What if someone made an art social network

[B.K. Conn]

If someone made a social network that compared art (one piece beside another) and ranked it. Like with user profiles and user uploaded art. I wonder if people would use it?

[OmenSpirits]

It would be disastrous.

Think about your audience, their personal tastes, feelings involved, etc.

it would end...badly.

[dpaint]

no, its a stupid idea. Who cares what other ignorant people think about a piece of art? It proves nothing, just more digital masturbation for people interested in art but too lazy to spend time making it.

[B.K. Conn]

really? interesting response.

[Star Eater]

Not much else I can add that Omen and dpaint have not said already.
That example you have basically shows what a flawed idea this would be.

[B.K. Conn]

You think all types of artists would opt not to do this testing with their art?

[dpaint]

You think all types of artists would opt not to do this testing with their art?

Only the bad ones would do it; the the good ones have better things to do and don't care what 14 year olds think.

[Parka81]

If you're going to create an art social network, at least make it helpful to someone.

[Arshes Nei]

I'm trying to figure out what would be the point of this to be honest.

[QueenGwenevere]

Oh god, it would be like the worst of DeviantArt mated with the worst of Facebook and all of MySpace in a hideous threesome and spawned a mutant social network... D:

You KNOW what would happen. People would gang up with their friends and make endless alternate accounts to push their own ratings up and push their high school rival's ratings down in a huge ugly teen popularity mud fight. Eventually the whole site would drown in its own drama as the trolls move in to feed...

[Saurabhinator]

It doesn't make sense to compare two pieces arbitrarily.
Maybe if there was a purpose to each piece like in a competition; but in those cases the judges should have some background in the particular theme of the competition.

[LORD M]

Oh god, it would be like the worst of DeviantArt mated with the worst of Facebook and all of MySpace in a hideous threesome and spawned a mutant social network... D:

You KNOW what would happen. People would gang up with their friends and make endless alternate accounts to push their own ratings up and push their high school rival's ratings down in a huge ugly teen popularity mud fight. Eventually the whole site would drown in its own drama as the trolls move in to feed...

Sounds like a good source of hilarious drama and endless entertainment.

[B.K. Conn]

It doesn't make sense to compare two pieces arbitrarily.
Maybe if there was a purpose to each piece like in a competition; but in those cases the judges should have some background in the particular theme of the competition.

Interesting, what if they are locked in separate battles according to genres?

[Shorinji_Knight]

People would use it. But I think I have to agree with the Bad Idea camp. This would be like when you were little and you and a cousin each took drawings to your mothers and asked them to choose which they liked best.

[drd]

The core problem here is you would be attempting to create a social networking platform (a system based around community) with competition, which is divisive by it's nature. It just wouldn't end well.

[B.K. Conn]

There must be a better solution than the current art sharing social networks: dribbble, behance, deviantart. If you could have an art social network do anything what would you want it to do that is different?

[TASmith]

No one's mentioned DA yet? Behold, here's the best (most popular) work that would result:

http://browse.deviantart.com/?order=9

[Jie Kageshinzo]

Well, I, for one, would make a drawing of an anime girl with underboobs and upskirt with striped panties and then watch it being upvoted by horny basement dwellers whose idea of a perfect work of art is like this:

[Saurabhinator]

No one's mentioned DA yet? Behold, here's the best (most popular) work that would result:

http://browse.deviantart.com/?order=9

I think the distinction i made between this and what the op was saying; it is that on da you can choose to like as many pictures as you want, where as the proposed method is to be more selective.

I would actually like DA system more if their "more popular" page actually displayed what was more popular instead of trying to cherry pick from each medium.

cghub seems to be able to rank them just fine.

[B.K. Conn]

So perhaps it's a fear of the unknown if we fear ranking art (our own art). Isn't it better to know what the world thinks? However the method (as displayed on op) may be selective, it is actually more implicit than a Like, Favorite, or views, and perhaps more true to what a consumer may buy (i.e. shirt graphics, or designs, or a painting). I think it isn't necessarily correct to assume the art consumer unintelligent and witless.

[TinyBird]

Interesting, what if they are locked in separate battles according to genres?

And then you'd need a bunch of admins or at least people who go through the images to make sure they actually fit the genre and people don't abuse it, and if you can't pidgeonhole the image to some specific genre, then there's even more problems. Not to mention it's pretty hard to come up with sufficient amount of genres that are at the same time descriptive and encompassing enough unless you combine the genres (like, "comedy" images but which are also "fantasy" images, it'd either go to either of those or then to a "comedy"/"fantasy" genre setting). Even most art sites fail at genre categorizing.
And then if you were a pretty okay artist, but your art constantly got accidentally constantly compared with pro art (assuming the images are randomized to pairs) and it would end just getting lots of negative/non-votes, or the other way around you're a pretty crappy artist but your art got constantly paired with even crappier art but you'd still get votes... what would that really even tell about the artist? Probably not that their art is good or bad or how many people actually liked it, so I'd say in terms of "testing" the art, it would be pretty pointless.
Unless these images are also categorized to be compared with those of similar skill level but seriously not even that would help this sort of thing and would just take it further from testing the art.

And that reminds of this post: http://muddycolors.blogspot.fi/2012/06/mediocrity.html like would a high rank in the site actually tell much about the quality of the image posted?

[TinyBird]

However the method (as displayed on op) may be selective, it is actually more implicit than a Like, Favorite, or views, and perhaps more true to what a consumer may buy (i.e. shirt graphics, or designs, or a painting).

Well, that actually reminds me of one PatchTogether incident where a super popular 14-year old (or something close) DeviantArt cartoon dog artist made a dog toy design there (point of the site was to create toy statue designs and the one which got most votes was made... but only after winning the voting it had to also get at least 20 pre-orders) and who got all her fans to vote for her, so the design won instantly. But when it came down to get the pre-orders to the toy, none of her fans actually bought it! Probably because most of her fans were under-age and couldn't order/pay one without permission or didn't have the money, but in the end, the amount of votes meant nothing and the toy was never made. But unfortunately by having her fans spam the votes, some other toy didn't get made either.

[QueenGwenevere]

So perhaps it's a fear of the unknown if we fear ranking art (our own art). Isn't it better to know what the world thinks? However the method (as displayed on op) may be selective, it is actually more implicit than a Like, Favorite, or views, and perhaps more true to what a consumer may buy (i.e. shirt graphics, or designs, or a painting). I think it isn't necessarily correct to assume the art consumer unintelligent and witless.

Oh no, it's known all right. We know perfectly well what happens over and over anytime you have a popular voting or ranking system on the internet anywhere.

1. Sex, fan art, and cute out-ranks everything else, regardless of quality...

2. People get their friends to mass-vote on their submissions, so the person with the biggest pool of "friends" automatically outranks anyone with fewer friends, regardless of the quality of submissions... (Happens in popularity-vote contests ALL. THE. TIME. Even on the community activities here, I've seen people urge all their offsite FB and DA friends to come vote on their entries, and behold, those entries suddenly get a mysterious flood of votes...)

3. People offer bribes for votes ("Vote for me and I'll draw you fanart!") This also happens a lot in popularity-vote contests...

4. People make tons of alt accounts and vote for themselves...

5. People invariably vote for their friends, regardless of the quality of the work...

6. And vice-versa, if down-voting is allowed, people vote against/urge their friends to vote against individuals who they personally don't like, regardless of the quality of the work...

7. And no matter what, you'll get floods of teenagers with typical teenage taste skewing the results toward general tackiness.

I would actually like DA system more if their "more popular" page actually displayed what was more popular instead of trying to cherry pick from each medium.

That's what they used to do, it didn't work either. What you got was 99% fanart of the top five fandoms from the 10 most popular artists all the time. If you didn't particularly care for those artists and their fanart, it made the front page dead useless.

It's still dead useless, but that's largely because people have figured out how to abuse the current system to get their not-so-popular fanart on the front page...

I'm not sure if there's a way to make it really work unless people can define elaborate filters to suit their own tastes, or unless a group of intelligent people curates a selection of "the best" (which requires people and time.)

[TinyBird]

It's still dead useless, but that's largely because people have figured out how to abuse the current system to get their not-so-popular fanart on the front page...

I remember when DA had a... I'm not sure if it was just a bug or oversight, but at least at some point, a new image with most amount of new pageviews got into the "most popular" front page (at least for the most popular in 24 hours category), but because of the issue in the site, if you refreshed the image page, it counted every refresh as a new pageview, so people kept just refreshing their own image page until it had gotten so many "views" that it automatically rose to the front page (and after that they usually stayed there when people went to look at it from the front page).
Eventually this was fixed (and now they count the popularity from favorites I think) but during that time basically anything could be "popular".

[B.K. Conn]

Probably because most of her fans were under-age and couldn't order/pay one without permission or didn't have the money, but in the end, the amount of votes meant nothing and the toy was never made. But unfortunately by having her fans spam the votes, some other toy didn't get made either.

You can't spam vote if the images randomly generate (2) at a time out of a pool of thousands of images. Statistically very very hard to do. Just wanting to a address this issue directly. I don't feel spamming could be done, and if it could it would be far too laborious for your friends to ever attempt.

[Arshes Nei]

Yeah again, someone tell me the purpose of this?

[TinyBird]

You can't spam vote if the images randomly generate (2) at a time out of a pool of thousands of images. Statistically very very hard to do.

Except that when you start, where will you suddenly get thousand images? I mean if the point is for artists to get their own art "judged" they will have to post it, and at the start there hardly is thousands of images, (unless you yourself/the owner of the site post some random art there which would kinda defeat any purpose this place would have) which will increase the chance of repeating images quite a bit.
And with thousands of images we'd then be likely to have the problem I mentioned in my previous comments, that the statistics would be skewed by the randomizer and any votes or non-votes wouldn't tell anything.
Like Arshes said, what's the purpose? What are the artists supposed to take from the votes they get or don't get?

[B.K. Conn]

Good feedback, thanks guys. What about this same idea only with photography? or maybe just as a general social network? The question has come up, whats the purpose. The purpose would be a sense on random discovery of images people upload to the network and to capture peoples opinions/preferences of the images as they explore.

[JeffX99]

Galleries, art collectors, marketing departments and art directors are who you test your art with.

[vineris]

There must be a better solution than the current art sharing social networks: dribbble, behance, deviantart. If you could have an art social network do anything what would you want it to do that is different?

Make me money.

If I want to be exposed to random BUT GOOD images I'll go to Lines and Colors.