GEEXiES

The first image link doesn't work, but this one does:

https://media.piefed.social/posts/dR/Ew/dREwBXGL4ZKlZlx.jpg

Now that you said ghost town... There is this sub I really liked that had around 500 000 members but with close to zero activity, like one or two posts a month and barely any comment. Now, with the changes, last time I checked it said it had less than 1000 active users!

I don't know if this change is good or bad for Reddit, but you can bet it was bad for mods, because they are complaining about those drastic reductions in member counts. I understand that there is no point in counting members if they are long gone, just like it doesn't make sense for a city to count their deceased for a population estimation.

Anyway, as usual mods there complain and complain but won't leave the site. I'm trapped there because of a few niche subs I can't find good replacements for, but I hope all these changes move more people out.

hiding total sub member count with a rolling view count

Wouldn't that be worse? I've seen a sub that had close to 5 million members and the new metric showed today 98 000 weekly users. r/gaming had what? 30 millions? Now it's 2.4. This makes it look worse, doesn't it? Or am I missing something?

But I agree with anything else you said.

I've seen kids with Nirvana t-shirts who knew nothing about the band. This might be similar.

Not even unique I'd argue. He was lucky Digg killed itself at the right moment.

Glad I'm not the only one! :D

As annoying as she was, Fi from Skyward Sword almost made me cry at the end of the game. Well, a couple of tears.

Those were my thoughts. Now I'm also thinking of making it mandatory to include a piece of paper or whatever with the username written on it and have it show by the artwork on the progress photos. That could add a layer of complexity for the fakers.

The sad part is that all these will make the submitting process slower and more tedious, but that's the world we live in. But I guess artists will understand.

Exactly. Truly sad. And I'm confident most users will respect the rules, specially if they have to provide evidence of previous works (on public profiles) and they are proud of their work. The thing is... how do you know when AI is getting harder to spot?

Do you make it a rule to include hands or whatever in the art? That's just a crazy and almost funny idea, but one that at some point won't even matter. So previous work and, yes, progress pics or videos, are what I can think of. The other option could be to just admit that it is inevitable to have some bad apples and deal with it as long as it's a minority.