Is DeviantArt making a comeback?

[Freemints30]

Screw that. Thou I do post on DA I try to stay as far as possible away from the community only really joining groups., as the amount of drama I have seen from a distance is staggering. This kinda led to me having a mostly dead account with 0 watcher after a year as I don't do fan art on top of it. I get more responses out from twitter and Instagram( which my only problem is that you can only upload shitty jpegs but it more of a small inconvenience to me) currently. The only good thing I got out of DA was they have the best gallery system but that was it. I'm don't want to touch furaffintity even if my life depended on it. The only way I currently see getting popular on there now is simply give up my dignity and draw inflation fetish art for the currently trendy fandom and spam there the fourms.

[FedoraSpooky]

I've had one since I was 13, but I ended up leaving it for tumblr a while back when it turned into a ghost town due to other people leaving. Still posted occasionally after that, but yeah... It sucks because I really enjoyed being on there, met a lot of friends through that site. Still has algorithm issues, but it doesn't feel like the constant treadmill of deafening noise that twitter is. I'm considering going back, but I dunno if I should use my old account or make a new one. I have the most followers there out of all the sites I've ever joined, but a lot of it's probably abandoned accounts by now. XD ;

[PabloRomero]

I wasted 10 years on deviantart, so i don't think i'm going back. Facebook and Twitter helped me to do pretty good business, now a lot of the work comes to me instead of me trying to find it.

[Shanny8]

Twitter isnt exactly meant to be an art gallery- yeah you can post art, but it works better when you're promoting. I still have my Deviant Art account, but I'll post something there every once in a while...with me I'm mainly trying to promote & monetize stuff, so yeah I'll stay where I'm at on Twitter.

@Iris-Grimoire Have a Pillowfort, and I tend to forget that I have it- that's how quiet and slow moving things are over there. Plus, right now I'm connected to mostly artists and the platform hasnt gone public yet, so promotion is an uphill climb there as well.

[Iris-Grimoire]

Yeah, after the tumblr purge people only stayed for a few weeks then left, but it's still pretty good to replace tumblr as a mini gallery. I post some of my good art every now and then there while I wait for open reg, because then you'll be able to engage with the communities instead of just replying to 5 month old threads.

[Kann]

I have my DA account for a decade now. It's been fun at the beginning but now I enjoy not having to look at fetish art while looking for artists to follow so I hardly ever go there.

I just try to juggle various sites and see what works. xD

[Rhonder]

it was really important to me as a developing artist with its tutorial base so i still think it can be good for beginners.

This is basically what I was going to say ^ I was active on DA from like ~2008/9 - 2012 from when a friend in middle school introduced me to it a little while after I started drawing more. It was absolutely a fantastic resource at that point in my art-career, both like you said with the abundance of tutorial resources all in 1 place as well as a place to start posting things without having to try and face the scary world of "real" social media as a kid/teen xD

Buuuut now it's been like 6 or 7 years since my last post there, and it's not something that I have much interest in trying to get back into.

[Karmillina]

Deviantart took way too long to change the UI... I think it's something that should have changed at least 5 years ago. That green was always so unappealing and coming back to see what's up is like taking a trip back in time, and not in a very good way...

still, if this new Eclipse thing is not a CORE only thing, I might be willing to join back into the community, but I have outgrown the average submission themes and less and less things about the platform have become interesting to me. It makes me wonder if I could even rejoin the community anymore.

[BobbyjoeX]

from what i heard, only veteran accounts have the old layout, any account made after will get the eclipse layout

[JeanGuillet]

That's the best analysis of what sets Deviantart apart from other social sites that i've heard in a long while. Yeah. It's web1.0 and it's authentic and they don't shadowban you and make you pay for ads. Makes the internet fun again.

[mrtoontastic]

I never left deviantart since.... 5 years ago (currently). I started there after Flipnote Hatena, and haven't left since. It hasn't treated me bad, and the only thing I've had to worry about is making sure my art continues to grow and thrive properly. Besides, the translation from deviantart to tapas (in terms of comics) has and hasn't worked at the same time, but I never had a true reason to abandon the site. xD My art is harmless and so are my comedic or action stuff, so anyone is free to jump in, read and have fun.

To be honest, I used to upload EVERYTHING on deviantart. Comic strips, drawings, even literature. I only decided to spread things out so my page doesn't look cluttered. Looking back, it makes it feel a little barren outside of making new drawings. Maybe deviantart is making a comeback, but that'll be a big wait, and see.

[ble]

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

[nostalgicroxas]

I find it interesting how a lot of people are talking about the community on dA and I have always found it, honestly, invisible. Like a lot of my experiences online through the ages, no one notices me much? I might have had some readers 10 years ago on there, but I'm certain none of them are still there now, and none of who does stumble across my art comments it. My most favorite'd piece is a sketch I did for myself of penis anatomy - that is how it functions and the muscles involved - and it's a crude doodle.
The only bit of the community I interacted with was an rp section in the long-ago forgotten chat feature, which is of course gone now. The overall problem with dA is it's UI updates have always been slow. Even the change from the old green to the new uglier grey-green was a hard pill for people to swallow. So going to another color change but not actually improving the Submit area is lame... Like to upload a written piece that has any semblance of bold or italics text, used to be you had to manually put in the html, now you have to leave dA and go through St.ash to upload it and then do a cross that way. Very annoying.

[ajcrwl]

this thread popped up on my twitter feed and just.... lmao..

https://twitter.com/vintagefoods_/status/1158504898293620737

--

Like a lot of my experiences online through the ages, no one notices me much

same

[Karmillina]

The forums are pretty unfriendly, but at least the groups seemed like a good place to find friends. I never found community through deviantart-curated mediums, but rather among small pockets of people who aligned with my values well enough. That being said, I was never popular on the site, and it was hard for me to increase my watcher base.

[ble]

This post was flagged by the community and is temporarily hidden.

[punkarsenic]

mass exodus-es from site A to site B are understandable, but we need to realise that none of these sites' algorithms are working for us. they have overheads, they have investors, they have employees - they need to make a profit, and if that means pushing us down then so be it. thats true for dA, its true for tumblr, its true for twitter.

i havent used dA since i was 14 and dont have much interest in going back. really, i think if we want social media that works for us we need social media that belongs to us. stuff like mastodon sets an example of how this can be done, but also i dont like the culture on mastodon haha. so i dunno how to develop a social media by and for artists, but i think its the ultimate solution. all else is bandages

[joannekwan]

also i dont like the culture on mastodon

How is it over there? :0

[punkarsenic]

so its like, from what ive observed, all the people who were too woke for both tumblr and twitter. just a bit weird to me. insular.

that said, mastodom works in like... lots of different Bubbles with different rules and layouts, so perhaps cultures vary? theyre like twitter and discord had a baby. i felt the UI was crowded and overcomplicated, but it essentially works the same as twitter

ill admit, i didnt put a lot of time into figuring it out. thats the problem with mastodon, its pretty unintuitive and takes work. maybe if we made a tapas mastodon bubble we could create a comfortable space to get started? iunno

[Carossmo]

My dA was my very first platform to post art ahahhah still alive sorta :'D

Carossmo on DeviantArt