notifications and Mental Health

It's one of those "I've stood in the shower too long" thoughts. So, get ready for my rambling thoughts.

I feel like art sites and notifications tend to have an unhealthy relationship. Not just from myself personally, but from how other people treat them as well. I think I noticed it in others before I noticed it in myself. I think a lot of notification systems i've experienced on art sites are not the best for mental health.

The urge to "Clean" notifications instead of leisurely view the content.

This one is one I noticed in others before I noticed how it affected myself first. People always talking about how they either have to keep their notifications at 0 or let it run up in size and stress over the amount of submissions they have to go through to get it down to 0. It hit me really hard today when the site [Itaku] implimented a notifiactions feature for submissions from folks i watch that it didn't have before. When I would go to this site previously, I would just hit my feed up and browse. This week since it's been implimented, I have had submission notifications and instead of viewing them I would go to clear my Notifications to "Clean" it. I didn't go to that feed to view art, i went there to clean a notification, and thus making viewing said art a chore.

I've felt this from artsites like DA, FA, Weasyl, etc too, but not to the realization of how this mindset effects how I interact with the artists I am following on all these artsites until I felt inconvenienced by this feature being added to itaku. On FA I just don't look at my submissions notifs anymore because I have at least 1500 at any given time over there. I often just let it get up to 10k, look at the first page, and nuke them so the number is 0 for a few minutes. I don't think that's a healthy relationship between me and the content i want to enjoy.

The Impending weight of Worth based on Fav counts.

Artists tend to have low self esteem. I can't tell you how many journals I read each month about an artist feeling like they aren't good enough or that they'll never be this or that. Along with those conversation often comes up the theme of Fav counts or view counts. A lot of artists have a very unhealthy relationship with Favs. It's always been a notif I don't particularly like to care about and thought a bit of an anoiying notif, but I always see how much people use their fav count to tear and break themselves down. I've even had to unwatch an artist before because they become so obsessed with their fav count that they only ever talked about or complained about it.

"People don't like my art anymore, i only got x favs this week" "I must be a shitty artist, no one likes my art" "Why did X get this many favs by Y get none? I worked harder on that." "I'll never be as good as Z artist, they get way more attention than me". "I don't want to get stuck drawing fanart/nsfw because it gets more favs/views." That sort of mindset based around those stats is so commonly plaguing creators that it is nearly unbearable to listen to once they get hyper obsessed about it.

This interaction with favs is like.... one of the most unhealthy things in the art community. I'm glad I don't feel the same way, and just think the notification blip is annoiying, but also at the same time I wish that Favs were a notif that can be turned off. So far only IB can turn the fav notif off, and that mostly helps with the "must clean notif dot" mindset for me, but I think it'd be good for artists with this unhealthy obsession with worth based on favs a little bit if on other sites.

Honestly, I kinda feel that a fav notif should be opt-in because of how badly obsessed people get about it. or like... a notif not even existing. I think a notif not existing would be better so that its a silent stat like views.

I dunno, i kinda think the relationship between notifications and the users needs to be looked at a bit more. How obsessed do you get over your own notifs and how often do you also see other people struggling?