this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Artists whose whole career depends on the whims of social media giants have dug their own hole.
Easy for you to say. Are you even an artist?
Small artists need a convenient way to get their work to the eyes of regular people. If their self-hosted gallery is seen by no one, it doesn't facilitate their career. They generally can't afford to buy ads and are not popular enough to get a fan made groups spreading the word everywhere else.
Not to mention that this is such a callous attitude in general. Because you in particular aren't susceptible to this manner in which wealthy assholes are screwing people, then it's their fault for needing it?
It's ouroboros.
People don't leave which means there is an audience so people try to stay and capitalize on the audience that stayed.
Seriously, fuck Twitter. It needs to die. That might mean that a lot of people need to change a lot of things to make their lives work.
If you're successful you can pivot. If you're barely making ends meet and rely on Twitter to keep you afloat, I'm sorry to say this, but you're not successful yet.
It's not ouroboros because it's not artists with 1k followers that are keeping most people on Twitter. They are just the small fishes caught in the turmoil. Rihanna and those at her level can move anywhere, anytime and they won't even notice the difference. They are likely not even handling their accounts personally.
But I don't care to kill Twitter more than I care about smaller artists. What is it really being gained if you sacrifice them just for the satisfaction of killing a platform you don't even use? A lot of artists struggle but that doesn't make their work any less valid.
I'd hope everyone manages to move over, ultimately it's their best hope because that place will only get worse, but even I see that not everyone will make it. The followers lost in the move might be the difference that ends the viability of their career. But it's tragic that this is the situation that they have to deal with. So, why rush them and shame them for it?
The problem is that the artist needs an audience to use arts as a means to survive. If there is no audience to pay or exchange goods for the art provided by the artist, the artist cannot use art as a sole means to survive. Like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, etc. Twitter is just another platform providing a specific type of audience.
Unfortunately, the artist doesn't get to dictate the audience they receive from the platform since they don't control it. In essence, an artist that starts relying on specific platforms for an audience is making a calculated risk that the audience will remain unchanged for the forseeable future.
As for shadowbanning, even if it is a crappy tactic, in the end is just the platform owner(s) shaping their audience to the way they see fit. One can argue that it is just a tactic to go against the artist. The reality is that the owner(s) are looking at how their audience grows and shrinks and are making their own changes to maximise audience growth and, in the case of twitter, advertisement revenue growth.
When someone relies on a service they provide (art) to pay the bills, pay for food, etc. it's devastating when your service loses customers/audience. Life is a constant risk prediction. Attempting to force change on circumstance outside of one's control is high risk of failure and, in my opion, an effort best used in finding better opportunities.
I don't make money as an artist, but I live with two of them. They both migrated to Mastodon, with my technical assistance, and left Twitter before Elmo bought it.
Bear in mind I'm not the previous commenter, but I believe what they were saying is that the writing was on the wall over a year ago, and there are alternatives. Artists and computer geeks tend to get along with each other, and so most artists should have a techy friend that can help them with exposure online. I understand that switching platforms is inconvenient, and tiresome. Looking at it from a tech perspective however, it's a better ROI.
The worst of it is the ≈week of daily posts right before you shut down your Twitter account, linking to your new account. My friends were able to direct link, but I don't know if Elmo is allowing that any more.
Moving over is definitely the right call, I know. But many people are still struggling with trying to find alternatives only to have few followers coming along, so they can't just cut it off and hope for it to work. The technical part is frankly the easiest part of it.
they made a home on a platform once, they should be able to do it again. Staying on xitter or whatever is just kind of nonsense at this point.
Yes, and generally how that goes is from a point where they are just making art as a hobby to one where they rely on their audience to pay the bills. It's not such a trivial thing to start over.
audiences will rarely move from platform to platform. For content creators, we have to go to where our audience is, or provide an incentive to move elsewhere. That's the main reason why there hasn't been a decent competitor to YouTube, Twitter, nor Twitch. The audiences there are entrenched.
I'm sure if there was a platform they could jump to that would sustain their career, they would
What do you mean? If it's about not being "regular", it's in the sense that most people don't depend on their stuff being seen on social media to make a living. They are just browsing as a pastime.
do you take pride in being the final stragglers left at the bar that's now a nazi bar? That's twitter now.
Fuck right off with that self righteous bulshit. A lot of people there are doing more to push back against Nazi propaganda than your sorry ass does here.
Fuck yourself right off with that self serving garbage mcfuckwit. A lot of people are doing more to push back against Nazis, but if you keep going to the platform that defends them and provides them avenues to attack the rest, they should get fucked sideways.
cute conversation, gonna block you now.
Self-serving to whom? I am not one of those artists, I am just supportive of them. You know, those people who even you are aware that are the targets of the nazis, the people who are trying to push back. So they should get fucked? Did you spend one second trying to consider what's like being in their position?
Did you not actually block me or does blocking do nothing here? I'm still seeing your self-righteous nonsense.
As they say on the Grumpy Old Geeks podcast, don't build your house in someone else's backyard.
*had limited choices as to which hole to dig