Something that weighed on my heart for a while…

Hello everyone, Hiros53 here and I have another announcement, so please stick until the end, but hear me out first. Let's start with the premise upfront:

I do not like Captions anymore.

It's funny, because captions definitely were the thing that brought me into this community and what really catapulted my popularity on deviant art. But there were certain things that have always bothered me about captions. Here is how I see them:

The positives:

- they are really clickbaity. People just tend to click on pictures more than on text, which is why captions tend to do better.

- they show people that they are short, meaning they know they are not in for a long time when reading them.

- They are great for new writers to get traction

The negatives:

- They are a pain to make as a creator.

- They are selling the wrong thing. When people click, then they click because of the picture, not the story.

- Making the picture feel fitting and making sure the text is readable is a real challenge from time to time.

And that last part has always stung pretty hard. There is a difference between “Came for the picture, stayed for the story.” and “Came for the story and enjoyed it as well as the picture.”. And it didn’t help that I never knew how to make patreon previews for these things, because blurring the picture to tease a story is just false advertisement, even if I mention that it's a story I am advertising for. Not to mention that a lot of the time those pictures don't even belong to me, which is why I always include a link to the original creator under my posts on DA.

All in all, captions are just really a mess from the perspective of a creator, which is why I have decided to step away from them from now on. Captions are a great starting place for aspiring writers, as they give them more views and clicks to grow faster. But the bigger you get, the more diminishing returns you get.

This funnily enough will change my patreon almost comically little. Like it will stay almost exactly the same. Instead of “captions” and “stories”, I will now rebrand them as “short stories” and “long stories”. “Short stories” will be literally the exact same as “Captions” were, except for the Png version, which will now no longer be made for them. And “long stories” will literally not change at all from their previous brand of just “Stories”.

What advantages do you and I get from that?

I can advertise more freely on DA, without feeling bad or advertising the wrong thing.

And you get my finished stories WAYYYYYYYYY quicker. The reason why so few captions get uploaded to my Patreon in their finished state is because after they are proofread, I never want to do a caption for them. And asking a friend to do a favor for you also isn't always the solution when you usually upload twice a week.

And that's my full reasoning why I am stepping down from making captions. Are there any reasons why you think captions are way better in picture format rather than just the story alone? Let me know in the comments. But for now, thank you everyone for listening to my plight and may Nagisa bless you all.