fresh submissions by default on artwork page

If you click on the fresh tab, next time you visit the artwork tab it'll begin from there instead of popular. Or it can also begin from your favorites or submissions from people you follow c:

Basically it goes on the subcategory you last visited.

This is great for the few users who actually think to click it, but the real advantage of having Fresh be the default, is newer images get the advantage of that "first glance notice" from the average user looking at the front page without thinking to look on their own.

Now just by design this doesn't work as well as somewhere like FA where literally going to furaffinity.com takes you to the main art feed. Furrynetwork.com just takes you straight to your "What's new?" feed, and thus cuts people off from casually noticing some new eye-catching piece on their way to their new watched content.

As a whole I think this requires just a couple small changes. Going to the main site should take one to the main "new art" feed, and it should be actual new artwork, and not pieces that are already getting large view counts.

The popular feed is a great idea, but it should come secondary to trying to promote new works by lesser known artists. We want to raise everyone up within the community equally, not simply feed more views to those who are already well known. Letting people look at those getting a lot of attention as a secondary measure is a nice feature though, but should not be the default.

Quick note, I'm going to use "artist" as a blanket term for all creators here for ease of use.

As much as you CAN change it, I think it's crucially important that this is the default for all people and they can then change it to popular if you want. This is because using just popular on it's own means no new artists/musicians/creators can get any form of notice without having a big following already from other sites. Making it so the newest stuff is seen first means that people will see new stuff and people will have their art and works seen by people. That's the only way artists can grow is with constant exposure, sure, you CAN change it to newest, but not many people will. Artists rely heavily on that stumble-upon nature of newest content first. Especially for someone like myself who works in an under-appreciated medium (music) in an under-appreciated genre within music (heavy metal). Without this many artists wouldn't be noticed at all. For this reason I think it's crucial that fresh is the default for viewing submissions.

I actually have a friend who refused to join up on this site, simply because the popular work got shown first. He felt like he'd be buried more than usual, and didn't want to bother.

There is a suggestion to make the "Fresh" category display first on the artwork pages over here:

http://support.furrynetwork.com/topics/274-fresh-submissions-by-default-on-artwork-page/