/r/ArtFundamentals (not Drawabox) will be shutting down permanently

https://www.reddit.com/r/ArtFundamentals/comments/14bd2xr/rartfundamentals_not_drawabox_will_be_shutting/

2023-06-17 00:54

Uncomfortable

Tl;dr: Reddit is changing in ways we do not agree with, and we are not comfortable having a presence here on a platform we can no longer trust. Subreddit will close later this month, although the specific date is as yet undecided. In the meantime, join us on our Discord chat server.

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Earlier this week, I posted about reddit's API pricing changes that will be rolling out July 1st. There was, and is still in some significant form, a subreddit blackout in protest of these changes, and by and large it appears that reddit's management has not handling this as one would hoped, although it is certainly as one might expect.

Much as I would have liked to participate in the blackout, this all unfolded while I was unexpectedly out of town to attend my grandmother's funeral, helping my parents with a complicated move, and ultimately travelling back home. While many subreddits don't have too much to worry about in regards to locking/unlocking their communities because they exist largely here on reddit, I was not in a position to quickly deal with any technical fallout related to the integrations between drawabox.com and reddit.

That said, having now had the time to properly look at the issue as a whole, and the further statements made by reddit administration and management, I have decided to shut this subreddit down, permanently, and will do so in the coming weeks. I'm currently bogged down with last-minute work to get our promptathon event ready (this is also something my very sudden travels has hindered, so I'm not yet certain if we'll be able to hold it for the end of June, but I'm doing everything I can to meet that goal), so this is probably something I'll manage during that last week when the promptathon is hopefully being held.

This community started on reddit, back in August 2014. It wasn't like most other subreddits - the only posts were the lessons I uploaded, and community members participated by posting their homework as comments, which I would then critique. Eventually in October 2016 the workload became untenable, so while implementing a paywall for the critiques I'd done for free up until that point, I also shifted the subreddit structure to allow students to submit their homework as regular posts, allowing them to critique one another. This moved us to being more of a regular subreddit, but one still intrinsically tied to the Drawabox course (which from Spring 2015 existed on its own separate website, allowing some of our audience to support our efforts through Patreon without running afoul of reddit's policies).

The reason I'm mentioning this is because reddit's management has recently stated that if a subreddit is "abandoned" it would be within their rights to assign a new moderation team to take it over in order to ensure users' access regardless of the intent or wishes of those who first built it. Certainly this is unlikely to be an issue that would impact us - we've certainly grown a great deal since we hit our first thousand, but they were likely thinking about communities considerably larger, more generalized, and with fewer grounds for legal action over damage to a brand via misrepresentation if such a thing were to occur.

All the same, the stench of it does not sit well with me. They are driving a wedge between everyday users, the volunteers who build, moderate, and maintain the subreddits those users enjoy, and the developers who've created amazing third party applications to help make reddit more user-friendly when those actually profiting couldn't be bothered. They appear to be gambling that the far greater number of users - many of which will never be aware of this issue, and many of which aren't really that concerned by it - will outweigh and drown out the voices of those who understand the inequity in reddit's current approach.

I am fortunate - I do not count myself amongst those many users who work their asses off to ensure the communities you love continue to run smoothly. I have been, and continue to be compensated for my labour. Furthermore, as a community we are all fortunate, because in the closing down of this subreddit, we lose only one of several of our bases, and if I'm going to be frank, the one that is least valuable to us.

We will still have:

• drawabox.com - where students can submit completed homework as they did here, and also can get their questions answered fairly reliably. It still has a lot of room to grow, but we've got plans in the future to help drive more reliable critiques towards those submitting for community feedback. This will be an integration of a program similar to the #critique-exchange run on our discord, although it will only be worked on once we've been able to get through much more of our content overhaul, so it won't be any time soon.

• More importantly, our Discord chat server, on which around 10,000 users are active each day (and yet somehow it's also kind of peaceful?). Students provide each other with feedback on their homework (including partial work, which the realtime nature of our lesson channels handles far better than the subreddit or website are able to), and are also able to have space to explore other areas related to what they're learning, or just get to know their peers.

Many communities here on reddit are not so fortunate. The majority of them are operated by moderators who receive nothing for their time - unless you count the vitriol thrown at them whenever they are forced to do their jobs. Reddit has been a lot of things over the last decade and a half, but whether for good or for bad, it has always been due to the creativity, hard work, and passion of four parties: the administration, the users, the mods, and the third party developers.

Reddit would be a very sad place if left only to the first two.

As far as Drawabox is concerned, there's nothing to worry about. While we won't be on reddit, we will still be offering our free foundational drawing course as we always have, and will continue to improve it to the benefit of all. But for reddit as a whole, don't sleep on this. We all owe it to the people who've made reddit great to support them in whatever ways we can.

So long, and thanks for all the boxes.

Edit: Some of you have asked about what will happen to the potentially valuable advice that has been offered on this subreddit.

Short answer is, I've attempted to back up the subreddit's contents, but I've hit severe limitations. The main problem is that in order to back everything up, you need to know what posts actually exist on the subreddit. Using the API, you'd ask for the newest posts, and then gradually work your way back, just as a user would view the "new" page and then gradually scroll to get older and older content. Unfortunately, both on the website and through the API, this is capped at 1000 posts. There has existed a third party solution that continuously aggregates data, PushShift, but unfortunately Reddit's API changes and the turmoil around it has put a nail in that coffin, and that option is no longer viable. Doesn't mean it's impossible, just that it's beyond me.

What I have been able to do is back up everything that I have been involved in. Using my own user history, I've been able to grab the entirety of any post I've submitted, as well as any post I've commented upon (including other users' comments).

I've saved this to my own database, and will make it available - although I'm coming off 3 weeks of sudden and unexpected travel, plus 1 week of suffering from covid while also getting the final work necessary for our Summer Promptathon done, so I definitely need a break.

Hopefully this solution will be sufficient. It obviously isn't perfect, although most of what I've heard is that the responses and advice people are worried about losing is the advice I've written myself.