Weasyl prioritizes infrastructure overhaul while usage drops

[Conan]

It appears the rudderless ship that is Weasyl continues to be plagued by people not caring much about their product, as they prioritize infrastructure "upgrades" over doing anything that might make people pay attention to them.

Their publicly-accessible Munin page recently unveiled a number of new servers. I would imagine these are mostly virtual, as there is no way in hell Weasyl needs more physical servers than Inkbunny, FA, and SoFurry, when they have far fewer users.

Speaking of users, Weasyl's traffic is on a steady slide downards. You can go ahead and guess why, but I'm sure the official excuse has something to do with Ben doing something two years ago and me writing these posts.

[ProvincialTwit]

The official Vivisector Kickstarter will be launching soon; our goal is to be able to buy enough soothing salve to ease Conan's never-before-seen levels of butthurt.  Please give if you are able.

[GreenReaper]

I imagine they're putting the infrastructure in place to allow them to scale once they figure out who they want to have on the site, and what they want it to be about. There's little point in growing only to end up with a random assortment of users, and then to fall over because you are not ready to handle them.

A lot of people tried out the site as a result of promotion during the FA drama. Naturally, there has been decline as they realize it does not yet meet their needs. It isn't all bad news, though - they're levelling out to about five times the traffic they had last year. That should be enough to keep them going while they figure it out.

Anyone else notice that "active users" has disappeared from the site footer?

[Conan]

The official Vivisector Kickstarter will be launching soon; our goal is to be able to buy enough soothing salve to ease Conan's never-before-seen levels of butthurt.  Please give if you are able.

At least someone cares. Please make the check out to "cash" and watch my FA account for all the porn I'll buy with the money.

I imagine they're putting the infrastructure in place to allow them to scale once they figure out who they want to have on the site, and what they want it to be about. There's little point in growing only to end up with a random assortment of users, and then to fall over because you are not ready to handle them.

A lot of people tried out the site as a result of promotion during the FA drama. Naturally, there has been decline as they realize it does not yet meet their needs. It isn't all bad news, though - they're levelling out to about five times the traffic they had last year. That should be enough to keep them going while they figure it out.

Anyone else notice that "active users" has disappeared from the site footer?

I don't have any problems with them looking to the future, it's just there won't -be- a future if they continue to do nothing worthwhile and taint their name more than it already is. I've talked to people, people who have no idea that I post here or any of my past involvement with Weasyl, and they all have the same indifferent "it's not FA but there's nothing Weasyl does better" attitude. Turns out people don't care about folders as much as we thought.

Weasyl will never figure this out because the people who matter are too afraid to deal with anyone that thinks differently than they do, and Kihari apparently doesn't care enough to overpower them and actually get the ball rolling.

[charmander]

Speaking of users, Weasyl's traffic is on a steady slide downards. You can go ahead and guess why

Charmander is leaking Weasyl’s users to FA?

[ProvincialTwit]

I don't have any problems with them looking to the future, it's just there won't -be- a future if they don't put me in charge and do what I say because reasons

ftfy

[camellia sinensis]

weasyl is a competently run art site with more features than FA at the expense of a smaller community. what more can they do?

like honestly what features are they missing? so long as FA has the lions share of the activity weasyl is gonna trail behind, even if they implement a feature that sends you a muffin basket every time you upload a submission or post a comment

[Conan]

weasyl is a competently run art site with more features than FA at the expense of a smaller community. what more can they do?

like honestly what features are they missing? so long as FA has the lions share of the activity weasyl is gonna trail behind, even if they implement a feature that sends you a muffin basket every time you upload a submission or post a comment

I'd be interested to know why you consider it "competently run". Many people who have gotten "too close" (including myself) tend to disagree. There are others who disagree just based on the fact of who's on staff. Additionally, Kihari, the actual site owner, being barely visible is concerning. Go onto the forums and find the last time he actually posted on the public forums. It was February. When the owner isn't even trying to actively involve themselves with the community (and from what I'm told, he's not much more involved behind the scenes), there's something wrong. For what it's worth, Both Kihari and Dragoneer have posted on their respective forums three times since January 3rd.

Weasyl acknowledges it needs more features. That much is fact. The problem is they don't even have feature parity with the other "big" sites, and certainly don't offer anything unique. That's the problem. As long as FA is online (or offline with the intent to come back online) you're going to have a hard time drawing people over and keeping them when your product is essentially a "me too" product. Nothing really functions differently than how anyone else is doing it. The "notifications" and "submissions" pages look EXACTLY LIKE FA (well, actually, FA's shows you the icon of people who followed you. Weasyl just lists this information. The whole page is just bulleted lists).

Weasyl lacks the premium features it sold people on during their fundraiser. The fact these don't exist nearly two years after the fact taints their name even further. Said features are apparently constantly tied up in development hell. Nobody there wants to just commit to them and get them done. Nobody there wants (or is able) to put their foot down and say that they need to be made a priority. Those wouldn't even be groundbreaking features.

I don't have any problems with them looking to the future, it's just there won't -be- a future if they don't put me in charge and do what I say because reasons

ftfy

I don't give two shits about ever being "in charge" of Weasyl. I am upset that the site that I, and many others, donated money towards, is now drifting along with no intention of ever becoming the site that was promised as the group of babbies running it cry in their IRC anytime Ben or I say anything about the site.

Perhaps if the people at Weasyl who thought I was out to "destroy Weasyl" and the people here who think I want to be "put in charge" combined their misguided assumptions, they'd even out and people could just realize I'm just trying to point out problems that, if fixed, would make the site better in the long run. And if you're going to post "huehuehue and how do you even know that", nobody on Weasyl's directors staff has any more experience doing this than I do. I just see things differently, and that apparently scares the hell out of them.

[ProvincialTwit]

[camellia sinensis]

so, what features are they missing

[Conan]

so, what features are they missing

Here's where they asked people to tell them exactly that. Including Two people (and someone replying positively to one of those posts) suggesting a marketplace/commission management idea like I have been.

The point is they need to add features other than ones that just put them on par with other sites. They asked for suggestions, they got them, but they have yet to even come out and commit to any of the bigger ones.

[ProvincialTwit]

Or maybe
just maybe
they don't want things like that image Pigeon just reposted in one of the FA threads to come back and bite them in the ass?

Maybe
just perhaps
really going out on a limb here
they don't want to 'commit to' adding a given feature until they've developed it to at least an alpha state and determined for certain that they have the dev talent on hand to see it through to completion and deployment into production?

But, no, that can't possibly be it.  They must be ignoring everyone and everything and Doing It Wrong on purpose. On porpoise!



(or maybe the cock you've been sucking to get your leaks from devchat has been cumming the pus of partiality into your eager, gaping maw, instead of the spooge of enlightenment you think it is?)

[JigsawJones]

so, what features are they missing

Here's where they asked people to tell them exactly that. Including Two people (and someone replying positively to one of those posts) suggesting a marketplace/commission management idea like I have been.

The point is they need to add features other than ones that just put them on par with other sites. They asked for suggestions, they got them, but they have yet to even come out and commit to any of the bigger ones.

I for one really like InkBunny's site coding. All the features I want, good tag search/block function, VERY artist friendly commissions/marketing features, and easy browsing. In fact, I think the only thing I don't like about InkBunny is most of the people on it...

[a pigeon]

Some artists I've been following the work of have quit posting stuff on FA but they haven't moved to/become active on Weasyl or any other furry art site, instead they've been posting on tumblr and/or twitter. Anecdotally, I think there has been a certain shift of furry subculture community and social networking activity to twitter especially and also tumblr : away from FA and other furry run sites

Perhaps that is an issue here : people who don't want to use/be on FA can post their work and get feedback, comments and commisions from the large furry community on tumblr/twitter so for some that will be just as good, if not better than weasyl currently is.

Of course Weasyl is a dedicated platform for art and social networking combined and superior to tumblr/twitter in that respect (Just finding someones stuff amongst their reblogs, retweets et al can sometimes be hard) so I suppose it comes back to playing the long game and keeping things together over the years it might still take for Weasyl to become the go-to furry art site if it does become such.

In fact, I just noticed on the latest FA news journal that someone who has been on FA for a mere 8 months was saying:

Reading all the comments here just make me want to up and leave this site and go somewhere else.
I enjoy being on FA, but all the problems - drama, and shit that keeps going on regarding admins and running the site professionally is becoming REALLY off putting.

^
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5819207#cid:40613411

These things always move slower than we might wish, but time will tell. Sooner or later, time will tell.

[camellia sinensis]

i really hate the whole artists moving to tumblr thing because so many of them don't have seperate blogs for their art and for reblogging or doing community stuff. The same problem is true for twitter since there's no easy way to just check to see the artist's gallery without wading through weeks of personal minutia.

[Conan]

Some artists I've been following the work of have quit posting stuff on FA but they haven't moved to/become active on Weasyl or any other furry art site, instead they've been posting on tumblr and/or twitter. Anecdotally, I think there has been a certain shift of furry subculture community and social networking activity to twitter especially and also tumblr : away from FA and other furry run sites

Perhaps that is an issue here : people who don't want to use/be on FA can post their work and get feedback, comments and commisions from the large furry community on tumblr/twitter so for some that will be just as good, if not better than weasyl currently is.

This is likely a huge factor. Despite the fact that Weasyl is a relatively new art site, it still functions like the existing options. There are two completely seperate pages you need to go through just to upload something, and three if you're changing a thumbnail. Tumblr has one single page and you don't need to do anything other than select images. People watching then just see everything in one feed. You can also bulk upload to Tumblr. I don't recall ANY furry-centric art site having a bulk upload feature.

Something for new projects to keep in mind, I suppose.

[GreenReaper]

You can also bulk upload to Tumblr. I don't recall ANY furry-centric art site having a bulk upload feature.

On Inkbunny you can bulk upload multiple submissions, and also upload multiple files to a single submission (useful for comics, accompanying sketches/sketch dumps, alternate versions).

Tumblr, like any blog, is a great tool for distributing a stream of creative output. It's not so great at displaying lots of work in an organized fashion. Most artists can use both a blog and a gallery. Fans who are not looking at their blog may miss out on some updates and sketches, but to an extent that's always been the case (e.g. LiveJournal).

Ensuring that uploads are as easy as possible is important, but part of what makes it harder is adding value (i.e. selecting pools/folders/ratings, adding keywords).

[greaseyote]

Some artists I've been following the work of have quit posting stuff on FA but they haven't moved to/become active on Weasyl or any other furry art site, instead they've been posting on tumblr and/or twitter. Anecdotally, I think there has been a certain shift of furry subculture community and social networking activity to twitter especially and also tumblr : away from FA and other furry run sites

Perhaps that is an issue here : people who don't want to use/be on FA can post their work and get feedback, comments and commisions from the large furry community on tumblr/twitter so for some that will be just as good, if not better than weasyl currently is.

Of course Weasyl is a dedicated platform for art and social networking combined and superior to tumblr/twitter in that respect (Just finding someones stuff amongst their reblogs, retweets et al can sometimes be hard) so I suppose it comes back to playing the long game and keeping things together over the years it might still take for Weasyl to become the go-to furry art site if it does become such.

In fact, I just noticed on the latest FA news journal that someone who has been on FA for a mere 8 months was saying:

Reading all the comments here just make me want to up and leave this site and go somewhere else.
I enjoy being on FA, but all the problems - drama, and shit that keeps going on regarding admins and running the site professionally is becoming REALLY off putting.

^
http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/5819207#cid:40613411

These things always move slower than we might wish, but time will tell. Sooner or later, time will tell.

I've definitely noticed this too. A lot of people have shifted away from using FA but haven't replaced it with another furry art site. These people often maintain accounts on FA, weasyl, etc., but they aren't really active there. Instead, they use sites like tumblr to post work and twitter to keep their fans up to date on their activities. There's probably some serious advantages of doing this. Better uptime. Smartphone accessibility. Automatic notifications... and a userbase that is less prone to drama and creepiness (at least a little bit)... the hardcore basement dwellers seem to only hang out on furry-specific sites and eschew mainstream social media. Furry in general is becoming more mainstream, more focused on furry socialization and less on trading media with furry characters in it.

You can also bulk upload to Tumblr. I don't recall ANY furry-centric art site having a bulk upload feature.

On Inkbunny you can bulk upload multiple submissions, and also upload multiple files to a single submission (useful for comics, accompanying sketches/sketch dumps, alternate versions).

Tumblr, like any blog, is a great tool for distributing a stream of creative output. It's not so great at displaying lots of work in an organized fashion. Most artists can use both a blog and a gallery. Fans who are not looking at their blog may miss out on some updates and sketches, but to an extent that's always been the case (e.g. LiveJournal).

Ensuring that uploads are as easy as possible is important, but part of what makes it harder is adding value (i.e. selecting pools/folders/ratings, adding keywords).

For a furry artist, it is really important to display everything you've ever drawn in chronological order, and organized in to specific folders by genre? I don't think it is. Artist want people to see their best and most popular work, as a way of saying "hey, I can draw you something like this," to get further commissions. A lot of artists are in fact critical of their work from several years ago, and may not want people to think their old art represents their talent if they've improved since then... so gallery folders aren't really necessary from the standpoint of selling commissions. I think this may be why you see a lot of artists who are most active on places like tumblr and basically use FA or weasyl like a file dump, and don't really spend much time there. Often, they will post notices on their accounts stating that they will not respond to communication on these sites.

Inkbunny, specifically, has been far too "tainted" by it's cub porn reputation to attract a mainstream furry audience. For a lot of furries, especially a lot of the people who entered the fandom recently, after cub was banned on FA, this seems to be the fandom's one taboo. People want nothing to do with it, regardless of how unusual their own lifestyle is.

[MazelTovCocktail]

I don't really give much of a shit about Weasyl or the discussion about it (which explains why I'm just now seeing this post), but I'm interrupting the thread to mention that I love Achewood.