Reddit seems to have introduced sitewide AI moderation bots that are sweeping up users and outright banning them, without warning or explanation, for crimes like including links in their posts. This has started to hit some pretty well-known artists in r/comics.
It’s inconsistent and unpredictable - which makes it worse, since you don’t know what the rules are. As companies like Reddit give up more and more control to unaccountable machines, this kind of thing is getting more common.
Reddit has always had kind of a strange relationship with contributors and what is often called “self-promotion”. On one hand, it wants Content… But it can’t seem to decide where it wants the content to come from.
It’s nice that we’ve got alternative spaces like this.
Anyway, have some links:
- More comics:
- Patreon
So, honest question, if creators want to ditch Reddit, where do they go besides here? Fediverse ain’t that big yet.
For comic artists, there already seems to be a decent and growing community here. I’m a musician. There is (used to be?) a vibrant community on Reddit for songwriters, home recording enthusiasts, amateur producers…and it was a good place to network. I won’t go back to Reddit for any reason, so where do I go? Those communities here don’t have enough users to be active. I’ve tried.
its going to be hard since most if not all the communities are on reddit, and barely on any other platform.
I’m sharing my stuff wherever I think I can find an audience… Reddit will be included until it becomes untenable. (I exclude Xitter from that because I don’t like Nazis.)
Scott used to put comics up on his site VGcats. XKCD still does this. You can just make your own site.
Don’t think on a where to go permanently basis. Just go where your target people are, forget about how a specific platform gamifies their algorithm. Subscribers and followers, upvotes don’t matter in the slightest anyway. Make sure, instead, to always refer people to a place where they can engage directly with you. Either listening to your music, buying it, buying merch, or getting some interaction. But don’t put much stock on platforms, it’s there for the corpos, not for you.
In short: just make another reddit account, because this is where most of your readers/viewers are.
With device fingerprinting that’s getting harder to do.
Unfortunately, yes. Each person has to establish their own ethical framework for what they consider proper or not. But there’s no two ways about it. You either show up on the place where people gather, or no one will know about your thing. A good way, for example, is to make it clear that the main channel is the fediverse, mastodon or whatever. Like I said, have a hub somewhere everyone can arrive to and know immediately where to find your stuff. There are degrees of interaction, you don’t have to tie your entire private life and existence to one account in one platform, but you don’t build a community sitting alone in your own bedroom, no matter how comfy and ethically safe it is. You have to go outside and meet people where they are.
Hm… You know, dustyData, that really explains why so many projects now have a Discord server as their primary channel.