The specter of Deviantart is haunting the digital art community. Fatigued by the eternal rat race of modern social media artists have - especially as of late - spoken in wistful terms of the "DeviantArt era" when art communities were fun. DeviantArt - where many millennial and gen X artists cut their teeth online in bustling 'clubs' and sub-communities, made friendships that sometimes lasted for life, shaped their characters & stories, and even forged and discovered creative careers. All of this Inside a community of other artists - people who "got it". No need to explain when drawing an unclothed figure that you weren't drawing anything pornographic necessarily (unless you were, in which you uploaded to NewGrounds instead), finding fan-works and animations neatly organized into the many nearly endless categories in chronological order. A near infinite amount of not just tutorials, but assets, memes, and bases - mostly free to use.
Of course, DeviantArt isn't technically dead. It still exists, but its users have long gone - the organizational structure that made the search function so uniquely functional (and continued to keep content on the site relevant for much longer than the average social media post's average singular hour of visibility) now completely gutted for a modernized corporate layout that destroyed much of the charm and actual usability of the platform. The modern DeviantArt is a zombified husk of itself. Deviant only in so much that it has become a pariah amongst its modern counterparts for embracing generative "AI" against the expressed wishes of even its most loyal users. Modern Submissions to the website, where hundreds of thousands of genuine user created submissions used to populate have been crowded out by tens of computer generated files - images produced from their proprietary "AI" model - now clog up the website.
Each generated file made from the data of former artists who have long abandoned the platform, homunculuses on a blighted digital landscape, zombie content for the zombie website lingering in the hell of irrelevancy.
So the questions begs, what went so wrong? And more importantly: Why hasn't anything captured that spirit again?
The Birth of a Legend
In the late 90s, as the internet and personal computing exploded in popularity, the home computer and burgeoning internet spaces became the realms of customization and creativity for hobbyists. Open-Source Software (Software with code that can be freely used, edited, and distributed freely by anyone) with customizable and adjustable features created thriving art scenes - like Winamp a free to use music player where users could easily swap out customized interfaces made by other users.
At the turn of the century, in the year 2000, comes DeviantArt - a site that hosted downloads for these visual customizations. The site called user uploads "arts" (later "Deviations") and soon folks of all creative persuasions flocked to the fledgling platform to share all types of work, even drawings, animations, tutorials, ect.
Features Make the Site
In 2006, DeviantArt introduced the ability to designate use licenses - such as the ever popular creative commons license to each upload, further cementing the sharing aspect of the website. While this may seem inconsequential, the entire upload and deviation page's features represented and reflect an ideological position via its UX design that sets it far apart from its modern contemporaries. Use licenses were often displayed alongside a link to download the file itself, in which the file could be used and edited.
Alongside that, often above it various times in the sites history, were prominently listed "clubs" that where users could go look to see similar content under similar themes - and ostensively join these communities. These communities ranged from fandoms to closed groups dedicated to a specific idea to resources and everything in between. Many of these groups were curated so closely they required a membership approval to contribute. These clubs themselves could be subscribed to by users, and would appear in users inboxes as "stacks" - collections of submissions from the club grouped together. With no algorithm dictating and amplifying already popular posts to see things a user liked - joining these communities or subscribing to them allowed users to find things they might be interested in without an enforced algorithm and sent them to a centralized inbox neatly organized.
A user who subscribed to a club for Vocaloid, for example, will not only be exposed to visual digital illustrations of the most popular Vocaloid - Hatsune Miku - from an already popular artist, but may be exposed to many Vocaloid characters, songs, animations, cosplay, tutorials, printables, ect. via every single submission to that club in chronological order, creating a more equitable point of exposure that prioritized contribution over pre-existing metrics.
Other features of the site emphasized this community-oriented approach even in how users individualized their profiles & spaces - somewhat paradoxically. At the peak of DeviantArt's popularity a premium user's profile would often be filled to the brim not just with images of their own art but a litany of graphics from various users, edits of templates from other users and HTML and CSS often written by - you guessed it - other users.
Stamps, buttons, emojis - often emblazoned with favorite characters, witty phrases, or short videos compressed into .gif formats we were common, as were other graphics such as borders and icons. All of these various elements that might make up a page linked back to the tens, sometimes hundreds of other creators, alongside prominently displayed collections of favorited works from around the website, making every profile a constellation of user creation curated in a unique way that promoted not just the user themselves but the entire community.
A single stamp displayed by a user after one click would take the user to a deviation page (the name for upload pages) where credits would often break down the creation of the upload with a litany of links:
The pixel bases
a tutorial on how the file was compressed
the template file itself
then to the side of the deviation page the clubs submitted to would be listed.
Once a deviation received comments, user created emojis and reactions often featured in those comments, adding more points of exposure to other users as users often chatted or shared additional resources. A singular upload could easily detail its entire creation pipeline, uplift those who created and shared tools that made the piece possible, and showcase the creator while also linking to one or several communities. From one upload the credits may spawn tens, even thousands of other creations, linking back to a greater eco-system.
A resource is worth a thousand arts.
In the modern era, when a creative person wants to look up how to do something, video sites like tiktok and youtube are often the only place to get updated information. It is far harder to get information that is written like a guide or look up simple answers to questions. Tutorials on social media sites - especially those favored by modern internet artists like Xitter and Tumblr are often drowned out and lost in their abysmal search engines with very pared down bookmarking and favoriting features. On DeviantArt, making collections with names and folders was fairly easy. Tutorials were not just lost to the algorithm, an odd piece of content in a sea of rapidfire posts, but instead tucked away into the tutorials section of the website - a ready made section of the website for resources, something modern art sites very rarely have. As DeviantArt was made for customizing applications originally - documentation was needed and a robust feature-set associated with documentation, which could also double as outlets for stories and journals and updates. Tutorials didn't just keep the site relevant, it made the website viable, as users returned to the site even those that never signed up - just to view a tutorial or download a specific file. As the website allowed content to remain relevant without the push of an algorithm via a robust search function, users could spend more time on content before posting without having to necessarily feel punished by not putting out more, quicker.
The file sharing function of the site allowed users to not just post tutorials but all sorts of content that could be actually created by the user, print-outs, fabric templates, cosplay tutorials, papercrafts, cursors - all reasons to come back, create collections, and share them with others, it also allowed for increased collaboration and community creation. Pixel clubs where users could take a template, decorate it and be prominently displayed on others' profiles encouraged this sort of collaborative behavior - but it offered something of even more importance.
The tyranny of the popular artist vs the entitlement of the hobbyist
In the modern social media landscape there tends to be two types of users within the artist communities, who exist on a continuum: The "Popular" Artist and the small hobbyist. Now these are not distinct categories, an artist can go through either end of the spectrum through many platforms and share traits of both. The popular artist is an artist who is perceived by others to have a large amount of followers, clout - and is seen as a leader within their distinct niche. The actual numbers don't matter as this is based on perspective, many consider large artists to be over 1k while another artist may see themselves small at 10k. All that matters is that the positionality of the hobbyist is smaller than the popular artist in that community.
There creates a problem, the hobbyist who is attempting to make it to the status of the popular artist will often ask popular artists for help, asking how to achieve their style, what resources or brushes they use, and complain that larger artists don't seem to be interested in helping others in their community. On the other hand, the popular artist is simply one person and doesn't have the time to direct the many people asking them for help or resources specifically feeling that the hobbyists are entitled and there are simply too many of them.
Most modern social media sites and art sites do not feature ways to display resources or credits, which leaves users having to repeat this sort of information - or specifically leave it buried within a website or other off-platform place, or risk using the limited space on their profiles or posts to link to resources at the expense of other information they'd like to present to followers, this pins hobbyists and popular artists as competitors rather than community members at different parts in their journeys, while this sort of dynamic can always exist due to the basics of power imbalance - it's largely exacerbated by the limitations of modern social media platforms which are getting tighter and tighter.
Youtube destroyed annotations, tiktok highly limits links, micro-blogging sites like Xitter and Bluesky simply do not have the space or linking capabilities per post to allow content space to breathe - as posts are swiped by after only a few seconds, with limited ways to save or use.
Social media sites are built for consumption, not creation.
Even on modern websites, even sites that allegedly are built for artists lack the focus or features that actually support community building, or even support other types of art other than visual anime style character art.
Sheezy.art a commonly cited "DeviantArt successor" lacks almost all of the community building and file sharing features cited, as well as more distinct categories instead relying on a tagging system.
The most important users of any art community: The Novice and the Adjacent
In the melodrama between the popular artist and the hobbyist, a sizeable chunk, probably the largest portion of what would be an art community - goes largely unheard and disengaged.
It's no secret that many a modern artist were forged in DeviantArt in its heyday, but it is rarely ever considered how that happened.
While I don't have a comprehensive survey or data on how many users found DeviantArt or became artists through the site - anecdotal data suggests the process went something like my personal journey:
When I was once a wee child with unfettered internet access I was fond of another defunct website - Quizilla - a website where users made quizzes. Many users pushed the format of these quizzes into something more akin to interactive fiction - choose your own adventures and often included pictures to set the scene or better explain the looks of characters or scenes. Most of the pictures were lifted, usually without credit from other places on the internet - often times Deviantart, which is why the site implemented the option to include watermarks as this sort of behavior tended to be normalized in certain communities.
Before the wider availibility of fandom merchandise, especially for foreign fandoms like anime and K-Pop, I would, like many children my age in that time period, find and save pictures and fanart of things that I liked. I printed them out, stuck them on binders, and used them as decorations on my locker or room.
Eventually, I followed the watermarked links onto Deviantart. I uploaded rough sketches of fanart but found myself wanting to emulate the artists that I admired - I couldn't afford the Copic markers popular at the time with traditional artists and mangaka ($400 dollars is insane in now money, it's definitely more insane in 2008 money). Still, nevertheless, I persisted. Seeing other artists speak of GIMP a program allegedly similar to photoshop - still attempting to edit my traditional sketches. Through the labyrinthine tutorials, journals, and comment suggestions I found a link to a pirated version of Paint Tool Sai. For my birthday I asked for the much more sensible wacom tablet that lasted me from freshman year of High School into my college years, and while I waited I still was able to share my silly sketches to clubs on the site and get feedback and friends. I printed out coloring pages and paper dolls at the library of my favorite characters from their respective sections by other creators on DeviantArt, saved tutorials and templates from creators that I liked.
When I finally did get my tablet I was able to trade points (the DeviantArt premium currency) by creating art for others, who I was able to pay for decorations for my profile and even a few months membership to the website.
I cannot imagine anything similar to that happening to a novice artist today on any social media platform or dedicated "Art website"
Novice artists, especially young ones, do not have the same opportunities for community building and resource access. A novice artist today may have to go to 3-5 different sites to experience what I just described.
For example:
Unpolished sketches by an unknown artist are often ignored on most social media and art websites unless posted in a private community (which are often hosted on separate platforms from where art is typically showcased: i.e. Bluesky vs Discord) and specifically for critique.
This is discouraging for novice artists as the barriers for entry are simply too high for participation and as the art community gets technically bigger more privileged artists who access to resources and time to produce better quality (read: more polished work in the popular styles of popular subjects at the current moment) art that can be consumed easily.
This is an existential threat to the entire community as the novice artists, and even casual hobbyists disengage entirely as there is simply nothing for them to do besides give adulation & money to a more popular artists without getting much in return. Novice artists and hobbyists are put in the quite frankly humiliating position of begging for attention and resources hoping to attain the position of popular artist.
This harms the popular artists as well as they, who often are not even as well off as others in the community assume they are (remember: there is no number or metric that defines a popular artist, it is only perception and relation to other members of the community). This alienates popular artists socially as they are swamped by requests for help, resources, and platforming - often as they attempt to sell and showcase their art to a dwindling audience of disengaged users. The hobbyists and novices often build resentment towards these popular artists, feeling betrayed and taken advantage of by those they see with more power attempting to hawk their wares.
If I was a young novice today many of the avenues for learning would be so heavily monetized and blocked off, I'm not entirely sure I would've been encouraged in developing my skills.
Brushes locked behind gumroads, Patreons, and other highly monetized platforms away from where I would even post my art.
If I wanted to showcase a bit about myself and my friends - I would likely have to make a separate caard or strawpage, or learn how to code on Neocities, many of those resources to learn how to code paywalled or filled with unhelpful ""AI"" features.
I'd only have 10-40+ minute video tutorials with sponsorships to learn from, which would be very difficult with my then undiagnosed ADHD
I'd find it hard to make friends on the endless amount of fast moving discord servers, where unless there were explicit events with templates I couldn't outperform the more advanced artists.
I wouldn't have a way to be rewarded for my participation in the community without hard cash or have a way to reward others.
I wouldn't be able to afford any premium features of any platforms and wouldn't be able to compete with the many commission offerings asking for real cash.
The user of drawing bases - something that was once normal, though I never personally engaged - would be considered "Cringe" despite the fact that it was a perfectly ethical (if credit given) and valid way of creating that can act as training wheels for the inexperienced creators to make something closer to their vision while they built up their skills.
Finally, if I ever wanted to engage with creative works outside of my specific niche of static character art and the tags that I personally knew of, I'd have limited opportunity to do so on any major art platform or social media.
I would've missed the opportunity to have my artwork exposed to the cosplayer who'd found my Gakupo fanart through a shared Vocaloid fan group and cosplayed it or the pixel artist that I traded my points to for a pixel portrait to display on my profile. I wouldn't have had the opportunity to uplift my friend's art of my favorite characters in a unified way.
If I were a novice artist today, my only way to contribute would be to upload a picture, like some posts of artists I already follow, and hope to god that others would do the same in return.
And that, my friends, is how an art community dies.
How We Got Here
DeviantArt has been bleeding out for years, part of it is platform trends: DA struggled in the industry move to mobile, lost out to more general platforms with more advanced feature stacks like tumblr. Its association with younger users killed its "cool" factor over time. Several layout changes like the baffling abolishment of its categories were unpopular with users. While some of these changes and developments were genuine mistakes and at times out of the control of DeviantArt - many could've been easily avoided by listening to the communities of the website: User testing the newer layouts, not implementing a generative ""AI"" feature at direct conflict with many in the community.
Although, the users isn't always right, sometimes they don't even know what they want.
While I often refer to myself as User Experience professional - in truth the proper term for what I do and am best at is Product which encompasses User Experience (UX). I have no idea why tech, allegedly known for its ruthless dedication to efficiency and utilitarian culture, chose the most vague and non-descriptive names in existence for these positions, but in all of my autistic pedantry cannot help but clarify the meaning of these terms as I'm constantly embarrassed by the leagues of "UX/UI" professionals content to allow the world to think of us as pixel pushing glorified graphic designers. (no offense to graphic designers)
Put concisely, User Experience is the study and application of psychology, design, and interaction between a user and a piece of technology - this is often an explicitly visual interface - but a common non-visual interface example would be a voice assistant.
Product is the apotheosis of business analysis, UX, and Engineering. Ideally a product professional is able to harmonize all three of these elements into a product offering that is able to:
Be a viable, sustainable, profit creating product with a good market fit.
Be useful and beneficial to the user
Continue to grow and scale with its userbase
In my professional opinion DeviantArt failed at all three of these basic product tenants over time.
However, nearly every other modern art site attempting to pick up the former crown of DeviantArt has somehow fared no better, mostly by listening to its users too much.
The Curious Case of Cara and Co.
While many art sites have attempted to pick up where DeviantArt has stumbled off, a particular attempt caught a lot of attention lasts year after Meta's platform changes, Twitter's implosion, and the general malaise towards larger social media platforms after their toxic embrace of Generative "AI". Put together by a handful of artists including the notable Zhang Jingna and a handful of volunteers. Visual artists fled to the app in droves with a record number of signups and then only a few months later - many artists have told me they scarcely even remember the site. Simply using it either as a portfolio website or have stopped visiting or updating it all together.
An Instagram/Twitter hybrid.
Artfol, a similar platform suffered a similar fate, and Artstation - a place similar to Cara favored quietly by art professionals as a sort of Instagram/Linkedin hybrid often used as a portfolio also failed to achieve mainstream popularity as a home for the online art community, bleeding out similarly to DeviantArt after introducing generative ""AI"" features against the wishes of its own userbase.
Artfol, another Instagram clone.
But why????
Elite Capture - a term discussed by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò in his book of the same name is described as:
“the presence of unequal access to power— some have greater access to power (by virtue of their lineage, or caste, or economic wealth or gender or some other reason) and consequently the ability to influence the transfer of funds/resources disproportionately.”
In more simple terms: even in more marginalized communities, people with more resources will prioritize their own interests and direct resources when building community structures to their own benefit rather than to the benefit of the overall community.
This is rarely done on purpose - but artist communities and platforms crafted by professional artists have only perpetuated and amplified the problems from social media by failing to consider community building, resource sharing, and accessibility to hobbyists, novice users, and non-creatives as a priority in building a shared space.
These problems permeate the culture of creative communities like a viral born illness, with clear symptoms:
The near extinction of non-digital visual art in online spaces
Hyper-monetization of all resources and reduction of the forms to better fit monetizable platforms
The scattering of smaller communities in more niche creative genres (like pixel art, yarn work, and cosplay) onto different platforms and forums isolated from each other
Overall increased competition between creatives
Most worryingly, the propagation of a highly contentious "commentary" sub-community where artists are encouraged to socially punish other users, promote negativity, and otherwise at best make money and gain popularity off of serious abusive situations (turned into "drama") that should be in the purview of trained professionals and at worst act as a carceral kangaroo court to litigate personal drama by weighing personal audiences against each other.
Ironically, within Táíwò's book this is also described:
"Even outside of work, social media features such as likes, shares, and retweets play the role of points in games. Over time, these simple metrics threaten to distort or take the place of values (say, the wish to meaningfully contribute to discussion or to take pride in the quality of one’s work) that might otherwise have inflected our behavior on these platforms."
Sometimes the User is Fucking Wrong
When artists now are now asked, after years of being on social media platforms and these lackluster art sites, what their dream art website looks like.
They describe a store.
A store that is allowed to sell pornography also.
A place where they can display their wares, take payment in the form of currency and likes, and maybe - often as a distant third - have the ability to share the work of their friends.
To be frank - it's embarrassing.
For a group of people, many of whom ostensibly identify as anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, queer, ect. The lack of imagination regarding how to build a sustainable platform of creatives that isn't just a set of personal stages for panhandling is actually buckwild.
In the words of one of my favorite creatives - Aaron McGruder - creator of the Boondocks in his speech to black youth about the media in 2003:
"Please take responsibility for yourself"
"This is not a motivational speech because I'm not a motivational speaker"
and also
"You better figure this out or I'm moving to Cuba."
I refuse to believe a group of people who pride themselves on their imagination, worldbuilding, media literacy, and creativity cannot come up with a better system than this. Both because it feels like common sense if thought about for more than two seconds and because we have many successes and failures in recent memory to have learned from at this point. DeviantArt being the prime example.
A Glimmer of Hope in this Trying Time
While I mostly withdrew from online art communities after about 2013 to focus on my career in tech, I only returned truly after the great crypto-crash of 2023 triggered a cascading series of layoffs in which I was left with a devastating gap in my life after losing my job that I had worked a decade to get. Only after a year was a certain white haired vampire able to heal me (you can read more about that here) and I started seriously rediscovering my art side after years of sporadic drawings throughout the years left to rot on tumblr and Instagram. I eventually created enough to create a fan webcomic and have been working on that in my free time ever since.
The online art landscape I returned to online was radically different, colder, and more difficult to penetrate. While I have collected more followers than I have ever had only platform put together on Bluesky (3.6k), my art still underperforms anything I had ever posted on Deviantart where I often got hundreds of likes per post to my 200 DeviantWatcher follower count despite honestly improving greatly.
Don't tease me for my username, I was 13.
But take a look at the stats for this average old art during the "peak" years of DeviantArt of an old original character versus a my most "successful" (above average) fanart post on Bluesky
When broken down statistically - my posts on DeviantArt averaged 40-70 interactions per art posted anywhere from 30-60% of my overall watcher count.
My average highest art post on BlueSky of all time is roughly 10% to my overall user count - with the average sitting at around 1-2% engagement. Roughly in line with the averages for across all modern social media.
This means that any user under 100 followers is likely getting absolutely no engagement - and since comments are rarer than ever - rarely no interaction.
This is not normal, nor sustainable long term.
Surprisingly, the platforms my art does best on - and I receive the most engagement on are contradict the common wisdom of many online artists.
Facebook and Reddit.
Yes, yes, I've heard it all, Meta is evil, Facebook is dead and unusable. Reddit is a bastion of Nazis and hell. Hope you all stop using Youtube then.
Anyways, the place I've recently posted where I received the most genuine attention and embrace of my work - especially my comics tend to be within Facebook fan groups despite the fact that mainstream fandom is often thought to be contained on other more modern platforms.
Older platforms, especially those with features built around communities like Reddit's subreddits and Facebooks Groups and Events simply have more diverse (read: not completely professionalized) engaged communities and more engagement as a result, in my opinion.
While that's a bit controversial, I'm sure many engaged in more niche forums and communities would also agree.
Though there is one Art focused community that I think has the DNA of DeviantArt.
Artfight and the future of online art
After getting more into the bluesky art community, I was exposed to Artfight, the annual month-long artgifting event where people draw each other's characters, for free as part of a gargantuan competition.
The Discord alone has over 400,000 members - a number that I didn't even think Discord servers could hold, meaning that the website itself is likely far bigger.
When I looked around the site though, I didn't just see the old culture of DeviantArt - I felt it.
The lack of monetization and prioritization on actual creativity oozed through every part of the website, whether through the HTML/CSS customizable profiles, the template assets made from community members to be used for thumbnails of finished art - it actually feels like a community built on resource sharing. Crediting is built into the interface and highly encouraged and everyone is working towards a similar goal - It's not DeviantArt in its heyday exactly, but it's a fuckton closer.
While Artfight has apparently had a host of their own development and management challenges - I can't help but think that the community and its explosion of growth indicate a move in the right direction.
Or at least a deviation from the new normal.