3 years ago
$44 billion doesn't seem to buy you much these days, eh?
Don't really know what to say that hasn't already been said, but I know some people have been asking so I just wanted to say this: the FA team is watching closely, and we're listening to feedback and concerns. We're talking, and we're going to be trying some new things in the future. I've already got some working early concepts on my dev box (more soon), and I can't wait to get your feedback so we can work build off it further.
Oh, and a few people have asked if we'd ever consider doing what DeviantArt's proposed with their built-in AI art generator. To that, I say: EWWWWW! No.
Don't really know what to say that hasn't already been said, but I know some people have been asking so I just wanted to say this: the FA team is watching closely, and we're listening to feedback and concerns. We're talking, and we're going to be trying some new things in the future. I've already got some working early concepts on my dev box (more soon), and I can't wait to get your feedback so we can work build off it further.
Oh, and a few people have asked if we'd ever consider doing what DeviantArt's proposed with their built-in AI art generator. To that, I say: EWWWWW! No.
FA+

It's not the previous owners' fault the website suddenly is now only worth 44 million.
And yeah...we really do live in bad times. Twitter is falling apart, telegram is auctioning off names for crypto...the AAA video game industry is diving headfirst towards a monumental crash with microtransactions...not to mention the real world conflicts and chaos.
Also yeah, definitely no to AI-generated art. That was a dumb mistake from dA that should never have cleared management.
It was such a bad experience I swore never to install another mobile game on my phone, and I haven't.
I'm not just talking about the mobile market, though. See Overwatch 2, paying $20 for a single skin, or playing the game for LITERAL YEARS to earn a skin through weekly challenges. The entire video game market has become saturated with the blood of our wallets, and the AAA vampires know it full well.
So... we're really close, but I can't say when, until I can say when, then I will say when.
Twitter is terrible as an art gallery and was best served for people focused on instant gratification via an obsession with stats. Had a place, sure but the fact many made it their main got pretty annoying because it was endless scrolling finding their older stuff not to mention the fluff like political nonsense, food pics, game rants, etc.
FA is in dire need of moderizing but still a better platform for furry content than Twitter ever was.
FA's goal is to put art first, and that will always be our goal, but we make all the other bits far more polished and usable. It's something we've been working on over time.
Keep up the good work, Boss Man!
And yeah 1 more year for here in Germany aswell ^^
Only time will tell what will happen there in the end.
Thankfully, my main site is right here, and Twitter is just an afterthought for when there's extra time.
Since I've now been here for over 16 years, there is one thing I remember that I miss a little. Remember the artist-submitted FA banners at the top of the page that would change each month from 2006 to 2013? Those were always fun to see. Then, it switched to only a few changes per year, then to one that rarely never changed. It was always fun to see something new, and I'd always go to look through the galleries of each artist as the banners changed. One was even a cute playable game.
When I was in the TV animation industry and doing freelance graphic design I bounced around from job to job working on TV shows, projects, pharmaceutical companies, interactive Flash design, and managing teams of Korean animators. I hated it, and the media industry burned down my soul. I left the TV industry and never went back.
The biggest problem? Execs. C-suits. The uncreative fucks (yes, fucks) who lord over money and budgets who also micro-manage everything. They love nothing more than "contributing" to a project solely so they can say "Yeah, I helped make that." But their ideas NEVER work because they don't understand how artists design and create, how the process works, or even the spirit of the entire project.
But they love to interfere, and they'll drop lines like "I love the show! Everything works great. Hey, did you know my nephew really loves Spider-Man? I was just thinking how create this would be if we find a way to add Spider-Man in somewhere, maybe in the background, or a reference. Yeah! Let's get the voice actors to..."
THE VOICE ACTORS ALREADY RECORDED THEIR LINES. The animations been done. We'd have to redo entire scenes here, and that's going to set the project behind by days when we're already behind by WEEKS.
And because of people like that it's why the animation team ended up working 16 hour days and sleeping in the office at the end of production.
That's what Musk did. He came in, micro-managed, told the teams what to do without knowing a single fucking thing about Twitter, how it worked, how the code operated, how the resources were allocated, or had knowledge of any discussions that occurred in the past. He just said "do it" and the entire team went "Whoa, that's now how this works." and then anybody who complained or told him the idea was bad was terminated.
Clusterfuck.
Musk knows as little about Twitter as the CEO of Walmart knows about how to restock local store shelves, buff floors, and clean restrooms - essentially nothing.
I guess he thought the code could rewrite itself to magically do whatever he wants, on an impossibly short notice! I guess he shouldn't have fired all the people who were best qualified to do what he wants. Even if they weren't fired, trying to make big changes in just a week, simply wouldn't go well. He left no time for planning, testing and feedback, which can take many months, or longer.
Generally, changes that take away existing features are usually a bad idea. In Twitter's case, they nullified their free verified status checkmark, an existing feature, by encouraging people to purchase a non-verified look-alike checkmark. The blue check no longer means, "I'm a verified user." It now means, "I paid for visibility, but I'm not verified." Musk didn't think that through very well!!
HOWEVER
There is vast room to improving social interaction on FA, make commenting more rewarding and fun, and try to vastly increase the way in which folks can engage one in a way that's fluid. That's one thing Twitter did well that, admittedly, FA doesn't. That's kind of what we're looking into.
At the most, I'd love to get funds for development, hire coders, expand services, bandwidth, etc. Building up FA is in my interests, but it's hard to come out and be like "I need $50-100K at a minimum." because nobody wants to lend that kind of money to a furry site, but servers, infrastructure, and code time are very real costs.
He had no understanding of how the platform works. None. At all. Even after 17 years of being at FA, when I have to make a tech request with my team sometimes it's a matter of understanding the "environmental impact" a feature could have, because doing X could potentially change Y and Z, and then there's considerations like the amount of resources something may take, performance impact, community health, etc.
You never rush into things. I've had times where I made suggestions to the team and a week later my brain had a weird intrusive thought and realized a new way my idea could be a bad one. Sometimes ideas need to be torn apart, and you take what's good that's left, and build up from there. NEVER rush in. I've made that mistake in the past. I've upset the FA community before. But with that comes experience.
After paying $44bn for him to rush in and make these mistakes... these are not the actions anyone with this ANY experience would ever make.
Nobody with even a the tiniest sliver of business knowledge would have done what he did unless they were absolutely incompetent. It just frustrates me. The man has all the money in the world, I don't. We struggle sometimes, and yet...
Updoots have a perverse incentive effect where people start commenting a lot of the same things over and over, having figured out exactly what to say to get the most of them consistently.
Go to basically any subreddit, and take note of the top posts. They all resemble each other distressingly closely, because updoots have rewarded people saying what everyone else wants to hear, rather than actually contributing any new thoughts.
Twitter is always so full of toxicity because extreme takes and dunk-ons get the most updoots. Engaging earnestly with other people isn't rewarded, so it doesn't happen.
Updoots leave no room for nuance, no meaningful conversation. They turn communication into a purely performative popularity contest.
People might want updoots, but they really don't need them.
And FA will always be first and foremost an art gallery site, but there's a lot of things we can do in the name of content exploration and making it easier to find/digest the things you want (pun maybe intended?) with a way that made browsing Twitter fun but without all the bullshit that made Twitter awful.
Two big sites crashing must be quite the traffic. Hoping FA can withstand it. -pets website- You can do it. You can stay online for the influx of new users. I believe in you
I never considered Twitter worth using to begin with. Even before the buyout, it was one of the worst websites you could possibly use for uploading any form of art let alone Furry art. Plus, it was well known for having the kind of userbase who brought their political views into places where they are not welcome or warranted, even more so after the Tumblr exodus. I just knew spoilt rich kid over there would screw this up, and yet again demonstrate that he doesn't understand how the world works or the value of his ill gotten money.
Since Telegram has also been mentioned, it's truly disgusting how far it's degraded in such a short span of time. Not only have I already seen them stealing usernames and promoting money laundering - they have also badly let down a good friend of mine. The only thing keeping me there despite it being run by crooks is that I'm in several groups who have yet to move over to Discord.
Seeing all of this happening only makes me appreciate having a website like FA even more. I've remained posting here all these years despite all the new websites that have come along, and I've been taking note of how this one has changed over time. It'll be interesting to see what these new things you've got in the works are, but I'm definitely glad to see that this site will not be following in DA's grubby footsteps.
I always found it real annoying how artists would abandon FA for Twitter, somehow thinking it's an art site, or post on there that they're taking commissions and open up here.. i'm not on there, and if they open on here, I question why do they not announce that here? Makes no sense.. ah, and i'm pretty sure Twitter won't protect from content theft like you guys do on here, and there's really no way to track stuff on there, I don't figure.. so a picture could get retweeted to somewhere else and who knows where it'll go after that. -_-
..'course, those'r my thoughts, i'm pretty cut-off from most of the stuff that goes on.
Thanks for being you, it's nice to see folks who have a brain in their skull as opposed to the mindless drivel I hear from places outside of here. owo
It's kind of a natural development cycle.
We've maybe been talking for the past year off and on about making certain changes and trying to build off ideas, but we had stages we wanted to meet first. Well, now we have much more incentive to speed that up.
Well, hopefully the plans you guys have and are preparing for, will work out nicely and be better for the site and community as a whole. I'm happy with the way things are run here and have no complaints whatsoever. I wish ya'll luck in future developments so that they go smoothly for you. <3
♥ ♥ ♥ :>
Just look at Meta. Is it a community of friends and family? An ad platform? A marketplace for used shit? A news service? A VR community? A giant furnace where money goes to vanish?
When you start diluting what you do you take away from the things that made you successful.
Social media isn't a bad idea on paper and it started out good...but then the idiots arrived and look what happened.
Now if you ever get FA+ on a payment other than paypal I will gladly throw money at you to support the site! I am just 100% too concerned of Paypal doing it's "OMEGAWD THERE'S PORN THERE" shit and knocking out my paypal to risk it.
Looking forward to the updates.
💛
Also, THANK YOU for staying away from all this AI NFT TechBro bullshit. That all has NO PLACE for us at FA!
I don't need computers drawing my art any more than I need computers driving my car. I will stick to my Wacom tablet and/or commissioning artists, and my 6-speed manual transmission, thank you very much. :'3
People are always going to complain. That's just what people do. The important thing is to be able to understand why they're complaining, process their feedback, and try to understand the things that upset them so you can work on that in the future.
As someone who has a pretty decent grasp on aeronautics for a non-pilot and regularly listens to ATC communications online (and I did actually want to obtain my pilot's license years ago, and I'm fairly certain that if I was that passenger who came to the rescue when the single-pilot died or something I could get us landed safely), this concept completely scares me. Unlike with self-driving cars, where there is no centralized control and drivers do not need to radio in nor respond to commands, and everything is done at the discretion of each individual driver, and signals are provided via actual signals and signs on the ground, I literally don't even know where to begin with this concept of a self-flying plane. ATC would either have no way to communicate with it, or even if it has AI transponding on the radio, I just don't trust this in the slightest... XD;
All these people scared shitless about something that literally cannot happen, yet they have no fear about a self-driving car which is connected to the Internet via cellular networks... xD;
As for dA? I genuinely don't know Spyed anymore v.v the Spyed I knew is clearly gone. His entire team is useless. I was maliciously reported then suspended for a damn week over an offsite PSA I had up about my being cyber stalked, bullied, harassed and threatened. When I demanded action, the "team" told me I had been anonymously reported when this is literally impossible to do (I've tried) and despite my telling them that whoever had reported me was under police investigation, nothing was ever done.
I was screwed out of $400CAD because SURPRISE! If you have pending transactions from purchases others have made, if you get suspended, those transactions are REFUNDED and your algorithm on the site is fucked up because for the time you're suspended, no one views your page.
It's sad but Spyed more than likely has no idea what's happening to his site. And if he does, then he doesn't care v.v
Dragoneer >....> if you ever sell FA, I'll slap you...with a rotting piece of seaweed mixed with man o' war jellyfish >....>
FA is one of the only large active communities where your worth isn't dictated by an algorithm.
Nope. Never got one, never will and glad I never did. Sure dodged that mess... damn.
The search engine seems to be a bit funky recently too. But that’s it !
=^.,.^=
Newgrounds improved their features following the Tumblr exodus, and hopefully FA would do so sooner than later.
You do a great job.
But do you think can make an icon to fav stuff there maybe like a heart or paw icon like how eviantart and twitter does it without going the next page to fav something the art there?
Cause it gets a bit tedious for me to just trying fav stuff in a row sometimes just coming in and out to fav something in the next page in an art piece there and just need a bit faster way to fav something.
I hope at least that when try to improve this place, especially the twitter fiasco that everyone is talking about, I hope you can add something like that there that DA and twitter have and put that kind of feature in this site very soon there.
Also do you think you can fix the time zone or say the time where people comment or something there?
At first it wasn’t showing the right time at first before for me, but then it got fixed and now it’s back to the wrong time there.
To try to tell you what I mean, Like for example I commented here on 11:30am but it says 12:30pm instead. That’s the wrong time there and it was suppose to be 11:30am there.