Let's Make Some More Noise Around Here

[GlaringFeline]

A lot of people joined up, I think, out of "protest," y'all know how it goes...but the problem is that you eventually stop being pissed off and go back to whatever your habit was. Hell, to be frank about it, over on FA I've repeatedly pointed out to them that for a bunch of people who complain about that place so much and how terrible it is, they sure haven't made the effort to make an apparently better site the "place to be."

I think pretty much any site that has a bad track record has this: FA, dA, YouTube. I think part of the reason these moves never stick are because no popular artists are making a permanent switch and in turn, bringing their fanbases with them. Sites like that are also the established platform for their genre, and the users probably don't want to leave because of the possibility they could become popular at any moment and the popular people don't want to risk losing all that traffic and income. "Protests" like these go in circles and it irritates me to no end.

I'm not sure what to suggest other than maybe the staff itself visibly encouraging discussions among the users. On my FA page, I specifically tried to encourage discussion about sexuality and kinks (not in a "Ooh, so sexy" way but in a more psychological "Why does this do it for you?" or "Here's why this image is effective" way), but getting people to actually talk, YOUNG people especially, my lovely peers who grew up in an age where conversations were limited to 140 characters, can be like pulling teeth. But maybe the staff could post something here and there to promote random discussion. Probably nothing too heated, like politics.

I like this idea. When the forums were livelier, I loved participating in discussions. The only problems I foresee are the discussions being all the same people when the goal is to get others chiming in, and discussions can get heated regardless of the topic so a forum mod may have to keep an eye on it to stop arguments before they grow big enough to warrant locking the thread.

For the sake of getting some lesser artists off the ground they could maybe do some kind of "weekly staff picks" thing where they just show off a drawing they like or want to spotlight for one reason or another that might be from somebody whose not especially well known. Or maybe they could do some kind of monthly or weekly contest regarding art and try not to pick the same winner twice (otherwise we all know it'd be he same few people).

Weasyl's staff are a small team, something like this may be too time-consuming to be purely staff-run. Maybe normal users chosen to be on a board of judges would work, but to prevent bias staff would have to pick people with a wide variety of tastes (like one judge that likes digital drawings, one that likes traditional, one for carving, one for sewn works, etc). They would also have to write up rules for the judges to follow. There will be people that cry favoritism if they aren't chosen, but those kinds of people are everywhere and I don't think that can be avoided.

[XoPachi]

The big thing is that almost all the people who are fed up with FurAffinity fled to Tumblr. Which is in every possible respect a horrible substitute for a traditional gallery site. It's bad for the people who post and bad for the people who go there to look at stuff. But for whatever reason it has become popular, and popularity is self-perpetuating especially when it comes to sites dedicated to communicating with people (which is another thing Tumblr is terrible at; you can't really talk to anyone so much as talk at them — even Twitter, the king of the minimalists, has gotten better at this).

Microblogging is a vastly faster tool than gallery sites to gain any reasonable following. And for most people, if you're posting, a following is clearly what you're after to some extent. The share functions of sites like Tumblr and Twitter allow for signal boosting which can gather clientele extremely fast and post updates such as streams or Patreon notifications which can circulate much more efficiently. Because really, how many people actually check journals on most accounts?

Microblogs require much less clicks to get to the creations and notifications of our favorite content creators. Log in>scroll. That's it. At the cost of organization, you can put something in peoples eyes instantly as opposed to galleries:
log in>notifications>submissions>click image/post>enlarge>backout>click image/post>enlarge>backout>click image/post>..... FA makes this especially slow since for some reason they have to reload the page and take you to a NEW webpage for favorites and watches. Any little increase in speed that gets you to your desired content faster, makes you more viable than the competition.

They're not perfect clearly, but it's not bad for artists to use Twitter or Tumblr whatsoever. Take it as someone who racked up several thousand followers in two years. I didn't get 800 on DeviantArt in three. Galleries are slow.

[bloodywing]

I try to be active here. I'm one of the few artists that came from dA (I'm still active there) who are not into the furry genre. But the audience here is a way to specific. So my contributions here are a bit half-hearted and reaching a specific group of people here is difficult.

I'm not a protest member, I just see this as another channel to get an audience ... somehow XD

[Kakurady]

Everything I post to Fur Affinity, I post here too. Twice the work, just want to make the life easier for people who want to switch.

Speaking of quiet: I've made a suggestion on the forum a while ago, and while it's already implemented, nobody from the Weasyl contributor team had replied. https://github.com/Weasyl/weasyl/iss...22+is%3Aclosed Not that I'm any better; I still have notes to self since last June I haven't looked at, not to say the piles of event photos I need to work on.

[Taw]

We are all volunteers and all of us have different things in our lives that can make it sometimes hard for us to keep up on things. We all have jobs, family, school, etc to manage, which all come first. This is why having our team curate and pick through submissions and such for spotlights and whatnot would be very difficult, as dedicating time to one thing means we need to take time away from another.

This doesn't mean that we aren't listening to feedback though! We do read through suggestions and ideas and we discuss these and try and see what would be in the site's best interests and what would benefit the community the most. One thing we will be working on, as mentioned a bit by Frank, is our communication to the public. We can be a bit too quiet at times, so we're going to work towards fixing that, and try and engage more often with users.

Everything I post to Fur Affinity, I post here too. Twice the work, just want to make the life easier for people who want to switch.

Speaking of quiet: I've made a suggestion on the forum a while ago, and while it's already implemented, nobody from the Weasyl contributor team had replied. https://github.com/Weasyl/weasyl/iss...22+is%3Aclosed Not that I'm any better; I still have notes to self since last June I haven't looked at, not to say the piles of event photos I need to work on.

Sorry that this hasn't been replied to! We try and keep up on things when we can, however, we are a small team and things do get missed occasionally like this. Keeping an eye on GitHub is probably the best way to keep up on what fixes are implemented at this time, but we'll try and work on this as well.