When artists now are now asked, after years of being on social media platforms and these lackluster art sites, what their dream art website looks like.
They describe a store.
A store that is allowed to sell pornography also.Capitalism and the greater opportunity to live off your art are definitely one of the biggest death causes of most community oriented sites. The moment money enters the equation, fun gets kicked off. Why show off your art around if there’s no profit to be had and the clout can’t be transformed into money?
The author finding Artfight and mentioning how it has no monetization further drives this point.
99% of art is made without the intention of selling it. I think it is bizarre that capitalists are so desperate to make art = money when that was never the point to begin with for the majority of it. It is just another perversion from our greedy culture.
That’s why they want to replace the artist with AI.
Oh sure, they have used commercial artist’s work without compensation so many times. It is clear they never wanted to pay for it to begin with.
I deleted my dA gallery over a year ago. Not interested in feeding their AI with my works. It’s a shame, too, a few of my deviations made best all time under A:TLA characters’ keywords.
Their UI is cancer. Endless popups nagging you to get Core. Their messaging and chat functions are useless to everyone except scammers. And now, the search function, aka the last thing I found dA useful for (because of the massive amount of tutorials uploaded there) has been completely nerfed. Now if I’m looking for a specific tutorial, I have to go to duckduckgo and type in the keywords and site:deviantart.com to pull up actually relevant results.
The enshittification of DeviantART is complete.
I wish there were other widely used galleries to post on but alas, I’m confined to FurAffinity for now.
There isn’t inkbunny too, on the furry front
No. Inkbunny allows art of minors being in sexual content.
They’ve committed themselves to AI art, that’s how dead it is.
I remembered fond memories predating that period though. The chat room community was at once, very large. The chats still in fact exist, though, they’ve really tucked them away in a corner. Still have friends from there, still have seen so much talent come through there.
But you won’t ever tell anymore what AI is and what AI isn’t, because they’ve welcomed AI with open arms for a while. DeviantArt has truly backstabbed so many artists, without a care.
Oh and their logo is stupid as shit, looks more like an X than DA.
I had no idea, and this hurts. I have a few, but fond, memories about DeviantArt when I had a short phase on highschool where I was drawing for a bit (which was more than 10 years ago). It didn’t last long, but DeviantArt was a large part of it.
Hearing they are commiting to AI art - THE platform for actual artists (at least it was, 10 years ago), who AI hurts the most, is insane. That’s pure betrayal. I hate this.
my first pc was a vista laptop, i downloaded some awesome windows themes and cursors from deviantart. once i tried to replace the start menu orb, but the image file i replaced must’ve been the vista logo that comes up at boot. it didn’t boot anymore.
Yup. They have an AI Art Generator called ‘Dream Up’ and it does exactly what you think it does.
So you can just make an account now, not caring about actually drawing or rendering anything, but you can just generate art. It’s crazy.
It doesn’t generate art, it generates content.
It degenerates art
I learned web design on deviant art
Sad to see it go this way
The modern internet kinda sucks. I wish I could time travel back to pre-2007.
It died a long long time before this. The enshittification directly started back in the early 2000’s when one of the owners basically usurped the whole company. Which of course lead to mods quitting en masse. After that it went downhill and that downhill trend continued. Then it got bought out by the Israeli’s, and the AI art injection was them trying to prevent the site from going under.
Nothing about the site is what it was.
Yeah I remember the “Art Girls” in high school (2004-08), getting royally pissed off at changes to the platform over the years. I’d say most dropped it by 2007 or 2008. I think my ex had some reason to abandon it in 2006, but I don’t even remember what they were complaining about back then.
As someone who was also there when that happened…It was a very sad moment. Pretty much written on the wall what was happening.
Its just a porn site now. You can’t turn it off. Or more to the point turning it off doesn’t prevent you seeing it. The amount of suggestive underage AI images is simply horrible. I’ve been looking through it logged out for while now.
3D artist here. I am active on numerous art websites, including DeviantArt and Cara.
I joined Cara quite a bit later than everyone else so I can’t give too much commentary on it yet, but I will say that it is very much not dead. It certainly has an active and growing community, but it is still a niche site so don’t go in there expecting it to be the next Twitter in terms of userbase size.
DeviantArt, on the other hand, is quite a bit more unfortunate. It actually has a rather sizeable community still but the heartbreaking part is watching the owners systematically sabotage it. Nearly everything they’ve done in the past several years has been catered towards driving AI use/growth while letting every other part of the site fester and rot. I don’t share my DA profile with clients or family members because if they click off my profile there is an extremely high chance they will be hit by a wall of untagged fetish porn and AI slop that will never be tagged despite the ToS requiring such.
Just a few months ago DA removed their official app from mobile app stores for some reason and it became very clear that that was how many users engaged with the platform. Myself and many other artists on DA noticed a very sudden and very large downturn in user engagement and views. They also made some back-end algorithm changes that made this even worse but they have never confirmed that and I doubt they ever will. Membership subs basically exist just to give you extra AI prompt credits and cloud storage space and maybe better selling rates assuming you actually sell anything. The other features, like boosts, have been broken for months now.
Platforms come and go over the years but DA should go down in history as the one that turned to their core userbase, the very people that built them and funded them for so many years - and punched them right in the goddamn face.
Stackoverflow holds that title but deviant art is definitely second place
Your complaint has been marked as a duplicate.
I still use deviantart occasionally and the ui has gotten worse every year. Even ignoring the impact ai art has had on the platform, search doesn’t work anymore, groups don’t work anymore, its impossible to find things you are looking for
I miss the old days of DA. Countless hours of scrolling to find the perfect wallpaper or art for my TTRPG games. Now I mostly use Patreon or occasionally ArtStation. But it not the same.
Man I haven’t thought of this site in like 20 years. Great memories, but I guess enshittification got them too.
That article is in dire need of basic editing.
[image of Clippy]
