i believe low_skill is a subjective and inappropriate tag, and should not be added to pictures. if one thinks a picture is drawn with low skill, the comments section and/or voting is the appropriate place for their opinion. i removed the tag from some pictures, and i have messaged some members who have added this tag with my thoughts and so far have received a non-cooperative response.

what do the mods think?

thanks.

Tags are not only to help people find pics they want to see but also to avoid pics they don't want to see. Personally, I dislike badly drawn junk more than some of the grotesque kinks that are, at least, well-executed.

If you don't like your art being labeled "low skill", then do your best to improve your work.

however, your own definition of badly drawn or low skill, is not the same as everyone else's, hence the "subjectivity" of the tag. in fact, i have looked through some of the pictures with this tag, and there are some i would not describe as drawn with "low skill"

tags should be objective, and describe something that is clear to everyone. if anything, i have just as much right to remove the tag.

perhaps what you think is low_skill, is not. maybe it was meant to be drawn that way.

As I have made my living for over 25 years as an artist and have been an Art Director at two major videogame companies, my judgment isn't as subjective as you'd like to think. I'm not being elitist-- there are lots of pieces here that are nowhere near professional level but are still competent and undeserving of the low_skill tag.

But with that said, excuses for bad art are just that-- excuses. "--meant to be drawn that way?" Really? That's the excuse a cat uses when it slips on a waxed floor: "I meant to do that." It's just as unconvincing.

If you want to display your art to the world you're going to have to get used to the idea that you will be judged on it. Go ahead and remove the low_skill tags if you like, but don't fool yourself that trying to silence your critics will make your art any better.

you seem to have several presumptions still, including that you think i am taking this personally. in fact, none of the art in question has been drawn by me. my only perspective in this is from an organizational standpoint, and one of correctness for the site.

now why have you brought critics into this? critics are subjective by nature. why would a critic use a low_skill tag? this brings me back to the fact that critics should use the voting system and comments, but not tags.

I think your taking this personally because your responses seem to be emotional and irrational.

I'll try one last time:

Tags are not only to help people find pics they want to see but also to avoid pics they don't want to see. Comments alone will not preform that function.

I don't know how to say it any clearer than that. If you can't accept it, I'm not going to waste any more of my time on the subject. Unless the moderators want the low_skill tag banned, I will continue to use it.

I agree that using a tag to judge peoples art is bias and unfair to he artist, so far as I know there is no rulebook of art that says what is or is not considered good art and so it can´t be defined in a objective manor. Also it´s a bit egocentric to try and avoid art just because it´s defined as bad, a artist grows the best if there art is viewed and critiqued aka threw use of comments and scores.

Yeah, I kind of agree with scar/Cyborgcat

I overall agree a "low_skill" tag, and any other tag judging of a picture's quality is subjective and goes against the purposes of tags.

As a matter of fact, the tag "sexy" is aliased to "invalid_tag", as the definition of sexy is unique to everyone, the concept of sexy is subjective.

eqgz said:
As I have made my living for over 25 years as an artist and have been an Art Director at two major videogame companies, my judgment isn't as subjective as you'd like to think.

I am sorry but, as enlightened as your judgement might be, you are still only one user among the 10000+ registered users of e621 (and probably the x5 more lurkers), and as such, your opinion has only a neglectable weight.
If one picture reaches the rating of -5000, then maybe we can consider giving it a negative tagging, as we can affirmate half of the userbase has manifested their preference.
That's still very discussable.

eqgz said:
Tags are not only to help people find pics they want to see but also to avoid pics they don't want to see. Comments alone will not preform that function.

The site gives a range of tools, such as blacklisting, tag reasearch, score research, rating research, and faving, who are enough to let people filter what they like. There is no need for a system of "anti-faving".

Lastly, posts are subject to moderation, which includes the removal of pictures who are considered not worthy of e621. By using tags who judges the quality of a picture, you are in a way substituting yourself to moderators.

Thanks for clarifying the situation, Kald. I will not use the low_skill tag in future.

If I understand correctly, there is a way I can keep from wasting my time on childish scribbles by using something called "score research"? I will look into that. I would love some way to filter out anything with a score below 0-- or maybe even 5.

One last thing. 5000 amateur opinions don't outweigh the judgment of an expert. If you need surgery, all of your friends and neighbors disagreeing with your doctor doesn't make him wrong. But since this site is far less critical, it really doesn't matter much.

And here-- you're the doctor, not me.

eqgz said:
a way I can keep from wasting my time on childish scribbles

Honeslty, but you should get over it as it is. If I'd tag every picture that I dislike because I find it low-skilled, I'd die trying and even score filter would not help (porn is up-voted often because it's porn). Neither score, nor tags are significant, though absolute crap and weird fetishes gain negative score.

And, yeah, "5000 amateur opinions don't outweigh the judgment of an expert", but it's not an artist social network ergo almost everyone is amateur (everyone can give advice "practice more" etc.). Expert role is taken by moderation team with "rule of cool and rule of funny" (whatever? x)

Lets face it folks; any one can draw a picture, but not everyone has skill. Skill is a well developed talent or ability and frankly... there is a lot of art on e621 that shows very little skill. Composition, line of action, anatomy, proportion, expression, detail, lighting, shading, coloring... practiced artists tend to have a firm grasp on all or most of these concepts. Kacey, Miles-DF, Strype, Ipoke, Nekogami, azelyn, dingbat, dr comet... like them or not, all have well developed skill. They may be stronger in some areas over others, but they exemplify the basic definition of art skill.

Now refer to this: http://e621.net/post/show/37409 This is a very deserving example of 'low_skill'. I'm not saying the artist is horrible, but they definitely do not have the skills necessary to render composition, the anatomy is very under developed, proportions are awkward, and it's very crudely drawn to top it off. Had it not been tagged 'low skill' I'd have done it myself.

If I happen to be a person who doesn't want to see that kind of art I would certainly blacklist 'low skill'. So as it is; I'll be using the tag as I see fit.

or you can just spot it in the list of posts and ignore it by moving your eyes a few inches or if you clickt on it and later found out it´s not to you liking, just click back and keep browsing, quite symbolic the Internet was first devised as a way for people to communicate and share information with each other yet people only care "what´s easiest for me"

"what's easiest for me" is what the site is for
fuckwit

why not just do a google image search? if you see something irrelevant or that you don't like you can click to the next page? SO SIMPLE OH MY GOD

I'm not really a fan of a 'low-skill' tag, despite the fact that yes, some images really ARE terrible - since it's too subjective and has potential to cause drama/confusion as to what it constitutes.

I would prefer if people instead used tags to explain WHY it is low skill in objective terms, such as 'lined paper', 'unfinished', 'anatomy error', and so on. I realize that makes it harder to filter these images out, but I think that in the interests of objective tagging, the occasional suffering through glancing at a crappy thumbnail is a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things.

If folks insist on a subjective tag for these images, (and believe me, I can empathize due to how this issue skirts around any appropriate, convenient tagging solutions), I would suggest 'amateur' as a much more appropriate and less-drama inducing alternative. I would (hopefully) think that is a compromise we can all be happy with.

Unlike the others I am firmly in eqgz's camp on this. I would like to use the low skill tag to filter out the binder paper lined works, the mspaint amateur stuff, and the rest. I bristle at this communist egalitarianism. The whole fandom is like that, acting butt hurt when someone judges a work sub-par.You can see it in the defensive squealing about it being only a hobby, or it's a style, and other irrelevant crap. The tribal defense the fandom as a whole performs when any sort of quality os brought up, is becoming a cliche.

One of the nice things about this site is that it's people usually uploading other people's art, and usually of decent quality. that's why the really bad stuff stands out. It's not about content, but technique, and it isn't entirely subjective either.

The problem I have with the voting scores is that they can be gamed, it's also unclear how one can filter out negatives scores in the interface.

eqgz you want to filter negative scores (and tell me ho when you figure it out) because hose take effort to vote down. a score of 0 often means no one has seen it for favorited it yet.

I would rather use the tag as a public service, an allow others to filter out at their will. I'ts not an insult of the artist doesn't know about it, and If many of them did I'd expect the DNP list to gow huge.

Also I'd think the low_skill tag would cause a lot less drama than a comment along the lines of "Dayum! someone should have their pencil privileges revoked and their hands broken for uploading this shit to the board." I mean most people look at the tags AFTER they look at the image either to see more of that artist's work. or to figure out which to add to their blacklist.

This site, with the tags and voting I though was a bit more merit based than the usual fursecution screaming gallery.

I's Accept Amateur,as a compromise maybe, but how long before someone else gets butt hurt over that too?"Speshul Snowflakes deserve to be melted.

still don´t see the big fuzz of seeing bad art...so what you saw a bad art whoopee, just click back and keep browsing.

Plus it´s unfair to some artist if some art snob comes along and Low-skill tag a piece of art that most would find okey. The site has Mods and it´s there job to decide what passes threw or not, not us users.

It is a big fuzz. Ones black lists are set up, the filters are set, and you get a nice string of Tsampikos, and Strype art, then a nice Moody Ferret piece, and you et this awful crayon scribble. It's a buzz kill. Generally this site has been of such high quality, because it's people posting "other people's art", rather than promoting themselves,and as such this place has a much higher quality level.

And it's not unfair that the piece is tagged, because it is the OTHER USER"S choice whether to add that tag to their black list or not. You may not mind crap art, but others, and I do!

Also making a crack in the comments that a Low Skill piece "This fucking sucks!" seems to lead to getting banned. So I'd rather go the less drama route and just tag it and black list it and get my friends here to do the same.

This site isn't set up for "just move on" it's set up for tagging, so that one doesn't need to "move on. Otherwise, what's the purpose of the tagging system, and what I chose to blacklist is not what others would. So Low Skil is appropriate to the tagging system IMO.

Yes it's a big Fuzz, especially with the quality of the rest of the site being higher than average.

Just throwing my two cents in:

'low_skill' is something I think the e621 community would have a very hard time agreeing on what would qualify. Yes, it would be ideal to filter out the MS paint crap, but you know someone will be going around tagging certain pictures as 'low_skill' that others won't agree with.

In the end, I honestly don't care, because I don't use blacklists anyway. I joined this site for the art, even if I may not agree with the content it could still be well drawn, and even if it's not well drawn, it could still have a good idea/message.

Also, eqgz, I'd like to point this out:

"my judgment isn't as subjective as you'd like to think. I'm not being elitist"
"One last thing. 5000 amateur opinions don't outweigh the judgment of an expert."

Not being and ass, but I was actually listening to you at first, then you went and said that.

I agree with the idea of a low_quality tag. While there is subjectivity, the comparison to the "sexy" tag is a bit (okay, a lot) of a straw man. assessments of technical skill are far less subjective then a statement that someone likes or dislikes something, which is essentially what the sexy tag was.

on the other hand, take something like this picture of a furry being dissolved in acid: http://www.e621.net/post/show/7886/acid-blood-canine-death-digestion-female-food-fox- That's not something that turns me on at all and even made me queasy when I first saw it, but it is easy to see that it is technically solid.

the low_quality tag is for things that look like an 8 year old drew them in MSPaint. These are not very common most of the time on this site, but they show up occasionally and it really is a boner kill. I don't imagine that there would be a very large or notable margin that people would be fighting over whether something should be tagged as low_quality. More importantly, unlike something like sexy that's subjectivity makes it effectively worthless, a low_quality tag is something that I'd expect a sizable number of people to appreciate for blacklisting purposes. (while meanwhile those that would rather not have it wouldn't need it)

CyrilC gets the point. Thank you. I could go for a term change to low quality. and he's right the tag is just there for the smudgy pencil on binder paper "HA FIRST PORN" type drawings that are occaionally uploaded (for the Lulz), and not something that is used to lasg some specific individual. There are plenty of artists I dislike, but I am honest enough to refrain from using the tag if they have a modicum of technical skill.

Kang said:
CyrilC gets the point. Thank you. I could go for a term change to low quality. and he's right the tag is just there for the smudgy pencil on binder paper "HA FIRST PORN" type drawings that are occaionally uploaded (for the Lulz), and not something that is used to lasg some specific individual. There are plenty of artists I dislike, but I am honest enough to refrain from using the tag if they have a modicum of technical skill.

But the question is, can you guarantee *everyone* will be honest enough? I have personally seen people on this site whine about how an artist sucks because they didn't like them/the characters in it.

Metal_Fox said:
But the question is, can you guarantee *everyone* will be honest enough? I have personally seen people on this site whine about how an artist sucks because they didn't like them/the characters in it.

Actually I do. because they "HATE the Subject Matter" I mean I thin NezuMi's stuff should be expunged from the universe, and I'd like to kick the peopLe in the nuts responsible for uploading her shit, but is undeniably skilled. Also Gideon get "TUBE COCK!" and harsh criticism of his industrially milled and polished genitalia, but one still can see there some skill there. Artists can "suck" without being Lodw skill. See?

Kang said:
Actually I do. because they "HATE the Subject Matter" I mean I thin NezuMi's stuff should be expunged from the universe, and I'd like to kick the peopLe in the nuts responsible for uploading her shit, but is undeniably skilled. Also Gideon get "TUBE COCK!" and harsh criticism of his industrially milled and polished genitalia, but one still can see there some skill there. Artists can "suck" without being Lodw skill. See?

I am not questioning your ability to be honest about an artist (or character) you do not like. I am questioning others, for example:
http://e621.net/post/show/30023/
the user BlackWingDragon.

Metal_Fox said:
I am not questioning your ability to be honest about an artist (or character) you do not like. I am questioning others, for example:
http://e621.net/post/show/30023/
the user BlackWingDragon.

*Read Post* I see. but, for one, the "Low Skill" tag was not added. (its a competent piece of work, of silly), and two. how does this Blackwing Dragon able to post such flame bait on the board, whereas eqgz gets banned for agreeing NOT to use the tag, and moving to comments as "scar" indicated? How I see it, is if Blackwing Dragon had used the tag. there probably would have been less drama in the comments. However, it seems he is a drama queen, and therefor probably would not have used the tag what so ever, because he seems to thrive on drama. See? It seems to be self correcting.Like I said I trust the membership here to be mostly honest, with the occasional drama bomb and corrupt individual. Let's not react with the usual "one bad apple spoils the whole bunch" discipline method that made school such a misery.

"Low Skill" now aliases to "invalid tag"? Oh that's a low blow. just when the site is getting a flood of real crap.