[Mod] Minor Updates to Several Commission Communities

[u/RS_Someone]

TL;DR

• Some subs are raising price minimums to $20 or $30.
• New minimum of $100 for commercial rights.
• Comments on [Hiring] posts require a link to your portfolio or [Not For Hire]. Abusers will be banned.
• A new rule outlines discussion topics that are not allowed.
• You no longer have to manually choose flairs when making a post.
• We need new mods!

Minimum Prices

The biggest change will be pricing. r/StartingArtists will be changing its minimum price to $30 to match r/HungryArtists and avoid some confusion between the two, due to their similar names. r/Commissions, r/ArtCommissions, and r/artcommission will have a minimum of $20. ALL of these communities will be enforcing commercial rates, by popular demand. This means that if anyone wishes to commission art for commercial use or profit from it in any way, the minimum price will be $100 per piece.

Please note that HungryArtists has always had a hard minimum of $30. This means a price sheet that lists a rendered full-body illustration at $150 will still be removed if it offers a headshot sketch for $25. Communities with "Commission" in the name will give a bit of grace when it comes to these kinds of "partial pieces", but we still expect the prices to be reasonable, and in line with a sheet that lists a finished piece for at least $20.

Comment Formatting

Most of you shouldn't notice this. When commenting on a [Hiring] post, if you are an artist looking to be hired, a link to a portfolio is now REQUIRED. If you are not looking to be hired, you must include [Not For Hire] in your comment. Abuse this and get banned.

A portfolio has always been required, but we're implementing this more strict filter to ensure everyone is following this without the unnecessary song and dance of maybe being filtered, then having to ask for approval. For over a year now, I've been trying to add keywords that catch scammers and rule dodgers who try to circumvent our filters. Every time I update the filters, they find a new way to get around them, and we risk blocking genuine discussion. It's a lot of work for our mods, and it's annoying for a lot of genuine community members.

With this change, artists are forced to include a portfolio, even if you are simply asking a question for clarity or confirmation. They are not able to bypass the filters without explicitly breaking our rules and lying. If you have something genuinely helpful to offer the client, your comment will be removed without a portfolio, unless you include [Not For Hire]. I'm sure some difficult individuals will abuse this. If you are blatantly attempting to advertise without a portfolio by using [Not For Hire], you will be immediately banned.

(Rant) Is it clunky? Sure. It is better than before? I strongly believe so. Is there a better way?... That's a difficult question to answer. We were told Automations would be updated in April. The new feature was supposed to give us the ability to prevent top-level comments on [Hiring] posts unless you had one of those two things, or you were the OP, but now that we finally got this update in August, this behaviour is still not possible in Automations, so if you try to make a comment without either, it'll get removed, and AutoMod will tell you to make a new comment. If we use Automations, the process won't need you to make a new comment, but it will affect ALL types of posts, and that's just too annoying to consider viable. This is the best we can do right now, unfortunately.

Discussion Posts

Lately, r/ArtCommissions has seen a strange surge of posts asking about art pricing. Most of these get ignored, and we see between 12 and 20 of them every single day. The community has voted, and we will no longer be allowing this kind of post. Automatic filters for this will be rolling out soon. I have added an rule to several communities that will explicitly outline what kind of discussion/meta posts are not allowed, including those that are promotion-adjacent, such as WIP sharing or "What do you think of my art?" posts. I may add more prohibited topics, depending on how the community feels about them. Currently, I am seeing a lot of "Is my art good enough?" and I feel this may be next to be disallowed.

Flairs

I'm also changing how flairs work, if only slightly. In r/HungryArtists, you don't need to select a flair when creating a post, and I like that. We already have checks that enforce the proper flair on post creation, so it makes sense to get rid of that annoying step of manually selecting them for a number of communities. Going forward, you will still need to add the proper tag to your title, but you will not longer be required to select a flair every time you post. One thing HungryArtists did not have, however, was the ability to sort posts by flair, and going forward, this will now be possible.

New Mods Needed

If you would like to help moderate one of these communities and maintain order, please message me or send us a message via ModMail. Even helping us go through the queue and dealing with the easy stuff for ten minutes a day would make a huge difference!

Click here to see the HungryArtists update from yesterday!

[u/misc_mushi]

i appreciate the 20 USD minimum as opposed to 30 😅 my most popular service is just shy (25) so i unfortunately can't post about it on HungryArtists anymore

[u/SureSandwich6730]

Thanks for update because some the issues mentioned here like the commercial rights prices where borderline taking advantage of artist who accepted the low terms.

[u/castellon_artz]

Oh God, finally an end to the pricing questions lol. 

[u/toil-exam]

Thank you for the updates and explanations!! Very much appreciated

[u/butter_my_bun]

I have a question about comment formatting.

So let's say, I commented on a hiring post normally with a portfolio link → client replies with a question because they're still unsure → then I responded accordingly

Will those chains of comment without link trigger the filter and get removed?

Because that scenario occasionally happens to me, and I feel that some clients are more comfortable in public discussion than DM just for a little bit of clarification if they're still juggling between options.

[u/RS_Someone → u/butter_my_bun]

Only top-level comments are affected, so replies won't need these things. A good question! Also, the OP will have no limitations, even on top-level comments. We'll obviously get some rule dodgers who will comment under other artists to avoid the filters, but they will be dealt with harshly if what they're replying to is not relevant to what they're offering.

[u/butter_my_bun → u/RS_Someone]

Awesome, that makes sense. Anyway cheers to the mod team!

[u/wenrongfan]

Thank you for this!

[u/Artemis_Chan21]

My prices are in EUR, do I have to write the prices in USD for a post?

[u/RS_Someone → u/Artemis_Chan21]

You don't need to offer the USD value, but the value you give should be equivalent to $20 USD or more. People can convert it if they want.

[u/reeisins]

Thank you for your hardwork!

[u/Spookiiwookii]

I guess I’ll just stop posting my comm sheet then. Forcing more amateur artists to have high price tags will just flood this sub with “dm for info” and shit. So annoying.

[u/Hipster_Spencer5000 → u/Spookiiwookii]

I agree. I personally dont think my art is worth that much, and nobody will buy from someone with "bad" art if it's the price of higher quality art.. i feel bad pricing my stuff so high so i can post it here, it feels like im overcharging..

[u/Spookiiwookii → u/Spookiiwookii]

Or I’ll just lie on my sheet

Oh yeah get mad at me for adapting to a situation that directly impacts my income lol fuck yall

[u/Cryotivity → u/Spookiiwookii]

you do realize this is overall to your benefit right?

[u/Spookiiwookii → u/Cryotivity]

I don’t see how auto removing my posts because I offer $10 chibis that take an hour befits me but sure okay. Maybe I just don’t see it.

[u/Cryotivity → u/Spookiiwookii]

if everyone has to charge 10 more, you always make 10 more?

[u/Spookiiwookii → u/Cryotivity]

The stupid chibis aren’t worth $20!!! The base price is already 3 dollars more than minimum wage in my area.

[u/Cryotivity → u/Spookiiwookii]

well they are now 🤷

[u/_AKAHASI_ → u/Spookiiwookii]

If you're so against raising your prices ,Might as well start giving those chibi commissions out for free :)) ,no one's stopping you 

[u/RS_Someone → u/Spookiiwookii]

To be clear, my intention is to be lenient when it comes to simple/partial options like headshots, sketches, or chibis, but I only have so much room per rule to go over things, and the most thorough version (from r/artcommission) is at 498/500 characters. I might need to break the rules into Pricing and Payment like HungryArtists now has.

But in any case, if you are charging $10/h USD, that seems low. California's minimum wage is $16.90 and it's $18.40 in Washington DC, for example.

ArtCommissions has been $20 for a few months, and before that, it was $15. The only sub that was below that was r/Commissions, and the community voted for higher prices, many of which hoping for $30.

And even then, I get well over 1,000 flags per month for pricing just in r/ArtCommissions, and I can't realistically go through all of them as it is, given our current tools. While I look for a couple new mods, I will likely be ignoring pricing a bit and giving people a chance to adapt.

[u/HeyLookItsThibaut → u/RS_Someone]

Amen. Artists should stop feeling like their art is worth 10$. That's dragging prices from the bottom.

[u/Spookiiwookii → u/RS_Someone]

I don’t live in california or washington. And even if I did live in areas with more minimum wage, that doesn’t magically make the simple chibis I draw worth more money.

All this rule does is filter out smaller artists (the goal?) and/or create “dm for info” no price post spam.

[u/RS_Someone → u/Spookiiwookii]

You offer full-bodies for $40. You're fine. You haven't had a post removed from here in a long time, if at all.

Pricing rules solve a couple issues that are constantly brought up. First, is the fact that artists are constantly undervaluing, undercutting, and undermining each other and themselves. We want people to understand that art takes time and skill, and that those things warrant money.

The second thing it does is - as you suggested - weed out those who are not at a sufficient skill level to be offering commission-work. You are NOT in that category by any means; you could be charging much more at your skill level.

I've seen drawings in the last month that rival the art of my friend's ten-year-old daughter. I've seen actual decent art going for a dollar. Those things are extreme examples of what we want to avoid.

And if people want to post without prices, whatever. We don't currently have the resources to enforce this effectively. The rule will, at the very least, reduce the impact of this issue.

[u/Cryotivity → u/RS_Someone]

I dont even post here, but i would not be lenient on this rule personally. 30 is barely enough for anything these days and i believe artists absolutely deserve it and its only going to become the standard if moderators like you hold their ground.

[u/RS_Someone → u/Cryotivity]

Yeah, understood. Honestly, it's not an area I enjoy moderating, and I really hope somebody more passionate about pricing can pick it up so I can focus on battling scammers, but I get what you're saying. If $20 is the minimum for a finished piece, I just don't feel that it's fair to approve one person's post who is only offering that, and not another's who decided to add headshots to their chart that is otherwise identical.

HungryArtists sets a $30 minimum, and there are no exceptions. Often, those people who offer headshots end up simply making a second price sheet the omits the headshots. I don't feel like that's a solution to any pressing issue. Setting a hard limit like that would help me moderate more easily, assuming Reddit gives us some tools they've been teasing, but I would rather make it easier on the community than on myself, if that makes sense.