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Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

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Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#11

Post by Graffur »

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…

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

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#12

Post by t8y »

I used to use it and stopped, not sure when or why.

I think most people just started using Instagram and Twitter to share art? Most pros in the games industry use ArtStation now along with Twitter. I think it's less important to share with other artists than people in the same industry.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#14

Post by tmikaeld »

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 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..

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#16

Post by INTPenis »

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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#17

Post by Freak_NL »

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…

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.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#19

Post by can16358p »

In 2000s I used to. Then at some point my interests shifted a bit. After some more years I decided to see how it's doing and saw that they made the ugliest, most unusable, horrible design ever. We were also much more mobile and there was a much cooler app, Instagram, for discovering art, with a MUCH better interface and social features.

dA had great potential IMO, but whoever was responsible for their design changes and their inability to jump to the mobile bandwagon properly killed it.

Re: Ask HN: Do people still use DeviantArt?

#20

Post by defanor »

Occasionally I try to browse it (plenty of nice landscape photos there), but it nearly freezes FF at once (on a powerful desktop computer, even), and now it presented me with a page saying that something went wrong on their end while trying to check it.

It's similar with imgur: another image hosting that used to be usable and served pictures without requiring registration, but not anymore (well, it still serves them, just not as lightweight as it used to be, and a bit more buggy). As well as with smaller image galleries before that; not many websites, software projects, or just any sorts of projects in general seem to stay nice for a long time.

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