The people, who downvote a certain drawing, never seem to tell what's wrong or only very rare.
As an artist I have to tell that downvotes can make feel very upset, especially if people don't tell what's wrong. On my first Isabelle post, people told me what's wrong, but on my other posts noone said something.
I don't see my drawings as downvote worthy. They don't have any fetishes or something weird looking.

The reason why downvotes make me feel so upset is the fact that I put a lot of time and potential in my works. I literally spend days and sometimes a week on a single artwork.
Why, for example, people downvote my Doomguy X Noelle Holiday drawing? Does the e621 community take crossover pairings too serious?
Is it hard for people to relate the artist's feelings?

I know e621 is not a personal gallery, but some artists search for their art here.

demongirl_demoness said:
I don't see my drawings as downvote worthy. They don't have any fetishes or something weird looking

E6 users act like they're art critics and downvote anything they don't like for no reason. Plus they don't use a blacklist at all

This title is how I feel about Reddit

ifuknowmenoudont said:
E6 users act like they're art critics and downvote anything they don't like for no reason. Plus they don't use a blacklist at all

Yeah, that's the sad truth. People these days think the world only revolves around them. I'm trying to ignore these people, but it's very hard, because it's not a good appearance when you have downvoted posts in your artist tag.
I hope that behavior and the refusal of using the blacklist will stop one day.

https://youtu.be/waEC-8GFTP4?t=29

People downvote anything they don’t like. They probably don’t tell you what they don’t like because they don’t want any confrontation with the author or people who like the images and they don’t want to be accused of not using their blacklist (if that is the issue)

Upvotes/Downvotes are a general "I like this/I don't like this" measure. Think of it like a food you avoid, but won't outright reject if it is on your plate; can you describe what it is about this item that you dislike beyond beyond "I don't like it"?
Blacklists are for content that users never, ever want to see period, and in some cases certain things are difficult/impossible to add to it even if it were to that level as it would involve fairly large tag strings, even if we discount the "I don't know I disliked this until right now" factor.

This is an issue inherent to single-point +1/-1 systems like this site, Reddit, the most recent variations of Youtube, and similar; if you feel lukewarm to something and you wish to cast a judgement on it you only have a full positive or negative rather than a star or other more exact multi-point system where you can select a rating to add into the pile.

Try not to take it too seriously, by the way, everyone likes things others dislike, and the same is true in reverse. Score doesn't matter much for functionality on here, outside of score searches and filtering, and if your image gets downvoted enough to actually be significantly affected by that I am certain there is at least one person in the comment section telling you what is disliked. Also bear in mind commenting on things you dislike on here is generally discouraged, due to "use your blacklist" being a common response, and the risk of a record.

votp said:
Upvotes/Downvotes are a general "I like this/I don't like this" measure. Think of it like a food you avoid, but won't outright reject if it is on your plate; can you describe what it is about this item that you dislike beyond beyond "I don't like it"?
Blacklists are for content that users never, ever want to see period, and in some cases certain things are difficult/impossible to add to it even if it were to that level as it would involve fairly large tag strings, even if we discount the "I don't know I disliked this until right now" factor.

This is an issue inherent to single-point +1/-1 systems like this site, Reddit, the most recent variations of Youtube, and similar; if you feel lukewarm to something and you wish to cast a judgement on it you only have a full positive or negative rather than a star or other more exact multi-point system where you can select a rating to add into the pile.

Try not to take it too seriously, by the way, everyone likes things others dislike, and the same is true in reverse. Score doesn't matter much for functionality on here, outside of score searches and filtering, and if your image gets downvoted enough to actually be significantly affected by that I am certain there is at least one person in the comment section telling you what is disliked. Also bear in mind commenting on things you dislike on here is generally discouraged, due to "use your blacklist" being a common response, and the risk of a record.

I think e621 needs a star rating system. I'm trying to focus on people who like and upvote my work, but the downvotes are ruining the appearance. It looks like it's equated with Minions, weird looking creatures etc. I already have 2 downvoted posts and I'm afraid that my drawing with Doomguy and Noelle is going to be the next.

demongirl_demoness said:
I think e621 needs a star rating system. I'm trying to focus on people who like and upvote my work, but the downvotes are ruining the appearance. It looks like it's equated with Minions, weird looking creatures etc. I already have 2 downvoted posts and I'm afraid that my drawing with Doomguy and Noelle is going to be the next.

Congratulation, you have created something divisive. People looking through artwork found something that splits them between like and dislike because it defies their expectations. Without some form of clear fetish tag on the image these types of images don't get filtered out by peoples searches or blacklists and so they tend to hover around 0 for scores. This isn't a failing on your part, it's a failing of expectation.

As for why people dislike things? Well, there really aren't reasons to it a lot of the time. It's like food. Some people like brussel sprouts, some do not. They can't put into words that describe it, so they don't attempt to.

P.S. Star systems have almost universally been removed from sites(including twitter) because humans are naturally extreme in their judgements. Twitter found that almost all votes on posts were 1 or 5 stars and that less than 1% of votes fell outside of these extremes. So adding additional granularity is usually not useful towards obtaining more insight. Either somebody is going to like it a lot and spend the time to approve of it, or dislike it enough to spend the time to show that dislike.
P.P.S. Look at favorite count for a better indicator of "success" on your posts, not the score.

If something bothers me for some reason, and I downvote it, I don't owe anyone an explanation as to why. People are allowed to not like a thing without having to justify it. Personally I try to give constructive feedback where I can, but it's a lot of time and effort, and it often goes unappreciated.

I expect that if artists want to improve, they should already be viewing their own work with a critical eye. Yes, it can be helpful to get information from others on what you're doing right and wrong. But you shouldn't need to rely on that every step of the way. And when an artist seems to want to rely on other people's criticism entirely without taking an active role in their own improvement, I have to ask - if you're not going to bother putting in the effort towards improving, why do you think it's right to demand that complete strangers do?

Besides, not all downvotes are for art quality issues. It's totally valid to downvote a thing that bothered you for other reasons, and "users should just blacklist the thing they don't like" ignores, first off, that there are many things that are not really tag-able and thus, not really blacklistable, and second, that there's a difference between "this isn't my thing" and "I don't like this thing".

demongirl_demoness said:
The people, who downvote a certain drawing, never seem to tell what's wrong or only very rare.
As an artist I have to tell that downvotes can make feel very upset, especially if people don't tell what's wrong. On my first Isabelle post, people told me what's wrong, but on my other posts noone said something.
I don't see my drawings as downvote worthy. They don't have any fetishes or something weird looking.

The reason why downvotes make me feel so upset is the fact that I put a lot of time and potential in my works. I literally spend days and sometimes a week on a single artwork.
Why, for example, do people downvote my Doomguy X Noelle Holiday drawing? Does the e621 community take crossover pairings too serious?
Is it hard for people to relate the artist's feelings?

I know e621 is not a personal gallery, but some artists search for their art here.

no offense, but the way you worded this kinda makes you sound arrogant...I mean you said it yourself, this is e621, you're expecting people to criticize your art here?
Also, people who do criticize in a certain way are liable to get their comment flagged, or worse, get their account neutral or negative rated for "failure to use blacklist" or something. Which you know full well of yourself.

That's what downvoting is for, it doesn't matter whether we criticize it or not, we can just leave a downvote and keep our mouth shut to stay out of trouble.

ifuknowmenoudont said:
E6 users act like they're art critics and downvote anything they don't like for no reason. Plus they don't use a blacklist at all

that's incorrect...but you're entitled to your opinions, I just stated the reason above. Besides, people here crack more jokes than criticize work.

demongirl_demoness said:
Yeah, that's the sad truth. People these days think the world only revolves around them. I'm trying to ignore these people, but it's very hard, because it's not a good appearance when you have downvoted posts in your artist tag.
I hope that behavior and the refusal of using the blacklist will stop one day.
...
the downvotes are ruining the appearance.

They clicked a button, possibly expending less than a second of time evaluating the post, and you reacted by making a thread about it. A thread that has been made many times before, but will never result in the retirement of fake internet points. Downvotes aren't an objective measure of anything, and should be nothing to lose sleep over. It can even be a badge of honor to get lots of downvotes.

Nobody is entitled to a detailed review of their work. People can get an uncanny feeling about a drawing without having the art or anatomy education necessary to fully articulate what's wrong with it.

For some reason, I am having flashbacks to the F-List users who demand "why" when you tell them "no".

Ya are focusing on the negative votes because negative reactions to anything are stronger than positive reactions.
Your art is also kinda strange ngl. If you want more upvotes you simply gotta draw what you think people want to see. The characters im seeing in your art are normally depicted a lot less odd looking.

However you do you. Draw what you want to draw or take suggestions from people about what they want to see. Theres an audience for anything.

I happen to upvote heavily downvoted posts if they are drawn well because what normally gets downvoted heavily is typically only because of what's drawn not the actual quality.

Something that hasn't been said yet:
We don't know who uploads the art (well, unless you look at the tags/desc history). In many cases, the artist will never even know that their art is on here, much less that people are commenting on it. So that'll reduce the amount of critique you get.

ifuknowmenoudont said:
E6 users act like they're art critics and downvote anything they don't like for no reason.

I mean, that is sort of the point of downvotes to begin with. But as already said, they're pretty meaningless and not indicative of much, most of the time. As is often the case with these voting systems, whether or not something is received well can depend on who happens to view it at the time and be completely divorced from more objective analysis. One example of how they're pointless. And I've found e621 can be quite mercurial in this regard.

As you said OP, e621 is not your personal gallery. You're taking downvotes quite personally. That is a mistake

I’m not sure if you’re still following this thread or not, but if you are, as a fellow artist, I have a few important things to say.

The first thing is that upvotes/downvotes can sometimes be pretty unpredictable on this site. I’ve seen really great artwork get less than 10 upvotes, sometimes from some pretty well-known artists, too. My personal experience has been that this usually happens with art that isn’t really super pornographic. Most people are just here for porn. Like, if there’s no genitals, many people won’t even click on it. And even if it is pure porn, maybe you just uploaded it at the wrong time. Maybe it wasn’t tagged very well, so people looking for it may have missed it. Maybe the thumbnail made the image look less appealing than it actually is. I remember one really well-drawn image I found a while ago that didn’t get a whole lot of upvotes, probably because the character’s genitals were at the bottom of the image, and it was cut off in the thumbnail. So the thumbnail looked like just a regular fully-clothed character, but you couldn’t tell she was not wearing pants without viewing the full image. That, or all kinds of other things can cause a low score.

So, I was a little disappointed that my latest drawing (post #2962183) only got, as of present, six upvotes and eleven favorites. I have a friend who is a real, professional artist, and he’s said this is my best work. However, my drawing right before this one has 120 favorites. Why are they so far apart? The artistic quality in this case probably has nothing to do with it, and that turns out to be pretty common on this site. The earlier drawing was more pornographic, which was probably the main reason. It could also be that people prefer dragons to snakes. Whatever the reason, I’m certain it has more to do with the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies of post viewership than anything else. Hell, I’ve seen some very mediocre art get hundreds upon hundreds of favorites and upvotes just because the subject matter was right. People wanted to see what that artist drew at that particular moment, and the lackluster art quality did little to stop the post from being a success. If you do want upvotes, I’ve realized, you have to figure out what people want to see, and draw that. Don’t just draw what you want to draw unless you’re prepared to not care about the number of upvotes you get. But, you know, maybe it would be better to draw what you want and forget about ratings. That’s up to you to decide.
So, look… most people are not here to see Doom Guy porn or random humanoids. This is a furry art share board and art archive. Doom guy and Dragon Maid characters are not going to get much love around here unless the artwork is really exceptional and it hits the right niche. Trust me, I know. I drew a Dragon Maid character. I spent a whole month on it. It didn’t do very well here. It wasn’t really pornographic, and the art quality was not exceptional despite the time invested. It’s pretty obvious why it didn’t perform very well. I accept that. I have a few weeb friends who loved it, but E6 did not love it. And that’s perfectly fine, because I had fun drawing it, and I learned a lot about anatomy (as I’ll explain below, this is very important - I see now where I got the anatomy a little wrong, even though I thought it was perfect when I drew it. I learned from it. That’s much more valuable than the number of likes I received for it.)
Now, Loona IS something that people on this site usually want to see. Much more than Doom Guy. And, hey, would you look at that: your most popular post is Loona. You got over fifty favorites and over 20 upvotes on that one. That’s pretty good. People liked it. Again, subject matter matters when it comes to these ratings.

Now, here’s the most important thing I have to say. I’m saying this only because you’re asking for feedback, and I don’t intend to come off as mean or anything, but it’s something you need to be aware of if you want to improve.
Your art style is overall pretty good. That’s not the issue. The one real major issue, above all else, is anatomy.
Now, anatomy is really hard. I know that from experience. Don’t feel bad about not getting it perfect.
It is, however, one thing that will definitely cause downvotes. Most people can tell when the anatomy isn’t quite right, even if they don’t know why. That will make the difference between a lot of people liking the image or not. It can be really close to being right, and still get downvotes because it’s just not quite right.
You tend to draw arms and legs just a little too thin. The shoulders sometimes look a bit too wide. However, these are definitely better in your latest drawings, so you have improved for sure. The main thing I still think needs some work are the faces. They don’t usually have enough expression. When it comes to art, usually it’s better to have too much expression than not enough, IMO. Like, really, feel free to completely exaggerate the facial expressions. It’s almost impossible to overdo it. Try doing some practice sketches of facial expressions to get better at those. They can definitely be difficult to get right, but just remember that you shouldn’t hold back on the expressions.
Those are the main things I’ve noticed. The other issue has more to do with shading than anatomy, though the two are inextricably linked. A lot of your characters look kinda flat. Again, however, this has improved a lot since some of your earlier drawings. My suggestion is to try to make your shading look more round. Using highlights as opposed to just shading can help with that. Also, some of your art uses shading without shadows. Shading and shadows aren’t the same thing, and using shading without shadows also causes things to look flat sometimes. Try to remember which way the light is coming from, and draw the shadows over your characters to cover parts where direct light should not be landing. Using references for that helps a lot, too. Look up pictures of people standing outside in broad daylight. Use those for shading references.

So, try to work on improving those things. Always, and I mean always, use human references for your anatomy. Use a lot of them. Start with a sketch, and make sure the anatomy looks correct before going any further. Don’t be afraid to erase an entire limb and redraw it if it doesn’t look quite right. Join some discord servers or somewhere that you can post your sketches to get feedback on the anatomy before going any further with the drawing. And most importantly of all; remember that this is a learning process. You won’t get it correct all the time, or right away. You have to accept that you will fail. A lot. But every time you fail, and you realize what you could’ve done better, you’re improving. Your art, overall, well get better scores the more you do this. It’s all about perseverance and having a learning mindset. Just think of it like this: every new drawing is not a chance to get more upvotes and favorites. It feels like it is, but that’s not it. Every new drawing is a chance for you to improve yourself. So a downvoted drawing is just as valuable as an upvoted one, because you’re improving. That’s really what matters… not how many upvotes you get.

[/rant]

From what I've seen, critical comments themselves are pretty likely to get downvoted to oblivion in general. Not always, but usually. So in regard to why people rarely post their reasoning for downvoting an image, I'd imagine a lot of the reason is not wanting to post something that'll probably get downvoted anyway. Positive comments are much safer, so it's either say something nice or quietly downvote the image. Or say something snarky or silly, that plays well too.

If people want more serious critical opinions, then those opinions need to be welcomed more in general. This doesn't just apply to e621, but most all art communities. Of course, changing the entire collective attitude is a tall order, so my recommendation for individuals who want critical opinions and critique right now is to be very loud and explicit about that. Most everybody is happy to complain if they're sure they won't get their wrist slapped for it. Otherwise, people will continue defaulting to being positive or just saying nothing. Not sure what the best way to spell that out here is though, I guess noting that critical opinions are welcome in every image description?

Personally, I never downvote stuff I don't like, I would rather not click on it to begin with, I only feel like downvoting when it is something I find of extremely bad taste.

I haven't seen many if any of your post, but that is mostly due to my search parameters (I tend to use score:>49 or order:score almost all the time), after seeing your artwork in twitter, I believe it is ok, but the shading could certainly use some work, as it is now, it look very one-dimensional/lacks depth, I think it is because the shadows are all on the same side and with the same intensity.

Same as @Azero... I almost never downvote art here. I simply think "it is not for me", and move on.

(There is a lot of art I DONT like here, vast categories, but still, if I don't like them, why to even stop to watch it? Much less take the effort to quality something that simply is not my taste... but could be for some other people).

I also like very much the text of @scaliespe. The sad truth is that a lot of what I think the real good art in this site, is not even heeded by the majority of users here... they look simply for porn, and not the best quality, at that.

P.S.

I like your drawing, @scaliespe, specially the texture of the reptile skin, the light effects, and character proportions. Really more than average.

However, for all that was said, I think you should not allow that said average user of E6 be to you the indicator of how good is your work. Trust in your artist friend, if he sees improvement in your work.

mexicanfurry said:

I like your drawing, @scaliespe, specially the texture of the reptile skin, the light effects, and character proportions. Really more than average.

However, for all that was said, I think you should not allow that said average user of E6 be to you the indicator of how good is your work. Trust in your artist friend, if he sees improvement in your work.

Thank you 😊
Yes, I am still quite happy with it regardless of the ratings. Even while I was still drawing it, I wasn’t expecting it to be as popular as some of my more explicit drawings, because I already know that porn gets all the attention here. And that’s fine—I drew that one just for myself. 😊

Can we get a better system here? I recently got my work removed. Even my newest post was removed which isn't even 10 hours old.

And I don't think I draw bad. I really don't.

notgodokay said:
Can we get a better system here? I recently got my work removed. Even my newest post was removed which isn't even 10 hours old.

And I don't think I draw bad. I really don't.

E621 is not your personal gallery site. We don't accept just about any artwork: we have quality standards.
I suggest that you post on sites like FurAffinity, DeviantArt, or Inkbunny first. Uploading your own artwork to a booru site is a great way to get your feelings hurt.

Alright. InkBunny?

notgodokay said:
Can we get a better system here? I recently got my work removed. Even my newest post was removed which isn't even 10 hours old.

And I don't think I draw bad. I really don't.

Well, you have an amazing sense of self-esteem and that's truly commendable, but just because you don't think you "draw bad", doesn't mean your art can't be bad. If you really want to put your artwork somewhere on the internet, try using sites like FA or Inkbunny, since these are art hosting sites that don't have a minimum quality standard (but have other restrictions). E621 is an art gallery, it desires to archive at least somewhat decent artwork; not the best, not Vincent Van Gogh-quality artwork, but artwork that follows a minimum quality standard.

You can find the uploading guidelines and minimum quality standards here, otherwise you're more than welcome to ask for help in improving your artwork in our discord server. Just make sure not to post young artwork, and it's requested that you hide heavy-fetish imagery in spoiler text, || *link here* ||.

I'm not gonna join the discord (Not using it that way) but I'll ask how to improve my art.

What is needed for it to work? (Just answer here so this place is clean from a non-related conversation)

I don't know why my Doomguy X Noelle image has downvotes now. Now I'm afraid of creating anything Doom related.

demongirl_demoness said:
I don't know why my Doomguy X Noelle image has downvotes now. Now I'm afraid of creating anything Doom related.

You more or less ignored the whole thread of responses.

demongirl_demoness said:
I don't know why my Doomguy X Noelle image has downvotes now. Now I'm afraid of creating anything Doom related.

Single digit downvotes don't really mean much of anything. You got a few people who downvoted for unknown reasons, while there wasn't anything strong enough for mass downvoting.

demongirl_demoness said:
I don't know why my Doomguy X Noelle image has downvotes now. Now I'm afraid of creating anything Doom related.

If you feel like something is wrong, probably better to ask your fans then random folks on the site. Different people will dislike a given thing different ways. There isn't a magic bullet to have 100% folks to like 100% of your works. Hell, I'm some the well known artist have issues with their work, too, but you don't see such by a lot of folks upvoting it.

demongirl_demoness said:
I don't know why my Doomguy X Noelle image has downvotes now. Now I'm afraid of creating anything Doom related.

I got a better idea, post your content somewhere else and not here.
A Booru or something. We're an art gallery, not here to hold your hand.
You basically ignored this whole thread, came back and missed the point.
I mean, honestly, what are you expecting from us here?

it's better to downvote and keep simply negative comments to your self then to say a unconstructive negative comment and not use the voting function.

The same reason when someone upvotes or comments "so hot" - they don't explain what makes it hot, or why an image is cute. It in someways works both ways. But it is often said that if you don't have anything positive to say don't say it.

demongirl_demoness said:
I don't know why my Doomguy X Noelle image has downvotes now. Now I'm afraid of creating anything Doom related.

Because Doomguy x Impse is the only true pairing!

closetpossum said:
We're an art gallery

*This is an art gallery
Why speak as if you're representing this website?

Art...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIQSJsCWg34