deviantART DOESN'T love you.

Oh dA... Another year, another birthday... While everyone are partying and tongue-bathing you halfway to the point of orgasm, I have one of those killjoy moments where I just want to gag when I see the fake community hype.

You know what, let’s speak a little about those communities you guys are completely dragging though the dust for a moment. Normally, this would be a long, ranting post where I vomit a bucketful of bile at you, but honestly, you seem to start enjoying it, so I’ll keep it brief and to the point:

1: Stop with the feature creep.

Okay, nobody asked for Muro, nobody uses Muro, and yet you spent several thousand dollars too much on a piece of shit software that doesn’t play with my tablet, eats up more RAM than twenty tabs does on average, has less functions than any mainstream free program and is just hell to use. All the time you have spent on giving a sub-par tool, marketing the sub-par tool and using the bandwidth on the same sub-par tool has left a lot of the old “core” features of dA in the dust.

Then came the absolute piece of shit you guys call St.ash that in no way completely clashes with the dA UI and just clutters the user experience.

I could bitch about the rest of the minor changes, but ultimately, you guys have no fucking idea what to do and it shows. If you one moment go “let’s make a shit version of Aviary tools!!!” and then the next “Let’s make a shitty google drive!!!!!!” and forgetting about the core values of the site, you are failures.

Motion books? Apps???? Why are apps a thing on dA now? It’s not like we are being data-mined enough as it is.

(I will admit that the more interactive channels were a great thing! Pushing content properly in a non-obtrusive, useful way! Good job, dA. Now, do that again.)

2: Stop abandoning every good thing you made.

The Chats. They have never seen an official update since I joined dA. They are barely moderated. Crash all of the time. Deserted. What once was a nexus of communication between users and communities has now been decimated because you are too stupid to support it properly.

The same could be said about groups. I mean, sure, you made groups. Several years after deviants had to do make-shift “group accounts” that honestly wasn’t worth the effort. It was pretty cool when you made them. But have you updated them in any way since then? No? Why not? Because you feel like you are done with it and it therefore needs to rot like the chats do? The current model for groups is falling apart. Do you guys have a fetish for implementing great stuff to your site and then just... abandoning the awesome features?

Well, what about Portfolios? Oh, same story? Made once, never updated? Gee, I have seen checker boards with less consistent patterns at this point.

Print shop? AHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAAHAHAHA!!! What a joke you have here, dA. Your print shop does ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to promote artists that haven’t already been promoted past the point of oversaturation. Not to say that you have been completely outdone in every single little field by RedBubble. Actually, take a look at redbubble. Take a good look at their tools. They are there to make your life easier. Using RedBubble is light, fun and a pleasure because it’s streamlined and uniform. dA is a horrible patchwork of code that’s been frankensteined together over 14 years with no sense of unity.

 

3: Stop butchering firmly-established concepts.

Journals. Are. Not. Art.

 

Stop showcasing them as art. Just because it’s easier for you doesn’t mean that it’s easier for anyone else.

And look what you did. Because you abolished news, 5/6 of the “popular journals” are point giveaways where deviants can beg for attention for tossing a dollar into the air. Think about it. Imagine ads priced at 100 points for 200k views. Doesn’t that undermine AdCast? Oh yeah, you don’t really care about that anymore here have a Final Fantasy XIII promotion contest.

 

4: Your monetization plan is 14 years old. It’s time to change it.

Sorry, but as you are right now, dA, I can’t support you in good faith. I used to buy premium memberships en masse, but over the past couple of years you have made some incredibly baffling choices that has rendered them useless. And the fact that you have less of a choice to pay for what you want than you did two years ago shows that you have no clear grasp on how to get money out of people besides preying on 12-year-olds and their parents wallets.

You know how you make money? You provide a solid, useful service that’s worth paying for. You sell convenience for a fair price.

Oh well, enough about this for today. I feel like I could do something more but fuck it. As long as realitysquared still has a job at dA I won’t bother. No change will come with that fool around. By the way, fire that asshole. And the rest of the fucking $taffies as well while we are at it. We need a change in leadership around here. Maybe it’ll breathe a little life into the echo chamber the CEO board has become.