Some years ago when I was out with a few friends we ended up at a local club that was – for lack of a better description – slowly dying.
I couldn’t say why this was the case but for whatever reason the clientele had started going elsewhere for their weekend dose of booze and bass, with the owners so desperate to pull people in that they were allowing free entry along with drink tokens to anyone who’d cross the threshold. Still free entry and free liver punishment just wasn’t enough, once I got inside the place was predictably barren with scatterings of unenthused teens lurking on dance floor’s outskirts. This might have been a depressing enough sight in itself, but to make matters worse a contrastingly enthusiastic band soon appeared to play, who received little more than irritable glares and jeers in exchange for their music. They weren’t at all bad, but they were most definitely in the wrong place.
The point? Lately, The Duck has been emitting the same kind of atmosphere as that club and I’ve gotten a sense of how that band might have felt.
This is not say that the site is ‘dying’ or that I would wish such a fate upon it, but I can’t deny that the community seems off kilter in the wake of the recent update. I will stress here that I’m not having some sort of immature tantrum over the underwhelming feedback I have(n’t) received, just pointing out its abnormality.
During earlier uploads to its previous incarnation ‘Drunk Duck‘, my comics were less accomplished in just about every regard not to mention sparsely updated but I could usually accrue at least two or three comments in a matter of days. By contrast, continuously uploading pages through a week with barely a peep seems odd; I’d never expected to draw vast amounts of praise or anything as I’m sure my work doesn’t warrant it, at the same time though it can’t be that bad.
Looking at other comics besides my own the reduced number of comments appears to fit this trend, supporting the idea that a large portion of the community has simply left the site. Thinking about the months in which the changeover was happening I recall there being a lot of animosity towards the administration/owners, with more than few authors saying they’d leave if things weren’t sorted out. I can only assume that the threat was made good on.
I know I said I’d be patient, but I was counting on getting a significant amount of feedback not just for personal satisfaction but to analyse and include in my upcoming module essay. Were a month to pass like this with only a handful of responses from The Duck it would hamper my work severely leaving me little to write about in that area. So it is that I’ve accelerated matters and begun uploading elsewhere sooner than planned.
ComicFury was brought to my attention by regular reader Demontales (thanks!) as a possible alternative, and having looked over it myself in preparation there’s a lot to like. Besides being advert free (for now) the interface and general management is much more straightforward than the current system on The Duck, with many of its old users resurfacing there. The ratings system also seems more likely to provoke honesty too being anonymously done rather than attached to a user.
Having just setup and begun posting there I’ll admit my layout isn’t as tidy as the one The Duck, but it’s functional at least and doesn’t hamper reading. I’ll be posting on both sites as of now so ideally I should see a lot more feedback and commenting in the days to come.
Posted by Ozy 
Growing Branch 