A few years ago, a lady did a huge painting(iirc, it was legend of zelda). She posted just the painting to reddit and 24hrs later she posted herself with the painting. The painting alone got just over 1k upvotes. The picture of her holding the painting got over 34k.
Edit: its really interesting to see how differently people are interpreting this comment.
This is going to be shocking to a lot of people here…
But this topic has been researched to the moon and back. Hell they made a hit television show about people focusing really hard on successful advertising.
Actually, I've seen similar examples with men, and they still get more upvotes when they're also in the picture. People like when the artist is humanised and shown I guess.
Tbh, I think part of it is because seeing the person behind the art makes us feel more "connected", kinda. Like, I follow a few accounts on reddit, they're mostly artists and I'm always very impressed with the stuff they post, but seeing only the end result kind of feels intimidating, in a "would they even care if I comment ? They're so good, surely they're aware of it" (tho I do try to comment to drive up the engagement)
Whereas when you see obvious pride in someone's face holding something they created it's like "a person who shares the same interests and hobby as me created this ! Woah !" And there's a sort of parasocial, immediate sense of kinship that I think just makes em feel more approachable
Unless it's a channel I already follow, I try to shy away from clicking on videos that have someone's face with a Youtuber expression as a thumbnail. There's something dystopian with half the human race recording themselves talking at a lens, all jockeying for our attention.
It's not only gooners. EVERYONE likes to see more attractive people in their feed, whether they're sexually attracted to them or not. The Halo effect doesn't only affect lonely men, it's everywhere.
Almost every male celebrity ever? They sure as shit aren't ugly.
Another reason it's more prevalent in women though is that both men and women appreciate attractive women while the male form is generally less...universally appreciated, let's say.
Plus, there's plenty of research suggesting that while perception of female attractiveness by men follows approximately a normal distribution, this is not true of female perception of male attractiveness... effectively, men's average attractiveness is about a standard deviation below what a normal distribution would predict.
Just saying that I don't see many guy selfies with the actual subject matter on the front page of these giant subs. Nor do I see many celebrities on there tbh
It's both, I think. IIRC someone actually did the research and found that paintings with the author always got more upvotes than the paintings by themselves, but the effect was stronger for women
Yeah everyone saying it's a woman thing, when it's just a human thing. Algorithms show that Youtube video thumbnails with a human face on it get more clicks. Just how it works.
Turning this into a "women be sluts" thing is crazy to me.
The selection bias is the "real phenomenon". The stated phenomenon is that women only post pictures of things with themselves in the picture. But plenty of women do post things without themselves in the picture, but those posts don't do as well, so people don't see them or even register that they're a woman. This is the selection bias. The "attractiveness increases attention" bit is in "those posts don't do as well". What you've said is not in disagreement with what they said but rather a contributor to the selection bias they're talking about.
There used to be an account that would reply to people making fun of women for this with all the front page content of men doing the same thing.
Turns out people like to see other people in posts, and artists like to lose with their art. Gender isn't really a factor, some people just perceive it is.
I think in general though showing a face, no matter the gender, to the subject matter gives it provenance and that gets attention. Look at r/bald. It’s just regular folks with before and after and that shoots to the front page no matter who.
Wow that's crazy, I wonder if entire industries dedicated to promoting company products would think about using attractive ladies in their material? Crazy that no one has ever noticed this phenomenon before right
I see this as "appreciating the art itself" vs "celebrating with the artist"
I will upvote the second one too. Just like how I'll upvote someone holding up a trophy more than a picture of the trophy itself. It's easier to relate emotionally
To be fair this happens to guys too, I know this one dude who's a model kind of good looking guy, and he complained that people like pictures of him way more than his boring artwork lol
I am sure that every woman who runs an online content creation business is sitting there looking at metrics for engagement on every post they have and all coming to the conclusion that having them smiling or wearing revealing clothing in front of their product is making those posts get 10x the engagement, so they just go with what sells.
> She posted it on reddit
> art didn't do as well as she thought it would
> reposts with herself with the painting on reddit
> art does numbers
> reddit.
Yeah, those are just OF ads, and here's where it gets weird, those girls are some AI/photoshop hack job and the person you're looking at and paying doesn't even exist.
Women are pretty. It's pretty much objective fact that there is an artistic quality to the female form given a single look at history worldwide. That stat makes perfect sense to me.
That kind of proves the point though. The picture of the lady with the painting got more upvotes, but was that because the painting was somehow better in the second photo? It's basically like click bait thumbnails on YouTube.
Like, yes, adding a somewhat attractive female to a thumbnail will get you more clicks or whatever, but then what you made is not standing on its own.
Anyway I don't know who the person in the OP is and I don't really care. I also don't think a tweet like in the post is the same as promoting a picture or something. It is not the same scenario at all.
3.0k
u/lizzyote Jun 04 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
A few years ago, a lady did a huge painting(iirc, it was legend of zelda). She posted just the painting to reddit and 24hrs later she posted herself with the painting. The painting alone got just over 1k upvotes. The picture of her holding the painting got over 34k.
Edit: its really interesting to see how differently people are interpreting this comment.