AntiSocial Media

Is social media  becoming antisocial?

More and more it is becoming apparent that social media platforms are trying to think for us. They are constantly updating algorithms that take your interests away from you. You can see it happening all over the place, on many different platforms and if you ask me it is beginning to get out of control.

The first time I had realized this was on Facebook. When you have a page (not just a profile) on Facebook, it is your job to promote that page as best you can, but do you have the power to even do that anymore? The answer is no. Facebook has taken your power away from you and more and more they continue to make your page less visible to the people that like your page because they want to see your stuff. They limit who sees your work and only let it out to a choice few of your followers. If they randomly pick the few followers that are only lookyloo’s who do not like or comment, than your post is stuck in limbo waiting for another random follower to either come to your page and look for themselves, or maybe it gets dropped into their timeline at a later date… but the chances of that are slim.

Then Instagram started to do the same and people eventually started to notice they were not seeing everything, but only what Instagram wanted you to see. They followed the same example as Facebook, but without the monetary incentive Facebook uses to try and make you purchase views.

Well, now YouTube appears to be jumping on this bandwagon and is now slowly starting to limit views. I have started noticing that channels I follow are not getting put into my “subscription” feed. So I started checking around with other people I know and asked them if they were seeing this as well… and lo and behold, they are. How far will YouTube take it? Are they just limiting views or are they going to take it to the Facebook level?

One of the main reasons people use YouTube is the possibility that you can make some money down the road, (don’t even get me started on the 10,000 view thing) but what happens if YouTube eventually decides that it is you that should be paying them to let people that have subscribed to your channel get notifications from your channel?

Am I being an alarmist here? Maybe I am, but with the increasing amount of sites that are getting into the limiting business, shouldn’t I be worried about it? Are you?

Would love to hear your opinions on this, if you have something to say, feel free to leave a comment below.

For the record: YouTube actually started to do this back in 2012, but has recently made some changes that is making it far more active in its subscription hiding.

No longer FREElance

Freelance isn't free anymore as New York City by a vote of 51-49 becomes the first city in the US to attempt to seal the deal for freelance workers.

The Freelance Isn't Free Act is the first bill passed in the US that will actually give freelance workers a legal right to uphold their contracts and I hope the rest of the US will follow suit. This is a great thing for artists as the client can not just worm their way out of paying for work done, as long as a contract was signed.

"The Freelance Isn't Free Act will make sure all workers can get paid for their work, on-time and in full," said Council Member and lead sponsor Brad Lander.

The bill also establishes a formal mechanism for the director of the Department of Consumer Affairs to enforce the labor rights of freelancers who are stiffed by employers.

While it still needs final signing by Mayor Bill De Blasio, but his staff has said that he is indeed in favor of passing the Bill.

This is long overdue in the US and I hope it gets its final approval as soon as possible.

The Art of Blatant Theft

         There are far too many people that are pre-programmed to ask for forgiveness after stealing your artwork than there are those that would ask for your permission to use it first.

       Some time ago I was fooling around with the Google reverse image search functions. I fed in about a dozen photos of designs and paintings and around the 13 or 14 one, something happened. It kicked back a whole bunch of results. Here was one of my designs being used without my permission all over the web. There were 28 hits in total. 27 were all one guy that had my design up on different t-shirt sale websites, and one from a university.

      

        First I contacted the websites one by one and started asking them to pull it down. If needed, I emailed them copies of the original pencil sketches, inked drawings, and even linked them to where the exact version of the picture was taken from. Which made it obvious that the design was indeed mine. This was slow going but I eventually got them all pulled, and the guy got banned from all of them. Not that I think that will stop him from doing it again and again and if not with my art, than maybe yours. 

        

        The university was another story altogether. They were adamant about their design being done by their designer who was highly respected and blah blah blah. After much pushing on my part, they eventually asked the designer. He told them they paid only enough to get him to throw something together quick. He grabbed a random image off of an art website that fit the criteria and used it. He admitted his fault and the school stopped using it immediately. They nicely sent me a letter of apology and went about their business in my good standings. Since they were not selling anything with the image on it and not making a profit from its use (A few flyers and banners for their sports team) I did not see any need to pursue further.

        I would suggest that all artists start a quarterly reverse image search of your works and make sure you are not being robbed as well.

        Protecting your intellectual property has always been a difficult task and the Internet has only served to complicate matters. The web has become an unoriginal designer’s one stop shop for endless material to shamelessly ripoff. there is an immensely blurred line between inspiration and theft. Exactly where that line lies is perhaps different for every designer. But for me, it boils down to just being plain wrong. If you can't be a decent creative person with out stealing from someone else... Stop claiming to be a creative person. But then again Pablo Picasso did say that "Good artists copy, great artists steal."

Sporadic Video Wednesday

This is  a video from the first and only art show I have ever been in. ( I kick in at about the 4:14 mark.) That is soon going to change. I have been putting in a lot of effort lately and have been seeing some positive results from it all.

In this video, it is clearly demonstrated that I don't like being in front of that camera and jumble my words a bit, hey it happens. Public speaking has never been my strong suit.

)