Zach WeinersmithCan I just say, as a guy who writes and draws for a living, it sucks the extent to which modern artists have to think about the distribution channel as opposed to just making good stuff. 25 year old artists juggle 10 platforms, regularly updating their understanding of how each one's algorithm works. I dunno the solution, but the fragmentation and algorithmization of everything has eaten so much time that should've been spent on craft.
Jason Anarchy@ZachWeinersmith Yeah, it's pretty time consuming just keeping up with the basics. On the plus side, I feel like people won't have to keep up with Twitter for much longer.
Maritza Campos ☑@ZachWeinersmith it's all so fickle too. You're one misunderstanding or h-ack away from losing everything in a platform
Fraser Cain@ZachWeinersmith I focus my energy on the distribution platforms I control: website, email, RSS, podcast, Patreon. Everything else is a distraction and time gobbler.
I try to interview every new patron I get and ask them how they found me. I've done 1000 interviews and NOBODY has ever said they found me on Facebook or Twitter.
Spend time on these platforms if you enjoy your time on them, but don't use them for marketing.
Michele Banks@ZachWeinersmith i feel this very hard right now : (
Ian.Burnette@ZachWeinersmith there are so many fantastic artists on Instagram who I would've added to my daily comic list if they had their own site, and could just focus on doing their own thing istead of having to contort themselves to appease an engagement obsessed algorithm.
rocp@ZachWeinersmith it's not the algorithmitization, it's ruthless capitalism. You are forced to compete if you want to make a living in most fields, which is the same as saying that there is no living for everyone. It doesn't matter the system that we pick for life, so long as that tiny fact is still true, everything will degenerate into people being forced to game the system in exchange for food.
Ferdi F. Zebua 🌏@ZachWeinersmith Hear, hear. I agree that bad algorithms punish good artists.
....But I also must emphasize: First In First Out (aka. linear) 👏 is 👏 also 👏 an 👏 algorithm 👏. It facilitates & incentivises its own set of bad behaviors, too.
IndieArtisans@ZachWeinersmith At minimum, artists should be driving the traffic they do spend all that time generating to their own site and not to an e-commerce site as so many do.
JackNoir@ZachWeinersmith The solution is probably something like RSS.
Ian@JackNoir @ZachWeinersmith Or the fediverse which implements ActivityPub, so different servers can talk to each other.
@JackNoir @ZachWeinersmith ...so here is your mastodon feed as seen in an RSS aggregator...
Th3 Ph3d@JackNoir @ZachWeinersmith I follow SMBC (And most of the webcomics I read) via RSS. It's so much easier than trying to track it everywhere else.
Is This Real Life@ZachWeinersmith can you outsource it? It starts to make sense if extra work from your craft is enough to cover the cost. Anyway just a thought.
schrotie@ZachWeinersmith In my ideal culture artistic economic success would be decoupled from reach because generating attention seems to mostly select for all the wrong qualities. And that would then also "solve" the artist chores to generate attention on different plattforms. But how to get there I don't know.
Sophie
César Pallares 
@ZachWeinersmith just random thoughts, isn't that a problem that could be solved by a agent or a creation teams? That may be a new role for old ", institution" and allow the creators to focus on what they do best
Wolfgang Müller (DE:er/EN:he)@ZachWeinersmith @nicosemsrott könnte für Dich interessant sein, als Statement.
@ZachWeinersmith pick your three best and ignore the rest. Especially not very visual ones.
Darryl Mott@ZachWeinersmith Yet people STILL give the advice "Just focus on making good art! If it's good enough, your audience will find it on their own!"
No. No, they won't. And I don't know how many artists, writers, photographers, video makers, etc. over the past decade have been put off creating because that advice doesn't work anymore.
dr 🛠️🛰️📡🎧
@ZachWeinersmith Your point still stands in general, but I'm a little surprised that you in particular don't have A Person For That.
Lizard@ZachWeinersmith And this is why agents /publishers (and similar in other fields) evolved in the first place. They (allegedly) took on the work of doing the non-creative stuff, leaving the creator free to create. And eventually, they became gatekeepers. And then the pendulum swung back with the rise of the internet, but then it, too, became centralized -- why chase down a thousand blogs if there's a site like Instagram or YouTube? But as you note, mastering those cuts into creating. So it goes.
Nicholas Sarwark@ZachWeinersmith It is difficult, but necessary, to develop a model that allows an artist to control their own rights and distribution as simply as one would start a website.
@nsarwark The glory days were back when everyone used RSS! Newsletters do seem to be making a comeback, though.
TimP@ZachWeinersmith Yes, but, previously they would have had to give up and do a job they did not want to. There are many people enabled through these distribution channels who would previously have fallen at one of the many hurdles or been excluded by gatekeepers.
Hazy/Dusk💙💛🍉@ZachWeinersmith and now we have to worry about AI as well😞
Børge@ZachWeinersmith The solution can be here: federation. As long as the platforms are federated, it doesn't matter which one you use or any of your fans use. You can use Mastodon, while some fans use @pixelfed and others use X, Y and Z. As long as they all federate, then everyone on all the different platforms can follow you on your platform. Just like you don't have to have different websites for fans using different browsers. That should at least be the solution.
Max AnderssonAs a former politician, I can say this applies to politics too.
Getting your messages out through social media eats up a lot of time.
Dave@ZachWeinersmith I think that as the ability to be "famous" has scaled (we have a spectrum between "nobody" and "superstar") due to the fact that technology has allowed people do professional things without a huge team, the other burdens come along. Movie stars have a press team, the scaled down version of that is handling your own social media.
I don't enjoy it much either, but maybe it's just the cost of artistic success having more tiers?
Your Pal Gibson Twist@ZachWeinersmith I'm so old now, I can't even fathom figuring out how to market on new platforms. When I finish a comic now I just throw it on the floor and run away.
hpkomic 👻@ZachWeinersmith it's a goddamn nightmare
fluffy 💜@ZachWeinersmith @hpkomic this is why I really wish patreon/ko-fi/etc had an API so I could just post stuff to my site and then have a thing automatically do the rest for me via RSS or whatever.
Brian Transplant@ZachWeinersmith This seems to apply for all of the arts equally. Graphic art, writing, film, music and more are all affected. The best creators in the world will go nowhere if they can't game the algorithms or have someone do it for them.
On the one hand, federated social media helps by displaying things chronologically. On the other hand, people are still slow to adopt.
QueeRomance Ink@ZachWeinersmith Amen. It's exactly the same for authors.
Sabine@ZachWeinersmith ideally more federation of websites will make this easier with platforms like mastodon and pixelfed being able to share between eachother. Tumblr too soon