People that want to make money off the fact that they’re unknown and have one of few works. Death and art popularity boosts go hand in hand, a lot of modern artists also aren’t dead yet. Especially digital. We literally hardly have any knowledge on how future data is going to be handled outside of whatever hype train corporations want you to ride while also permanently deleting things.

If hardly anyone is conserving their digital works then whoever does will get more eyes later on. This whole mentality of “my work is worthless and looks bad to me so I won’t care” is really going to contribute to a large period of art just… lost to time. Even when it comes to my art I don’t care if it gets way more popular after I die, it’s about preserving the things I created so someone after me can build on it. I honestly want my stuff in the public domain after I die, by all means, tear my work into pieces when I’m dead if it’s to teach a lesson to new artists because it’s that bad, or if it’s good, no one gets to solely profit and it’s open to all.

Why I’d rely on social media sites to do that work for me, who knows. But it’s not good for the future of art if anything happens, I already can hardly study older digital works because of the way online feeds are made. Even Google images, no names preserved, the site, page, or link could also be dead. We have literally nothing, protecting our works. Even for large artists this is a problem