What do artist need in a platform?

[akitsukino]

I recently made a post about how I wanted to use social media to promote my art, but was struggling because I just couldn’t stand most platforms at times. I was definitely not alone in that feeling.

I have been thinking more recently about taking my art career/passion seriously. One of the ways people suggest doing that is posting more to social media and interacting with the right communities. But how do you do this when a lot of communities make you sick? It’s normal to be afraid of social media drama these days, but even being scared of the leviathan that is that there’s also the issue of what, when, and how you would post things. I’ve always been introverted and the internet doesn’t cha…

But love or hate social media it’s true it’s just not something you can completely ignore if you want to get your name out there. It’s an unfortunate thing for introverts that selling yourself is just kind of part of the experience. There have been some decent places but it feels like their fading away.

Tumblr was a raging cyclone of horrible, but it did a lot of a artists pretty good. Not just in commissions or fan bases, but in getting people hired for actual jobs. There are industry professionals who, to this day, still lament missing Tumblr (even if it is still technically there). And everyday I see artist after artist say they WISH they could leave Twitter but don’t feel like they can because the community/audience/fanbase they need is stuck over there at the moment. The need for another good artist platform seems so high that more startup alternatives are popping up; Pillowfort, Fanexus, Artfol, Waterfall.

Social media does freak me out at times being introvert, but I’ve always managed to consume it passively and step away with something. There was a lot of content sites like Deviantart exposed to a younger me that were both hurtful and helpful in my journey to being an artist. The fact that there is some kind of hole missing in the greater internet art community right now makes me pretty sad, but it feels hard to figure out what it’ll take to fill that hole.

So what do some of you think? What do you think a good art platform needs? Which startup do you think has the potential to be the next Tumblr/ DA? What do you think it’ll take for artists to FINALLY be able to pack up their bags and leave Twitter if they want? What could the future of art blogging look like? Let me know below!

[Caro]

I feel like my only strong platform opinion is that it can’t be purely artist-centric because sooo much potential audience exists outside of the artist bubble. Its probably great for making artist pals and feeling like a part of community but not entirely useful for building a strong audience.

Heck, I’d say more than half of my audience are folks who have no interest in art or drawing and just read comics for fun with zero interest in making em.

[rajillustration]

I still get most my views and print sales through tumblr so--it's not to late to hop over there.

For me, when it comes to a platform, I just neeeeeeeeeed to know that my posts are actually going to be seen by the people who follow me. None of this weird timeline nonsense where things are out of order, or bigger accounts get higher promotion because they have more clicks...I need to know that my work is worth my time or I will stop using the platform.

Like even using those hashtag promotions feels pointless because when you click the hashtag--it's the same 50 artists over and over who are amazing, I know because I already follow them, but I'm not going to find work that way. That and like...not talking about illustration here but strictly comics...having a comic twitter is like...not something with as big of an audience as fanart twitter or fandom twitter for me. But for someone doing gag comics to an older audience--they see good feedback on twitter, because it fits nicely onto the photo mode of twitter, it's easily shareable...it works better. You want to be where your readers are. It's a lot of knowing your demographic, and they might be on a very specific social media site.

[DasIstWunderblyat]

Good audience and algorithm. Many persists in unideal platforms for artists (e.g. Twitter) just because the audience.

[Kaydreamer]

I'd say there needs to be three main things in order for artists to thrive on a platform.

• It can't only be artists! It's nice to have cozy artist communities, but in order to actually find real work, a broader platform is required. That's what makes Twitter so essential. It's a humungous industry networking opportunity. Tumblr was great too, as it had a large non-artist fandom base. (It was, and remains, rather useless if you don't make much fanart... But if you do, you can still see some good results over there. I have some Dragon Prince fanart I made a year ago still collecting reblogs.)

• Chronological timelines. This is the BIG one. Instagram would still be decent for artists if it had a chronological timeline. As would Twitter. (I know it's an option on Twitter, but most people don't use it. This addiction-triggering, algorithmic nonsense isn't just bad from a moral perspective, it actively harms smaller creators.

• A gallery. Seriously, Twitter would immediately generate so much renewed goodwill from artists if it implemented an actual gallery.

[rajillustration]

A gallery. Seriously, Twitter would immediately generate so much renewed goodwill from artists if it implemented an actual gallery.

Twitter used to have a way to store tweets into like a list that other people could see--was super helpful for things like inktober and other events. But alas, it was too useful. It's gone now (or I have no idea how to find where it is on my page anymore)