Posting from a throwaway because this is something that embarasses me a lot. I’m an artist who posts fanart on social media but as much as I remind myself that fanart is just for fun, I should just enjoy myself and not worry about engagement, I can’t get myself out of the competitive headspace against other artists who create content for the same media. I find myself getting angry at more popular artists who only do lazy doodles, yet they get showered with likes and adoring comments. It makes me feel like I have to strategize posting times, engage with popular accounts so that they will promote my work, draw what the fandom likes to see and not what I want to draw. I become a lot more negative and stressed out when I actively use social media, but without social media engagement I feel less motivation to make art. I have no economic incentive to become a popular artist, my career is unrelated to art, but the compulsion is there anyway.
I started to overthink online interactions because of my competitiveness. It makes me insecure when I see cliques of popular creators who are friends with each other and share/praise only each other’s work. When I reach out to them, just to get to know them and not for self-promotion, they don’t respond and keep talking to their clique. I know that they simply don’t have anything to say but it feels like they are deliberately ignoring everybody who isn’t a part of their clique. I know about extensions that hide the numbers but I care more about the absence comments and interactions compared to the popular creators. How do I get less competitive about this?
Hard to answer. This is extremely personal and will vary according to people’s personalities. For me, seeing the numbers and the engagement actually motivates me to post. Or, motivated, past tense, since my career is taking me away from art and as I age I don’t have the same drive I guess. I wish it returned tough.
It might be a thing of the platform. deviantart used to be great to spark conversation over artworks, but I’ve left ages ago, when they did the eclipse thing. I don’t find people connect even a fraction in comparison on Instagram or Tumblr or FB or Artstation, I get what you mean about the engagement. The trend this decade is for doomscrolling, not commenting, with exceptions like Reddit or Lemmy which aren’t focused on image distribution and collection unfortunately. What I’m trying to say is, don’t beat yourself up for not having comments. You need a ridiculously large following to consistently have comments in any of those platforms.