I remember back in the late 2000s, I used to spend a lot of time on DeviantArt and even shared my own artwork. I can't remember why or when I stopped using the site.
Do you still use it? Did your usage drop off in the last decade? Why?
Former gallery admin/volunteer staff here (2004-2008):
The site got bought by Wix a few years back and is a mixed bag at this point.
It's had a long history of junior management/hubris making avoidable errors and missing opportunities to lead (I also attribute this to being led from LA, by very inexperienced management, where media/content properties see things through a very Big Content distorted prism in and of itself).
The site still has some charms, and its print service is still quite good, but overall it's killed much of the community that built it, and is trying to become...something that it doesn't seem to have articulated very well. While many attribute this to the "redesign" I think that's largely a red herring (the sites been redesigned several times, everyone kvetched ferociously and got over it) but its the underlying drivers of what the site is trying to extract from users, and the manner by which it is going about it that is more of whats detrimental to its long term stability let alone growth.
It's UX has always been a bit of a mess, now its still that way, just differently.
DeviantArt was the first place where I shared photography, a very, very long time ago. My account still works, funnily enough. It was a great place that reminds me of the MySpace / wild west days of the earlier internet.
The PMs were beholden to execs. At one point I interviewed for a PM role there, and realized they couldn't afford me to suffer that level of chaos.
DA leadership was either bunkered in R&D projects, or glibly shifting gears every other week. It was mostly torpor-inducing, but occasionally totally exasperating. I imagine it was infinitely worse for the paid staff.
I used to have an account with a bunch of art there. Not anymore. Some time after the redesign I deleted everything and now I only rarely visit the site. The only thing I miss is contact with a few artists I got to know through the site.
Off the top of my head, some of the reasons:
After the redesign the site was practically unusable on my computer. Viewing a single artwork froze my browser and took a minute or two of fans on full before anything showed on screen. I think they fixed that eventually, but it was too late.
They made it difficult to browse through single artist's gallery. When viewing an artwork, the default thing they did was guide you to a "similar" artwork from the entire site. This was very confusing to me at first and made it inconvenient to use the site the way I wanted - the fact that every click took ages to load didn't help either.
They broke RSS feeds.
They added a bunch of dark patterns to make people create an account. For example, even for artwork I explicitly marked as downloadable they forced you to sign in for it.
Probably other things I can't remember anymore. For a while I used their "use old theme" setting, but I think they later removed that, or made it annoying to use. In general, the new site was a completely different thing compared to the old one and I found no enjoyment in using it.
It looks like the site lost a large part of its community and visitors with the redesign. It makes me curious about how this process proceeded from the viewpoint of the site's owners. Any redesign will upset people who invest a lot of time in a website, but there must come a point where metrics show that the new website caused a drop in visits and uploads with no sign of improving.
What I wonder is if despite the general impression that the site has failed it is still meeting the goals set by its owners, and what does goals might be.
As a casual visitor, the site's redesign thoroughly broke searching and browsing art for me, and it soon started to get a graveyard kind of feel.
> What I wonder is if despite the general impression that the site has failed it is still meeting the goals set by its owners, and what does goals might be.
I can't imagine that it's meeting any goals at this point. It appears to be mostly on life support.
The site sold for an incredibly small sum of money. I believe it was less than $1 million. Considering what it once was, the sale price was astonishingly low. I think the founders chose the only apparent option that would keep the site alive and save at least a few of the core staff from losing their jobs. I will give them credit, the management team really did care about the site and the users when I worked there, which was from early 2009 to early 2013.
It was the best job I ever had and I loved every minute of the nearly 5 years I spend there. I learned more from that job than any other time in my career and it was really formative for me as an engineer. They had an amazing engineering culture which I haven't found elsewhere. At least sometime in the past they had a really strong drive to create the best place for artists and an incredible team working on making that happen, despite some missteps and controversial decisions. I think what they achieved is remarkable, especially given the small amount of outside investment they took. It was once among the very top sites on the internet, running on a tiny budget with a small team executing really well.
I credit much of the engineering culture to $randomduck and $mccann but there were a lot of brilliant engineers and inspired people working there. I'm happy the site survives in some form but it's sad to see how far it's fallen.
Yes, the UX deteriorated over the years. DA was my main source for desktop wallpapers and Winamp skins until newer repositories sprang along, such as wallbase/wallhaven and most recently webamp as highlighted by a recent HN post.
> ... dark patterns to make people create an account.
Those two where the reason I left the site, I frequently bought posters/prints there and also sold some myself. At the time, the site where the go-to-place for art and I think it was also the biggest? Looks like they overestimated how much their crap their members where willing to deal with and how hard it is to draw in new ones..
It's funny you should say that about the redesign because I never had an account there, I was just a lurker and followed links to Deviantart. But at some point I remember the site being impossible to use and I just gave up, eventually I stopped following links to the site.
It's crazy to think they'd allow someone to make such a horrible design decision.
> They added a bunch of dark patterns to make people create an account. For example, even for artwork I explicitly marked as downloadable they forced you to sign in for it.
What makes it more ridiculous is that at the sign-in page, that artwork loads as the background of the page, which means that they in fact loaded it but put a dark pattern to prevent people grabbing it. I have to rely on "view source" to get the direct link.
Same here, deleted all accounts.
They bet on being some mobile abomination
built on facebook-type javascript-based
dynamic pages(and really slow, cludgy javascript btw) which ruined everything the old site had, instead pushing premium
membership to people they ignored for decades and changing aspects (e.g.
art discovery) to push their professional/commercial 'art gallery'-type expirience which failed(site was mainly
geared for amateur art)
and they had to sell it to Wix.
Thanks for the summary. Never really used the site much, but I recall lots of artist friends back in the day sharing/hosting their stuff there. DA seemed to have a lot of community goodwill.
Overall, it's the same story again and again - in trying to become more like Google, they forgot how to be your friend. Turns out dark patterns aren't all that great long-term, huh? They probably haven't stacked up their mountain of JavaScript high enough.
A valuable lesson to keep in mind as I work on my future projects.
> They made it difficult to browse through single artist's gallery. When viewing an artwork, the default thing they did was guide you to a "similar" artwork from the entire site. This was very confusing to me at first and made it inconvenient to use the site the way I wanted - the fact that every click took ages to load didn't help either.
This was the killer, for me.
I'm glad it's there, because it has a few artists that I like, but otherwise, it's worthless.
I did, once, try to purchase some art on the site. A 3D artist had a model (a snake), that I wanted to get, in order to create some branding.
It was real pain, figuring out how to contact them. When I did contact them, I never got a response. It may have been the artist, or it may have been DeviantArt. No idea.
But they never got their money, and I never got the art.
I started browsing it again recently and it's really been nice. It avoids some of the issues that were bothering me with other platforms. Discoverability has had some interesting focus as well. I'm finding lots of new art that is relevant to my interests, and also more authentic which has always been a strength of DA.
I haven't posted any art there in a while but that's not due to the platform itself.
Anyway just my 2c, but it looks like a well-maintained and relevant art platform from where I'm at.
I feel like ArtStation is more geared towards professionals artists and illustrators. It's a blast if you're browsing but lack the community side of Deviantart.
I feel the internet that existed when deviant art made sense has sorted of died off, Today the web seems more about people all trying to get fame, make political statements or cash for every little thing they do.
Deviant art like so many of the sites that were mostly supported by a sense of community have died off, and given the massive potential for blow back over a communities behavior it seems unwise for newer sites to push that side of things.
I used to use it and stopped, not sure when or why.
I think most people just started using Instagram and Twitter to share art? Most pros in the games industry use ArtStation now along with Twitter. I think it's less important to share with other artists than people in the same industry.
Used it to find an artist and commission artwork last year. It looks and feels different, but not enough so that it's unfamiliar. It nags more now, just like the rest of the internet. I use it about as much as before, which is not all that much until I need something specific.
Wow, that's a blast from the past. DeviantArt was one of those sites that made me wonder, how did they build this? I just looked at it now and looks nothing like I remember, though. Just a generic themed image tile thing now.
My account there is 11 years old, almost as old as my child, who uses it all the time. I used to be fairly active on Flickr until I rage quit after some issues with the UI, an act I've grown to regret more with each passing year. I got a lot of Flickr traffic from there back in the day.
I've got a whopping 5 photos posted there, good ones though, if you're into synthetic aperture photography
Used it a lot until they turned off the old UI - this killed DeviantArt for me as it was not possible anymore to discover the content reliably. They ditched categories entirely, with no alternative. I'm still sad about this, as DA was absolutely awesome. No, I'm not sad ... I'm a bit angry, I have to say. It's another great site that needlessly got fucked by greed, modernization, ignorance and a lot of other bad stuff happening way too often these days ... I think i would even pay for DeviantArt reverting this stuff.
Edit: Asked on reddit how to navigate on DeviantArt some year ago [1] - still nobody could give me an answer. But a few noticed the same thing: Absence of Navigation ...
I lurked on it for a long time. My online habits switched more and more from pc to mobile in the 2010's. The mobile experience on deviant art via app as I remember it felt clunky. That led to me checking deviantart a lot less. Haven't conducted a survey though, I can only speak for myself. But maybe others have had similar experiences?
Update: at first glance, the deviantart app does seem to have a lot of bad reviews. That might explain a lot.
I used to draw all the time and used DeviantArt quite a bit for about a decade. I didn't post all that much, but I used it all the time for inspiration, stock photos for models, color schemes, examples of good shading technique or composition, new styles to try out, etc.
Then went through a bit of a tough patch and got out of the habit of drawing, so I haven't looked at it much in a few years.
Looking at it now, it appears they ripped out all of the UI and navigation and hid everything except for a few tiled images and a search bar. There's not even a proper pager, just a 'Next' link. The community stuff is all hidden. The categories, all hidden.
That's really sad. There's so much stuff there, and now it's all hidden away where people will never see it unless they know exactly what to search for and get lucky.
Stopped using it after the redesign a while back. The site feels like a puzzle box when you use it, whereas it used to be quite approachable and easy to sift through the loads of content on it.
It seems it's only gotten worse over time and I have little incentive to go back.
Occasionally I try to browse it (plenty of nice landscape photos there), but it nearly freezes FF at once (on a powerful desktop computer, even), and now it presented me with a page saying that something went wrong on their end while trying to check it.
It's similar with imgur: another image hosting that used to be usable and served pictures without requiring registration, but not anymore (well, it still serves them, just not as lightweight as it used to be, and a bit more buggy). As well as with smaller image galleries before that; not many websites, software projects, or just any sorts of projects in general seem to stay nice for a long time.
In 2000s I used to. Then at some point my interests shifted a bit. After some more years I decided to see how it's doing and saw that they made the ugliest, most unusable, horrible design ever. We were also much more mobile and there was a much cooler app, Instagram, for discovering art, with a MUCH better interface and social features.
dA had great potential IMO, but whoever was responsible for their design changes and their inability to jump to the mobile bandwagon properly killed it.
I think people are using artstation mostly these days, although it does seem like artstation caters to a more professional crowd, and deviantart attracted more amateurs.
Beyond, once in a blue moon, following a link to DA from social media, not in the last decade or so.
With the wave of web 2.0 sites like tumblr, pinboard, reddit, etc., digital artists have so many choices of where to post their content, so Deviant Art became just another option, and not a particularly attractive one either.
I did but closed my profile like 10 years ago or so. I was working on an icon set for KDE and shared my progress there, but afterwards started noticing that my work ended on several websites that didn't gave me any credit. When asked, all of them told me they just "took them off DeviantArt".
I used to troll it a lot. At one point, when I first signed up, it was an incredible source of undiscovered great art, but at some point it devolved into narcissistic selfies. I created folders name "fat women" and "uglies" and put all selfies in it
I used to spend a lot of time at DA with Linux customisation. There used to be it's own category which was useful. Now I have to filter through screeds of nudes and shit to find anything. It's not worth the effort.
My 14 year old daughter managed to find it by herself through her friends. I've only really ever used it to find nice wallpapers but my daughter is a pretty talented artist and she loves the site.
I got tired of looking at drawings of fantasy females with wings and pointy ears and perfect tits. Perhaps I would have found this more compelling if I wasn't gay, but I doubt it.
I used to spend a lot of time there and was given a Deviousness Award in 2001. I was one of the earliest accounts on the site. That was a long time ago.
The site got bought by Wix a few years back and is a mixed bag at this point.
It's had a long history of junior management/hubris making avoidable errors and missing opportunities to lead (I also attribute this to being led from LA, by very inexperienced management, where media/content properties see things through a very Big Content distorted prism in and of itself).
The site still has some charms, and its print service is still quite good, but overall it's killed much of the community that built it, and is trying to become...something that it doesn't seem to have articulated very well. While many attribute this to the "redesign" I think that's largely a red herring (the sites been redesigned several times, everyone kvetched ferociously and got over it) but its the underlying drivers of what the site is trying to extract from users, and the manner by which it is going about it that is more of whats detrimental to its long term stability let alone growth.
It's UX has always been a bit of a mess, now its still that way, just differently.