Why I Do Not Support Emerging Artists

I've been lazy about this recently, but for years I posted and reblogged things on Tumblr at regularly scheduled intervals throughout the day. My account on Tumblr exists so that I can scroll through the front page of my own blog when I'm bored or stressed out. My main criteria for what I reblog when is therefore the creation of eye-pleasing color coordination on the vertically-scrolling column, but there are some loose themes. No Ganondorf before 9:00pm, for example.

Because people are petty and awful, I would generally lose one or two followers almost every time I reblogged art that wasn't 100% professional and polished. Around 3:00pm EST was (and probably still is) a general deadzone on Tumblr, so I took advantage of that to reblog the work of emerging artists with supportive comments in the tags.

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So this is why I try not to interact with the posts of anyone who has an "immature" art style. I also don't know how old anyone is on AO3, which is one of the main reasons I started to move away from that site as well.

I just needed to get that off my chest so I can get over it and move on, because damn this nonsense has been living in my head rent-free for the past five years.

Re: Why I Do Not Support Emerging Artists

The other reasons why I've moved away from AO3 are:

- Now that recent updates to FFN have made the site almost unusable, I'm starting to see FFN comment culture crop up on AO3. This involves things like random people roleplaying in the comments and users requesting "kudos for kudos" interactions, offering to leave kudos on a story they haven't read if the author will leave kudos on their stories in unrelated fandoms. It's a mess.

- I'm also starting to see a lot of bot-generated spam comments. There's no way to block users on AO3, so you have to report each comment individually as you wait for the beleaguered volunteer staff to delete the account.

- The content warnings that people put on their stories make me unpleasantly self-conscious about what is considered "problematic" these days. Like, one 40yo (but probably immortal) character can seduce another 40yo (and also probably immortal) character into a poorly planned sexual encounter whose fallout will haunt both of them for the rest of their (probably immortal) lives, but there apparently needs to be a serious content warning if one of them takes so much as a single sip of brandy before or after sex. This sort of thing started to affect my writing, and I didn't like that.

- Too much time spent in Zoom meetings has made me want to limit the downtime I spend looking at screens.

- I am very very very lazy.