It was never about the numbers
I wrote a small thing about Cohost that I’ll probably come back to later for, like, some kinda actual “goodbye to this site”-type post but for now I just want to think (out loud) a bit on something that came up in the aforementioned post. I brought up that my digital art journey began on deviantART, touching on how critical that place was for the skills I developed and the artist I’d become.
2006 wasn’t the start of that site by any means but it was pretty early. Early enough in both its respective era and the greater “access to internet” era that its userbase skewed a lot younger and the community there was dictated by that. My friends and I there would pass around questionnaires that were fun “get to know me” kinda things and you’d build a more tight-knit group of folks around that!
(A screenshot of my dA journal’s footer, circa 2006.)
Clubs, groups, and shouting out specific artists at the end of your journal was how you let people know what stuff you thought was cool! Discovery before a computer told you what it thought you’d like! You got to know folks like this or by browsing categories, searching keywords (before actual tags existed)—often digital-word of mouth stuff that, by now, feels like a time long gone by.
The close friends I made there motivated me to get better because they were further in their art journey than I was. I looked up to them not because they were my favorite artists but because they would create alongside me and it would inspire me! I wanted to grow like they were visibly growing. Over time, I did, and my following would start to outpace theirs and… I think that’s where it started getting kind of nasty.
deviantART originally didn’t show you “followers”, it showed you “pageviews”, and seeing that tick up was addictive because it’s the only metric that is a “how visible am I” metric. The stats eventually got flattened to show the most critical ones: how much art do you have, how much are people saying they like it, how visible are you. I loved seeing that number go up but the damage wasn’t done by any of these numbers, it was done by something numberless to begin with.
Every day, the site would select notable artworks to be given the “Daily Deviatation” badge and every day, I would get upset my stuff was never selected. Why? The realistic answer is “I was 16 and thought I deserved everything without working for it” but the answer looking back is also, like, it was the only ‘thing’ on that site that displayed actual merit. The “popular” pages were mostly what got clicks in the last 24 hours—you rarely saw anything go viral there because it’d just be whatever the most already-popular artists had posted that day. There was no “going viral” on that site, really, because there was no feed! It wasn’t (and largely still isn’t) a site where things kinda take off outta nowhere because it’s a gallery. It’s not designed that way. The Daily Deviations were the only thing on the site that gave anything close to the feeling of “winning”.
I hated it. I hated obsessing over it. I gotta re-emphasize that I was 16-18 but the thought that I was working hard to better myself and not getting rewarded for it like other people were was infuriating. It was something attainable! My friends were getting them, why couldn’t I? It consumed me in that I started painting things I thought would be DD bait. “This will definitely get picked,” I’d tell myself painting a thing I didn’t care about simply to get the recognition of nobody I knew, forgetting about the friends and community of followers I’d built with hard work, time, and love for what drove me to create in the first place. So much energy spent on nothing of value to myself, my followers, and the site writ large. I didn’t need numbers to fall into that mindset, all I needed was the reality that posts were not treated equally.
The DD award never came and if I hadn’t quit the site sometime around 2014, I like to think that I’d probably would have gotten one. I’ve done some really good, notable stuff since! They still do it and I don’t care because that site is slop horseshit now, as far as I can tell they’re awarding it to AI-generated garbage, if that gives you any indication of the actual value of that badge.
On Twitter, there was no DD award but there is ‘virality’, as there is on tumblr, instagram, etc. The “number” is so much more insidious because there’s no plateau. 50 RTs becomes insufficient when you reach 100, which is a pittance when you reach 500, which is disappointing when you’re hitting 1000, which seems lousy when you hit the jackpot and get a solid 12-15k. What’s 1000 notes when you can get 50000+. You’ll be unsurprised to find out that in the 10+ years I’ve been on Twitter, I’ve gone through multiple “I gotta something that’ll get a ton of RTs” phases for the exact same reasons I did in the dA days. Sometimes a friend would get a surge in popularity and I wouldn’t. Sometimes I’d stumble into success with a post and I tried to replicate it. Sometimes I’d get mad my original art wasn’t getting the traction that a friend posting fanart would get. It’s all the same kinda mindspace that an anxious and insecure mind inhabits 24/7, which are conditions those systems are designed around. They want you to feel like that because when you feel like that, you post.
The problem was that I can tank a lot of that shit when I’m 16 because I’m 16 and my internal clock hasn’t been ticking long enough for me to have an actually meaningful problem in my life. Feeling that way when I’m 30 and on the second career track of my life is when that hits and makes you dissociatively depressed. Why am I wasting this time drawing shit I don’t like for a big audience that will only share it because they have a fleeting moment of excitement instead of a small audience that will build a meaningful connection with it for days? And if I’m lucky, years?
For the past four years, I’ve been running an extension called Twitter Demetricator by Ben Grosser, which removes all “bad” metrics from the site. (It’s now a little broken because I think it's abandonware but you can get the same results and even better options with Twitter Control Panel.)
It didn’t take very long for me to realise that turning all that shit off was good for my health and it’s been the case since. I don’t want to go too far into how that relates to numbers specifically because the point I want to make here is that it got me to stop chasing the thing I would with DD awards. The “merit” was gone. Everything I posted, and everything else on my feed alongside it, were on equal footing. A stray thought I had, a long thread I wanted to share, and artwork I spent hours on all sat the same and I had no way to not treat them as such. In every observable way, they were just Another Post. The merit was gone.
For Cohost, it certainly had ways of allowing you to go viral. We didn’t call it “doing severals” for nothing but by-and-large the “merit” never existed there. By stripping metrics from every facet of the site, everyone’s posts carried equal weight on everyone’s feeds. “A rising tide lifts all ships,” applied to posting, I guess. The merit being gone and a healthier space to exist in meant that for the first time since the dA days, I actually used Cohost to just… browse art a lot. It put me in the same headspace I was in the early dA days where I was just excited to find new artists because there was no “Oh this person’s popular and is followed by all my mutuals” or “Oh this person’s an industry legend” type stuff. Everyone’s art forcefully was leveled and I just got to be inspired by all this different stuff by different people and, for the first time in a very very very long time, got excited to meet new people and not just see their art but find out what kinda people they are. The “seeing their questionnaire answers in their journal” part was just seeing what they’d post between the art. It was exciting! I’ve genuinely made new friends because of it, the same way I would back then. Through an honest to goodness community.
And that was it. There was no other form of, like, reward beyond that. We weren’t sharing or networking for likes. I wasn’t drawing for attention, I wasn’t trying to “win” or game the system to come out on top. The discovery and friendship was the reward. It’s what it used to be, when I started. It’s what it got to be for a couple of years again. I will miss it. But I’ve also been through it enough now that I have no desire to adjust, adapt, or seek out anything other than that experience. It’s why I learned to love doing what I do, and why I loved existing online. To settle for anything else, it turns out, makes me deeply unhappy.