Dear Random Artists in my Discord DMs
One of the great joys of being a regular Discord user is the occasional rando spam offering in your direct messages from folks who share servers with you.
Contacting People for Money is Business not Art - Stop Wasting Time with Solicitations
A favorite trope of mine that I haven’t seen in a while consists of someone claiming they bought a virtual knife from me on Steam and that I must talk to a Steam representative pronto to get it resolved or my Steam account would be in jeopardy. This all takes place in Discord direct messages which makes absolute sense if you’re a dumb criminal. Why wouldn’t Steam simply use my email address? Speaking of email, LoBlast gets a few offers a week from SEO companies offering to help with LoBlast’s google rankings. Often they ask if they can send more information. Why don’t they simply send all the info the first time? Because they are vampires who require permission to enter your virtual domicile. This is known as B2B or “butt-to-butt” business (because “business-to-business” business is redundant). LoBlast doesn’t hang out on LinkedIn because it’s 95% butt-to-butt business with random messages of “my business can help your business do more business if you give my business business. Can I send more information?” Vampires.
So that begs the question: Are artists actually vampires? Only the ones in my Discord DMs introducing themselves with things like “hello?”, “you there?”, or “lol”. Instead of asking if they can send more information (vampire), they put you in the position of small talk participation. Never do they start by addressing the point. Often times you have to pry the reason out of them on why they are even contacting you. Eventually you get some sort of sob story. Then you see the art. Usually 4-9 pieces of various styles. Is it created by AI? Who knows.
(above) a bunch of images with seemingly random filenames like 5d84c47.jpg, -be0e-4e76-bdf8-946063fdcbd9-1.jpg, image_36.png, and IMG-20250930-WA0007.jpg
The most recent artist in my DMs showed me 9 pieces of art. Lately, I’ve decided to stop ignoring solicitors and instead be intensely, maybe even comically, enthusiastic about their offerings. If they want to spend all this energy doing sales then who am I to deny them an opportunity to waste both of our time. One SEO company was so impressed by my enthusiasm that they dug up my personal number and gave me a call. I told them they work in a very crowded market space, hung up, and felt gross because now I’m being stalked by the vampires. So I told the artist I wanted all 9 of the demo pieces to which they quoted me $900. That’s a great deal for them. They don’t even have to make new art as a commission earning artist. $900 for images they already shared to me for free.
Easy Steps to Better Represent Yourself
Get yourself a friggin’ website. Or even just a friggin’ webpage. Get on https://neocities.org/. Make some friends on social media. Have social media to make friends with. Post your art there and repost other peoples’ art like you belong to a community or something so you at least appear to have any passion for the thing you are trying to make money off of.
Ok, that’s not fair. I was so “enthusiastic” they probably didn’t have a reason to share those links, but if they simply started out sharing their work and presence as an artist I wouldn’t be inspired to act in this way. They usually claim that they can’t get any commission work anymore because of “scammers and art bots” but also act just like a scammer or art bot. At least now I can link them this blog rant going forward.
