Dobes Zone

     The steady decline of twitter and the general toxicity and user-unfriendliness of large social media platforms has a lot of artists and other creators scrambling to find different websites. Adult artists are in an even stickier situation, since twitter, unlike instagram, tumblr, and facebook, is a place where erotic content is still allowed. There are of course, niche websites and fandom spaces, but a lot of modern artists still rely on social media to bridge the gap and direct paying customers to their work.     There's of course a lot of debate about where to go, what platforms to chose, and where to invest one's energy. The thing that I feel a lot of people fail to understand is that establishing your presence and your body of work on multiple websites is a lot of god damn effort . It's something of a job in and of itself- not just reposting your work, it's also a matter of getting acclimated and learning about a new website and its functions, find...

         Patricia Piccinini's sculpture "Young Family"      There's something I really resent about "weird" media going viral, mostly in that it loses context or becomes harder to find information about- such as original creator, or even the original unaltered video/piece itself. Rumors spread, urban legends even crop up about the content. It's interesting as a cultural phenomena but it's also kind of maddening. I especially dislike when something becomes permanently attached to a streamer, YouTube critic, or an influencer, moreso than the original creator. I also dislike the trend of YouTube videos "explaining" any media, including viral art projects. There's this ever-expanding economy of clickbait that self perpetuates and thrives on further decontextualization of everything, which has happened in part due to YouTube's own algorithms and the ongoing struggle that video creators have to be seen and get paid for their work. The tre...