I spent ten years building up a following on Tumblr. I had 30k+ followers, great engagement, it helped my career thrive like nothing else. I could quit my day job and live off the fan base Iâd accrued.
Then, their policies changed. Half my work was no longer allowed. People left the site in droves. I left too, for awhile. I came back to a ghost town. I still have 25k followers, but I donât think more than 10% are active anymore. Iâm followed by ghosts. Same with DeviantArt, although I was never quite as big there, and Iâve been gone so much longer.
This disallowed half of my work was never allowed on Facebook in the first place, or Instagram, but their algorithms are such that my stuff rarely makes it to anyoneâs feeds, and if I post a link to where people could actually pay me for my content, itâs hidden unless I pay for it. Patreon swept my work away to a dark corner where no one could see it unless I personally guided them there. Twitch is so strict you canât even show bare feet. The death of Google Reader means nobody follows RSS feeds anymore, so I canât direct people to my own site.
So thereâs Twitter I guess, where I can post whatever I want, but again, algorithms. But more than that, I donât have the energy to build up a following once again on a site I donât own that can delete my career on a whim. The thought of spending time jumping around through hoops for attention just to have it taken away again has stripped any motivation I had to try.
The internet has been gentrified. All the small cute houses and mom & pop shops have been shut down and replaced by big corporations that control everything. Iâve been making webcomics for twenty years, and at the start, the internet was a beautiful wild place. Everyone had a home page. It was like having a house and people came to visit you and you would visit other people in their houses. Now, we donât visit each other in personal spaces anymore. Itâs like we have to visit each other in the aisles of a megamart. Everything is clean and sanitized and the weirdos who made the internet what it was are no longer welcome. No space for freaks anymore.
People still ask me for advice on how to break into comics, and I donât have any wisdom because I donât recognize the internet anymore. I donât feel comfortable working within its boundaries which seems to be getting smaller and smaller and smaller. None of the tools I used when I started exist anymore. Theyâve been replaced by things I donât know how to use. I donât think I could break into comics today. 2002 had so few barriers compared to now. You might have started on Keenspace, but you could reach a point where you could break away to your own site and people would go to it. Now, you start on Webtoon or Patreon and I guess you just stay there? It feels so much like owning a hardware store for years and then having to go work as a cashier at the Home Depot that put you out of business. Iâm looking at my career trajectory and it all points to being a Wal-Mart greeter with uncontrolled arthritis.
I donât want to make âcontent,â I want to make comics, I want to make art, and I want to do it in a space that is mine. Iâm not sure thereâs a place for that anymore.
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