I know you’re getting a lot of flack on this, but I can understand hating seeing ads everywhere. I’m also very anti advertisement, everything on the internet gets made worse by the constant need to shove advertising down our throats.

Artist signatures and accreditation however is not advertisement, you wouldn’t call a signature on a painting an ad. Not saying some artists don’t use comics to push their books or Patreon or whatever, but I feel that’s in their right to use their art as a platform to support their ability to continue to create said art. I think if you’re uncomfortable with that, the best option would be to not share their work at all.

That being said I doubt I can change your mind, but I’d like to present the argument I gave in another comment nonetheless.

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.