Topic: Why Would an Artist Want Their Posts Deleted?

I have been going through the deleted posts that I have in my sets and had some questions.
What are some reasons an artist would want their content to be removed from e6? I can understand if it is paysite / commercial content, something that isn’t explicit, or has been edited without permission, but what else? The same can be said about commissioners or character owners. Do they not want to be associated with the community? I would have imagined that having your art posted in multiple locations would be a good way to spread attention to them.

The reasons vary! They just plainly don't like their work reposted, maybe they don't like the moderation on this site, they wanna distance themselves from NSFW work, or they went off the rails and want all their work scrubbed from the internet.

I also think it's really silly not to want your work archived, but artists be artists sometimes!

While artists may usually want to spread attention to their works there is a much smaller incentive for character owners to want that. They may believe that sharing their OCs around can increase the chance of someone impersonating them and want to avoid that whenever possible, which may explain some takedowns by character owners.

I also think art can take a very intimate dimension for some artists or similarly that character owners can relate to some of their OCs in a very personal way. So in this way sharing this art around in a place like e621 may make them feel vulnerable as if something intimate about them was exposed. Maybe they used to be ok with it being shared but changed their mind or maybe they feel like a FA gallery is private enough for them.

Artists or character owners may also not want to be associated with a theme anymore like a particular fetish or NSFW works in general

I can say that a vast majority of takedowns are the result of unauthorised reposts (i.e., people sharing artworks without asking for permission first). This applies to takedowns from commissioners and character owners as well.
The idea that someone else is posting your works on another website without your knowledge may have made them feel uneasy or that it had violated their sense of control over their own works.
To add on to that, once an artwork is posted here by a third-party, it is essentially put on public display and critique that the artist cannot easily manage as if it were on their own galleries.
For example, there is a open vote system for people to rate how they feel about the artist's works.
You could also have unsavoury comments posted under their artworks, such as creepy comments, harsh criticisms, or comments that they don't want to be associated with.
Other times it could be because of TWYS or how e621 tagging works, such as how we define young or bestiality or genders, which the artist may not agree with.

Another possible reason is that they do not like the readily-accessible nature of e621, where anybody can view artworks even without having an account.
They may fear attracting the wrong type of crowd to their artworks or that their works may be scraped to train AI models.
On art galleries (like FurAffinity) and social media sites (like X), there could be a privacy function to limit their audiences or even privatise their works to select people. This function does not exist on e621.

If you want to read the actual takedown reasons yourself, you can check the takedown list and see the various reasons why people want their works removed from the site.

The answers so far cover the reasons pretty well in my opinion. You might want to skim through the avoid posting list as well since they can specify or hint at reasons too.
For instance, ebonychimera's listing seems to be motivated for possibly copyright reasons. And fluff-kevlar doesn't like edits of his work.

Another reason I can think of is commissioners rather than the artist having problems with e621.

The short answer is, quite bluntly, often because they are cowards and cave to shame.

There are so many takedowns with people quitting NSFW art from the unjustified shame like NSFW art is something evil you need to "move on from" eventually. This is mostly because of social pressure as society demonizes sex and sexuality. Sometimes it's for "professional reasons" but there is certainly a better name for these so-called professional reasons which is more common and proper to describe it as. Not being afraid to be your true self in spite of pressure is supposed to be a core value of being a furry, but what do I know, right?

Another common one is artists just not liking their old work, because apparently that means nobody else can like it and art is supposed to look like black magic that you can just inherently do without having to improve over time (this also leads to a cycle of gallery nuking as the artist improves, so long as they don't stagnate). Funny enough this is a common sentiment held by professional artists (some famously having to burn their sketchbooks after they die in their wills), which is a shame. This is kind of toxic to do because it's basically saying "it's not OK to be at this level" to people who aren't there yet. Some artists also just use e621 as a portfolio though, as a showcase of their best work to show to potential commissioners and leave their less prime stuff up elsewhere.

Shame from fetish art is also common, because giving harassers and kinkshamers what they want and comfirming that harassing artists works to get them to nuke their gallery to make the harassment stop obviously is going to do wonders for the livelihoods other fetish artists, and totally not just encourage and enable more harassment.

Another common sentiment is fear of AI training, as web crawlers are well-behaved pieces of software that only scrape e621 and would never just relentlessly scrape from the artist's original source instead, so taking their work off of e621 is going to do wonders to stop that from happening- and if you can't tell by the tone of my writing, this is not how things work. A desire to not have AI slop flood the internet, while a noble stance to take, ends up in artists making it incredibly difficult to find their human-made artwork unless you already know about them and ironically enough making AI slop more visible than real art.

Sometimes people have valid reasons, like paysite content being posted and having it removed. But usually it's because they're petty, cave to wrongful societal pressure, or lack street smarts about how the Internet works (which is especially true of copyright-motivated takedowns). Apparently "don't post things online you don't want others to see" was not drilled into enough peoples' heads.

inb4 "Well it's their right, they're allowed to do it!" It can be your right to do something and your reasons can still suck for doing so, they aren't mutually exclusive.

By far the most common sentiment is simply that they want their art posted via a gallery or account that they control. e621 obviously functions differently to that, and posts show up randomly from whomever uploads it.

rainbow_dash said:
By far the most common sentiment is simply that they want their art posted via a gallery or account that they control. e621 obviously functions differently to that, and posts show up randomly from whomever uploads it.

I'm curious, is that the most common condition for Conditional DNP, that only the artist can post? Scrolling the DNP list it seems to be, but you probably have actual stats.

mklxiv said:
I'm curious, is that the most common condition for Conditional DNP, that only the artist can post? Scrolling the DNP list it seems to be, but you probably have actual stats.

Yeah, I'd say so. If its not just to get ahead of random reposters (artist upload only), then its 90% of the time just to prevent 3rd party edits. I don't see very many make the requests for AI deterrence, or for social reasons. They happen, but not all that common I'd say. Wanting art made before a certain date (old gallery purge) is also somewhere in between for being not uncommon, but somewhat infrequent a request.

I don't even need to look at my stats sheet to know that much.

rainbow_dash said:
Yeah, I'd say so. If its not just to get ahead of random reposters (artist upload only), then its 90% of the time just to prevent 3rd party edits. I don't see very many make the requests for AI deterrence, or for social reasons. They happen, but not all that common I'd say. Wanting art made before a certain date (old gallery purge) is also somewhere in between for being not uncommon, but somewhat infrequent a request.

I don't even need to look at my stats sheet to know that much.

Huh, I saw a fair number of them looking through the takedown list, but as non-staff I don't have access to all the ones that are redacted for normal users, so I trust your word on that.

Been told by my art mentors to not delete old work so I can look back at it and see how much I improved. Problem is that I can see so many mistakes in old art that I can't enjoy it.

I'm used to drawing a new piece almost every day so it's just natural for me to want to keep my "gallery" cleaner. I'd personally delete 10% of my stuff here but I don't want to bother the admins, plus there is a decent number of people who favorited those pieces.

mklxiv said:
Another common one is artists just not liking their old work, because apparently that means nobody else can like it and art is supposed to look like black magic that you can just inherently do without having to improve over time (this also leads to a cycle of gallery nuking as the artist improves, so long as they don't stagnate). Funny enough this is a common sentiment held by professional artists (some famously having to burn their sketchbooks after they die in their wills), which is a shame.
This is kind of toxic to do because it's basically saying "it's not OK to be at this level" to people who aren't there yet.

To name just one way it's toxic, yeah.
The historical revisionism, and (in the pro artist cases you mention) the bad role-modelling of being so absurdly thin-skinned you insist on curating your image beyond your death, would be others.

inb4 "Well it's their right, they're allowed to do it!" It can be your right to do something and your reasons can still suck for doing so, they aren't mutually exclusive.

Yeah.. honestly, the whole practice of bringing up 'rights' .. Seems like it's consistently a halfwit-individualist deflection of legitimate concerns about 'What are the practical costs and benefits to not only the individual but the community?', not any substantive point.

Overall I agree that in many cases, mass deletions are 'because they are cowards and cave to shame.'.

absolutebanger said:
Problem is that I can see so many mistakes in old art that I can't enjoy it.

From my POV that is part of the point. Being able to point to things I did wrong in the past is honestly a great motivator for managing to avoid those things now. The more distance in time, the better the post-mortem you should be able to do on it (more objectivity, less attachment). The absolute best motivator I have found is to take a past work I disagree with my choices in, and create a whole new drawing that is 'that past work, but made properly according to my current standards'.

IMO maintaining motivations that are adequate to achieving your goals is actually a big, persistent, and poorly-discussed problem in any creative practice. I hope to grab onto any little bit that can help.

absolutebanger said:
Problem is that I can see so many mistakes in old art that I can't enjoy it.

Then enjoy not the art but progress and process. Did you like the piece when making it? Assuming not a commercial "do exactly what client says" setting.

Current art world allows for a lot of, frankly speaking, crap to not only exist but heralded as latest and greatest at being crap, so measure of quality is rather subjective. Pardon for a bit too tiredly-philosophical take on the matter.

As for the OP topic: depending on location it may be a good practice for an artist to be ready to wipe portfolio of such "controversial" topics (definitions vary). Of course some artists want absolute control over own work, but that is possible only if nobody has posted or photographed it. Odd logic but whatever. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

justkhajiit said:
Then enjoy not the art but progress and process. Did you like the piece when making it? Assuming not a commercial "do exactly what client says" setting.

I enjoy the process. I can't really enjoy the process if the process is already done now, can I? But yeah. Should've also clarified what I meant by "enjoy" earlier. It involves touching certain area of my body while going through own gallery. 🤔

I took down my old works because I transitioned from taking any kind of work I could get my hands on (only income being art) to not needing to make money at all so I can pick and choose what to draw, when I looked at my galleries and profiles I really didn’t see myself or my brand in it, so, took everything down from earlier on so I could rebuild my own image and recapture a connection to my brand identity, idk if this is a super niche take for artists, but I know some that have gotten a bit distraught with their galleries largely being themes they just really didn’t care for beyond needing money to live.