What's up OnChainArtists and everyone else. So I've alluded to some changes coming for OCA in some of my previous posts and I'm going to lay those out here. There will be some rules updates as well as some new policies to focus the content and improve the overall quality of work in the community. Also some updates and clarifications to some already existing rules. So I'll start with what will probably be the biggest change.
Minimum Quality Standards
I've been thinking for a while how to implement something like this. At the end of the day, when I created this community I wanted it to be a place for what I called "Serious Artists". That was the best I could come up with to try to be specific about who this community is for, while not alienating people who I'd want to contribute here. Saying something like "professional artists" would be a bit too far as there are tons of amazing artists who don't necessarily do art for a living.
Either way, pro or not, this is intended to be a community for "good" artists. While there might be a strong debate on exactly what that means, in the context of this community, here's a preview
This is our brand spanking new "Curated Content" page on PeakD. I really love this feature and it's one of those things I've been whining in the background for for a long time. Over time, I'd love if the entire community looked like this. In a perfect world I'd have better sorting tools and I'd have more delicate control on curating the community. I don't unfortunately, so things will be a bit crude until something like that comes along.
So what does this all mean, and what's actually going to happen? We're not going to kick everyone that's not at the level of the artists on that Curated Content page, but we will be trimming the hedges so to speak.
This being the blockchain space, we all, myself included, love our decentralization, and I thought long and hard about some ideas of figuring out where the line would be in a decentralized way, but honestly it's not practical. So there won't be any voting or long debates on what "Good Art" is. Some of my favorite people here have put it best in that OCA will operate more like a magazine, and myself and the mod team are the editors.
If you post something here we deem below the minimum quality threshold, that post will be muted and if 3 of your posts get muted, your account will be muted. This is also to curb something I see rarely, but an artist that CAN produce good work, doing something sub-par just to get a post in I suppose. OCA is not the community for that. Save your roughs or doodles, post the final here. If you're posting sketches, the sketches need to be art themselves, not ideas for art. To be blunt...
If you can't draw well, don't post drawings in OCA.
If you can't paint well, don't post paintings in OCA.
Whatever the artistic thing you're doing, if you're not good at it and you know it, don't post it in OCA.
I don't hate or have contempt for amateurs. We all start somewhere, there's nothing wrong with that. I'm just saying this is not the community for that. This community is for the people that are past that. People that take their craft seriously and have achieved some level of proficiency, and expertise.
There will probably be a lot of people butthurt when we start executing this, but just remember there are other art communities here other than OCA, and if you don't like any of them you can start your own.
3 Strikes
This is a rules update. If 3 of your posts get muted, for whatever reason, your account will be muted until further notice.
Update to the Studies Rule
We currently have a rule where we do not allow studies, or copying other artists artwork. We want to clarify that this also includes 3D illustrations.
No Crafts
I've always said OCA allowing crafts was temporary until someone made a crafts community, but I suppose as long as we're allowing it, there's not much of an incentive for anyone to create one. Well, now there is. If you love posting your creative crafts in OCA, which many of you do, take the plunge, start a community, I think there are enough of you that that would be a vibrant community and it would be stronger as everyone there will be into the same thing.
No Body Art
Similar deal as with crafts, I feel like I've seen a community specifically dedicated to this, so if there is one, posting there would be a better fit, otherwise again, take the leap and make a community.
One I forgot, One Post Per Day
If you’re doing the level of work we want in this community, you probably aren’t going to be able to produce several in a day. Typically if people are posting several times per day, it’s spam, or at the very least not very interesting. It’s not good practice in regards to curation anyway to post several times a day, so yea, no more of that please.
Why do any of this?
The value of communities as a feature on Hive, in my opinion is that it is a mechanism to connect people to content that interests them faster and more efficiently. The faster and more efficiently people are connected to content that interests them, the higher the likelihood they will engage further by visiting again, joining up, commenting, sharing, etc. Because of this, from the beginning I've advocated for extremely niche communities.
In practice though community growth has a snowball effect and Hive is very small. The more people are posting in a community, the more other people want to post in that same community because that increases the visibility for your post, and to be honest, the last thing I really wanted to do was resort to telling people, you can't post here. As a community owner, you want your community to grow and be active, but there's not really much of a way around it to keep the content relevant to the community.
Some people will love this change, and others, not so much, but I think it's necessary to improve the community overall.
Keep up the awesome work peeps!