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Comment by neom | Hacker News Reader

From 2001-2007 I worked on helping build the community at dA. Had such an interesting and unique childhood and teenage years due to deviantART (and IRC). I owe everyone from that time a huge thank you for helping me become who I am today. It lost all it's magic (for me) when Scott and Eric Kolb left. Angelo is an absolutely amazing guy and I really really admire him but it was pretty sad to watch the community die. FYI, Chris Bolt the dude who built a lot of the tech there is INCREDIBLY and if you can figure out how to hire him, hire him - afaik he hasn't worked anywhere else in the last 17 years.

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I remember chatting with Scott on ICQ when he was building the site at the very beginning. He sent me a link to test uploading something, which I did - a screenshot of my desktop. It's one of if not the oldest remaining submissions, and was the first 'daily deviation' (for lack of other content, I'm sure!).

Lots of great people around communities like this back in the day, but then so many of us seemed to grow out of them.

Oh c'mon, you have to link to a piece of internet history like that!

To save you the quick google search, this is it: http://dangeruss.deviantart.com/art/A-Dangeruss-QNX-12

It is the oldest submission not performed by deviant art staff and the oldest submission still online.

Awww, QNX! I remember booting that from floppy disk, must have been '97 or early '98... (I wonder if there's an ARM SoC version of it? I'm guessing I must have been running that on a Pentium grade machine - a Raspberry Pi or NextThing CHIP is _way_ more powerful...)

It is only pretending to be QNX, it's really Windows...

Here's the (genuine) QNX boot floppy demo, BTW. Alas, my new laptop doesn't have enough RAM to run it.

http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html

It was this one: http://pressf8.deviantart.com/art/bSCATES-Desktop-2-1-19

I think there's one that's older by url count, but this was the first featured one, and I think second oldest surviving.

I was there from 2000-2006 and feel the exact same. I grew up on deviantART. All my friends were there. It opened my eyes to many forms of creativity and I may have never become a designer or entrepreneur without it.

At the risk of embarrassing myself, here's what I was up to from ages 15-20: http://a-t-o-m-i-c.deviantart.com/

Same here. I loved the community in the early 2000s. I actually met my wife on DeviantArt in 2002 and been happily married for 12 years now. My life would have been very different without that community. My wife and I both left the community pretty soon afterwards, though. It just changed too much after the switch in leadership.

The 00s decade in general seems to have been the high point for small/idependent/hobby-based online communities in general.

You too can create an off world colony.

I think I was there from 2002 to 2004 but the language barrier was too big for me. God I was a mopey kid then. Here's my embarrassing page: http://sosa.deviantart.com/

I know who you are. I used Impulse for a long time. Kudos on that. I've had three accounts, the first one when dA launched, but then when I became an admin I created http://johnedgar.deviantart.com and deleted the old one, and then when I started working on other aspects of the community I created http://neom.deviantart.com.

Damn, I forgot I even had an account there for a brief time. 15 years or so, damn. I think even the email provider I had account with went bust. No way to recover the account. http://keyframe.deviantart.com/gallery/ here's my embarrassment in support to you! Real edgy, I was.

I remember that Winamp skin \o/

I used your Impulse skin for WinAmp for several years, in my opinion the best looking one ever for that application. The rest of your work is equally excellent, you have nothing to be embarrassed about!

I remember those Skins. Didn't you also post on Skinz.org?

I can definitely say good things about Chris - I remember standing in front of the many racks of servers in LA doing hands-on maintenance with him guiding me over the roar of the fans via phone... I've done lots since then and I'm still impressed at the efficiency they had in both hardware/software for their huge site load and minimal render times. Chris is a very knowledgeable, skilled guy. Angelo was genuine and had a good thing going... also hosted some great dinners and loved to talk shop/tech/nerd out. I really hope this turns out well for all.

Was it you that caused the fire? ;)

Would you care to elaborate what was so amazing about the dA community? I ask sincerely as someone who was never a part of the community. I've visited the site in passing a few times, so I know of it. But would love to hear the specifics as to what makes (or made) dA such a great place for you (and others of course!)

DA has always had a culture of being a safe place online to post something you've made without fear of ridicule. I joined in 2001 as a person-who-liked-drawing but had no scanner, so I tried out writing, since that was a category on there that other people were doing, and I got terrific feedback from a handful of strangers, who quickly became friends. Now I consider myself a writer. Programmer/writer, but writer nonetheless, and I don't think that would have happened without DA. I eventually became a programmer there for a while too, so maybe I wouldn't have become either of those. ;)

Anyway, as far as I could see, that welcome-to-the-community experience was happening to everyone who joined, if they were participating at least. It's bigger now, so it's hard to bump into the right people when you're new, but that same DNA is still there. Read the comments on any popular piece - it's usually positive and constructive. And often extensive.

I don't know if I'm replying well; I feel like this ultimately just sounds like "you had to be there" - but when it comes down to it, I believe the amazingly positive culture is the answer to "what was amazing?"

I think this is exactly it. Kindness was something built-in from day one, it was core to everyone who was responsible for steering a community. We talked about loving each other and loving the community very often and publicly and loudly. It also came from the top. Scott Jarkoff (co-founder) and especially Eric Kolb (dir of community) are really great people, they encouraged and in fact mandated a general idea of no assholes. Everyone on the community team had a lot of lee way to ban, and we banned liberally and often for anything that was even remotely off tone or out of culture. The cool thing about banning from the admin side is it was build in a "time out" manner, when you banned someone you would generally set a period of time the ban was for, and it was pretty difficult to ban someone for life. Rehabilitation was something we actively promoted. We worked pro-actively to resolve conflicts out in the open. We also made a pretty deliberate effort to instill a culture of positive critique and criticism. If someone posted something that was harsh or to the point, you could generally expect an experienced community member to reply with a suggestion to start with a compliment or something similar. Sometimes someone would even re-write a whole crit for a new member to show how it's done. We tried to humanize the site as much as possible too, profiles became very important, we encouraged people to be very personal in their journals. It was for sure lots of little things, such as around 2005 (I think but don't quote me) the community staff started talking among themselves about having a photo as their profile, not an avatar. The IRC community was also quite large and vibrant, and again the tone was always positive. Pedanticism was STRONGLY discouraged. Every time I was coached by Eric or Scott, it was always super: "you are awesome here is how you can improve btw we love you, be more awesome, you are awesome." - This is what Scott wrote on my linked randomly one day, you can get a sense of the type of dude he is: http://john.je/jIP5 -- As a note, this is the exact same way that the DigitalOcean community was built. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714513

This culture sounds awesome. Prescient and rare nowadays.

fear of ridicule you say.

I deleted my account because a workmate found my lightsaber rotoscoping on DA.

I guess they mean you wouldn't fear ridicule from other DA members. But this is still the internet, people will find your stuff and possibly make fun of you because some people are just plain idiots.

I thought it was cool to learn rotoscoping i was trying to be the star wars kid or anything.

personal hug box, with areas to challenge your creativity and request the harshest of criticism if you so desired.

putting yourself out there in this way was also part of the networking aspect, as it was hard to get any attention to your artwork.

as we've seen to this day across a plethora of networks, nobody has come up with a real solution to discoverability in the face of volume, and I fear machines are just going to learn to do it the same way as humans.

Hear hear. Without deviantArt and the incredible support of the community I would have never gotten into product design.

Also, hi

Jeroen!!!!! Hello!!! Hope you are well and awesome to run into you on HN.

Haha, I am very well. Yourself? Hit me up on Twitter @jmulder to catch up!

I deleted my twitter because it's a distracting insular tire fire, however, I'll find you on FB. :)

Sorry to interject, but does this imply that FB is not a distracting insular tire fire? hmm...

Personally, I have only a few very close friends, and I only open FB once or twice a week to see what their kids are doing. so no, for myself it isn't.

To everyone reminiscing in this thread:

Better make a repository of your works, quickly! Who is to say it will be the same site in a few months, or weeks.

Indeed - I was half expecting this to be an Our Incredible Journey dot tumblr.com post...

Thank you for your role in creating such an amazing community. Things definitely began to decline post '07 and I eventually retired my dA accounts back in '12... But you're right, the experience it offered was completely unique and will be a subject of my nostalgia for the rest of my life. I met so many great friends through common interests, and would never have continued my interest in writing without it. And I almost certainly wouldn't be working as a web developer today.

I am currently drafting what I think could be this generation's dA, improving upon some of its shortcomings and offering new collaboration tools.

If you have the time and think you could provide some insight, I would love to email you some questions about your experiences building that kind of community, because it is exactly the kind of community I wish to serve.

Well... that's the first time I've ever been thanked. So, you're welcome. I think DeviantART worked pretty well because of the team that was charged with looking after it. We screened community leaders pretty heavily for being genuinely kind and good humans who, in very many cases, cared more about the community than the art. I think everyone who worked on community building really appreciated and loved art and (selfishly) realized that the way we could see the best art was to attract the best artist, and the best artists would only come to a safe place they could learn and grow without fear. Scott Jarkoff, Angelo Sotira and Eric Kolb are seriously some of the most gentle and loving people I've come across online. Happy to talk more - je@h4x.club

Is it true that in the beginning, staff members would comment on every piece of art that was uploaded?

I think every gallery was different, but every gallery director was super attentive, people took the task of gallery directing super seriously as it was a pretty huge honour. For the years that I did it, I didn't have a life outside of IRC/deviantART period except to go to high school, and even then I would bring my laptop to the library at lunch + breaks and find an RJ45. I also slept for about 3 hours a night during those years as I was in the UK and much of the community was in the US.

It wasn't a policy, but it was definitely just part of the atmosphere. Wow, that's odd to think about now, isn't it? The internet seems so interactive now, but back then a user submitting something to a website was absolutely a new thing.

> this generation's dA

That's Tumblr. Build for the ones after.

I came over to deviantArt from dMusic. I had no interest in graphic design or digital art but I loved what those guys were doing as web architects. I definitely lied about my age on a contract when I joined the staff. I cringe looking at my old userpage and have no idea why they ever put up with me, but I'm glad they did because I learned so much as a programmer just from being in the same room (or IRC channel, more accurately) as them.

The biggest gift they gave me was a little space on their server to run my own PHP site, which I used to rip of all their code and make an online community for DIY punk bands. It kind of exploded in popularity and was so badly coded that I constantly crashed their MySQL server and eventually got the boot. When I went to college I figured programming was the obvious path, but the Java and VB classes they offered seemed so outdated and unimportant compared to what I knew was possible on the web. It really bummed me out on real world computer stuff so I just dropped out of technology completely and played starving musician for way way way too long. Now I'm old and trying to catch up to kids who don't even know a world without social networks...

> Chris Bolt the dude who built a lot of the tech there is INCREDIBLY

Incredibly what? =)

I haven't touched my DA account in years, but more because I've stopped drawing than any issue with the site or community. I was exposed to the work of a lot of amazingly talented people through DA, that I probably would not otherwise have seen.

http://rorypyro.deviantart.com/

Sorry, bad at this English thing. He's *INCREDIBLE!!

He's one of the best MySQL admins on the planet, for one.

Oh god, I remember this do vividly. Especially when Andrew joined, the dAmn thing and the hacking community, and then the Co founder drama and slow death.

I was able to go to the first deviantart summit way back and had a blast. Was a lot of fun meeting a lot of the team and community. I still have those posters that were given out the last day somewhere around here.

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