When I say nobody, I mean if you're starting out as a hobby artist and trying to make a name for yourself. For this post, I'll compare the self promotion experience between DeviantArt, Instagram, and Twitter / X which covers more than a year of content creation.
Disclaimer:
This is my experience. Someone else could have had a different stroke of luck doing the same thing and get a different outcome.
Instagram:
It used to be good until the era of reels came which forced visual artists to adapt or get fade into irrelevance by what the algorithm deems as uninteresting content. The reason reels became the death of a lot of art accounts is that IG wanted to compete with Tiktok and promoted content that used the feature which also crowded out the content discovery portion of the site. This made authors that knew how to edit videos with a small bling have an edge compared to artists that had to spend more time figuring out how to edit videos.
It sounds sensible to ride the trend but there are artists that don't want to sucked into mainstream hype or just can't be bothered to learn a new form of content. Yes, time lapse videos showcasing their art is amazing but it's a different way to pass time consuming the content because you're spending more seconds watching transitions versus a still image you can gaze and examine the details upfront.
It doesn't help that your content uploaded on IG automatically gets fed to their AI learning machine. I've said this before, majority of the people that appreciate an artist are fellow artists while the rest are tourists that happen to tap into the interest which can be converted potentially to patrons. Since IG has never fixed the bot problems commenting on your posts to spam or bot accounts that randomly follow other accounts, these activities just prop up numbers so that sites can report some activity of novel engagement when there's less organic engagements than there actually is.
Remember when the new Cara app for artists was hyped as an alternative to Instagram as an anti-AI art theft platform? it's not going to stop artists that want to cross posts and a lot of the established names aren't going to be enthusiastic about losing their follower count progress. The big accounts get bigger and the smaller accounts have to climb steeper hills is the trend as visibility will always favor established accounts than discovery.
A lot of accounts on IG are probably dead accounts as it's not unusual to see an artist with 50k+ followers get 300+ likes on average per post. How does that even work? Again, I think it's just accounts that botted up their follower accounts or actual accounts that just went inactive. Posting on IG is like screaming at the void especially when you have no benchmark on how much engagements you get like "views or impressions" per post.
The last thing is the term shadow banning which Meta often does for content they don't like. There are unpopular forms of visual art especially when themes like horror, gore and violence are depicted, this freedom of expression is tricky to navigate but the nail in the coffin is having AI art be more popular for the algorithms because Instagram is built for short attention spans.
Artists can take hours to days trying to finish a work with a level of an AI can do in a span of a few hours minus a few details. It's not like people are inherently averted to AI anime art, they see it, press like and this fuels more visibility to accounts that pump fast content.
DeviantArt
All of the cons presented on Instagram minus the reels. But this site has a little better form of content discovery as it gives your content a chance to appear in randomly if your tags are right. But the saturation of AI art there becomes overbearing that your content can have the energy of being ranked 2nd page on Google and still be invisible.
This site has lost a lot of good artists since it sold it's platform to adopt AI art and it even has a feature to have accounts create AI art using Dream Up. Thriving artists there that don't rely on AI are the ones that have established their names prior to the pandemic. When it comes to self promotion, Deviantart is a bit better in content discovery than Instagram.
Twitter / X:
Perhaps the only platform I like to be in despite the controversies it has. If Instagram is the highest difficulty and DevianrtArt is a few points lower, Twitter is the normal difficulty level. With some of my content generating various impression counts and engagement per individual metric. It's like a hit or miss but I can see better reach even without the blue check mark.
For instance, the post below is my most highest number of impressions and likes to date but it's content that I personally find the least desirable since I thought didn't put much effort to it than my other content that gets ignored.
https://x.com/AAdamada/status/1823268590575100411
But a single retweet or like on a post triggers more impressions and reach. In my observation, the algorithm tends to value content shared in twitter communities and have a lot of retweets, likes still play a role of course but this is just a personal bias and maybe the algorithm isn't coded the way I thought it would.
What I like about Twitter is how an average person trying to be a content creator has a almost an equal chance as everyone else if they put a little more hustle networking on the right communities, people and type of content they pump out. Even NSFW accounts have visibility now. Putting your content out there is like a Litmus test and reality check if you got what it takes to produce something visually impressionable that people would engage with the post even just a click as every action related to your content is weighted.
I have a Pixiv account and haven't started posting there but it's sort of a different platform where you need to be familiar with Japanese culture and be really good at creating art to get anywhere. For an artist that's into anime-style, if you can make it on Pixiv, you can make it on Twitter because the skill level to attract attention in an art focused platform like that is high that it's no surprise when artists that post on Pixiv get a lot of followers on Twitter without hardly trying as their reputation precedes them cross platforms.
Hive:
I like this platform because it gives me some quick for having a hobby but there's a limited growth opportunities here in terms of gaining an audience and having reality checks. There's a shortage of the kind of art published here and most of the digital art tend to be fanarts because that's where the money is for posts and I understand that. Rather than invest more time producing original characters (OCs) where only one cares inside their head cannon, it's safer to just produce established characters because of common interest generated for validation. I'd be lying if I didn't entertain doing fanart but if I ever do it, I want to create the piece because I'm a fan than pretending to be one for clout.
Thanks for your time.