FA+
Shop
My Thoughts On FA These Days
5 years ago
You guys may have noticed that the last year I've been really slow here. I know there are a lot of you that don't follow me on other platforms and I feel like an explanation is way past due. I want to leave this journal on the front of my page for awhile to talk about it. Maybe it's just venting. Without a bunch of fluff these are just my honest thoughts.
I feel like FA has become a storefront first and a community second.
I feel like the site itself is a pain in the ass to use, especially as a comic artist. Comic links kill me.
I wish FA rules regarding human content were different.
On the first point, it used to be that the front page was full of excellent art. And I mean in the aesthetic sense, I'm in no way saying the things on the front page aren't literally art. But they're primarily ads. YCHs and adoptables are half the front page these days. Often written out in tablet pen over the front. Often watermarked. Most of these submissions have bidding wars in the comments. I try to keep my Patreon calls to action neat and tidy. Only on things my Patrons fund. Never watermarked. That's just my personal definition of courtesy, as insane as that might sound. The ads here feel loud. It makes posting art here feel less artistic somehow. I'm not saying I'm right, I'm only saying how I feel.
I want to keep this user page alive at least, but if you wonder where I am. Well. I'm around. I'm always on Discord. I'm just not usually here. The internet is competing pretty damn hard for artists these days, and frankly FA is having a really hard time keeping up. Do you still surf here primarily or have you gone to Discord or Twitter or some other community space? Really interested in where everyone is at.
EDIT: So far what I've taken away from this discussion so far (lots of long answers, thank you for your interest) is the following.
People recognize the problem but just avoid the front page.
For many FA is not a place to find new artists or art by strangers, it's a place to follow already known artists.
Social media (Twitter especially) is very roundly rejected as a possible alternative by the community.
Still listening.
I feel like FA has become a storefront first and a community second.
I feel like the site itself is a pain in the ass to use, especially as a comic artist. Comic links kill me.
I wish FA rules regarding human content were different.
On the first point, it used to be that the front page was full of excellent art. And I mean in the aesthetic sense, I'm in no way saying the things on the front page aren't literally art. But they're primarily ads. YCHs and adoptables are half the front page these days. Often written out in tablet pen over the front. Often watermarked. Most of these submissions have bidding wars in the comments. I try to keep my Patreon calls to action neat and tidy. Only on things my Patrons fund. Never watermarked. That's just my personal definition of courtesy, as insane as that might sound. The ads here feel loud. It makes posting art here feel less artistic somehow. I'm not saying I'm right, I'm only saying how I feel.
I want to keep this user page alive at least, but if you wonder where I am. Well. I'm around. I'm always on Discord. I'm just not usually here. The internet is competing pretty damn hard for artists these days, and frankly FA is having a really hard time keeping up. Do you still surf here primarily or have you gone to Discord or Twitter or some other community space? Really interested in where everyone is at.
EDIT: So far what I've taken away from this discussion so far (lots of long answers, thank you for your interest) is the following.
People recognize the problem but just avoid the front page.
For many FA is not a place to find new artists or art by strangers, it's a place to follow already known artists.
Social media (Twitter especially) is very roundly rejected as a possible alternative by the community.
Still listening.
Oh and patreon is nice too, but this one feels like a paywall. Some artists tend to not share anything beyond there anymore. I mean yes that's okay if you're established but I can't follow every artist ever. Although I like the idea of giving my favourite ones a little financial help to get them to make more, even if I pay more for that than for other monthly services online.
I agree that when I forget to post here it makes Patreon look like more of a paywall. It's not because I don't want you to see my stuff. It's honestly just a problem of motivation. Will be trying to correct for this.
It's just whole Tumblr has been a canvas waiting to be painted while twitter is just like your news feed. That's why creative people used Tumblr so much. I still use it but it's more of a reblog funny stuff for me now, I hardly see much art there now.
Also don't worry about patreon or being unmotivated, I'd probably be the same if I wasn't so unmotivated doing art in the first place.
I have one thing to give Twitter tho... It starts where I left it, on Tumblr I had to remember where I left off.
PS: if you want, we can have a conversation about this on your discord, maybe that will get me to dare a step there :P
I might search out artists on Twitter, but that's usually people I already know.
Personally, I still primarily use deviantArt, just on the basis that it's easier to browse and post works there. The only reason I keep this account is to follow the few FA-exclusive artists I enjoy and stay in touch with the one friend of mine who's stubbornly refused to get a dA account. Afraid I'm not much help on the social-media side of things, I avoid that on principle these days.
I know about the social media stuff I usually use it for the games on there not much else and I know why you do cause of it at the top and the staff being so left wing bias'ed and it being a election year they are purging conservatives and any other alternative voices and more on there. it is all political now nothin is safe from it even the supposed "site errors" always go one way and not the other and when it does go the other way it is just token few just to try and hide there blatant political bias.
possible though one can state general facts out there on things like this etc with out one kicking up the storm.
Discord is my main venue for interacting with folks in the community, though it's not much of a place to store and display content. This is still my primary place for that.
I will continue to support all three platforms and I love being a part of your discord group too, but I am here for the whole event, and not just the show bits. You're awesome and a huge inspiration to artists like me <3
Just know nomatter what, you have friends and fans like me that will support whatever you decide to do <3
Personally for the furry world I mostly use FA and Twitter. And believe me, I do not like doing commissions over Twitter. So that narrows me down to FA. I hope that someday a platform will come along that boasts artistic liberties as well as a good community platform.
As for other places. I don't feel like discord or telegram groups could replace FA at least not on a larger scale. They're just not designed to be a market place. Patreon is a bit complicated for me emotionally. On one hand I love being able to consistently support content creators without having to buy art or merch. My problem is that it's a paywall and for some artists it's a steep paywall. I've seen artists who charge $5-10 per post just to view the final version other artists I've seen charge closer to $20 a month just to view their work. It's a bit ridiculous because it gets expensive fast even just to follow a few artists. Right now I only follow the creators I like and want to support and even then I'm spending more than I want to on patreon.
I started using Twitter more, but Twitter mobile does a poor job of keeping accounts airgapped. On numerous occasions I've accidentally liked nsfw content using my sfw account because Twitter notified me of an update, but doesn't tell you which account you're on.
Tl;Dr. FA has too many ychs. Discord and telegram are market places. Patreon is ridiculously expensive and Twitter is ok at best.
Entry into Patreon shouldn't be that outrageous. At all. The only reason mine is $2 instead of $1 is that I heard from a lot of people they didn't want to give Patreon that much of a cut of their contribution (I think at $1 its like 35c that disappears). The higher tiers are there for those that want to support me and I appreciate it, but really it's just me finding extra stuff to give them.
For awhile the system was I'd post everything here and only post things early to Patreon. But what about when I do human stuff? Then the ads got worse and it made me feel skeevy coming here at all. Then I started forgetting. And here I am now. I'm just at a reflection point where I need to either refocus my attention here or continue as is.
I do NOT use twitter, I am on discord but I do not use it to browse art. If FA is bad for browsing art, twitter and discord is unuseable. I want to be able to find pictures easily when I need them. Twitter, discord and even patreon are terrible for this. Especially if images are posted in an endless feed, causing endless scrolling through past posts hoping I can find what I'm looking for.
At least FA looks like a gallery and I can fairly easily find past content.
Fa is not a community site. You don't come to FA for community. Or even to discorver new artists. I can't recall ever seeing the frontpage and going "neat"" *click*. Never.
I don't browse FA to find new art. I check FA to check the feed of already warched people.
How then do I ever discover new artists?
Mainly from communities elsewhere (like discord or picarto), Word of mouth is the best advert you can get. And after seeing a random post and finding it interestring I usually then find the artists FA if they got one.
In finding their FA, I get to see their past work, and I follow them to see their upcoming work.
If artists I discover from discord or picarto doesnt have a FA then I don't end up following them beyond what activity they may continue to post on discord/stream on picarto.
I like furry art. I like furries.
But I don't want it 24/7, I can't dedicate all my time to it.
I like being able to toggle on furry art easily, by going to FA, going to picarto or going to those discord servers that host furry content.
It's just convinient. And I know some artists hate FA and go to newgrounds/inkbunny/what have you.
But when they move I'm left behind. I simply don't want having to browse or check any more sites.
Front page is never usefull, but at least is fair in their function. DA at the contrary have the "popular" section and the "what hot" sections that shows only artist with thousand of hundreads more watchers than you, they are already popular, the don't need even more free exposition (cause it generates a snowball that makes imposible to get into that selected group if you start from the bottom).
The only way to get attention are tags, just use the ones that relate to your art and you know people will search. and hopefully new people will find you (this is true for all sites), people don't usually browse the front page, we all just go to watch our already known artist or use the search option to get new things from unknown people, without tags people won't fing you. u.u
but yeah, is hard, we are all in this same boat.
As for other places, I'm here and on DeviantArt, Twitter, I have a Patreon account (though, like others have said, it does start to get pretty expensive), and I also have Discord and Instagram. For me, the worst is Patreon simply because it's much more of a paywall than the others. And with minimal funds myself, I really have to limit how many artists I can support to, like, 2 or 3. Depending on how much it would cost for a certain tier I would want to have (typically the lowest tier, but sometimes not). Discord......I typically don't chat much, so it's kinda......meh. Instagram is kinda difficult to get notified of the certain accounts that you want to be notified of. Twitter.....I have no issues with as I only have one account for pretty much anything (my family really isn't on Twitter much. They're more on Facebook). DeviantArt......I can't really find any fault with it, honestly. Was my first art platform (i.e., joined there before here) and is more suited for a lot of my stories I write than here (non-furry). I never had tumblr.....and probably never will now that the porn ban was implemented. Sad too. There were a couple tumblr pages I would look at from time to time even though I didn't have an account that had some outstanding art. Kinda wish I would have followed the links provided to the artist's page(s) and followed the artists at the sites where I do have an account now. Oh well.
(Kinda rambling a bit. My bad.)
I know people are just trying to get paid and all that, but I really feel like this is a larger problem with the furry art community. Now that it's becoming viable to make a real living off this, everyone wants a piece of the pie. Monetization is getting more and more aggressive and I think it's actively hurting not just the viewers, but some of the smaller artists that end up stunting their audience growth and artistic growth.
Unfortunately, options are limited when it comes to platforms for this kind of art. Discord and Twitter just aren't substitutes for a dedicated art gallery like FA.
I mainly use Twitter because some artist have moved over there and use FA as a second now, but don't think it's a good place for posting art unless you have a big following or if you remember to do the tags there properly. But idk, like most places, it's whatever you want it to be
Lots of people, but can go silent for a day or two at a time. Very chill spot imo.
Anyways, uh, may I ask what's your Twitter? Should really follow once I get an account, but I don't really see it listed on the profile. Uh, I'd ask for Discord too but I don't know if that's some close friends circle kind of deal or you and other TF artists hang out on some big public discords.
https://discordapp.com/invite/xFEhhbP
It's like, okay, we get it, you're open for commissions, or you want to do a piece, but you want money from someone for it. FA isn't the place for that, not really. FA isn't a shop, it's a portfolio site (or, at least that's the way I've seen it). Patreon (or other similar sites) is more the venue for these types of artists, IMHO.
Can't get on Discord.
I hate Twitter and what it does. I recognize that it is a powerful tool for businesses, artists, and individuals and that it is changing the face of global society but wherever it is leading to, it isn't anywhere near there yet. I'm hoping something positive will come out of it but currently it seems to be quite the dumpster fire. I have finally come around to the realization that I'll have to make an account though at some point so I can lurk and watch the furry artists that are primarily active there. There is no way to look through a convenient archive of previously posted artwork though which is quite annoying and you always have to click "view" to see what you came for. If you want to go back and find something you saw previously its a real chore.
I primarily spend time on Discord with people that enjoy the same or similar things which gives me exposure to new artists drawing work that suits my proclivities. That's where FA comes in handy to see if they have anything else I like (which sometimes are things that I enjoy immensely) and if they do, are they active with commissions, is it relatively convenient to commission, and are they anywhere near my price range. There's a synergy between the two utilities that's hard to ignore--they work very well together. If somebody sees my FA page they might tell me how much they enjoy the things I get and then we have a fun chat on Discord. FA has acts as more of a community facilitator for me than the actual community itself
I've expanded to a few places, one of which being Furry Network.
https://furrynetwork.com/slimshod/
It's clean and fairly robust in terms of UI and capability. It's a bit tricky to navigate though. Pillowfort may be another good option.
https://www.pillowfort.social/Slimshod
Just a couple ideas.
Commercials - addblock solved
New comissions - watch the artists u like and avoid the frontpage.
Too bad fa doesnt have a list to block thing like inkbunny has( block things like ych or ponies for example) , owell its free
Cant complain too much.
I have no real issue with Twitter, but I strongly dislike their UI as a means of displaying images. The infuriating auto-collapse as I scroll means I'm always accidentally clicking where I didn't intend and losing my place. I also have to scroll past dozens of duplicate posts/retweets to find original content. Depending on how active the account is, it can take hours to see a years' worth of work. It just isn't built to be a gallery.
After FA, the next most active community I've found is in Discord and IB. Discord is convenient, but if you only check servers once a day, an image you may have felt like commenting on has likely been followed by pages of other postings and conversation; it feels like commenting on old news.
>Search
>Enter fetish
>Sort by date
I also browse the recent favorites of artists whose tastes I feel are pretty consistent in matching my own, and build bases of "known content contributors" from there. Adoptables are cringeworthy and YCH just come off as desperate pandering, but I just don't pay attention to them; every one of them'll eventually come to the sad conclusion that doing this as a primary source of income just isn't viable unless you're one of the 1% in talent and output speed, and fizzle out.
In terms of sites? This shit's the best there is. Twitter's absolute ass with its feed (no way to selectively disable retweets/quickly search a certain day range), and the only way I get anything out of it is via extensions to mass-scrape people's media feed. DA's draconian on lewds, and patreon is abused to high heaven by people using it as a ghetto paysite instead of the socialized support for the creation process it's meant to be - which has since led to workarounds via certain yiff-centric scrapers, and created lots of chaffing+tension between creators and consumers as a direct result of this tug-of-war.
Everyone's desperate for a good alternative, what with newgrounds opening its doors, HentaiFoundry/Sofurry/Transfur/other alt sites constantly getting mirrored to and abandoned, or western artists starting to screw up pixiv's eastern focus in their aimless site migrations - but FA, in all its early-2000s era design mentalities, is still at least consistent in what it wants to host.
E-hentai's the one and only site to have a fully-competent tag search system, imo; you can be damn well certain no YCH/Adoptable/Auction artist is gonna tag it as such if filtering becomes widespread.
Art is just being rolled up into regular social media - which is great, the average person accepts Furry is a legit thing now - but the downside is then you have no place just for you and your art.
I have little interest in finding more new artists - I'm following too many already for the number of hours in the day to look at all this - but if some kickass art was commissioned from some artist I never heard of, I do check out their page.
I'll occasionally see a good artist that I like and give them a follow, but it mostly is just a mess of advertising. And I don't really blame the artists, but I really have to wade through a lot of guff before I can really find something of substance.
That's the thing I like about twitter, the algorithm, as flawed as it is, actually does a very decent job at curating the user experience. I'm always scrolling through and finding new things via likes and retweets. And people are finding me as well through likes and retweets. It also happens a lot faster than FA.
I don't really know what standard to hold it up in a community sense, because it's all a bunch of niche bubbles just bumping into each other from time to time. Sometimes the bubbles merge but mostly everyone is just kinda in their own space. Granted I wish this wasn't the case but this is just what I observe.
Pretty much been waiting for FA wanting a piece of that storefront cake - it's really surprising they still don't. (Except.. shinies I guess?) In either way I fully agree that the louder the ads scream, the quieter the community gets and that's super sad and eventually will be the end of this site and/or the furry community for me. Could be wrong as well, though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My real problem with twitter is just that I think it's a cesspool of badly thought out sentences that'll drive anyone who uses it too much crazy, but that's not really relevant to posting art there.
Unpopular opinion: I absolutely hate YCH's. Adoptables are a close second. I've purchased many adoptables in the day, but they've gotten so out of hand. And YCH's? Just open a freaking commission slot. I honestly do not see the point of a YCH when you could just open a commission and someone would buy up a slot to get exactly what they want instead of a pre-set pose/scene/scenario.
That aside, I came back to FA in hopes of getting more followers, and after spending 3 seconds on the main page flooded with the aforementioned crap, I was like, how are people going to find new art among all this junk? They're not, and that sucks for people like me.
I post most of my art on Twitter, but it's extremely hard to get attention there. Unless you are already racking up 100+ likes on each post so people see it pop up on their feed. Instagram is the same way.
What is a struggling artist to do D:
Is posting art in a Discord or Telegram channel really a thing? How the heck do you get followers off of that haha.
This might get a bit personal but take me. I draw porn but it's informed by who I am. It's my oppressive childhood, my gender dysphoria during the teenage years I never got to have, the desire for magic in the world, and me calling bullshit on all the taboo society has placed on sex in general, combined into a thing. People usually relate to at least one of those. I know where those people are and who they are. I know where they hang out cause I do too. I drew and commiserated with them for years until people started remembering my name. And I'm so, so lucky that eventually it all just happened.
My general advice to anyone trying to get followers is find out who your people are and just be as kind with sharing your gift as possible. 'For exposure' has become a bit of a meme at this point. It's rightly used to criticize assholes who don't pay artists the wage to which they're entitled, but it should stop there. People frequently assume that doing things for exposure is inherently demeaning in any context. In my opinion it isn't. When it's for a community people notice and they eventually pay you back ten fold.
Then I trace the source back to FA and give them a follow.
But as for actual community interaction, it's mostly Telegram for me, followed by discord.
I usually frequent FA almost everyday poking around for TF content and actually manage to find new people to watch or follow on here. I also use discord here and there, but there are just so many discords to join and keep track of that I can't frequent all of them to find new content.
Discord is a great place to build a community but it drastically suffers from compartmentalization and its hard to "be a part" of more than a few communities. In a server of 100 people you're lucky to have a dozen who regularly contribute and interact.
There is a huge amount of potential for FA to add features to make the site more community oriented but from my time on here it seems like the devs are reluctant to change much. The redesign earlier this year really caught me by surprise lol.
I hate twitter, instagram and the whole social media thing in general. So yeah. I'm here on FA for my art, randomly find a friend post in Discord or, looking up tags on E621... I'm late to this journal, but if your interested... that's the answer for me.
I will admit that part of the problem itself is that artists have widely varying opinions and if you propose a site that does X and Y, you've just pissed off half of the furry art community and your new site's destined to fail because the artists won't support it. Fans are the same way, there's no set of features you can provide that will not piss off a large portion of fans or appease a large portion either.
At the end of the day, everyone stays on FA because it has the traffic. The gravity here's too strong for anyone to escape the orbit. Nobody LIKES FA, but nobody likes the alternatives either. And there are many, they just don't have the same gravity.
Also, in regards to comic linking. There’s actually a plugin that I myself use which overhauls FA’s upload system. You can bulk upload with it (it automatically delays uploads so you don’t have to wait) and you can setup profiles to auto fill info. The profiles can also be setup to auto-update previous first and next links. It’s also a handy tool to keep track of notifications (it’s a browser plugin, it will notify you of new submissions, comments, journals and messages. It’s customisable too, you can filter out artists/tags, and stop notifications for certain things)
It’s called FABUI and it’s amazing.
That said: the reasons I'm still here are because A. as you noted, it's still dead simple to follow specific artists, and B. there's still almost two decades' worth of material here to mine, however much of it is shit, and nothing about the site design actively gets in the way of that. FA is certifiably Not Great, but the other alternatives are, in my view, even worse.
Twitter and Discord are fucking terrible for any kind of archival purposes; like Tumblr before them, it's damn near impossible to dig through an artist's back catalogue before your browser collapses and catches fire under the weight of miles and miles of endless-scroll web design (and Discord already flogs my poor computer like a red-headed stepchild to begin with.) On top of that, the overall site design of both buries the actual art in a morass of non-art content that is just simply not what I'm here for (Twitter with its average of fourteen million retweets of stale memes per one contentful post, Discord with ages of old chat logs from people I don't know and don't particularly care about.)
As with most of the modern, social-media-era Internet, there is no thought spared for history, only the Perpetual Now. And that's both gross to me on a philosophical level and just plain inconvenient for binging purposes. Say what you want about the decline of the user culture here, but at least the damn site just lets me power through any given person's gallery in pursuit of my weird interests, no questions asked.
It's the same losing battle we had in videogames in the 2000's. Nobody expressed a desire for microtransactions and DLC except those looking to profit from them. Oblivion Horse Armor was the laughing stock of the entire gaming community. Now it's a painfully average transaction in the market. Whatever becomes of the 'Metaverse' or 'Omniverse' or whatever you want to call it, I just hope creativity can flourish there, but I'm increasingly pessimistic.
Sorry that went a bit off topic. But you are right, FA works as a binge and following mechanism better than a lot of other places. Which is why I've been trying to upload more regularly here as opposed to Twitter or some other random place.
Weasyl does this to collections automatically.
DeviantArt does the same.
Pixiv does, but you can't alter a manga after you upload it unless you pay for premium.
Even Twitter allows arrow key scrolling through 4 images at a time.
If I can rant a bit, the problem is that these places are either obscure, turn away adult content, or lack the full package of features. In the words of Gabe Newell, piracy is primarily a service problem. Pirates have it figured out, and everyone else is pretending like they're doing it perfect and wondering why success isn't happening. It's infuriating watching people trying to employ DRM on platforms like Patreon when they're so awful to read on.
Exhentai for example. There are no restrictions on upload. Login cookies last forever so you only need to do it once. There are no ads. Reading absolutely anything is free, and they make money on Hentaiverse (browser game) and selling GP, which is used to download archives and a few other things. It doesn't matter that it looks a bit dated because its utilitarian. It works. They raised 75 million in funding last year. There's room in that formula to operate legitimately if someone wanted to.
If I get bored sometimes I’ll search for keywords.
I’d love to join more discords as I feel that is where community might be, but for the most part I think people stream and interact with their followers on patreon. I’m just note ready to spend $5-10/month per artist. FA is where I can see what artists are doing in one feed. But I get the sense its most artists last priority.
I finally caught up with my watch list so I plan to start trimming the watch list and figuring out which artists I might be able to ignore and which I should be following.
And where.