside of online spaces. Show submissions, critiques, ect. I post online because I want to share and talk about it but engagement means nothing to me. (Full time ceramicists obv will have a different purpose for social media ok)

I cosplay. I post and create content specifically for different online spaces (for tiktok (yeah I get it shut up) and insta). I want people to see the time and energy I put into those creations and enjoy the content that comes out of it and for people to be able to react and see the interpretation of a fictional character. Much like with drawing - the engagement does matter! not for the express purpose of popularity but for the community. (I would still create cosplays as much as I do now if I wasn't posting online btw. It just happens to be a good avenue to share work outside of the handful of cons in my state which btw cost money/not cheap compared to the "free" cost of posting online.)

And that's a fraction of it. I'm just a little tired of seeing posts go "oh, you should make art just to make it and stop worrying about likes" when???? To me, as someone who exists in a lot of different spaces of the art world, it's silly (sometimes ignorant and overbearing) advice. If you only produce work because you want attention that's not healthy but if you produce work for attention that builds towards something else (community, friends, like minded people, work, ect) that's different and having people ignore your work or, on other sites, have an algorithm that actively works against you (as an artist who takes time to produce a piece of content) then yes!!!! It fucking sucks ass!!!!! It's the worst!!!! Especially for those of us who have been around long enough and been on different platforms to know that it doesn't have to be like this for artists and telling artists to suck it up anyways and not get discouraged is a tone-deaf message im really sick of hearing.

Stop lumping a diverse group of people together, boiling their motivations and purpose down to a single idea, and then tell them to get over themselves and just "have a good time". It's an infinitely more complex issue and I don't think non artists (and to some extent people who only do one type of visual art) understand.

Maybe I'm being a little pretentious here or whatever but this is coming from someone who has never seen success (in whatever way you want to define it) through drawing and posting online (over 10 years). This is someone who starting seeing success in cosplay and has seen that trickle down to the basic "we're showing it to the baseline number of people and that's it" that the algorithm allots. This is someone who hasn't had any hope in their art being shared/seen/ect by more than about 5 people FOR YEARS. And yet I create anyways and hope that one day I'll be good enough that maybe I'll get somewhere with it all. Because the problem is that if you've been around long enough to have that initial popularity and then the algorithm changed and you get no interaction you get left with a sense of "well I must not be good enough" and it gets destructive. Maybe this is different than younger people and how they view social media and their relationship with it but for me? I was lucky enough to never get attention in the first place so it doesn't have a heavy influence on my motivation. But it's still there and it's still a consideration (at least for work that I share because I want to reach people who also enjoy those things and for them to see and appreciate the hard work I dump into my projects.

TL;DR: I'm tired of people lumping all artists together and telling the community to ignore notes/likes/engagement/ect because it doesn't matter and you should create just for funsies. It's a far more nuanced issue that deals a lot with medium specifics and professional artists (those who live off their work) vs not.

[retronator]

Brilliant explanation. Your view on it is interesting, some of which is subjective, but I care because I use the app (and social media at large) primarily to look up art from around the globe—I mean, how else would I be able to? I look at pieces on tumblr for longer than 3 seconds; I get inspired and share awesome work all the time. The 3-second threshold only applies to me when I get put off by the blurry display and it can completely change the art I'm seeing (compared to the original save)...

It is very subjective, I agree. You can choose which place to look at art though, especially since many artists post on multiple platforms. 

This is another subjective choice of course, but here are the reasons why DeviantArt is for me the best website to find/look at art right now:

No noise. Everything posted is art. Yes, it also has journals, and status updates, and polls, and forum posts, but those are all separated away from the main art queue. If all you care about is art, this is exactly what you can get.

Notification queue. Posts from people you follow all get added to notifications. This means you never miss anything from your favorite artists. On Tumblr and Twitter, unless you follow very few people, it’s impossible to look through every post. Unlike with DA, you can’t filter out just the art.

Groups for discovery. Similar to Facebook, groups are places to find artists you didn’t know yet about. It’s not any better than reblogs/retweets, maybe even worse, because anyone can submit to groups whereas with reblogs/retweets you already (usually) like that artist’s taste, so their recommendations will probably suit you. But at least there is some discovery built in.

There are many things wrong with DA, from its cluttered design to lack of moderation in gallery categories (isometric pixel art is full of things that are nothing but), but the no noise+notifications combo really outweigh it for me.

Can we do better? Yes. The problem with DA is also that not everyone posts there. Some artists are only on Twitter, some just on Tumblr, some just on Pixel Joint … We would need one central place where:

There is only art.

You can follow artists so you never miss their artworks.

It has all the art, from everyone/everywhere.

That’s what my Pixel Art Database aims to be. Key pieces of technology need to be developed for this to happen:

An artist database with everyone’s social media accounts.

A spider/crawler/robot that collects all the posts from these accounts.

An algorithm that filters just (pixel) art from all the posts. 

User accounts for following artists and tracking which artworks you’ve seen already (notifications for new ones).

Once you have all these running, you can say which artists you want to follow and it will theoretically give you a stream of just the artworks that these artists have created. Then you need a system for discovery/recommendations and you’re onto a good start. Of course with a clutter free viewing experience (absolutely no ads next to artworks).

So that would be my ideal way for how to look up art from around the globe.