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That's Burnout Baby

@ggiirr

Am amintor just trying to remember what it's like to enjoy things again
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ggiirr
chipper-smol
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krudman

I do not want to sound like... You should have known better/I told you so/etc, but as... not that, as I can sound, I really hope artists take stock of what's going on at twitter. Things that have happened to artists in recent years:

  • tumblr banned porn to appease bigger companies
  • webtoon called your passion a side hustle all while laughing that to the bank
  • deviantart scrubs your art to sell AI art
  • patreon is constantly finding new and exciting ways to make people who use it nervous
  • twitter has been collapsing for the past year
  • there are other sites with their own problems Im not familiar with

There is no single platform that won't throw you under the bus if the people running it think they can make more money elsewhere. It doesn't matter if they'll find out they're wrong later. They'll gamble with your livelihood, and when their platform collapses, they'll sell it off afterwards and move onto the next thing to ruin for a buck.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Tumblr allows nudity again, but it's run by clowns, and it won't be but a few years before they find some new parent company or investors that want to ruin it again. No platform is safe because this is how this game is supposed to be played. Growth, growth, growth, tear it down for scrap, and sell it.

I don't pretend to know the answer to this problem, but at least diversify, make your own website, and make back ups.

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krudman

Worth reblogging in light of twitter announcing it's going to scrape it's own site for AI training and now artists are feeling forced to jump ship.

Extrapolate everything you've seen in the past year and take an educated guess if twitter is going to get better or worse moving forward. That site is only going to get worse, and it shouldn't be a surprise at this point. This website is only going to get worse. Every website is only going to get worse. You don't need'em!

Move, network, make a website, a youtube channel, a blog, make friends, build relationships, diversify, grow. You won't get serotonin, notifications, and good boy points for good posts™ on the terf website, but the people who matter will follow you.

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qwilman

i’ve got a follow-up that’s going to feel like it runs counter to this, but i promise it doesn’t. pay attention to the professional actions of the people at the top of any site you’re on. we can’t all keep track of board members or what bought what from who, but as we all slink back to tumblr we need to remember they banned porn, and we need to remember they did that to appease people at the top who want to do much worse.

conversely, when someone has the opportunity to make their site more money and they don’t take it? that’s absofuckinglutely worth remembering.

newgrounds is the big, weird, messy jumble of content that could only come from being around for 20 years, but it has no investors to appease. pillowfort has a publicly-available breakdown of their budget on their donation page. cohost has regular breakdowns of their finances. if you assume they’re acting in good faith, then even when things get really scary for them, they hold true to their word of not seeking VC money that will eventually ruin the site.

all this to basically say when people show you who they are believe them. there’s a good handful of sites out there right now who are doing the things everyone says they actually want behind the scenes, and a lot of them are living hand-to-mouth. i know we’re all broke, and i promise i’m not here to scold, but at a certain point we have an obligation to notice when someone is putting in the work we say we want to see.