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PaperclipPerfector  20hr ago (text post)   744 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for March 20, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Designing items myself gives me a bit of a moat between myself and the bulk of the drop shipper industry people who either have to buy designs from other designers or have to sell the same generic goods that everyone else is trying to sell so they must differentiate heavily on marketing, brand positioning, funneling, conversion tactics or whatever.

Hm. I've been looking at side gigging some small run stuff, but I've been worried that this moat isn't likely to survive long, if it's even alive at all, now. The furry fandom's kept a large portion of the previous demand for normal artists, partly because of the various politics, and partly because non-artist furries have awful tastes (myself included)... but there's already content you can get from AIgen in minutes that you can't get from a normal artist in months, if at all.

It is a numbers game. I have made over 40,000 unique designs over the past 10 years or so. In the beginning I didn’t know what people wanted so I made 100 different designs at a time, then had to wait and see what people bought. Out of 100 designs maybe 10 of them would sell at all. I would take the 10 that sold and make 100 more variations of each of those, then just keep doing that.

From the inside, does this feel at all like you're getting Whispering Earring'd? People who go hard onto this philosophy seem like they become little more than conduits for the algorithm -- not just extremes like Mr. Beast or Linus Tech Tips who praise A-B Over All, but even some pretty small-time 'winners' seem to take massive swerves to whatever gets hits. It seems like it should be possible to find a decent middle-ground (eg dejojotheawsome on YouTube seems to be doing a bunch of horror mod minecraft stuff for the hits, and then Vintage Story for fun), but that's hard to tell from outside.

I can't tell you for sure whether I think your small run side gig would be profitable or not without hearing really specific details about it, so I can't really comment for sure. But as it currently stands people still love art from real people. You have to keep in mind that that is a large selling point for a large amount of people. Just because there's a machine that can create what they want doesn't mean some people wouldn't be willing to pay for art made the old fashioned way.

From the inside, does this feel at all like you're getting Whispering Earring'd?

Yeah, kinda. Which is why I like to keep the POD drop shipping part of my brain separate from my actual creative endeavor brain :). I do a handful of side gig stuff that I make little money from just for fun currently. Eventually I will switch back to doing something like that full time, but for now I need to make money to last me a few years and if it's at the whims of an algorithm then so be it.

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