Topic: Deviantart is Dying

Posted under General

Seems like a lot of sites are putting on a new fresh coat of paint to keep up with modern times.
I guess the times really are changing.

kokomon12 said:
Don't worry we can stop this change.

How about no?
It's huge amount of work to maintain two seperate sites essentially, so of course they are going to get rid of the old when there are features that weren't on the old layout.

thegreatwolfgang said:
Seems like a lot of sites are putting on a new fresh coat of paint to keep up with modern times.
I guess the times really are changing.

For some sites like furaffinity it is literally just new coat of paint (hence why they allow just using old layout as it's literally same backend with same featureset) and other sites it's overall moving forward including e621.
Sites like twitter and facebook are trying to lower the amount of workload and unify the experience with mobile as huge majority of users are already on mobile, so it's desktop users who are burden.
With DeviantArt, I'm still more annoyed by Wix aquisition as their backend went full on hell.

My only problem with the new layout is that I cannot browse categories like before, so I cannot choose to show only the posts that are categorized as Rainmeter skins. Unless there is a way to do so that I don't know about.

ccoyote said:
Changing the site in a way you don't like is not "dying."

Alot ofor people in DA said that there going to leave because of the change

How much is 'a lot'?

Dramatic changes produce salt, as we've recently seen right here. Some people leave, for sure (although probably at least some of them were just looking for an excuse). Isn't it also a gimme that other people will be attracted to the new design who wouldn't have used it previously?

Usually this kind of proclamation is overblown, and I find that it often seems to be based on the poster's personal social bubble on the site in question.

kokomon12 said:
Alot ofor people in DA said that there going to leave because of the change

I'm sure DA's owners and operators have already taken that into account and determined the changes are merited regardless. It's still not dying, any more than Facebook has died in spite of its much-maligned interface and design changes over the years. People will adjust, and life will go on.

Updated

Welp. I'm not a DA user (yet), but anyone willing to leave a community of people behind over a website design change that doesnt make a site unusable? Good riddance imo. I've seen it plenty of times on forums and MMOs. Generally the only people who actually leave (rather than just talk) either rarely came on to begin with, or were generally toxic.

mairo said:
With DeviantArt, I'm still more annoyed by Wix aquisition as their backend went full on hell.

I love it when I get a direct link to a DA image and it takes up almost three fullscreen lines. From the looks of things, the vast majority of it is a token of sorts. Why you would need to authorise yourself with a URL token to access a publicly available image is beyond me.

helloanonmyoldfriend said:
I love it when I get a direct link to a DA image and it takes up almost three fullscreen lines. From the looks of things, the vast majority of it is a token of sorts. Why you would need to authorise yourself with a URL token to access a publicly available image is beyond me.

I'm guessing it's because a lot of artists complained about the past exploit that let you get an original 2500x2500 size image even if the artist set it so you could only see a little 500x500 thumbnail.

I don't even browse DA anymore. I doubt it will actually go away. It'll still have a userbase.

If it did go away, though, I wouldn't shed tears.

tenchi_fox said:
Welp. I'm not a DA user (yet), but anyone willing to leave a community of people behind over a website design change that doesnt make a site unusable? Good riddance imo. I've seen it plenty of times on forums and MMOs. Generally the only people who actually leave (rather than just talk) either rarely came on to begin with, or were generally toxic.

The artists I follow there are mostly good folk, and yet three of them started complaining about the switch. Only one of them even sounds toxic in their complaints, and it's only in regards to Eclipse.

furrin_gok said:
The artists I follow there are mostly good folk, and yet three of them started complaining about the switch. Only one of them even sounds toxic in their complaints, and it's only in regards to Eclipse.

Exceptions to every rule, of course. People will often complain about change as we're all neophobes to one extent or another (imagine if e6 went to a violet text on lime green background theme), but generally we adapt, as it's what we do as people. Now the question is whether those artists leave that community, or complain and readjust.

I left DeviantArt at around 2015-2016, the time that Core was introduced.

At that time, the artists that I have followed migrated to Tumblr and Twitter.

After going back again after Eclipse was implemented, I had a hard time setting up again because there were fewer views and activities. I had a thread on regards to DeviantArt Eclipse if it was still worth it, and popular opinion says "no".

It's a shame though that DeviantArt was a pioneer for Web 2.0 design and interfaces back in the 2000s.

----

On another personal note, it sucked that Autodesk Sketchbook can no longer have that feature where you could integrate your artworks to DeviantArt. The Wix acquisition kinda killed off that feature, right around the time where Sketchbook gave their premium features for free, and where I got my tablet.

alexyorim said:
At that time, the artists that I have followed migrated to Tumblr and Twitter.

Twitter is not an artist's website. Artists should have a gallery; if they want to tweet on the side that's fine but it should never be their primary.

After going back again after Eclipse was implemented, I had a hard time setting up again because there were fewer views and activities. I had a thread on regards to DeviantArt Eclipse if it was still worth it, and popular opinion says "no".

They still haven't added clever searching features that other galleries have, but it's way better than Twitter.

furrin_gok said:
Twitter is not an artist's website.

I could have said Instagram, which is also a gallery on it's own.

Pardon if I kinda mentioned Twitter often because I prefer Twitter over Instagram.
It's more than personal bias; I created my account there in 2015, the same year as DeviantArt Core, and I only created my Instagram account the year after that.

e6 still has a few pressing issues that are unrelated to the site redesign that the staff won't fix since it goes against their principles, so it's not surprising that it's starting to gradually lose steam because of it.

or, who knows? maybe the site culture will just turn into furry twitter as the userbase changes, evidently referenced by even mario in other threads.

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