Update to Rule 9 and a quick chat about Found Fanart

First off, here's a link to the new mod announcement and Rule 8 changes if you didn't get a chance to see it while it was still pinned.

Hey folks, in this thread I’ll be discussing Rule 9 of the subreddit, why we have it and what our approach to it will be in the future.

If you don’t care for the details, here’s the tl;dr:

1. The Found Fanart Thread is being completely scrapped.

2. As before, all non-OC fanart will be removed from the sub.

The wording of Rule 9 has been updated to reflect this, though since the Fanart Thread has been defunct for a while, no one should notice a difference in enforcement:

No Fanart or Cosplay is to be posted unless it is of your own making, or you commissioned the artist and have permission to post. If you wish to post non-OC fanart please use our Fanart Hub linked at the top of the subreddit.

The Fanart Hub button on the top of the sidebar will shortly be removed, and likely replaced with a link to the Three Houses Question Thread once it goes up.

Why remove Found Fanart in the first place?

There are three reasons for the existence of Rule 9:

1. People who post fanart that isn’t theirs are much less likely to properly give credit to the artist. Compelling them to add a source and then re-approving the post is an additional hoop the mod team must jump through if Found Fanart is allowed.
2. Because they’re easier to appreciate at a glance, fanart and memes get far more upvotes than most other posts. It’s also obviously much easier to post someone else’s art than to make your own. As a result, subs that allow Found Fanart are often flooded with it, and that can drown out other kinds of content.
3. Though a less-prevalent issue than the last two, if Found Fanart is allowed then it’s possible for artists’ work to get posted here before they have the chance to post it themselves, meaning we have to have an additional requirement that the artist is fine with their art being reposted.

The Found Fanart Thread

The Found Fanart hub was most aimed at concern #2 above: preventing the sub from being flooded with non-OC art. We can speculate about what exactly caused it to fail, but the most obvious explanation is that people post fanart because they want it to be seen - either because they’d like other people to appreciate it, because they want that sweet, sweet karma, or both. Having a secluded thread for fanart effectively killed any chances of art being seen. Attempts to save the thread by posting it more frequently, if anything, made things worse.

The mod team has floated the idea of allowing Found Fanart to be posted one day of the week, but has decided against it for now. This is partly because Three Houses is on the horizon, but mostly because at the end of the day we feel that the right to post fanart that you didn’t make isn’t necessarily important enough to outweigh all the problems it creates.

While we’re not totally ruling out the possibility of finding a way to make allowances in the future, for now we’ll be sticking with the current policy.