Why Twitter is the worst possible website for artists: A Jay Rantâ˘
Hi all, this is something Iâve been wanting to talk about for a long time, but I never quite had all the wording in mind for why, exactly, Twitter is the worst website that artists could possibly go to. Yes, even worse than current Tumblr, even if they draw porn.
Letâs begin my essay.
Reason 1) The character limit.
One of the most important things for an artist is the ability to actually describe their art. Imagine if you went to a museum and looked at all the paintings and all they had was â#Abstract #MyArt Subscribe to my Patreon for alternate versionsâ underneath each one without any description at all, and the artists who painted them are nowhere to be found.
Describing the picture is important, it means that thereâs more to the image than just a pretty picture, thereâs a story you want to tell with it, and adding that description is incredibly vital to world building and character development. Otherwise, all of your pictures are simply that. Pictures.
Being concise is possible, yes, but a full and complete description is vastly more important.
Reason 2) How Retweeting and âRetweet With Commentâ functions.
This is the absolute most devastating part of Twitter. On Tumblr, when you reblog a post, youâre often also reblogging a chain of reblogs with commentary, creating an ongoing community discussion that allows critique, funny additions, fan-art, etc. to be included as part of the post itself.
Also, the artist may reblog their own art and say things like âHey, I drew this yesterday and Iâm super proud of it. Looking at it again made me smile a big ol heccin smile!â and it encourages community feedback like âIt makes me happy to see you proud of your own art!â
On Twitter, Retweeting is considered âThe polite optionâ while Retweeting with Comment is considered âScummy.â The reason being, if you Retweet with Comment, the âCommentâ becomes a brand new post, getting its own notes independent of the original post. Therefore itâs heavily frowned upon, especially by artists who want more people looking at their original work, rather than at someoneâs comment.
The major problem with this is that now you have a community where everyone is just silently retweeting each other with no commentary, just taking a picture and showing it to their followers with a blank expression on their face. No words. Just, â*holds up picture silently*â
This disconnects the person who retweeted the art entirely from the art itself, making everything feel cold and distant.
Sure, you can comment on it and THEN retweet it, but very VERY few people will actually see your comment, even fewer will reply to your comment, because comment-chains arenât a thing thatâs encouraged on Twitter.
In fact, âPlease remove me from comment chainsâ is a very common thing said by artists because when comment chains happen, the artist is getting @âd for every single response. Therefore, it ultimately leads to artists wanting less comments and more silent Likes and Reblogs, since the notification spam is frustrating and becomes an annoyance.
This major disconnection from an artistâs followers puts artists in this strange position where theyâre encouraged to never interact with their followers, since few people are even going to see that interaction.
Reason 3) Seeing the response, but not the original post
When youâre following someone on Twitter, sometimes you just see, âArtist posted this reaction imageâ and you have to click on the thread to see what thatâs even in response to.
As stated above, this is because Twitter doesnât function like Tumblr, you donât carry the whole reply thread over when you reblog a post, so all that shows up on your followersâ timeline is your isolated response, and they have to manually open the thread to see what âI hate this so muchâ or âMy face whenâ is even responding to, adding a level of tedium and once again, disconnect from your community.
Reason 4) Image formatting, auto cropping, etc.
Thereâs dozens of tutorials people have made on what format artists should draw their art in so that Twitter doesnât crop it or squish it, encouraging artists to adjust their aspect ratios of their art so that the website doesnât make their image set look like shit. I donât even need to describe why this one is bad.
Reason 5) The website strongly encourages controversy, drama, hatespeech and cancel culture
Twitter as a whole is designed so that the trending tab is king, and what is trending will always be controversial topics that have come about. Politics, drama, cancel culture, any gigantic swarm of people angrily ranting about the same topic will make that topic Trending.
This means that unless you change your region or use TweetDeck to hide the trending tab, youâre welcomed with drama, dark topics, etc. as soon as you open the site.
Reason 6) Lack of tagging, the Media tab sucks as a gallery
Without a proper tagging system, all of an artistâs work is simply there, existing, and will eventually just disappear into obscurity. People canât search for a tag like âHot boobsâ and find your art, unless you specifically type âHot boobsâ into the text, going back to Reason 1 with your description just being a bunch of hashtags to hopefully get more viewers.
You have a âMediaâ tab, of course, but the lack of a tagging system means all of those memes and reaction images you posted in random threads are also included in your Media tab, so people have to sift through 550,000 meme images to find your art.
The lack of tagging also means Whitelisting and Blacklisting are two things that are nigh impossible to fully do. Tumblr created an art community where artists would politely have tags like âtw:spidersâ or â#SuperGoodBootyâ so people could have those tags blocked or whitelisted to either hide them or bring them to the top of their dashboard. With Xkit, anyway. But still, Twitter has little to no way to do this, I still canât stop seeing people spreading their assholes on my Twitter timeline, thereâs no way to make the assholes go away.
Also, if you post someone elseâs art, itâs in your Media tab now, even if you properly credit that art to its creator.
Without a way to properly browse someoneâs gallery via a tagging system, you just have to sift through every single image, video, etc. theyâve ever posted to find their art in there somewhere.
Reason 7) Thereâs better options literally everywhere
This is just a huge frustration. Tumblr, Pillowfort, FurAffinity, Patreon, Booru sites, E621, FList, PornHub, Newgrounds, Hentai Foundry, Inkbunny, even just Discord, thereâs tons of websites designed for artists that allow galleries, favorites galleries, tagging, folders, portfolios, descriptions of nigh infinite length, etc.
So why did people flock to TWITTER of all places when Tumblr collapsed? Because all the BIG BOYS⢠are on Twitter. Why go to FurAffinity or Hentai Foundry when you could go to Twitter where the literal celebrities are at? Wouldnât you rather have Keanu Reeves possibly one day see your John Wick art that you drew? Wouldnât that be soooooo cool?
Thatâs why people went to Twitter, because itâs the biggest social media website. People were desperate to keep their porn-art careers going and decided to jump into the deepest pool of all in hopes that the trillions of fish on that website will like what they have to offer.
Thereâs no sense in going to a smaller website that encourages artists to communicate with each other and their follower base when you could go to TWITTER and potentially get 100k-5mil followers and become a bazillionaire!
The Twitter flocking happened out of sheer desperation, fear that our careers as artists will fall into obscurity if we donât go to the biggest possible website and put our art out in front of the biggest possible audience.
Never mind that sites like NewGrounds, FurAffinity, Tumblr and Pillowfort are literally designed to help artists and their fanbases find and see other artists, go to Twitter where an artist has to retweet their own art 4 times a day during peak hours in hopes of someone with 5mil followers retweeting it to get them seen.
Reason 8) It just plain does not get you any recognition.
Iâve been doing streams very regularly, and advertising on Pillowfort, Tumblr, Twitter, FurAffinity, Inkbunny, Discord and Newgrounds every time I fire up a stream.
What Iâve found through looking at my analytics on StreamLabs is that an average of 0.8 people per stream are redirected to my stream from Twitter, while 1.5-25 people on average come from any other place. I have 7k followers on Twitter, and 2,000 people in my Discord server, and yet 25 people on average find my stream through Discord and only 0.8 through Twitter.
Why? This is why.
Because on Discord I can @ everyone, and anyone out of all 2,000 people on Discord who have notifications turned on see that @ immediately, on their desktop, and/or hear the notification. They can, at any time, tab over to Discord and see that itâs an announcement of a stream, and follow the link.
Or, they can go to Twitter and scroll down through their feed, and among the thousands of posts from the 600-1200 people theyâre following they might notice my stream announcement post and click the link.
Discord encourages communication, as thatâs what the platform was meant for. This means that itâs incredibly easy to get someoneâs attention through it.
8.3 people on average find my stream through FurAffinity. Why? This is why.
Because they go to their FA, they go to âNew Submissions from people you followâ and they see one from me that says âBoob Stream Whoa Aaaaâ and my stream announcement picture. Right there. Easy as day to see.
Reason 9) You canât edit your posts
On any other website, ANY, you can go âOh whoops I made a grammatical errorâ or âOh thereâs an error on this drawing I didnât noticeâ and you can either edit the description or change the picture to correct your mistake.
Twitter has no such luxury, at all. The only way to edit a Tweet is to completely delete it and do the whole fucking thing over, deleting every note you had on it and reposting it to peopleâs timelines.
Reason 10) The timeline is NOT in chronological order and CANNOT be put into that order
I didnât know about this until someone sent me a DM on Discord explaining it to me and showing the evidence of it. Twitter has a sort of âFeaturedâ system, in which posts that have higher notes will be moved higher on your timeline, completely against your will or input in any way.
This means that if someone posts art shortly after some 150k follower artist posted their art, people following both artists will be less likely to even see the smaller artistâs note-lacking post because it was moved under all the more popular pieces of art.
This makes small artists with 1-10,000 followers completely dwarfed by these supermassive artists with 150k-5mil followers whose posts always get 3k-50k retweets, likes and comments. I had been wondering why I, with 7,000 followers on Twitter, only get an average of 40 likes on my art I post, and now I understand why.
My art is constantly being pushed below art from bigger artists or bigger Twitter users in general or drama posts or whatever has higher note counts than my stuff.
Conclusion
Twitter sucks dick for artists and we should all leave it immediately.
Please, if you can, show people this.
And show me if they reply angrily asking why thereâs weird incesty art in the background lmfao.
