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Content creators, streamers, and entertainers are everywhere in the world around us. Some are comedic and make us laugh with a 6 second video a few times a day, some are educational and provide bit sized pieces of information the teach us something new or provide us with helpful tips for our daily lives, and some are entertainers and community builders who create little pockets of the internet for us to sit in and enjoy ourselves. Content creators are always looking for new ways to engage with and connect to their audience and for creative and artistic creators, we think we have just the thing.

Today is the day! Bard, originally known as Spart, is a community based social media platform for collaborative world building, storytelling, and discussion between artists, writers, actors, musicians, and more! We have been working on improving and evolving Bard over the last 8 months. This included everything from adding features, fixing bugs, and improving the look and feel of Bard to improving the underlying code so that we can continue to move quickly in the future. But let’s get to it, here is everything that has changed.

In a world where many of the platforms we use are transient, it’s important for creators to have a complete list of their biggest fans, peers, and connections. Newsletters are a great way to keep track of that list. Like all things, all these social platforms we use to sell and share our art are transient. They exist now but one day they will not and even the audiences we build on these platforms will join and leave over time.

Bard, the storytelling platform for creatives, is bootstrapped. For my non technical readers, what does that mean? To bootstrap a platform means to fund the platform through your own personal savings and revenue made from the platform itself. Bard is built in house, by me, along with all the marketing and outreach.

It’s not the end, we promise. If you don’t know what DALL·E 2 is, it’s an AI that can generate artwork from a sentence and/or images within a few seconds. That may include an art style, an artists name, or even a sample image from a piece of art you like and it's honestly pretty good at it. It’s basically a super power for people who want to sell artwork online without putting in much work.

The algorithm as many people on social media like to call it is sort of a generic term to describe the methods that a platform uses to determine what posts show up for which people. It has it’s benefits but it also has some pretty huge downfalls as we all know. In this blog I am going to dive into one of the purposes of the algorithm, how it affects artists, and how Bard offers an alternative solution.

Artists as a whole aren’t making money if they’re only getting paid by other artists. There are plenty of creative platforms out there that profit and take a few cents or even dollars off the top of creatives engaging with creators. This isn’t necessarily their goal but it is the reality.