Being an artist is tough enough without people sabotaging our social media efforts for their own entertainment.

I recently ran into a "bot" on Reddit, "furrymirrorbot", that automatically reposts furry artwork when posted to Reddit, without asking the artist or anything, making the link to the repost available to everyone in the very same post the artwork was shared in.

Some people don't think it's a big deal, the owner in question played the old "it's on the internet and I'm not making money off it so there" card, clearly more concerned with themselves as looking at a Tumblr is apparently hard to do on mobile. However, artists need to generate traffic to their sites; FA, DA, Tumblr, etc. Only a small fraction of that traffic will end up supporting that artist by, for example, commissioning the artist. Everyone else still gets to enjoy the posted artwork for free. Artists know this and work hard to make it work.

Now if you redirect that traffic, even if the image is exposed to a large audience, few people make the effort to seek out the artist and support them. What's the alternative? Watermarks? Paywalls? Contrary to what some people think, being able to draw is not like having a license to print your own money. And redirecting traffic can affect artists in a very real way.

Honestly I don't understand the mindset; if I enjoy an artist's work, I do everything I can to support them. If I don't enjoy a person's work, I leave them be.

Please let artists curate their own work.

P.S. For the people who might ask "What if I share an artist's work? Is that bad?"
I can't answer that for every artist. Personally, I'd never stop people from saving my work to their harddisk for their own personal enjoyment, even if I could. If I see people repost 1-2 works of mine, unedited and with a link back (not claiming the characters for RP twitters or whatever) I actually appreciate that. But that's a far cry from scrapers and bots who repost everything you upload because they can and feel entitled to do so.