Active vs Passive Engagement, Gallery Sites and Social Medias

I think a key difference people don't acknowledge between gallery sites and social medias, is active vs passive engagement.

Generally speaking, liking a post or commenting on it on a gallery site is a lot more active of a decision on the viewer's part (like on sheezy where you have to click on a post to like it or commento n it) where on social medias like instagram or twitter, it's kind of a mindless thing you do to any post you somewhat like.

This is why i personally find issue when people complain about low engagement on here or furaffinity or deviantart, it's not equivalent at all to social medias.

I think this mostly is caused by social medias making art into "content" and seeing engagement as the only way you can grow, rather than organically or by forming communities with your fellow artists. We've lost a lot of that peer to peer support i think.

100 people liking your art is a LOT. If even 10% of that commissioned you, that's 10 commissions from a single artwork! As someone with a larger insta profile, it can be easy for these numbers to seem so small because people on instagram are not there to look at *your* art or *your* content. A view could be a single person who immediately scrolls past, it means nothing.

Another thing to consider is sites like deviantart and furaffinity have been around for a really long time, and have become a place where people go *to* commission people, sheezy, artfol, side7 and all the rest are still in their infancy so I don't think major profits should be expected.

I get it though, you want more engagement because in this economy you need to know if it's even worth your time to post somewhere, you can't just risk "waiting it out" if it's taking away from time you could be using to get paid that week. I just don't think we should be expecting the same turnaround on engagement between these two online ecosystems. You wouldn't expect pouring rain in a mostly temperate climate, it's not impossible but it's not guaranteed either.

I'm sorry if this barely coherent this was mostly just my train of thought but it's something I've been thinking about a lot.