It's 2 am, my leg hurts, and I'm using braincells to think for once and ramble, so here you go. Thanks to eclipse everyone and their grandmother seems to be making DA alternatives, and while you'd think that's great, I see it as something not so great. I won't be naming any specific sites in here as completely negative examples though, this is more of a general observation and comparison. Any website that I deem to be doing these things relatively right in a positive manner I will mention.
I'll want to first of state that I equally despise eclipse just like anyone else does, in case anyone for some reason feels like I'm for some reason protecting it.
Also I'll give quick notes throughout regarding my thoughts on how toyhouse handles the topics im talking about since I feel like thats relevant too.
All these little art websites popping up out of nowhere are all doomed to fail or barely scrape by either due to falling into irrelevance, being unable to pay server costs, abandoning projects, or the devs having drama stirred up on them. Starting websites is very difficult, especially when you intend to replace something, but I feel like many of these recent websites have been handling this the wrong way. I'm no website dev by all means, but as someone who's been on the internet for a majority of my life and has seen communities and websites rise and fall over and over again I think I can give a good idea on how this COULD be properly achieved with the right amount of investment, luck, and proper care.
First off: Professional website
Yes, professional is a scary word for the hobby artists out there, but I do not mean a website FOR professional artists. I mean a website that is designed professionally (aka with good, stable coding that can be edited at a later date by any new coders hired onto the team), an actual paid team, active paid moderation when it comes to social features(*), A website that you can trust will keep your data safe, and one that sounds appealing to people in such a way that it may attract more users. Have the money to advertise oneself in the initial start, because once you kick off and hit a high active amount of users you will be able to rely on them to come to you! But even Deviantart used to advertise itself outside its website before word of mouth became reliable (until it became known as a mess of a site, where the word of mouth became negative.) This is the ONLY way to ensure your website will actually be on par with any notable art websites to the point where it could self-sustain itself reasonably.
*Some websites that do pay their staff do ultimately have volunteer moderators, I particularly don't like this much as I feel that anyone that functions as staff on your website should get some form of compensation for it as payment and be under a contract to protect their rights. Moderators on websites often get a lot of shit for doing their job, and at the very least they should get something from it and not just a pat on the back.
Second: Monetization
We all hate ads, that's true, and getting your website approved for adspace is even more difficult. Especially when you have to also make sure no malicious ads get brought in or if you want to be able to host 18+ content, but its a way to make revenue. And if you're planning to make a website that's supposed to serve the same functions as deviantart (Aka a website where an artist can host their own art in a gallery, ignoring the social features) You will not get far with just donations from users. Your primary form of income should NOT rely on donations, that is a big no no if you intend to become something that is a viable "alternative" to deviantart, that you also intend to be better. The best way to achieve this is to have some kind of reason for your users to give you their money. Either by allowing them to have adspace on the website, customization, premium, etc, on top of having normal adspace.
Starting a website is a huge investment on the owner's part, and if the developer is unable to actually prove that they have the money to be able to run these servers (and then have donation money as a buffer in the case that the owner cannot fully cover the costs) its not a good thing. You should be able to run your website for at least a year without having to rely on random people working for you without pay, and without having to beg for donations via patreon. I personally do not agree with not paying your staff, especially the coders, who are the people who will be spending literal thousands of hours of their life to make sure your website and its features work. Any time the website is down your coders will be the ones at work to make sure its fixed. Every time people's galleries are suddenly deleting images, you will go to them. They are your lifeline. If you can't pay everyone, for the love of god pay your coders. A good, paid coder, will go a long way in the websites future (And will generally prevent having to perform website rewrites!). Can't actively hire a good coder? At the very least have someone paid to code your website as a one-time investment, so that your own, cheaper coders can work off of something that works rather than making a mess of spaghetti code.
Think for a moment about deviantart. The largest file you can submit to deviantart is 30mb, and i'd say the average can range from 2mb to 15mb. Deviantart currently has 358 million images hosted on its website, not counting literature or images that also have a download to a larger file size. Toyhouse only allows images of 4mb, which even I often break and thus have to resize images for. Artfight has recently been able to up their limit to 5mb. But the difference? Artfight and toyhouse are not professional websites. They are (mostly) fully run by unpaid volunteers relying on donations- which means that since the volunteers are unpaid, they cannot reliably have the people they hire work on them full time without donations because they aren't monetized. If this is good or bad, is up to the goal of the website of course. (Artfight generally can manage, as its a once-a-year event.) I'd say this isn't inherently bad, because these websites are also not trying to serve as a replacement for a website run by a giant company. Toyhouse, in fact, fullfills a niche in the market, making it more likely to be profitable. But let's move on from this, as I think i got the point across.
Third: BETA WEBSITES ARE NOT RELIABLE.
This is a bit ironic as the website i'm posting this on, states that its in beta! (When the hell did we change from alpha? There was certainly no announcement about that.)
This one is a bit of a paradox if you're a small time person that wants to start a company to run a website! If you want to gather funds, you need to have things to prove the website works of course. And every website starts somewhere, so here's the pros and cons of beta websites that I noted. I'll try to find the con to every pro I can write down.
| PROS | CONS |
- Having a usable or interact-able beta website builds trust with future/current users that you will actually go somewhere with the project.
- Beta websites allow a community to form before the website is fully released, guaranteeing that there will be a population of users available during full release which will attract more users looking for an established community.
- You are able to consistently communicate with your users and get direct feedback on things.
- An alright way to gather funds for the website's future through donations/premium perks
- You are able to change the website as much as you want before full release, as users would be using the website fully aware that this is not the final product.
| - It is very easy to stain your reputation with a beta website if it remains in beta for a significant amount of time, either because you went public too early and thus were asking for money for a website with little to none features, or because your development time is too slow to keep your users happy.
- It is very easy for a closed beta community that generally only congregates with itself to put off potential new users either during beta or during full release (if users have heard of how people behaved during beta was commonly in a negative light)
- The more you acknowledge, the more people will expect you to acknowledge. And then, if you stop publicly acknowledging people's feedback, users may fall to believe that the website has been abandoned. Combine this with slow development time and it can form a very unpleasant combo for your users. (See more at point #4)
- If you are not transparent about where the funds are going, users may become upset with the website and draw assumptions that you are pocketing it all. Combine this with the above issue, and you get a REALLY nasty combo. Users may also fall upset if you lock all your good features behind paywalls in beta, or may feel like the perks given for premium are worthless.
- Your users will certainly get pissed off if you throw everything upside down every month.
|
Its clear that while there's an equal amount of positive and negatives i can think of, the consequences of the negatives and the likelihoods of the negatives outweigh the positives. At the moment, in fact, I feel like toyhouse is currently in the state of the fourth con, where there is no real transparency about where funds go, development time is incredibly slow, and most of the staff having gone radio-silent, it isn't great. Deviantart, on the other hand, due to being a company, does not have to be transparent about its funds as it doesn't receive money from donations and their website is in full release. Technically they could have decided to stop updating the website at any point because it wasn't in a beta. (Technically toyhouse doesn't receive donations either, but it sells product (premium), which i can't tell if thats better or worse with the situation its in. I suppose worse as we're all waiting to get the actual completed website that people are funding)
fourth: Interacting with your userbase, and how it can all go so, so wrong.
This is something that I deem Toyhouse does pretty well. Staff is pretty much very separated from users, giving it a feeling that if you have an issue, it will be dealt with properly. (of course if that actually happens is another matter, but shhh)
This is a trend that I feel is obviously common when you are building a beta website and you want to communicate with your users about feedback and suggestions. It's great to do that! And if you are staff, reading those kinds of feedback and then responding to them in either a weekly Q&A or something can really build a great relationship with your users! But the issue is mainly that these days, and I feel this is part of popularity culture, staff or devs of things in general like to tie their private life into their community. Whether this is because they want to be friendly and hold conversations, or if this is intended because they want to become known as The Owner Of Cool Website, is questionable. Tying your private life into anything you do online is a big nono, and you want to avoid is as much as you can- ESPECIALLY when you're trying to build a brand or run a community. Because if you have admitted or have done anything shitty, ever, this WILL be found at some point or another if you don't separate private life from work life.
It's understandable if you don't want to come off as bitchy or cold, but if you want to uphold some kind of status quo as owner of a website, you have to be able to separate things. Be able to act with confidence and know that drama that could kill your website within seconds will not be brought up, if you for whatever reason have that kind of drama in your past. The less you give out about your past and private life, the more stable a website becomes. I mean fuck, do we know anything about who owns deviantart? In my many years on that site i've never known who owned it, and they certainly have never tried speaking to the community as far as I know. Another good example I'd say is how Waterfall handles it, where it is a site that is in beta, and staff is communicative, but only on matters regarding the website and nothing else. I have no clue who staff is, if they have private accounts anywhere on tumblr or twitter, and that's how it should be kept. That is, in general, what your public face should be. And this is why I recommend you create a new public face (aka make a new account) that goes under the handle of your website, and do not link it to your private directly. Need to link it to yourself? make another account that's exclusively to show you're a real person, and keep it at that. No need to ever share on it or do anything on it.
#4 is going to split further into its seperate category now:
fifth: Avoid making discord servers for your website, ESPECIALLY IF ITS GOING TO BE FOR BUG REPORTS AND UPDATES
Your users will not always want to have to hand out the way to directly contact them by having to join a discord to fill out a bug report, that more often than not is in a public channel too. Just make a google form and attach a link to your website, and if you MUST have a discord for your website, remember the bolded lines in #4. You, as the owner, are capable of completely fucking everything up by saying the wrong things. Most users also want to see site updates on the site, and not via the discord. Prioritise posting update news to the website, and THEN the discord, not vice-versa.
On top of that, while discord servers work great for small groups, the bigger it becomes the more difficult it is to manage, and if you made this server as the official server, it takes away development time for the site as you will be tasked with either moderating, managing your moderation team, FINDING good moderators, and then also helping your moderators answer questions. Strongly reconsider making an official discord for your website, and instead encourage the community to make their own. Less work for discord, more work for the website.
FINAL POINT
DO NOT PARADE AROUND THAT YOU ARE AN ALTERNATIVE TO X OR Y WEBSITE.
NEVER directly state that you are going to be better than, or will be replacing the empty space left by, OR are an alternative to a website. Do not rag on other websites trying to do the same thing. The first thing this does is that it seems wholly unprofessional from a user point of view, if not childish. Your users will deem what your website is in terms of word of mouth advertisement, and you'll have to accept it if they deem you an alternative, but you have to think about your goal.
If your goal is "I'm making this website to be better than what x website is and replace it.", rethink it. Ideally, you'd want "I'm making this website to fulfil a niche that is heavily demanded by people, and I'm willing to provide it."
And maybe, just maybe you'll think about how discord's main slogan was "it's time to ditch skype and teamspeak." (although they recently removed it, good on them for growing up), and clearly it got success, this is a fluke. People already despised skype, and teamspeak functioned as exclusively for gamers. They saw a niche in the market for a combination of consumer and gamer, and took it, and went "hey guys, we're fulfilling the niche that combines these two for you!". The majority of discord's advertisement came from the fact that they were so good at making a functional app, that everyone generally agreed that it was better than the products it compared itself to. it's questionable how good they are at making a functional program now but that's another can of worms.
If you directly compare yourself to a website, people can and will compare you to them. And more often than not, it has a negative effect. And I can genuinenly say that I play into this effect. You see, let's use waterfall as an example. I like waterfall, I like its potential, The staff interactivity, etc. But waterfall directly advertised itself (or at least the first time I saw it) as a tumblr alternative. And now here's the thing, tumblr may not be great, but I am already fully set up on there, and I run into a lot of issues doing basic things on waterfall that are basically nonexistent on tumblr. On top of that, if I wanted to build an audience or interact with people, well, waterfall is there, but its kind of dead too. So then I compare it to a website I've been on for 5 years now, and I think. "Okay, am I going to deal with the poor performance of a website that prized itself as an alternative, or am I just going to stay on the original because everything the alternative stated is currently still much better on the original?"
Alright I'm pretty sure I've rambled outta my ass here, but quick reminder that THIS IS PRETTY MUCH JUST FULLY MY OPINION BASED ON WHAT I'VE OBSERVED OVER THE YEARS!
So if you're going to disagree, please be civil about it. or Fuck, ignore my ramble, I'm just unable to sleep really.