the "remove the headline from links" thing that twitter is doing is coinciding with another wave of panic from artists about "links being nerfed" and engagement on things artists are promoting/selling being worse and i'm once again just like... idk feeling really morose about how susceptible people are to believing tall tales instead of the actually obvious "no people are just not using twitter that much because it's a hostile site" and social media at large has conditioned us to ignore promotional posts because users only want content.
seeing someone post the general thought of "links do so much worse here now" when i posted a promotional thing on tumblr and saw it do about as """good""" as it did on twitter like... it's not that Twitter is nerfing your engagement on promo posts, it's that people just don't respond to that shit on major social media sites. they've all done a bunch of changes over time, some subtle and some incredibly not, to shove Content™ down your throats and whether you like it or not it has absolutely gotten you to just scroll past shit when someone is trying to Sell a Thing.
it's not that different here to be clear! a post where you are trying to sell shit will very very likely do worse than a normal art post. but that's also normal! the people who want to click and buy shit will always be a fraction of a fraction of the people who just want to see art for free. has it gotten worse over time globally on the internet? of course. but the 'why' isn't like a switch got turned off, it's just a really slowburning consequence of every social media platform training users to not pay attention to that shit because you making money doesn't make them money.
i guess i'm eternally frustrated by this stuff because you can understand it and relatively simply explain it to people and they will still buy into the untrue shit because, like actual conspiracy theories, it conveniently answers all your anxiety-driven worries. and that's how you end up with everyone going to a place like bluesky and despite it being an insular platform with no external growth capabilities, people think it's The Solution because the numbers are not Twitter's numbers and therefor are good regardless of how contextually low they are.
i've seen a looooooot of this on twitter specifically over the years but mostly ignored the supposed rules out of laziness. i see where it comes from though and i don't blame people too much. like yeah, sites do fuck around, for a while tumblr did that thing where any post with an external link in it wouldn't appear in tag searches and that was terrible. actual censorship and suppression (mostly motivated by profit or because a website does not want to moderate a certain thing) does happen, but a lot of times, i would say most of the time, the problem is just... you haven't found your audience, or the one you had is dwindling because they've moved on to other places. (i have like 5000 tumblr followers and i certainly do not get 5000 notes on every post LMAO)
i think a thing a lot of people really need to accept/embrace is exactly that fraction-of-a-fraction thing you mentioned. consider your own behavior online. think of all the posts you see on the internet every day. think of how many things you scroll right by because they don't really catch your interest. how many artists can you name whose merch/prints/books you sincerely go out of your way to always buy? very few, if any, i'm guessing. how much of your feeds is fan art for stuff you don't really engage with? probably a LOT if you've been online a while. everyone has a different mix of interests and everything you post online has a limited blast radius of interest, and whether or not it gets seen and passed around just comes down to chance. so many pieces i've posted have gone nowhere until i reposted them later and pure luck of the draw carried them into the thousands of reblogs/reposts/retweets. having keywords like shop, patreon, etc. never seemed to matter. if you search those keywords everyone censors, any day of the week, you'll still find top posts that include them, along with links.
i think it's hard for people to accept that hard work does not equal success, because we get taught that from birth and like... nope unfortunately. it's not fair, but you'll probably feel a little better about things if you don't assume the worst every time you post some art and it "flops". can't tell you how many times i have reposted things that got 0 attention the first time that suddenly got a ton of love. the situation can change. my Bocchi The Rock!! fan art may not have caught the eye of certain followers when Bocchi was newer, but maybe in the past year more of them have gotten into it, and if i repost it again, someone who overlooked it before will go EYYY IT'S BOCCHI and it will be someone with a lot of followers and suddenly that piece does better than last time.
"it's just the luck of the draw" also sounds shitty to say at first but like... luck of the draw means you have a chance. and those lottery tickets are FREE. repost/retweet/reblog your old stuff and work on getting over the Fear Of Being Annoying (you probably aren't being annoying).
