I'm gonna say it again: your "people should comment more" take just isn't ever going to result in that.

The people who are going to comment already are.

What you're really doing is expressing a perfectly human, normal desire for attention, but in a self-entitled blamey way which, frankly, does not encourage me to think I'd want to actually give it. There's a whole world out here, you know? And a whole bunch of cool stuff for people to look through? And most of the time, for most of the people, the most — and I do mean most — effort they can burn in exchange for the sight of your particular Cool Thing is a Like.

The amount of artists who make themselves sound resentful of the existence of Likes is baffling, frankly. If Likes weren't there, the vast majority of the people hitting that button would, faced with only avenues that instead demand a substantially more effortful, specific, articulate response, would just do nothing.

I don't think the people complaining actually would prefer that? They've just wandered into sounding exactly like it because they won't correctly articulate what they're experiencing as their own feels; and that ends in them portraying it instead as a failing in their audience.

Please, for fuck's sake, it makes you sound awful.


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in reply to @caffeinatedOtter's post:

Absolutely. Also a lot of artists / writers / musicians who have this take don't seem to realize that what they're complaining about isn't just some sort of internet culture that has sprung from nothing in the last generation or two – it's the whole modern western mode of art-consumption.

Our cultural way of engaging with art for at least a hundred years has been basically passive, with expected forms of feedback either abstracted into very small symbolic acts or completely non-existent. People go to a play or a concert, they sit silently all the way through and then at the end then make a noise with their hands for thirty seconds and go home. People go to an art gallery, look silently at the art, go home. People read books silently, finish them, put them away. That's normal!

Sure there have always been some people who have the time and energy and enthusiasm to write fanmail or wait at the stage door to give flowers to the cast or whatever, but it's always been a tiny minority, and the extent to which capitalism keeps most people constantly exhausted and passive when they aren't working has only increased over that time.

Would it be lovely to have a completely different culture and way of engaging with art? Yes, probably. But we can't achieve that kind of transformation just by saying 'people should comment more' just like we can't stop climate change just by saying 'people should turn their thermostats down a bit'.