At present, artists aren't even thanked or conversed over in /art/ very often. It's almost exclusively requests, and some call outs for paid content. All things considered, this bothers me. People who like work aught to be saying how much they like it, talking about how cute cool or hot something is…

It hurts as an artist to find your only comment is "That's hot, would you do my favorite character getting decapitated?" only to find that that person has copy pasted and anonymously and bumped literally 5 or 6 other threads.

Accepting everyone can provide a bastion for outcasts, but at present, we're not a bastion. With Furries, BDSM, there's a feeling like "Oh I've found a place where I can be myself! I can talk to people here about anything and know they know that I have dark fetishes, I can share a community with these people safely. I can find friends, activities, and craftsmanship here."

A good gurochan for me would be one that, while mostly a porn site, those using it as just a porn site can simply lurk and scroll through, happily indulging in everyones efforts while occasionally coming over to the community side to say how much they loved a work and beg the source for more.

I've passed through hundreds of people. People into guro look at the guro community and feel worse about themselves, at present. People who roleplay guro on other websites say to me "I would never interact with other fans of guro. You're cool though, unlike the others." I run servers and awkward, rude people who only ever talk about their own fetish, and constantly shout about it, run every other person out of the server or make them silent. And I mean literally, these people come up to me later and say "XYZ sent me a dick pic" or "ZYW begs me for free artwork all the time."

I think selfish people with loud opinions are running interesting, kind, community focused people out of the site. And they don't come back for the porn, they don't come back at all.

For those people, I want to say… Try to remember that not everyone uses this site the same way you do, or for the same reasons you do. I mean, they do if you act so selfishly that you make it impossible to use the website for other reasons, like making so many requests that you and 3 others can personally flood out artists threads is an example of making the website worse for both artists and people that want to feel a sense of community.

Also remember that while you may feel it's okay for you to personally control the direction of the site with selfish actions because anyone in your position would do the same, that isn't true. All websites have an ecosystem, and solo players are part of that eco system. Allowing other types of people to thrive– perhaps even playing the other roles some times– allows the solo player to thrive to. If artists are happy, more art comes, if community leaders are happy, more people come around to thank artists and to post content.




Lets define the ecosystem, for fun:

Community Leaders: Like me an onix, active and interested in affecting discourse. We're the same type though we differ in opinions about art economic ethics. I run a number of discords, communicate daily with any artist I can find, and consider events guro fans would like.

Heavy users: People who post 113 images in a guro thread for the sake of it

Content creators: They make stuff. They're motivated by the propagation of their work, improving, pride, and gratitude.

Socialites: They are happy community members. They feed all of these groups. Participating in the leaders activities, and thanking the content creators and heavy users for their uploads.

SAUCE PLZ: These guys only ever ask for sources and request their fetish. They odn't say almost anything else except for thanking people who provide them their fetish. I'm making them their own category because this is almost all they do. They come, dump requests on every artist they like en mass, and leave. Sometimes they'll argue or gripe or try to sabotage and artist if they are refused too harshly.

At present, we have NOOOOO socialites. and I don't believe it's because artists ran them all away with intrusive marketing, socialites inherently love supporting the community and its projects. Most of the people into guro that I talk to don't see artists looking to get paid as taking advantage of customers. So I think there are other reasons, like web design up until I changed it a month ago, and lack of leadership.

I'm trying to lead by example more now, but I can't fill every role in the ecosystem by myself, which is how it feels presently.