The Rise and Fall of DeviantArt

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God we need a website that is FOR artists and fans of art. Everything is either dead, working against you, or incredibly niche. Being an artist online is torture now.

I just wish there was a website like this again. Being an artist and trying to grow your socials is just tiring, we need a community like this. It’s unfair.

Can't believe we told them "if you do this we will stop using your website" and they were shocked when we did indeed stop using their website. Rest in peace, old friend. I shouldn't have been on your site at 9 years old but I sure was and it sure did do irreparable damage to my relationship with the concept of cats and wolves

Shocking how companies keep "updating" their platforms by changing everything that made it popular and loved in the first place. Just unreal, stop altering it and let it be, almost everything is imploding because they keep messing up with the algorithm and point of these sites, making their core audience come to no longer use let alone despise it

I think the reason DA felt so different because, in my experience, it legit felt like walking through an art gallery. Sure, the desire to have people like your stuff and follow you to see your updates were cool, but the desire to become "popular" rarely existed. Unlike other sites now where value is strictly about your follower count of faceless profiles, DA provided a space that felt easier to make connections with those within your niche.

DeviantART was a goldmine for fan art of obscure games and shows… and also for some fetishes you didn’t even know existed.

I used deviantart so much I can remember the "most popular - all time" page so vividly how it looked over 10 years ago. death note cosplayers at a cafe, some poem/comic strip about the artist's parents getting divorced, a big drawing of all the simpsons characters, a syringe in someone's tongue piercing hole, etc lol

My dad has an art site of his own that he’s been actively working on since the 90s, I believe. I’ve been told that at one time it actually competed with DA. Once the AI art announcements dropped on DA’s end, my dad’s site, Side 7, got a relatively huge spike in new users lol

Someone once described the internet as a constant burning of the Library of Alexandria and I think that’s very accurate here

I'm an old soul, and this is what happened to EVERY site I used to hang out at and enjoy in 2000's, not just DA. The truth is, besides corporate greed, the rise of social media such as facebook and instagram totally destroyed the old, niche sites. There used to be a forum for every fandom and hobby and anything you were passionate about, until Twitter came along and sucked everything into a hashtag melting pot. And so, the slow death of forums and community websites started and one by one our hang outs disappeared.

Checking the front page of Deviantart these days is so soul-crushing because a good chunk of the pieces on the front page are those dreadful AI "art" pieces, which all look the same and have no personality. Even the crude drawings that people used to ridicule the site for have more charm and soul to them. Just complete sludge.

My parents used internet filters that blocked art sites like DA, so up until like 2014 or so when I turned 18 I only really knew the internet for Facebook. I feel wholly robbed of the sparkledog phase I so rightly deserved.

As a deviantART child, I clicked SO FAST. I was on DA from 2013-2020. i agree that eclipse KILLED the site. 😢 I miss the days on 2013-14 when I was a wee babe, coloring in mspaint bases, arguing with trolls over Derpy Hooves, and vibing with my chunky headphones playing Kesha bc I was just quirky like that. 😂 I anticipate a nostalgic trip of a video and I am excited to listen. 😊

Something I will never forget reading from someone about the AI debacle with DeviantART is how their friend had passed away at some point before the AI opt-out feature and therefore couldn't opt out as a result because they were dead and their friend didn't have the login info. So it wasn't just stealing images from their users, it was stealing from the corpses of past users too. Really ghoulish behaviour.

I met my husband on deviantart. He filled out my pirate meme in 2007, we became friends, then had a long distance relationship, and now we've been married for 11 years. dA was important to me in so many ways and I'm very sad to see what it's become. I'm still there, though I rarely post art anymore.

One more thing screwed by the fall of DA was webcomics. With the shutting down of SmackJeeves, DA was the last site for indie webcomic artists to post their comic in page format with a community that could feed new readers to them. IG penalizes anything that isn't a square, so full-page comics and traditional strip comics are a no-go there, and Tapas and Webtoons Canvas are heavily oriented to infinite canvas comics, so page-by-page or strip-by-strip comics look like tiny, meager updates compared to the pages and pages that an infinite canvas comic takes up. Tumblr is okay, but because it's not primarily an art community it doesn't do half as well as DA did. Honestly, the story of how Webtoon became king and how all the other webcomic sites (SmackJeeves, Drunk Duck, I can't even remember the others!) have died would be an interesting one, as well as an insight into all the comics we've lost from the sites dying.

When I discovered deviantART I was no child. I was a young mom with a two-year-old, someone who hasn't drawn anything in YEARS. And thanks to that website I rediscovered my love for art, started drawing again and developed my skills. I've spent 10 happy years on the site sharing and admiring art, making friends, losing friends, making new ones, enjoying one fandom then another. It was fun. But then Eclipse started and the rest is history. Now I barely ever visit the site. Such a shame.

it’s when they switched to that new look, eclipse. that’s when i remember the downfall of deviant art. rip DA you took care of my 13 year old little artist self

A guy on deviantart once asked if he could send me naked pictures of himself so I could practice drawing anatomy. I do go to nude life drawing sessions but I did not know this guy and this was literally the only thing he messaged me. Of course I said no and he was pretty miffed and tried to change my mind. He was really insistent that it wasn't a kink thing, he just "genuinely wanted to help artists" XD