I feel sad for the people using these not as exploration or playing around but as a money printer. There will be a moment very very soon in which they will have the sour realization that whatever they do it doesnt belong to them.
If someone uses public domain art, anybody else can use it in the same way they did. And if they use stolen art well guess what? Anybody else can reuse it and print it, their rule.
This because the person that won that contest with the space opera drawing which is nothing but a Klimt opera painting (yes the circular door is there but way better) they were asked about the prompt they used, but they said thats their own because it took them so much time to do. But is not theirs, anybody can look into the promot and generate a similar idea, or just redo the one they did with their same image because its the game they are playing.
As an artist there is nothing worst that going at a canvas for hours and getting something you know you can do better.
As a prompter, there is nothing, they did nothing, just pulled the lever on a slotmachine. And if they pulled it for hours just so someone else grabbed their result and remixed it well, they end up with what yhey brought, nothing.
It's a bit rich that these people are trying to claim the prompts as theirs and no one else can have it. Yet they tell us artists tough shit if our stuff is taken and used. =\
but the law is not with them. in the US, at least, AI anti-art is not protected. (I refuse to call it art). so you can use it however much you wish. they don't own anything.
that said, the art fed into the machine does belong to many people and is copywrited.
for fun: it looks like it's possible that Nightshade is working.
I heard they flag your profile to not use your images if you say out loud you're using Nightshade... so it's better to keep it on the down-low? I dunno, so much confusion out there about everything
I'm not using it as I don't have the computer power to do it. but there are literally tens of thousands of artists who either are or want to. as I hear over and over again about AI, that too, is a horse that is out of the barn.
I'm not sure, someone said it in another thread... I don't think they were talking about Substack, more like Adobe accounts, Insta profiles, Behance profiles etc. Like if you clearly write on your profiles you are using Nightshade or you mention it in thread conversations it could be flagged. Which is no big deal they just don't scrape your stuff but it makes Nightshade less effective. Because they have no way of detecting it beforehand unless you tell them you're using it. I really don't know how accurate all this is, it's just something I've heard.
Brilliant Meghan. I don't venture onto Insta very often these days and haven't posted anything there since February. I've just buried myself in Substack and having fun writing and drawing and creating here and doing what I love, instead of what I think others might love, or even worse, what an algorithm might love. I'm completely and utterly fed up of the AI generated images that are spewing forth on Pinterest - they make me feel slightly nauseous - there's something always slightly off in them - too shiny and 'perfect', oddly distorted, too many fingers and toes, weird postures and odd angles when you look more closely.. I am not a working illustrator anymore (not that I was for very long anyway) so I don't worry about my livelihood, but I do hate the idea of my art being scraped for AI to butcher and distort and turn into something nightmarish..
Oh no, they're filling up Pinterest? I'm not on Pinterest but was thinking about checking it out because I'd read some other substacks talking about how great it is. I agree, they always look a bit a off. I can almost always spot it - and AI writing is becoming easier to notice too, it's just a little funny. And yes, you nailed it - the idea of our art being scraped to make it is so frustrating
Yes unfortunately, it’s there in full force. I don’t pin my work there, tried a few times to get into it but just couldn’t get into it, but have always loved it for the inspiration…. Now, if you put the word illustration after any search, you get sooooo many AI generated images, it’s scary.
Plain old google image searches are getting inundated with AI crud too. I was googling some reference pics yesterday and it's distressing how quickly it starts presenting you with the plasticky crap. And I just know more than half the people out there don't even know the difference.... People have shared AI 'birds' with me going 'oh look how beautiful nature is'.... Like..... apparently you have skipped out on nature documentaries when you were a kid because I promise you nature didn't create that glossy abomination...
It just makes me realize how niche we are as artists. Like I noticed this before, when friends would come to me with someone's artwork going 'hey you're an artist so I thought you would like this, isn't it lovely!' or 'hey this looks just like your style doesn't it' and I'm like...... respectfully, nooooo.....? Or when people can't see anatomical mistakes etc in figure drawings... most people really aren't very visually attuned.
All this commotion have made a positive change that I'm noticing. Now, artists are getting back to the real essence of making art. The social media had made us to care unusually about likes and reach. While that is still there but lots of artist have adopted the mindset of not caring about it. I don't know how to feel about it.
I don't know that they don't care about likes and reach - after all, that's a good way for people find clients and employers and professional opportunities! Goodness knows, I would love to be able to reach more than 5% of my followers! But if the platforms no longer let me do that, then the trade off is broken. You're right, I might as well spend my time doing the work I want to do rather than the work I feel like they want me to do.
I've been on the Fediverse (Mastodon) for a while now, just as a general user dabbling in various topics, on a large general purpose server (mas.to). My timeline is about 95% free of AI products. They're moderated aggressively, which apparently takes a lot of work on the part of both admins and users, and the community in general is hostile to it. (Of course there is probably also a server devoted to it somewhere, so YMMV).
We were using it for writing prompts, and those were indeed a lot of fun and brought writers together. But when the writers hosting those announced they were stopping because of AI related ethics, we liked the posts. I don't participate in the few that are left.
you don't, really. once you get the basics down, it's like any other short-form social media. if you ever decide you want to give it a go, let me know and I'll dig out the basic how to pages that are over there somewhere.
Would you say Mastodon is a thriving community? Would it be worth it to be there as a visual artist? I don't want to splinter my attention too much but I also don't want to be on Meta any more....
I would say it is a thriving community but that said, I don't know how helpful it would be to be there. it's definitely a time sink, which I don't have (despite all the goofing off I've done on here this week.)
for me, it doesn't feel helpful because the people I would want to reach like gallery owners, museums, and other textile artists doing fine art pieces aren't there. they're all in instagram. I just don't know where they're going. :(
yeah it's hard to know what to do when things are in shift. It feels like playing musical chairs... You have to partition your time between different places not knowing if any will work out. And if you don't do that you will arrive to the party late and have a harder time setting up. It's a pretty tough period all around
it really is! and I feel so bad for younger artists. but also, I'm not a young person but I'm just launching an art career and initially I was having huge troubles with Insta, before all this.
now I think it's because I had No AI / No NFTs in my profile. I'm seriously wondering if they selected those of us with that in our profiles to bust out of there.
AI's pervasive presence has even impacted artists on Instagram, prompting many to consider switching to platforms like Cara. Despite AI's potential, regulation and ethical use remain critical concerns.
I've used some ai to create thumbnails for stories, and it feels so dirty. Do you think Cara is a good place to find collaborators? I've tried messaging people on Pixabay in the past, but they don't respond.
I'm so with you on this. I think the social media dust is completely shaken right now, and I don't know that I want to spend the energy chasing the same methods on new platforms. I'm happy to just work with what I've already got established and focus my energies here on my newsletter. I'm very curious to see what things will look like when the dust settles, although I agree that will take some time.
Same. No point chasing the algorithms. Make it work for me, and I'm finding the newsletter fits who I am as a creator more. Just keep swimming, I 'spose!
I signed on to Cara and I'm supporting them financially too. I don't know if it will take off or become meaningfully large but I feel we have tried the 'using free platforms' route for a while now and come to realize over and over that when they say 'if the product is free, YOU are the product', they were NOT kidding. Honestly I don't even mind being the product if there is also a benefit for me... But the benefits keep getting cut back, the drawbacks keep increasing, and the recent massive suppression of pro-Palestine content has really been the last dystopian drop in the already full dystopian cup. I'm not packing up from Instagram just yet but I am thinking of it as a dying space, just like I still have my Facebook account but post there maybe once every few months. Something will have to come up to fill this gap, I hope it's something less dystopian.
As someone who offers paid subscriptions haha i 100% agree that Cara is a worthwhile investment. Even if it doesn't work out - at least we tried something. And every attempt to figure out a solution brings us closer to the ultimate fix. So I'm here for it. And yes to the point about insta being a dying space - there's very little benefit to the user to use the platform, that I can see. What is the incentive to stay? And if there isn't an incentive, then the users lose interest and abandon it altogether.
yup-yup, that's it exactly. I'm really trying to reorient to this way of thinking - giving my tiny little support to things I want to see thriving. I'm subscribed to Cara, I'm supporting a couple of independent newspapers/ journals since the massive exposure of legacy media as literal damn liars during the whole Palestine situation, I'm supporting some creators on Patreon.... I'm also canceling my Adobe subscription and I've downloaded Gimp and Affinity both. Like my capacity is not large, but I think we really have to vote with our dollars. We tried taking all the free stuff they give us and it just gets more and more poisoned. I feel it's also a 'sense of community' thing. Like if you don't pay for a service you don't feel entitled to demand it treat you better. You don't feel ownership or protectiveness over it. If we're all chipping in we can all steer the ship, and in case the ship veers off course we can withdraw our support in a meaningful way.... On Insta I literally feel it's turned into the Matrix, we're all plugged into our pods churning out content daily for the monster to feed on and we get basically nothing in return. I have never been a big 'promote myself' person so I've trundled on with a pretty small number of followers during the years.... but just recently I made this art print I want to sell to donate to Gaza and to make it go anywhere I had to sort of come up with a whole promotional strategy... I'm telling you, I did literally EVERY THING UNDER THE SUN I could think of, and I'm still doing it. The outcome...... less than impressive hahah :) Like the numbers are so huge now, everything is such a deluge, it is just insane how much energy and effort you have to pour into it to get anything back.
I went on holiday for a month. I’ve been back for over a week and my mum asked me why I hadn’t posted anything on the gram. Not feeling it, I said. I have reshared stuff on my Stories but … I will check out Cara but I don’t know what will make nonartists (or nonwriters) follow me there.
Its pretty niche for art - right now it seems to be more about the art community supporting each other, inspiring each other, making connections. Whether or not non artists make their way there 🤷♀️ guess we'll see!
but all of the art community wants people other than artists on there! people say all the time that they hope it moves outwards from the art community. (I've been on about 3 weeks or so? ish?)
So Cara has been made to be artist-heavy but it's definitely everyone's hope that other people will come too. What's the point of just artists talking to other artists forever? We all need audiences.... It's early days and there's financing issues and stuff as well, I chipped in with an annual subscription because I feel if we don't want these dystopian capitalist things then we have to be willing to support the non-dystopian things. The woman who started Cara literally paid out of pocket for it in the beginning and then got stuck with a massive bill somehow when 600,000 people joined in a week...... like there's a reason all these things we've been using have been set up by the mega-rich.....
Cara by design is very artist-niche, I don’t see it in that respect any different from DeviantArt or Artstation — with its same corresponding appeal to the masses. I understand those who say they can’t quit Meta because that’s where their clients and audience are — but we should realize this also happened because we ended giving them too much power, and enthusiastically so even.
yes on the power thing!! The thing is, when something is free you really have no right to complain about how it's run..... Which is what they're exploiting. I thought at first too that Cara will be just the new Artstation and it seemed to have the same profiles of artists, like a lot of animation and gaming stuff, but I have seen a bunch of fellow general illustrators joining recently, and honestly I think if enough of us go there people who are looking to connect with artists will come. I already have questions about how much of our general non-art-specific audience is even useful. Like it's only useful because you need to churn massive numbers so the algorithm doesn't bury you.... But I have had pretty large audiences on, like, Tumblr etc back in the day, and never saw a single sale or commission from them. I think we need to look beyond the numbers and think in terms of how many of these people just want to see a pretty picture as they scroll, maybe slap a like on it, a comment if they're feeling wildly generous.... and how many are actually interested in working with us, buying from us, all that need-to-make-a-living jazz......
Cara, unlike Artfol, did skyrocket precisely because of a perfect storm: big-name artists with hundreds of thousands of followers making the switch for good (and taking their followers with them), and the "all yer work are belong to our AI" big social media companies straw that stroke many an artist's back. Personally I'd like to see this as a renaissance of what truly matters in community sharing: do it on your own, at your own time, without being slave to a popularity algorithm you have no control over, and being respectful about the human condition behind true art and storytelling. Maybe this all sounds like an overtly idealistic utopia, but my hope is that the world at large realizes the human condition cannot be entirely replaced with technology.
I just hope Cara doesn't get slammed with logistical issues. I know they were struggling to keep paying for servers etc out of pocket when a mass of people suddenly joined.... I think we might have to accept that if we DO want someone not being corporately evil with us, we might have to chip in with a few bucks.... I have. I don't know if it will work but I feel it's worth supporting.
I feel sad for the people using these not as exploration or playing around but as a money printer. There will be a moment very very soon in which they will have the sour realization that whatever they do it doesnt belong to them.
If someone uses public domain art, anybody else can use it in the same way they did. And if they use stolen art well guess what? Anybody else can reuse it and print it, their rule.
This because the person that won that contest with the space opera drawing which is nothing but a Klimt opera painting (yes the circular door is there but way better) they were asked about the prompt they used, but they said thats their own because it took them so much time to do. But is not theirs, anybody can look into the promot and generate a similar idea, or just redo the one they did with their same image because its the game they are playing.
As an artist there is nothing worst that going at a canvas for hours and getting something you know you can do better.
As a prompter, there is nothing, they did nothing, just pulled the lever on a slotmachine. And if they pulled it for hours just so someone else grabbed their result and remixed it well, they end up with what yhey brought, nothing.
I think you're right, the market for easy AI sludge will be crowded and not very lucrative
It's a bit rich that these people are trying to claim the prompts as theirs and no one else can have it. Yet they tell us artists tough shit if our stuff is taken and used. =\
Lol! No! Is that a thing?
but the law is not with them. in the US, at least, AI anti-art is not protected. (I refuse to call it art). so you can use it however much you wish. they don't own anything.
that said, the art fed into the machine does belong to many people and is copywrited.
for fun: it looks like it's possible that Nightshade is working.
I heard they flag your profile to not use your images if you say out loud you're using Nightshade... so it's better to keep it on the down-low? I dunno, so much confusion out there about everything
which they? here? or somewhere else?
I'm not using it as I don't have the computer power to do it. but there are literally tens of thousands of artists who either are or want to. as I hear over and over again about AI, that too, is a horse that is out of the barn.
I'm not sure, someone said it in another thread... I don't think they were talking about Substack, more like Adobe accounts, Insta profiles, Behance profiles etc. Like if you clearly write on your profiles you are using Nightshade or you mention it in thread conversations it could be flagged. Which is no big deal they just don't scrape your stuff but it makes Nightshade less effective. Because they have no way of detecting it beforehand unless you tell them you're using it. I really don't know how accurate all this is, it's just something I've heard.
Apparently. I saw it talked about over on Twitter last year some time.
Ugh. Truly the worst timeline
Brilliant Meghan. I don't venture onto Insta very often these days and haven't posted anything there since February. I've just buried myself in Substack and having fun writing and drawing and creating here and doing what I love, instead of what I think others might love, or even worse, what an algorithm might love. I'm completely and utterly fed up of the AI generated images that are spewing forth on Pinterest - they make me feel slightly nauseous - there's something always slightly off in them - too shiny and 'perfect', oddly distorted, too many fingers and toes, weird postures and odd angles when you look more closely.. I am not a working illustrator anymore (not that I was for very long anyway) so I don't worry about my livelihood, but I do hate the idea of my art being scraped for AI to butcher and distort and turn into something nightmarish..
Oh no, they're filling up Pinterest? I'm not on Pinterest but was thinking about checking it out because I'd read some other substacks talking about how great it is. I agree, they always look a bit a off. I can almost always spot it - and AI writing is becoming easier to notice too, it's just a little funny. And yes, you nailed it - the idea of our art being scraped to make it is so frustrating
Yes unfortunately, it’s there in full force. I don’t pin my work there, tried a few times to get into it but just couldn’t get into it, but have always loved it for the inspiration…. Now, if you put the word illustration after any search, you get sooooo many AI generated images, it’s scary.
true. Pinterest is now a disaster.
Plain old google image searches are getting inundated with AI crud too. I was googling some reference pics yesterday and it's distressing how quickly it starts presenting you with the plasticky crap. And I just know more than half the people out there don't even know the difference.... People have shared AI 'birds' with me going 'oh look how beautiful nature is'.... Like..... apparently you have skipped out on nature documentaries when you were a kid because I promise you nature didn't create that glossy abomination...
Glossy abomination is such an apt description for AI art mimicking nature. It makes me feel sick. And so sad that people can’t recognise it.
It just makes me realize how niche we are as artists. Like I noticed this before, when friends would come to me with someone's artwork going 'hey you're an artist so I thought you would like this, isn't it lovely!' or 'hey this looks just like your style doesn't it' and I'm like...... respectfully, nooooo.....? Or when people can't see anatomical mistakes etc in figure drawings... most people really aren't very visually attuned.
Meaghan! Thanks so much for reading / recommending my article :)
This is all very bleak, huh? I'm so glad we have substack and I'm glad I've found your work.
[written by Chat GPT]
Lol! Too soon with the chatgpt joke, David 😂
Thanks for a great article and I am so excited to see more of your posts and artwork!
All this commotion have made a positive change that I'm noticing. Now, artists are getting back to the real essence of making art. The social media had made us to care unusually about likes and reach. While that is still there but lots of artist have adopted the mindset of not caring about it. I don't know how to feel about it.
I don't know that they don't care about likes and reach - after all, that's a good way for people find clients and employers and professional opportunities! Goodness knows, I would love to be able to reach more than 5% of my followers! But if the platforms no longer let me do that, then the trade off is broken. You're right, I might as well spend my time doing the work I want to do rather than the work I feel like they want me to do.
I've been on the Fediverse (Mastodon) for a while now, just as a general user dabbling in various topics, on a large general purpose server (mas.to). My timeline is about 95% free of AI products. They're moderated aggressively, which apparently takes a lot of work on the part of both admins and users, and the community in general is hostile to it. (Of course there is probably also a server devoted to it somewhere, so YMMV).
We were using it for writing prompts, and those were indeed a lot of fun and brought writers together. But when the writers hosting those announced they were stopping because of AI related ethics, we liked the posts. I don't participate in the few that are left.
Thanks for sharing! I've been intimidared to try mastodon cus I had read you have ti be a bit computer savvy to use it and i am.....very not haha
you don't, really. once you get the basics down, it's like any other short-form social media. if you ever decide you want to give it a go, let me know and I'll dig out the basic how to pages that are over there somewhere.
Would you say Mastodon is a thriving community? Would it be worth it to be there as a visual artist? I don't want to splinter my attention too much but I also don't want to be on Meta any more....
I would say it is a thriving community but that said, I don't know how helpful it would be to be there. it's definitely a time sink, which I don't have (despite all the goofing off I've done on here this week.)
for me, it doesn't feel helpful because the people I would want to reach like gallery owners, museums, and other textile artists doing fine art pieces aren't there. they're all in instagram. I just don't know where they're going. :(
yeah it's hard to know what to do when things are in shift. It feels like playing musical chairs... You have to partition your time between different places not knowing if any will work out. And if you don't do that you will arrive to the party late and have a harder time setting up. It's a pretty tough period all around
it really is! and I feel so bad for younger artists. but also, I'm not a young person but I'm just launching an art career and initially I was having huge troubles with Insta, before all this.
now I think it's because I had No AI / No NFTs in my profile. I'm seriously wondering if they selected those of us with that in our profiles to bust out of there.
Good luck with your new platform, btw.
AI's pervasive presence has even impacted artists on Instagram, prompting many to consider switching to platforms like Cara. Despite AI's potential, regulation and ethical use remain critical concerns.
I've used some ai to create thumbnails for stories, and it feels so dirty. Do you think Cara is a good place to find collaborators? I've tried messaging people on Pixabay in the past, but they don't respond.
It's early days for Cara so I can't say for sure - but I'd say its worth reaching out to people!
I'm so with you on this. I think the social media dust is completely shaken right now, and I don't know that I want to spend the energy chasing the same methods on new platforms. I'm happy to just work with what I've already got established and focus my energies here on my newsletter. I'm very curious to see what things will look like when the dust settles, although I agree that will take some time.
Same. No point chasing the algorithms. Make it work for me, and I'm finding the newsletter fits who I am as a creator more. Just keep swimming, I 'spose!
I signed on to Cara and I'm supporting them financially too. I don't know if it will take off or become meaningfully large but I feel we have tried the 'using free platforms' route for a while now and come to realize over and over that when they say 'if the product is free, YOU are the product', they were NOT kidding. Honestly I don't even mind being the product if there is also a benefit for me... But the benefits keep getting cut back, the drawbacks keep increasing, and the recent massive suppression of pro-Palestine content has really been the last dystopian drop in the already full dystopian cup. I'm not packing up from Instagram just yet but I am thinking of it as a dying space, just like I still have my Facebook account but post there maybe once every few months. Something will have to come up to fill this gap, I hope it's something less dystopian.
As someone who offers paid subscriptions haha i 100% agree that Cara is a worthwhile investment. Even if it doesn't work out - at least we tried something. And every attempt to figure out a solution brings us closer to the ultimate fix. So I'm here for it. And yes to the point about insta being a dying space - there's very little benefit to the user to use the platform, that I can see. What is the incentive to stay? And if there isn't an incentive, then the users lose interest and abandon it altogether.
yup-yup, that's it exactly. I'm really trying to reorient to this way of thinking - giving my tiny little support to things I want to see thriving. I'm subscribed to Cara, I'm supporting a couple of independent newspapers/ journals since the massive exposure of legacy media as literal damn liars during the whole Palestine situation, I'm supporting some creators on Patreon.... I'm also canceling my Adobe subscription and I've downloaded Gimp and Affinity both. Like my capacity is not large, but I think we really have to vote with our dollars. We tried taking all the free stuff they give us and it just gets more and more poisoned. I feel it's also a 'sense of community' thing. Like if you don't pay for a service you don't feel entitled to demand it treat you better. You don't feel ownership or protectiveness over it. If we're all chipping in we can all steer the ship, and in case the ship veers off course we can withdraw our support in a meaningful way.... On Insta I literally feel it's turned into the Matrix, we're all plugged into our pods churning out content daily for the monster to feed on and we get basically nothing in return. I have never been a big 'promote myself' person so I've trundled on with a pretty small number of followers during the years.... but just recently I made this art print I want to sell to donate to Gaza and to make it go anywhere I had to sort of come up with a whole promotional strategy... I'm telling you, I did literally EVERY THING UNDER THE SUN I could think of, and I'm still doing it. The outcome...... less than impressive hahah :) Like the numbers are so huge now, everything is such a deluge, it is just insane how much energy and effort you have to pour into it to get anything back.
Thank you! I hadn’t heard about Cara!
I went on holiday for a month. I’ve been back for over a week and my mum asked me why I hadn’t posted anything on the gram. Not feeling it, I said. I have reshared stuff on my Stories but … I will check out Cara but I don’t know what will make nonartists (or nonwriters) follow me there.
Its pretty niche for art - right now it seems to be more about the art community supporting each other, inspiring each other, making connections. Whether or not non artists make their way there 🤷♀️ guess we'll see!
but all of the art community wants people other than artists on there! people say all the time that they hope it moves outwards from the art community. (I've been on about 3 weeks or so? ish?)
Yes for sure. i've been seeing more and more non-art people following me the last couple days
So Cara has been made to be artist-heavy but it's definitely everyone's hope that other people will come too. What's the point of just artists talking to other artists forever? We all need audiences.... It's early days and there's financing issues and stuff as well, I chipped in with an annual subscription because I feel if we don't want these dystopian capitalist things then we have to be willing to support the non-dystopian things. The woman who started Cara literally paid out of pocket for it in the beginning and then got stuck with a massive bill somehow when 600,000 people joined in a week...... like there's a reason all these things we've been using have been set up by the mega-rich.....
Cara by design is very artist-niche, I don’t see it in that respect any different from DeviantArt or Artstation — with its same corresponding appeal to the masses. I understand those who say they can’t quit Meta because that’s where their clients and audience are — but we should realize this also happened because we ended giving them too much power, and enthusiastically so even.
yes on the power thing!! The thing is, when something is free you really have no right to complain about how it's run..... Which is what they're exploiting. I thought at first too that Cara will be just the new Artstation and it seemed to have the same profiles of artists, like a lot of animation and gaming stuff, but I have seen a bunch of fellow general illustrators joining recently, and honestly I think if enough of us go there people who are looking to connect with artists will come. I already have questions about how much of our general non-art-specific audience is even useful. Like it's only useful because you need to churn massive numbers so the algorithm doesn't bury you.... But I have had pretty large audiences on, like, Tumblr etc back in the day, and never saw a single sale or commission from them. I think we need to look beyond the numbers and think in terms of how many of these people just want to see a pretty picture as they scroll, maybe slap a like on it, a comment if they're feeling wildly generous.... and how many are actually interested in working with us, buying from us, all that need-to-make-a-living jazz......
Great article! Thanks for the shout out.
Thanks so much for the great read!
Cara, unlike Artfol, did skyrocket precisely because of a perfect storm: big-name artists with hundreds of thousands of followers making the switch for good (and taking their followers with them), and the "all yer work are belong to our AI" big social media companies straw that stroke many an artist's back. Personally I'd like to see this as a renaissance of what truly matters in community sharing: do it on your own, at your own time, without being slave to a popularity algorithm you have no control over, and being respectful about the human condition behind true art and storytelling. Maybe this all sounds like an overtly idealistic utopia, but my hope is that the world at large realizes the human condition cannot be entirely replaced with technology.
I just hope Cara doesn't get slammed with logistical issues. I know they were struggling to keep paying for servers etc out of pocket when a mass of people suddenly joined.... I think we might have to accept that if we DO want someone not being corporately evil with us, we might have to chip in with a few bucks.... I have. I don't know if it will work but I feel it's worth supporting.