this post is a collection of my thoughts and experiences being part of the aesthetic community on scratch. buckle up, there's lots of stuff here.
it all started when...
so around the end of 2021 i keep seeing all of these "aesthetic accounts": people who use symbols to decorate their profile, have a banner as their "featured project", and post projects that are essentially just slideshows, with heavily decorated thumbnails to match. i thought it would be fun, so i decided to try it. what happens next will shock you.
the experience
i... honestly don't know what i expected. it wasn't terrible, but it wasn't great.
fame
i see a lot of people talking about how some people "are only aesthetic for fame" and that aesthetic accounts "get hundreds of followers effortlessly within the first few weeks of them existing despite having not posted anything at all", and for some reason these statements (that are often merely opinions they reached from jumping to conclusions based on incomplete observation) are enough to get them to hate the entirety of aesthetic scratch. huh.
i don't know where those people get these assumptions from, but they are not true. nobody follows you "just for being aesthetic"; the few people who do get followers seemingly for no reason were probably lucky, or followed a bunch of people and ended up getting a lot of follows back. i don't know.
i know one thing, which is that my motivation to make aesthetic projects wasn't fame, or even community. i just did it because i thought it would be fun. it was fun, for a while. and then it got difficult.
work
don't get me wrong, i like being an aesthetic scratcher, but it takes so much time, energy, and creativity to make a single project that it's not even worth it anymore.
think about what is needed to make the slideshow-type project that aesthetic scratchers do. idea, execution of the idea, writing the result into the slides, coding the project (for those who code everything themselves), thumbnail (this alone is a whole set of processes: find background, find / make decor, decide on how to decorate thumbnail, actual editing), writing the description, finding a song to use... all that for a slideshow. which is essentially the bare minimum of what you can do with scratch. i don't know how they don't get burnt out.
although i guess they do, considering how many people leave after four weeks of starting.
"content culture" and forgetting your place
although welcome to be used by people of all ages for all purposes, scratch is an educational site meant for kids to learn coding. let's get that out of the way first.
i think part of the reason why aesthetic scratchers even exist at all ties in to the recent surge of people who joined scratch simply because they think it's just another social media site. is this correlation or causation? i don't know. but that's not the point. the point is that there's a third thing involved, which is the rise of the whole "content creation" thing. i could make a whole separate post about this, but basically, people see their projects as content that they post for others to consume, not creations they make to share with others.
aesthetic projects typically have contents similar to vlogs that you'd see on youtube or other video sharing sites. this is fine but i believe it's one of the signs of "content culture" (albeit a harmless one). it's not the fact that they're posting these, it's the fact that they're doing it on scratch. this would've meant nothing if these people weren't also "guarding" their content against being used "without permission".
before we move on, i'd like to remind you of one of the rules in scratch: all projects are remixable. to quote the faq:
We believe that remixing other people’s projects is a great way to learn to program and to create interesting projects. Through remixing, creative ideas spread through the Scratch community, and everyone benefits. All projects shared on the Scratch website are covered by the “Creative Commons Share Alike” license, which means that you can remix any project you see on the Scratch website -- and everyone else can remix any of the projects that you share on the website.
you got that? okay, great. hopefully i won't have to re-explain why saying "do not use without permission" is a problem here.
community drama and shit
something i've noticed within the aesthetic community (and this is present in other communities too but i mostly see it here) is that whenever anyone has a problem with someone else on the site, even just a personal one, they like posting rant projects and/or bringing other people into it. you could make one comment disagreeing with them—you don't even have to try to start a fight, just say something they disagree with—and the next day they'd move to a new account and immediately post a rant project about you. and then six months later they'd come back with another new account to "innocently" ask about it, thinking you wouldn't know it's them.
this may sound oddly specific, and that's because it is. it's happened to me. to be fair, there wasn't any major or long-term drama (it's literally just a disagreement between two people, and one of them decided to make a whole-ass project just to rant about it), but it happened.
conclusion
scratch is fun. i've just been hanging out with the wrong crowd.
the account still exists, by the way—i just no longer make "aesthetic projects" the way i used to anymore. nowadays, i do whatever i want lol.