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My Thoughts on Crossposting by ksharra
There's this weird new trend that I don't get with some artists on Weasyl and FA. It's not just one person (so if it's you, I'm not just picking on you), it's a trend. I don't get it.
People I watch have been either posting "Exclusive to Weasyl" preview pics on FA, or posting to Weasyl first and then deliberately waiting a day (or more) to post to FA.
Please note, artists who do this: the below statements are my personal opinion. They may not be indicative of your reasons for doing it, but this is what this watcher thinks when you do.
First impression: God, that's a waste of time.
You're either dedicating extra time to having to make a special image just to taunt your FA watchers with the fact that they can't see your artwork unless they accede to your personal choice in gallery preferences DESPITE THE FACT THAT YOU'RE STILL ON FA, or you're having to remember to go back the next day to post artwork when it would be more easy and time-efficient to post it all at once, since the only people who are really going to notice and care are the rabid fans who absolutely MUST be the first to post a comment.
Second impression: Wow, that's a dick move.
So instead of just leaving FA for whatever personal reasons you chose to do so, you're staying on to try and forcibly convert everyone else to move over by taunting them. Instead of standing up for your own personal feelings on which gallery you choose to use by simply moving over, you're attempting to push your personal feelings and choices onto others. If you don't like FA, go to Weasyl. Stop posting to FA. It's that simple. Just tell people you're moving and move, instead of coming back and basically saying "Nyah nyah, look at what you're missing, don't you wish you had this, gosh, you should really have followed me to Weasyl, sucks to be youuuu!"
All that said... if I'm watching you, I like your art. That's why I watch people. Despite my personal annoyance at what I see as petty behavior, I will still TRY to watch your art. But not everyone is as patiently tolerant as me.
Good luck.
For those who watch me, I post to both sites. As simultaneously as possible. Watch me here, watch me there, won't matter. Except on here you'll be getting a pretty banner, as soon as I can make one. Woo. Oh and I'm gonna post the banner on FA as art. XD
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Comments
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But I totally agree that the teaser images is really catty and immature!
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That's pretty much how I ended up creating a weasyl account. A lot of my favorite artists had said they'll posting to weasyl from now on. Saying they'll leave their old posts on their former page, but will post new ones on a new website from now on. Even some who are doing comics had said they will no longer post new pages on FA and only do it on weasyl. I didn't want to go to weasyl because it'll be another website where I have to remember another password. Though, the website itself is pretty nice and will take a lot to get use to, but yeah. I see what you are saying and I do agree. That's just wrong to try and force people to come to weasyl just to look at artworks by teasing.
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Pretty much with you on both of these. I've seen these suggestions and others tossed around as ways to incentivise old watchers to follow you to the new site, and I don't see why they would do that (is anyone really going to notice or care if they get pics a day later than the site they don't visit?). I'm pretty sure this is just clumsy hedging from artists who want to leave FA but don't want to limit their audience, and they'd probably be better off just making a clean break.
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I can understand that. But I am torn because I kind of actively want to see FA become a functional backwater; I want Dragoneer and all his awful shit to go back to sitting sad and alone at Olive Garden, but I also don't really think that will happen until FA has another major stumble. They're wobbly now, but they won't actually fall apart until they have their next crisis or major service outage in the near future. The steady transfer pressure is more just a way of maintaining things until that crisis happens.
The picture stuff I dunno if I strictly agree that it's bad but it certainly is unnecessary work for artists. If a strategy isn't portable, what's the point of it? Making cropped differently-named preview-pictures or remembering to time things for staggering uploads seems like a lot of extra effort for not much incentive, if someone is busy they would not be able to maintain it for all that long. If you want dual presence, it makes a lot more sense to make use of Waxpost to easily crosspost things as you make them, and just occasionally post reminders of your Weasyl presence.
The strategy a lot of artists have been using- offering commission slots to Weasyl first, or offering special commission slots that they only post on Weasyl, is a far more effective strategy towards shifting the center of power. Because the thing is, from the perspective of an artist who lives off their work you don't just want everyone to transfer; you want the people who buy art and commissions to transfer. Specifically incentivizing those people in a positive way is much more important. Even if they're only a portion of the larger community, they're the ones who matter from the perspective of letting artists sustain their lives off their art.
I mean, if people are that resistant to transferring that they aren't interested in even trying to look at Weasyl to follow their favorite artists, they're really not very good fans anyway. Not to mention, just look at the sort of people supporting awful rape-y stuff in that official Fender journal or taunting the artists who leave; I DON'T want those people to come here, thank you very much.
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Yeah, leave those guys to rot, I say. They're happy in their cesspool, and Weasyl's much nicer for their absence.
I'm not opposed to the basic goal or the other strategies artists have come up with - I'll likely be giving Weasyl preference if I ever open for commissions again, myself - but the cross-posting issue I'm not sure how to approach gracefully, especially for someone like me who's rarely active to begin with. It's a bit obnoxious to offer your old crowd the same things but worse with nagging reminders to follow you, but courteous parity doesn't help to reach people who only care about getting to see pics. I can't tell if any of that was coherent; I'm pretty tired.
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The problem is, Sappo, you want two contradicting things:
- You want FA to fail.
- You don't want the people you don't like on FA to come here.
If FA fails, all those people you don't like, all the people whose comments you hate, all the artists that draw things that offend you, will move to another site with more traffic - Weasyl. If FA's content stagnates, if it becomes a backwater, the people you don't want here will come here anyway, because Weasyl is the new next best thing, and it'll be the ideal place for them to go.
You can't have both. This is the logic failure that I'm seeing in people who move to Weasyl to get away from people they don't like. When Weasyl becomes big enough, the people you don't like will come here.
You don't move your art gallery to avoid people. You move your gallery to the place that has the best features, the most watchers, and the fewest bugs. I respect people that have moved here because of FA's bugginess, lag, and security failures, or because they like Weasyl's features much more. But do it without all the hate and drama. Seriously.
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Thank you. Thank you, thank you, thank you. So much this.
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I'm aware of this, I know.
I also don't want Weasyl to collapse back down and put power back in FA, because Dragoneer's "eh it will all blow over why should I care" attitude is infuriating and I do not want him rewarded for it.
The ideal is that Weasyl becomes the stable niche site for general issue not-awful-people, like Sofurry is the best platform for writers and Inkbunny is for cub stuff.
But I don't think that's an entirely sustainable state of affairs, especially not when it is such a large chunk of the community, so I suspect at some point things will tip one way or the other. At that point, I'd rather have Weasyl, with its relatively more communicative and (so far) reasonable leadership, better features, and more active development be The Thing. If the community is going to ultimately settler in one place, I'd just rather it not be FA- or at least, not FA under Dragoneer's leadership.
I also strongly suspect that if FA has another major outage in the near term (which, judging by history, is actually fairly likely) the decision will be made for us; Weasyl will become the new biggest thing, whether we like it or not. At least here the social tools like fav-able journals and filterable tags and stuff make forming a community (and avoiding the awful people) easier than the feeling of shouting into the storm that FA's social tools always had.
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I think it's only a "dick move" or what not if someone is like "IM ONLY GONNA BE POSTING ON WEASYL EXCLUSIVELY" because by definition, posting previews etc kinda violate the whole "exclusive" thing. I can see why anyone would remain slightly active on both though, that's just marketing. Not everyone sees journals, not everyone keeps up with moves, and honestly some people on FA do the same thing but link back to ANOTHER gallery on FA. It's honestly about exposure and marketing, that's all.
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Oh, and to clarify you do have very valid points and I pretty much agree with your opinion! I'm just trying to offer some reasoning to the other side - some people are being very very obnoxious with it and it doesn't help to try to be rude to anyone.
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I am inclined to agree with this. If people want to use both sites it is their prerogative.
There won't be a clean break if you decide to leave a website. However, teasing people instead of respecting their decision to stay with a particular site is a tad mean.
Some come to me saying how financially tied they are to one site. It took me a while to build my customer base before I left FA. I can build it again if necessary.
It is more important to do what I love than feeling like an obligated slave.
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That's something that confuses me about the way you broke with FA, QT: you deleted your gallery. Taking it down entirely leaves no breadcrumbs to bring people here, not to mention it must have been a tedious amount of work for you. You could have left it up to serve as a signpost directing your existing fans here. Instead, anyone who has ever faved your art on FA now simply has a bunch of unmarked empty favorite slots with no indication of whose art it had been. I'm not upset, I'm just... baffled. Why the extra effort when it only serves to shrink your customer base?
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Isn't that the fault of FA? It has had years to properly code the site It instead leaves things more of a mess. . I left 2 journals saying I had a Weasyl account, including one that said you can find my gallery here. It is not like people cannot block journal notifications. If I make a journal, everyone gets a notification. They are informed that I am removing my gallery and I even offer to give the artwork they may want that they haven't downloaded for free, or for a small fee if they want the entire gallery, since I am making it into an organized pack.
If FA's system is leaving the "Deleted" that isn't exactly my fault is it? Should I be punished for FA's crappy code?
If I said to people on Deviantart "I am closing my account and leaving due to it being crappy" A majority of users will chime in and agree that the site is crappy and request where I will be posting my artwork.
If I tell people I am leaving FA for whatever reason and it being a crappy site being one of them, people look for ways to blame the user for its shortcomings or be outright hostile.
I honestly don't get it.
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Geez, chill. I'm not blaming you for anything, nor being hostile. All I was asking was why you went through the trouble to erase your presence.
It would seem to me that the more web presence you leave behind (like old art), the more people are able to discover you later on and trace you to your most current gallery. And actually, I don't mind the fact that an empty fave is left behind, I just wish it told you whose art was removed. I'm sure a lot of people I've watched have left FA, and I have no idea who, because like many people, I don't read journal notifications unless the title jumps out at me.
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I think you're mistaking my post as being emotional. It's is not. It's confusion over the whole way people have been going at this whole situation.
As I said, I left notifications where to follow me and even offered to give people my old art. I haven't withheld anything. I don't need FA to be my archive of old works. I should be able to choose where that venue is.
The problem is that people don't see that it is really bad coding on the part of FA that certain behaviors would annoy people with ghost notifications. If I close my DA account it's a simple process. If I "deactivate" my FA it's a broken process.
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That's true I upload my old FA content here, but new pics will be here and not on FA.
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Remind me to request a "Like" button for comments. ;)
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FA users have been trolling us SoFurry with these for years. Tit-for-tat, name of the game. We deal with it ;-)
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My take on it is this: if you're going to leave FA for here, okay. A lot of people are storming off of FA like little children because they don't like little Bobby over here or little Susie over there. We get that drama is sometimes inevitable. But as far as the crossposting is concerned, I agree: it is a total dick move. If you want to post in both places, okay. If you want to stop using FA in favor of Weasyl, okay - even if you're one of the ones doing the diva move and posting a big journal about how you're leaving FA. I can live with that (and keep in mind, this is mainly just me venting - this is all going to blow over on its own eventually).
And truthfully, there are things that I like better about Weasyl. The markdown is nice, as is the live-parsed preview of text. I like that a lot. I like the way the profile looks here on Weasyl. But here's the thing: don't taunt me to migrate here, because when I see that, two things happen: one, I'm absolutely not going to watch you here. Two, I'll most likely get sick of seeing that crap and un-watch you on FA. And I have a feeling there are plenty of others like me.
I actually pointed out to someone on FA, on one of the community announcements. I normally don't like getting involved in the drama, but I just had a hard time holding it back. I posted a comment to the effect of "If you're not satisfied with what FA has to say about the situation and want to leave, then leave. Let your followers know where they can find you, and just let that be that." One guy responded and talked about how awful FA was, and I asked, "If it's so bad, why are you still here?" He actually responded with, "Because I run a business and my main watcher base is here on FA." Yet he was trying to get everyone to leave FA, just like you said in this journal. Like, he was actively trying to get people to leave. I called him out on that one: "So you hate the site enough to bash it, but not enough to actually leave it just on principle. Which does that make you: a coward, or just a loudmouthed hypocrite?"
Sorry, I know that's a little off-topic, but it goes along with the sentiment. I think people have turned this mess on FA into something that is isn't.
Link
Outlandish_Studios
I'm mainly trying to stagger things (unsuccessfully) so I don't upload the same thing at the same time cause I feel it's really annoying xD!