vera ⛓️💙

Our thoughts on the state of brokers, and the fear a lot of artists are feeling right now: We've been reading your posts and seeing how affected you are by this. You've spent years learning to draw, and are now competing with brokers who steal work, use AI, and sell it for less. And clients are hurt by this too: they commission something in good faith, then find out they'd paid for unethical work. This is a legitimate issue, and every commission site is dealing with it, us included. We've found brokers here pretending to be individuals and studios, which we banned once we were able to confirm it. Other platforms are fighting the same thing, and we want them to win too. Artists as a whole are better off when every platform is a harder place for unethical brokers to operate. The questions we've been seeing, and our thoughts: "Why ban brokers? Some of them are ethical." Some are, and we don't doubt that. However, we felt the unethical ones outnumbered the good ones. Sorting the good from the bad case by case wasn't something a team our size could do reliably, and we would prefer for artists to sell directly so they can keep more of their earnings. "Even if you ban a broker, they'll just make a new account posing as an individual, so it's pointless." Even if that's true, it isn't a reason to stop. First, being a broker on our platform is against our TOS. Second, a ban does have consequences, even for brokers. A successful broker account usually takes time: tons of listings, reviews, followers, repeat clients, a social media presence with history... The new account has to start over from scratch. Imagine if your commission page was banned, and you had to change your identity entirely to open another one. Now imagine that happening over and over. Eventually, you may not want to even bother selling on that platform at all, and that's our goal with brokers. "If you don't allow brokers, why is there one on your platform?" Anyone who applies as a broker gets rejected. The ones who get through don't apply as brokers. A broker being here means they either got past our application by lying, or that they received a Creator Key from another artist that trusted them. Although we strive to 100% broker free, we can't promise that (no platform can) because there will always be bad actors and people who are dishonest. However, we do investigate and remove the ones we have evidence for. "I reported a broker that was labelled on another platform, why weren't they banned?" A ban or label on another platform is useful context, but we don't have access to the evidence behind another platform's decision. And when we ask these accounts why they were labelled a broker elsewhere, they say they were never given a reason for the label, and that it was inaccurately applied to their account. Please know we want to act on every legitimate report. However, we can't ban someone just because another site did. We have to treat reports with consistency and fairness, and that means acting on evidence: what you send us, or what we find ourselves when we investigate. So if you're reporting a broker, please gather evidence that can be independently verified, and submit it with your report. Our final thoughts: We understand the frustration, and we appreciate that you're holding platforms to a higher standard. People speaking up for what they believe in is how change happens. We also want to remind people: there's room to be kind while you advocate. There's been a lot of harsh criticism on here lately, and we've been seeing other platforms receive a lot of hate as well, so please remember that there are real people reading your words, and they can hurt. We know first hand that running a platform is not easy. We also don't earn as much as others due to our 0% commissions fees, and it's especially hard for us to hire more people to moderate at the moment. However, that's not stopping us from continuing to work hard and doing what we can with what we have. Thanks for reading if you made it this far, we'll continue to do our best to support you.