Pertains to this thread aimed at certain users posting webcomics after cropping or stripping out the artists signatures / credit from the post. The thread had 1,262 upvotes, so it’s gotten a fair amount of attention and seems to be important in the view of many users based on the comments, as upvotes don’t necessarily equate to approval.

One such offender of this behavior responded with this post calling attribution “advertisement”.

There was also another post mentioning the same issue by another user with 299 upvotes.

There seems to be confusion regarding attribution and signatures with advertising watermarks, whether intentional or not.

Attribution as in signatures, are put there in the same way any classical artist might sign a painting. They put their effort into making something that’s important to them, they deserve the credit for their creation. Typically as well, the signatures are unobtrusive as most artists don’t want to detract from their work. They deserve to be left on the post. Even better is if you link to the artists website where the post can be found, or at least to their social media post where you saw it since they get no clicks out of a rehosted image.

Advertising watermarks added by a platform simply because you rehosted an image on its servers and shared it from there serve no purpose and detract from the image. Same thing with social media users adding their handle to an image they didn’t create. These absolutely should be stripped or cropped out if the original unmarked image can’t be found, in my opinion. Additionally providing a link back to sites like Reddit where you saw a post or meme, unless the artist shared it there, is unnecessary, especially when it comes to shitty sites like x or Reddit. You don’t need to give credit to some random account that just shared a meme.