Turned off comments for a month and my inbox actually got better
turned off comments on all my posts for a month as an experiment. not out of principle, i was just tired of moderating "do you do pet portraits" on a painting of a parking lot.
results, since i know someone will ask:
dms went up maybe 30%. actual inquiries, like people asking about a piece with a number attached, went from basically nothing to four in four weeks. sold two small ones off a story reply. the comment section was never where the money was, it was where the free labor was.
the downside is reach tanked, obviously. a couple posts that would've done their normal 2k got maybe 600. i don't care as much as i thought i would. the algorithm punishes you for closing the door and then the people who actually wanted in just... knocked somewhere else.
anyway i turned them back on for a commission piece because the client wanted to see reactions and now i'm back to deleting "AI?" six times a day. genuinely not sure which version i like better.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
This is interesting and also slightly terrifying to me. I paint mostly portraits and the comments are the only part that feels like talking to people at all, so I think I would just feel very alone with the work if I turned them off. But the "free labor" part landed for me, I get the same "can you do my dog" under a face study that took me a week and it is exhausting.
So the number of people went down but the ones who stayed were serious. That seems like it might be worth it. Did the four inquiries come mostly from the story replies or from DMs, or is it hard to tell in the end? I am asking because I keep thinking the answer is somewhere in stories and I am stubbornly bad at using them.
Honey, I understand that lonely feeling. I quilt, and half of what keeps me going is somebody hollering back at me about the cloth. But there's a difference between people talking to you and people talking at you, and "can you do my dog" under a week of work is the second kind. You can keep the door open without leaving it propped for everybody. When I do a show I'll stand there and talk all day to whoever comes up, but I don't hand out my phone number to every one of them. Maybe turn them off on the pieces that cost you the most and leave them on the ones that don't. You'd still have somebody to talk to. 🙂
the phone number thing is exactly it. i'll stand in the studio and talk color with anybody til my feet hurt, but the comment box is not that, it's a lobby, and i got tired of being the front desk.
the split idea is interesting and also probably the honest answer. only thing is the "pieces that cost you the most" are the ones where the comments go feral and also the ones where i most want to hear what people actually see. so maybe it's the reverse. leave the long ones on and kill it on the quick stuff. still workshopping it.
honestly hard to tell, i think 2 of the 4 were straight DMs off seeing the work and 2 came from story replies where i'd put a "this one's available" line under it. so the stories did more than i expected.
the alone part is real though and i won't pretend it isn't. for me the tradeoff was worth it because the comments weren't conversation anyway, they were just a queue of requests. but if yours actually feel like talking to people, that's a different math than mine. i'd kill the request ones and keep the rest before i'd nuke the whole section tbh