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Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

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Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#21

Post by zeruch »

Former gallery admin/volunteer staff here (2004-2008):

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#22

Post by zeruch »

tornadofart wrote: post #5

I lurked on it for a long time. My online habits switched more and more from pc to mobile in the 2010's. The mobile experience on deviant art via app as I remember it felt clunky. That led to me checking deviantart a lot less. Haven't conducted a survey though, I can only speak for myself. But maybe others have had similar experiences? Update: at first glance, the deviantart app does seem to have a lot of bad reviews…

The mobile app came very late, and was mostly a boatanchor.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#24

Post by kayxspre »

avian wrote: post #6

I used to have an account with a bunch of art there. Not anymore. Some time after the redesign I deleted everything and now I only rarely visit the site. The only thing I miss is contact with a few artists I got to know through the site. 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 o…

> 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.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#26

Post by destitude »

avian wrote: post #6

I used to have an account with a bunch of art there. Not anymore. Some time after the redesign I deleted everything and now I only rarely visit the site. The only thing I miss is contact with a few artists I got to know through the site. 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 o…

Where do you go now?

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#27

Post by mikl »

Beyond, once in a blue moon, following a link to DA from social media, not in the last decade or so.

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#28

Post by mikewarot »

My account there is 11 years old, almost as old as my child, who uses it all the time. I used to be fairly active on Flickr until I rage quit after some issues with the UI, an act I've grown to regret more with each passing year. I got a lot of Flickr traffic from there back in the day.

I've got a whopping 5 photos posted there, good ones though, if you're into synthetic aperture photography

https://www.deviantart.com/mikewarot

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#30

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

avian wrote: post #6

I used to have an account with a bunch of art there. Not anymore. Some time after the redesign I deleted everything and now I only rarely visit the site. The only thing I miss is contact with a few artists I got to know through the site. 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 o…

> 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.

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