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Posted this to the Artist Lounge sub and it got removed for some reason and suggested to post it here.
I just made a DA account and was uploading some of my gallery to it, but stopped because I have a few questions about it. DA's gotten a bad rep for some time, but I still see some big names on it and even a few major artists returning, although it seems like many still don't bother.
So, what's the general opinion of it now? Do you use it or used to? Is it worth having one?
I'm a small artist that made one to potentially get a bigger audience, but I do have a few concerns about the site, most notably when it comes to art theft. I've heard DA has a bit of a problem with that. I've also already encountered a couple of bots and mildly creepy comments although those seem to be uncommon. Another issue I've seen brought up a lot is the amount of weird/fetish art on there, but the site seems to do good job of not showing me any of that.
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I used to use it. It was fun before social media feeds overtook social media pages.
It's hard to take an art community seriously when their system for accolades and recognition are constantly flooded with mediocre Furry art.
Im in the furry community personally and tbh what I seem to see on DA is inflation fetishes and naked young girls where its clearly trying to essentially be child porn.
Don't forget the giant and foot fetishes, which seem as equally as prevalent. Browsing deviantART is truly like walking on eggshells.
On the home page for the thing that often welcomes new deviants some of those new deviants have uploaded actual child porn.
Art theft to. It keeps recommending i watch people that literally steal other users art.
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I noticed to that it's often the same artists works that get stolen the most.
Honestly, all sites have an art theft problem, but because DA actually has a tagging system, you are slightly more likely to show up in google image searches which means you're gonna get used in a lot of random thumbnails.
The good news about DA is that is has a functioning tagging system. While it technically doesn't allow porn, it will turn a blind eye so long as the artist self-tags it as such. The moment an artist uploads porn and doesn't tag it, their entire account gets nuked and there is no getting it back. This means that if you have your adult content filter on, it'll be pretty rare you stumble across it.
Fetish art you'll still get sometimes, they're much worse at tagging than the nudity people.
DA is a lot smaller, and everyone on it is an artist, not everyone is a consumer. Unlike twitter/tumblr, where everyone is a consumer but most people aren't artists. This means you won't get big number. HOWEVER, the number you do get is higher quality. For a long time, despite only having like 20 followers on DA, it was my only source of commissions.
Not sure why artist lounge kicked you here
I miss the old DA, back when the community was great and before it was corrupted with art thieves and child p*rn. It was the first art sharing community I joined, back in the very early 2000s. I managed to get some fame on there and built a bit of a following 2 times, but never made any money as it was mostly fanart I did.
I used to get yearly subscriptions, back when it was £18 per year and it was, if I had the confidence back then, a great way to earn money as an artist. The art theft though forced me to plaster ugly watermarks all over my art, which still didn't stop the thieves.
The final straw for me was when I scrolled through the home page and found blatant child p*rn! I won't go into detail, but I was seriously disturbed. I contacted DA about it and unbelievably they said it was fine 😱 that was the day I gave up after 15yrs of membership and left.
The last part is definitely a problem. I mean, people can draw what they want but its becoming furry/fetish land lol. I'm curious to see if any other artists bounced back and doing DA again.
I confess that I actually do some furry art and much of what I see on there is very well done, so it doesn't bother me much. The weirder/fetish art does though, but as I said earlier, the site seems to do a good job of not showing any of that. My main concern again though is art theft, but maybe I'm being too paranoid about it.
Art Theft is DEFINITELY a problem. Hell, even in the "good-ol days" of old DeviantArt pre-Eclipse it was a massive problem that is hardly regulated at all by the mods. Even in cases where we had evidence someone had been stealing art on the same accout for YEARS!
The "weirder" art? My colleague, my fellow artist, don't throw stones from that glass house of yours.
I miss what DeviantArt used to be. It's just not the same. A LOT of people left after the Eclipse thing. Honestly, as annoying as Eclipse's layout is, I could have gotten used to it- it's the behaviour of the mods that made me leave. Like, the entire community was aggressively against this change, (there was a toggle we could use to try Eclipse and it looked terrible in comparison to what we had and a lot of things were now broken, super hard to find, etc. and the notifications menu still has major issues), and the mods repeatedly ignored everything (only replying to questions and not concerns, and replying to those questions in,, so like, "there is no war in ba sing se" type of ways, I don't know how else to describe it)
Whether I log into DeviantArt as a GUEST (default settings, nothing 'adult' toggled on) or my original account, you immediately see porn and fetish art. Mostly fetish art. Front page? Inflation. Looking up stamps? There's nsfw and feet pics in there for some reason. Looking up my favorite fandom? One of the characters is literally wetting a diaper. There is ZERO moderation happening on DeviantArt. This was a problem back in the "good ol days", even- someone could have years worth of blatant art theft and with multiple people reporting them it'd still take months if you ever saw a result at all.
Not to mention, we have very little customization available to us on our profile compared to what we used to have.
It just sucks. Even if they fixed all of that, I won't come back because of the moderators. All they do is pretend everything is going fine and then ignore blatant art theft reports, harrassment reports, etc when they come in.
This is why I'm making my own site with a team haha!
Deviantarts always had weird fetishart. I remember when it first opened as a website in the early 2000s and my parents were both like "gasp" at the word "deviant". I had never heard the word before and since then Ive always associated the word with deviantart but it apparently used to be a "bad" word. My parents were very iffy of me using the site because of it.
It has always had fetishes and porn and people whining "youre just anti art!!"
But I can get on insta and twitter and accidentally come accross porn too. I filter it out constantly.
I did start reposting to DA again a couple years ago because it had my largest collection of followers still. Its still pretty much dead..in terms of interaction. But thats probably me because I dont interact on there. I literally upload and run. I even got a daily deviation in the recent past but the DD post on twitter got me more attention than on DA.
But that being said I have had people say nice things to me on there as well. So thats nice.
No good mobile app + no good AI for explore or scrolling through feed. That’s the biggest issue for me. Same goes for ArtStation, but it’s more targeted to the industry, yet even they have a better discover page.
Haven't seen mention of this yet, so I'll just add that as a smaller artist with <50 watchers, I've been getting A LOT more interactions on DA since Eclipse. Probably since they abolished categories as I always tag veryyyy heavily. I can't comment on theft (my art's not good enough for that yet haha) but it might actually be a great time to build up a viewerbase there right now, if that's your goal :)
I used to like it, but it has become so overloaded with fetish art that it might as well just be a fetish art site at this point. You can't search for any keyword without fetish art coming up.
I searched for Stardew Valley, Stardew fricking Valley, a wholesome little game about community, adventure, magic and farming, and it was pages upon pages of fetish art about the characters.
I made an account there once, and now I'm going to delete the account and the art because I don't want any association with this kind of stuff. Which brings me to a question I've been having: Does anyone know any good sites to post art?
I used to use DA way back in the day, but I haven’t seriously been back in years. I don’t think it can compete with places like Instagram, Twitter or even Tiktok. DA is the OG social media site for artists, though I don’t know if DA is what it used to be.
I was on dA since 2005 and left in 2014. They redid the website UX and it’s never been the same since. I’m not able to connect with people the way I used to, and the website has been over run with soft porn and weird fetishes, which is completely different to mature content art. I go on every once in a while to check how the site is doing. However, I’m not sure if I’ll go back serious
It was used to be best place for wide variety of community for artists before social sites took over and forums like conceptart org etc.. It had so much interaction we used to chat and know each other. Now this place only recognize bad arts. There is some weird hatred toward better artists there. Maybe jealousy and people that haven't grown from big eyed furry arts. It has become place for artists that refused to grow up. You can post 5 minute art with bad proportion and wrong perspective and people starts praising you.(Try it it's true) If you post anything other than sonichu level of art you will not see one bit of interaction there. Don't start with some kind of weird elitism with how many years they were in Deviant arts. In front page you could see people doing art for 15 years and haven't improved by little bit, takes any kind of criticism as offensive.
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Your post has been removed because users must be courteous to other users at all times.
Aside from the questionable content, as someone who has been actively using deviantart for about ten years, the Eclipse update has been a tad lazy.
They implemented a live chat feature that they seem to be pushing to try to get users to use instead of 'notes'. The chat feature has been in a 'beta' state for over a year and half the time it doesn't load or send messages, which is an issue when dealing with clients over it. The site has a lot of other bugs and glitches that have never been fixed or have been left for months.
I have the lowest tier of core membership for scheduling uploads, but half the time when I hit the schedule button it doesn't register that I do and redirects me to a 'buy a core membership' page. And when I do schedule posts, sometimes the site just eats it up anyways and never uploads them.
Was my first home for art. Then they lost 80% of my uploaded content. Files corrupted and the only thing left was some thumbnails... I think this happened after a major site update / redesign. Never updated my page after that and moved to print to order galleries to sell my work.
I've been on DeviantArt for a while and a lot of my works still get discovered through there, especially linked w/ resharing on Reddit. But I'm also setting up an Artstation account just becaues apparently that's where all the attention is atm, especially for high-level/business attention. But I haven't had much of a problem with DeviantArt's algorithm and filtering, the most problems with "porn" on my front page I get is Sakimichan who I actually follow lol
I'm a small artist that made one to potentially get a bigger audience
I doubt that’ll work for you 😭 I’d only post on da for a hobby if I were you. I’ve been on for 7 years, around 5 on my current one, and still only at 300 watchers, no commissions, comments, or favs on my works despite being quite skilled.
The major artists that are moving back already have a fan base to bring with them. I’m afraid you’ll get lost in there.
I hate them because of childhood ruining art