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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.

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.

> 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.

> They broke RSS feeds.

> ... 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..

Sounds like they tried milk it for more than it was worth. Not every site can screw users like facebook and get away with it.

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.

Oh, I remember that. I used to think it was because I had a poor performing computer (which I did) but it sounds like it wasn't just me

Where do you go now?