The State of Adult Art Post-2018

Article is also on Neocities and Newgrounds .

The Tumblr porn ban was the worst event of all space and time and beyond. Because of that, people are forced to use one of the worst platforms, Twitter. This is basically bad for adult artists, and I'm one of them.

Twitter's nature, even before Shithead Elon got a hold of it, wasn't as good as a platform people make it up to be. There's the chance of getting suspended for no good reason, getting tweets taken down for DMCA bullshit, and assholes leeching on others. Twitter is NOT a compatible place for art. Most media tags from artists contain thousands of stupid useless GIF replies and other things not related to art. Tags would have to be in the main post text instead of the footer, and they have to be all spaces and no caps. The way posts are shown crops out the images most of the time. The infrastructure itself is unfriendly to any art post.

The Same Song

The algorithm views art in such a very poor way where art is determined based on numbers than creativity. It's how a lot of artists get pigeonholed into the same styles. The way the algorithm is on twitter hardwires people in many ways, and adult art communities are one of the affected. One obvious example would have to be those strip games where the mechanics are based on likes and retweets. It's less of a game and more of numbers on a screen . The exceptions would have to be actually useful strip games where the mechanic is contacting and mailing payment processors to stop interfering with their adult art and how they sell them.

Artists and commissioners default to characters n' series that have already been done thousands of times (and worse, generated a hundred-thousand more) such as Loona, Dimitrescu, Renamon, Astolfo, that one Samsung Girl, Judy Hopps, characters from Family Guy, characters from Gacha games, I could go on. I do like some of the other characters popular in artworks though, so it's basically personal taste. Asides from that, most artists don't respect the characters properly, especially the female ones. They don't really take the time to learn their personalities and instead turn them into the same types of bimbos, sometimes tanned, sometimes with the queen of spades tattoo. I don't want to see Priyanka Maheswaran as a brainless bimbo Twitch streamer, I want to see her as her true knowledgeable self. But alas, it's what most people want.

Even the scenarios and subjects tend to not have as much twist. There's many angles to use out of a mating press instead of just the back, there's many variations to how one would draw a blowjob face instead of the fucked up anteater face, and there's potential in mixing and matching various kinks into something cool. Even the memes and trends could use a whole lot of variety. "evil container", that Brooklyn sweater, the forbidden pants, they're rather FOTM fads directed by numbers instead of what could've been opportunities for very different interpretations primarily shared by humans.

When having to look at the same type of images or trends more frequently whether if it's on boorus or platforms, it gets rather infuriating, specially this whole "Bleached" tag along with making unsolicited edits of turning black dicks white. It's not a sexy kink nor a good one at all, you're just a racist friend . This is why blacklist/word filters and catering a feed to a personal liking is useful.

I'm sure Bluesky has a lot of better smut, probably because it has more queer artists and others doing them, and that there's more room for unique art styles. The only problem is to find a custom feed or two that only show art along with adding a lot of words to blacklist, because there's still a chance a feed would bring out doompost crap. The closest thing I can think that allows you to show only media would have to be Tokimeki.blue , an application that offers a few more settings in how you view timelines.

Link In Bio

Another issue that the algorithm did to artists is having them join on the teasing bandwagon promoting their crowdfunding services through censorship, the very thing that all adult artists are against, and it gets real old real fast to me. They usually crop, cover, blur, or mosaic out the good parts. It's even worse when there's some people who'd blue-ball viewers by censoring the climax of the animation, which I find to be very unethical. The only exception I'd make is if they do this as a promo to follow their BlueSky for the uncensored version, which I find to be very valid, because seriously, Twitter is a super shithole.

What makes things more complicated is that artists may host their most explicit works in the highest expensive tier, sometimes only viewable on a Discord server. And with this tactic spreading so fast, it would be hard for one to balance their budget with monthly subscriptions of ten to fifty artists in a hypothetical sense. I can slightly understand why they're doing something like this; the job market's shittier than before, I couldn't even hold up a job because I got laid off a while ago. But I don't think doing teases is a solid tactic of promotion, it just comes off as an annoying form of engagement out of all other annoying forms of engagement. Just give the viewers some slack, most of them want the whole thing instead of a crop. At least release them within a week instead of a month or half a year. It would be okay if one is promoting their exclusive WIPs, project files, sketches, or time-lapses. I just want artists to use a more viable tactic of promoting that isn't obnoxious or teasing.

I Consent

Similarly, even the artists have their problems, notably Patreon. Not too long ago, some credit card companies or a bunch of TERFs threatened Patreon for previously allowing kinkier stuff like non-con, monsterfucking, hypno, etc. Instead of fighting back, Patreon pussied out and decided to ban these, especially while using moderation bots to take down the posts. Sounds familiar, right? That's how Tumblr died and ruined the universal timeline further. It pisses me the fuck off seeing people forced to censor their artworks by having the characters say that "they consent" or explicitly state the whole scenario is "consensual". It just completely ruins the whole scenario or fantasy. The way Patreon caused a disservice to the users is why we end up getting this horseshit . It makes me very sick to my stomach seeing people accept Patreon's recent censorship and the like as normal. This is not how adult artists should live. There's a good reason people need an alternative, but still, we need more options to choose than just one.

Platform Alternatives

Peaches

There's an upcoming alternative called Peaches that strives to actually put creators first and allow very NSFW art. It's planned to go live as a closed alpha later, so if you need a place better than Patreon to sell your work, you should go sign up for the waitlist very soon before it opens.

Conjured Ink

There's another alternative named Conjured Ink , an upcoming place that is not a platform but a bazaar of website for artists to sell their work without the fear of fascist puritan organizations and payment processors freezing accounts. It's also free and open source. You can either sign up for email notifications or join the Discord server for updates or if you want to support the project.

Haven

Lastly, there's the new upcoming platform that's destined to be the most artist-friendly place as possible called Haven . It's a website built from the Master's thesis on TikTok and its issues . While it mainly states itself to be a website that protects artists from AI art theft, there are other statements that I find to be very very important. The platform is planning to be an alternative to YouTube that doesn't have the unfair monetization policies that harshly strangles creativity by the neck, nor any pointless feature or change. The difference between Haven and other "YouTube alternatives" is that it won't do fascism disguised as absolute free speech. And yes it's going to allow NSFW art as part of the website being anti-censorship. For artworks containing other kinks, it will also support dead dove according to a livestream that talks about the platform .

If you're unsure if the platform can succeed, well you don't have to worry; the main developer is a Cybersecurity Major, and it's currently getting support from YouTubers sponsoring it. In addition, there's a chance it's going to be decentralized so people can make their own instances with their own rules. It says so in the Kickstarter FAQ . Speaking of which, you should go support Haven in any way that benefits. It's currently doing an art raffle , and there is a Kickstarter page with over 560 backers funding it. You too can help out by backing this project as a way of helping Haven grow. So please support the platform before April 10th because that's the deadline for the campaign.

Final Paragraphs

I wish Vid.me were to treat its budget wisely for the website and not shut down shortly, I wish Tumblr wasn't bought out by Yahoo and get porn banned, I wish Cohost was still alive. That's why I'm betting it all on Haven because we need a platform that's better than YouTube, we need a platform that's better than Tumblr, we need a platform that's a hundred times better than Twitter and every other website that started to suck. We've been so trapped into these same four or five websites and we need someone to break this centralized world of the internet. One would think that Haven and these upcoming alternatives remind them of the Poob meme. Well, I'd rather have Poob have it for me than a broken down platform where its own bot generates CSAM .

If Haven and the others end up failing by not meeting the funding goal or any other circumstances, then we are totally fucked, and I am not going to let you and the rest spend your days on the internet suffering. Go support and contribute to actual good organizations like Fight For The Future or EFF or the ACLU , the three that are all fighting against censorship and surveillance. Go visit FFTF's Bad Internet Bills website to prevent these bills from happening. Go to the stop-paypros site to fight against porn bans. If we can't prevent KOSA and other bad internet bills from being passed nor rollback from the previous bad bills, there's always the third option.

Malcolm X said that "We want freedom by any means necessary". Think about that quote and the speech it came from , and think about this image accompanied with that said quote. You know what to do with that information, right? If protests via contacting companies won't stop corporates, TERFs, and fascists from banning porn and limiting how you express your queerness, then you'll have to go to the roots of the problems and get rid of those that harm you, by any means necessary. If you really want things to get better, you'll have to take the effort to do anything to make our lives better.

Do not wait for a bad thing to happen, do it soon while you still have time to prevent things from getting worse.

(update: not even a day later since I posted this article and subscribestar has started banning niche kinks in favor of paypros. this fucking sucks. like i said, we need to either get into the credit card companies and the governments' thick skulls that banning porn won't fix things, considering that the US has a literal pedophile as president. otherwise, we may have to do something drastic to really make some changes. The Federal Reserve System Board's inviting public comments on the current guidelines relating to corps debanking people and organizations. You should go write up your thoughts on why payment processors, governments, and fascist groups like Collective Shout and Exodus Cry should not go interfere with what you create and what you host. It's due by April 27, 2026. Don't stall this any further. Go click on this link. )

References

https://bsky.app/profile/hibernotion.bsky.social/post/3l3c26h7s2h2c
https://pixelfur.maw.best/p/vv0ltz/862118692214769997
https://docsend.com/view/3bfgwiazwcsw44dg
https://youtu.be/GkHzoKw8bkI?t=7452
https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/1964-malcolm-x-s-speech-founding-rally-organization-afro-american-unity/

Further Reading

Watering Down of Art Online by Cosy

The Death of DeviantArt and the art-site shaped hole haunting the Internet by Torrent Empress

Artists vs. Social Media by Omoulo