Posting from a throwaway because this is something that embarasses me a lot. I’m an artist who posts fanart on social media but as much as I remind myself that fanart is just for fun, I should just enjoy myself and not worry about engagement, I can’t get myself out of the competitive headspace against other artists who create content for the same media. I find myself getting angry at more popular artists who only do lazy doodles, yet they get showered with likes and adoring comments. It makes me feel like I have to strategize posting times, engage with popular accounts so that they will promote my work, draw what the fandom likes to see and not what I want to draw. I become a lot more negative and stressed out when I actively use social media, but without social media engagement I feel less motivation to make art. I have no economic incentive to become a popular artist, my career is unrelated to art, but the compulsion is there anyway.
I started to overthink online interactions because of my competitiveness. It makes me insecure when I see cliques of popular creators who are friends with each other and share/praise only each other’s work. When I reach out to them, just to get to know them and not for self-promotion, they don’t respond and keep talking to their clique. I know that they simply don’t have anything to say but it feels like they are deliberately ignoring everybody who isn’t a part of their clique. I know about extensions that hide the numbers but I care more about the absence comments and interactions compared to the popular creators. How do I get less competitive about this?
It’s totally normal, and might be unavoidable. It seems like you’re uploading your art not just to show your creative output, but to feel validation. You want to know that your art is good and well-liked, and that people enjoy that art just as much as they enjoy any other art online.
You could try to do something like only post your art to a website that you use as a portfolio where the numbers dont exist and you’re not really competing with others on the same platform for visibility. That may not work if it’s truly about validation, as you couldn’t just put that away without needing to transplant the validation somewhere else in your life.
Your best option might be to try and more thoroughly engage with whatever community you already have in an effort to make the engagement that you already have feel enough. Maybe something like drawing requests of dumb ideas people have, just for fun, to get them commenting and have you draw something that’s just for the viewers and not for a higher level of art and engagement.