Do people still use DeviantArt?
I remember back in the late 2000s, I used to spend a lot of time on DeviantArt and even shared my own artwork. I can't remember why or when I stopped using the site.
Do you still use it? Did your usage drop off in the last decade? Why?
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.
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 of fans on full before anything showed on screen. I think they fixed that eventually, but it was too late.
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.
They broke RSS feeds.
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.
Probably other things I can't remember anymore. For a while I used their "use old theme" setting, but I think they later removed that, or made it annoying to use. In general, the new site was a completely different thing compared to the old one and I found no enjoyment in using it.
I started browsing it again recently and it's really been nice. It avoids some of the issues that were bothering me with other platforms. Discoverability has had some interesting focus as well. I'm finding lots of new art that is relevant to my interests, and also more authentic which has always been a strength of DA.
I haven't posted any art there in a while but that's not due to the platform itself.
Anyway just my 2c, but it looks like a well-maintained and relevant art platform from where I'm at.
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.
Used it to find an artist and commission artwork last year. It looks and feels different, but not enough so that it's unfamiliar. It nags more now, just like the rest of the internet. I use it about as much as before, which is not all that much until I need something specific.
Once their "devs" broke noscript/basic (x)html browers for good, I did ask them to reconsider, I got a "no", and it was over.
Wow, that's a blast from the past. DeviantArt was one of those sites that made me wonder, how did they build this? I just looked at it now and looks nothing like I remember, though. Just a generic themed image tile thing now.
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
Used it a lot until they turned off the old UI - this killed DeviantArt for me as it was not possible anymore to discover the content reliably. They ditched categories entirely, with no alternative. I'm still sad about this, as DA was absolutely awesome. No, I'm not sad ... I'm a bit angry, I have to say. It's another great site that needlessly got fucked by greed, modernization, ignorance and a lot of other bad stuff happening way too often these days ... I think i would even pay for DeviantArt reverting this stuff.
Edit: Asked on reddit how to navigate on DeviantArt some year ago [1] - still nobody could give me an answer. But a few noticed the same thing: Absence of Navigation ...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/DeviantArt/comments/gv1qsu/how_to_n...
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. That might explain a lot.
I used to draw all the time and used DeviantArt quite a bit for about a decade. I didn't post all that much, but I used it all the time for inspiration, stock photos for models, color schemes, examples of good shading technique or composition, new styles to try out, etc.
Then went through a bit of a tough patch and got out of the habit of drawing, so I haven't looked at it much in a few years.
Looking at it now, it appears they ripped out all of the UI and navigation and hid everything except for a few tiled images and a search bar. There's not even a proper pager, just a 'Next' link. The community stuff is all hidden. The categories, all hidden.
That's really sad. There's so much stuff there, and now it's all hidden away where people will never see it unless they know exactly what to search for and get lucky.
Stopped using it after the redesign a while back. The site feels like a puzzle box when you use it, whereas it used to be quite approachable and easy to sift through the loads of content on it.
It seems it's only gotten worse over time and I have little incentive to go back.
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.
Isn't it still the biggest art sharing website? Or artstation? Or Pixiv?
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.
I think people are using artstation mostly these days, although it does seem like artstation caters to a more professional crowd, and deviantart attracted more amateurs.
I used it in search of inspiration for websites, flyers, other marketing stuff. It all ended when someone introduced me to dribbble.
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.
I did but closed my profile like 10 years ago or so. I was working on an icon set for KDE and shared my progress there, but afterwards started noticing that my work ended on several websites that didn't gave me any credit. When asked, all of them told me they just "took them off DeviantArt".
I used to troll it a lot. At one point, when I first signed up, it was an incredible source of undiscovered great art, but at some point it devolved into narcissistic selfies. I created folders name "fat women" and "uglies" and put all selfies in it
I used to spend a lot of time at DA with Linux customisation. There used to be it's own category which was useful. Now I have to filter through screeds of nudes and shit to find anything. It's not worth the effort.
I sometimes browse it for Rainmeter stuff or icon packs. But usage has dropped, yes.
My 14 year old daughter managed to find it by herself through her friends. I've only really ever used it to find nice wallpapers but my daughter is a pretty talented artist and she loves the site.
I got tired of looking at drawings of fantasy females with wings and pointy ears and perfect tits. Perhaps I would have found this more compelling if I wasn't gay, but I doubt it.
Every couple years inspiration hits and I’ll post something new. I certainly don’t spend hours every single day there like I did in 2000-2004.
My gallery though largely still exists as an ode to the early aughts.
I used to spend a lot of time there and was given a Deviousness Award in 2001. I was one of the earliest accounts on the site. That was a long time ago.
I used to visit to get new custom Firefox themes. Now
a days Firefox isn't that much customizable anymore so I don't visit if either.
Not really, no. It used to be the only place like that, now I feel like it isn't.
All the professional visual artists are on ArtStation. That's where you will find gigs, not on DA.