Deviants Need Not Apply To DeviantArt
An end of an era? Eh.
Most popular e-artists don’t actually use Deviantart anymore. If you ever follow them on Twitter or Instagram, they rarely have a DA; if they do, it’s more of an afterthought, and certainly their least used social media for sharing their work. If you use it on a regular basis, you’re probably one of these three groups (the reader can feel free to assume which group the author is a part of):
People into the bizarre kinks made popular on the internet - your vore, inflation, and diaper fanatics
Pre-teens learning to draw anything better than a stick figure for the first time
People that enjoy mocking the first 2 groups (Did you know Encyclopædia Dramatica’s Deviantart group is still up? Did you even know that Encyclopædia Dramatica still exists?)
The first group has not been having the time of their lives recently. No one’s been enjoying Deviantart in the past few years, really. The first major piss stream into the user’s face began with the UI change. A complete overhaul of something that didn’t need fixing, only to replace it with typical SOVLLESS Web 3.0 design. It was like the “streamlining” done to logos, applied to an entire user interface. Groups are the only vestige of the User Interface that users actually liked.
The biggest change came from this update to their Submission Policies. Besides backtracking on what they’ve been known for a better part of two decades, with rules that they know will screw over a large portion of their userbase, they’re just pretty nutty in general—even for social media guidelines. The second point is especially egregious; the banning on aging up characters is a very lazy attempt at moral grandstanding. But to whom? The internet at large? Most people have their minds up already on whether they like that content or not on a website.
The first rule also gives up a little more information on how this came to be. It’s simply a corporate decision. Caring on whether actual people (read: celebrities) get posted on their results from them fearing that one fellow from the film or music industry suing them over what’s on DA, knocking out the website for good. The consequences are still no less expected, however:
Most websites to a pretty cruddy job when dealing with removing content from their platforms. Deviantart is no exception. Their genius implementation meant that people saw their accounts deleted, immediately, with no ability to remove whatever content did violate the new rules, and with no actual ability to appeal for their accounts to be restored. The fact that DA waited a few months between changing the rules and chucking ban hammers at people with no warning just added more salt to the wound.
Those that didn’t get banned quickly got to work scrubbing their accounts of any thing ban-worthy. For a lot of people, that meant straight up nuking their account and leaving a final post linking their Pixiv. Alts have been created by people trying to get back onto the website, but those have been promptly deleted again.
Will this ever be as big as the Tumblr Exodus of 2018? No, lol. As I’ve said already, most of the frequent posters on it were already users on all the other major social media platforms, so there won’t be a noticeable influx of your waifu shitting herself in a diaper on your timeline anytime soon. What this really signifies is a major death to a remnant of pre-2010 internet. All the old posts from back in the day, all the ED raids and weird kinks that you can only find on the internet being posted for the first time, ready to destroy your chance at normal sexual development, still stood up to now. These bans are just another spit in the face to the Internet as a “forever archive,” and further proof that Wix sucks fat gorilla nuts, no matter how many times Youtubers used to shill for it back in the day.