Do you still use it? Did your usage drop off in the last decade? Why?
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.
Good memories.
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.
Which user were you? I've had an account the last 20 years, so...
They never close accounts unless the user directly chooses to delete it, or they get perma-banned.
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.
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.
> ... 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 crazy to think they'd allow someone to make such a horrible design decision.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2022/jan/29/huge-mess-of-...
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 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.
I've got a whopping 5 photos posted there, good ones though, if you're into synthetic aperture photography
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 ...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DeviantArt/comments/gv1qsu/how_to_n...
Update: at first glance, the deviantart app does seem to have a lot of bad reviews. That might explain a lot.
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.
It seems it's only gotten worse over time and I have little incentive to go back.
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.
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.
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.
My gallery though largely still exists as an ode to the early aughts.