longer.blue

A few thoughts I have been having recently... Excusing myself for the jumbled mess in advance as I haven't properly structured anything yet, but I have been thinking about these things a lot lately and I needed a place to let it out without clogging up my account too much... Sorry in advance again, in case this post isn't going to make any sense to you Lately I have been wondering what my current identity of this art account is supposed to be and what I need to do to grow it. As I have abandoned my Xwitter account, a lot of my engagement has gone. Which is quite noticeable with all the reposts to image board such as zerochan/danbooru/etc. not being present anymore. Which also meant that all of the users reposting to these image boards (without any of my permission by the way), were all twitter users. I am still failing to see how people are still supporting this platform as it gets worse and worse with each passing month, but I suppose some people are that dependant on that slimmer decreasing chance of going viral and in long term growing that account, huh.... Speaking of SNS: Lately I have been thinking that with commercialisation of SNS (and the internet in general), that SNS is not that different than gacha games. The aspect of people being addicted to an algorithm that only pushes your posts to an audience by a slim chance is not that different from gambling. Most SNS are ditching hashtags, which makes searchability impossible and intransparent. They ask for money for supposedly better visibility and yet it's just being liked by like bot farms. It's just a vicious cycle to keep you hooked on said platform. I do appreciate that there are alternatives such as bsky/mastodon/etc and although they aren't perfect by any means, it feels a lot more like the early SNS days. I simply wish the platform wasn't stagnating right now. Although I'm not particularity caring so much about likes, it still is a bummer that some of the illustrations I've worked on for weeks don't do as much as expected. (Although in the most recent case, it performed badly on all platforms I have posted it in and I was quite happy with the result.) So, I've been wondering if the current path i'm heading with this art account is the right one... and in the broader sense if making a living out of it was even the right choice. Those who do know me for a long time will know that my content didn't used to be what it is currently, as I used to post a lot more ship content (both hetero/NL and BL), but when I joined the Genshin CC program back then, I shifted it towards non romantic content. (There was no particular reason as to why the change, but I also haven't found an OTP I was passionate about even before I made the shift). But lately, I have been feeling like going back the old ways... not particularity posting ship art (as I have an alt account for that now that I don't want to reveal just yet publically), but simply drawing my fav characters and try to do them justice. While I'm quite content with that, the growth of my account certainly isn't showing that and I'm honestly also a bit at a loss on what to do to make a proper living out of it without having to sacrifice more hours of my time just to post content... Things aren't going well either, but I'd rather keep them to myself instead of flooding my account with my complaints and rants. That negativity isn't what I want to present either.... Marketing is indeed hard... but that's why I have also stopped doing my self-indulgent community events like the few ship event days I used to do in the past for harurin on tumblr. Despite doing things with passion for the event to succeed, the result is more disappointing. (Even for the Harumasa bday event, that I tried to finish in advance to submit, it still wasn't shown on the event page, so I'm quite bummed for that illustration for quite a few reasons) In case you have even made it to the end, thanks for reading this jumbled mess of my inner thoughts. Thanks for also supporting me up until now. In any case, i'm not going to stop drawing and posting what I like, I am just a bit lost on how to approach this stagnation right now... Will be deleting this very soon, so please don't even reply to this. (I only needed a place to let these thoughts out before I start overthinking)