Thinking about old(er) DeviantArt

[Bakartridge]

Remembering how the site used to have a REALLY good design (both when they initially launched and from 2006 or so until like 2020), was a simple, effective design that looked really damn good and offered spaces for custom graphics on your page. Had a full burgeoning community too, I remember the chats and forums were constantly full and had people talking in em constantly. Then they screwed it completely up with the Eclipse redesign in 2020 that made it bloated, unusable, take up way too many resources, and basically killed the site and its relevance right then and there. It's honestly up there in terms of the worst web redesigns ever, up there with the Digg redesign in 2010 that broke tons of stuff and led people to hop onto Reddit, appropriate bc the DA redesign led lots of artists to jump ship to other places (mainly Twitter, unfortunately). Then it got worse in 2022 when DA leaned hard into the AI nonsense and the site has never really recovered. This whole thing just makes me so sad because DA means a lot to me, been going on there in one form or another since 2010, and was the first place I uploaded my own creations under my current(-ish) name, I even had a DA shirt for a while in 2017, so seeing it just completely go to crap is so upsetting. Though honestly, even if they reverted everything and went back to how it was tomorrow, the damage is already done, so maybe it's for the best the site just dies and better art websites spring up (like Sheezy and Cara).
Kind of a long and ramble-y post, just wanted to get it out there.

[dream]

You just reminded me of customize.org. Both sites then felt more like passion projects than software as a service businesses. Wish DA had maintained its style and just improved functionality / accessibility, kinda like how I perceive craigslist has done.

[invader_gvim]

The decline of Deviantart reminds me a lot of this article. Imo we can create a new place just as good as deviantart just by remaining a community and not a crowded bus station full of nameless faces. While I'm sad that old deviantart is gone, I'm also happy that it once existed. It was a good place.

Sometimes I feel sad about the old places where I posted art being gone in the same way, and it makes me want to not create. However there are still places to share them. I simply just have to share them with the few people who choose to look, as opposed to the crowd of faceless everyone.

The internet has a bright future and it is because of the creative spirit that isn't motivated by a company trying to get a bigger and bigger number of people to come and visit. A much happier model is finding something that invites people to stay and create, as opposed to visiting and watching.