I worked at deviantArt from 2009 to 2013. It was my dream job. At the time deviantArt made money a few ways.
In no particular order, because I don't know which were profitable or which represented a larger portion of revenue:
- Subscriptions (users could pay for a few extra features and to disable ads on the site)
- DeviantArt branded merch.
- Prints and products with users' art printed on them
- Sponsored Contests. These promoted movies or other media properties, or software of interest to artists. Often the prizes included Wacom tablets and Adobe Photoshop licenses.
During my time there a significant problem we were dealing with was due to deviantArt's stance on adult content. Anything was allowed as long as it wasn't outright pornography. In practice that meant that nudes were allowed but sexual acts were not. This had consequences for deviantArt's revenue. It meant that we could not run ads from the "reputable" ad networks and were forced to deal with seedier outfits that often (e.g. constantly) included malware in the display ads, exposing users to all sorts of nasty stuff. One of my projects was to detect and/or prevent the malware ads which proved challenging and at least given the amount of resources devoted to it, it was not very fruitful.
It really is sad for me to see what deviantArt has devolved into. Once the original founders sold out a few years ago I really didn't hold out much hope for the site's future.
imo once the suicide girls and the suzi9mm stuff started to be "the thing" - and we allowed a bunch of people from that crew into GD, things started to change really quickly. Honestly, I hated it so much, it made me really upset. I have no issue with that style of art, but it really took over the narrative for a while, and that was silly, and I'm still surprised some 20+ years later it was allowed to happen.
Who or what do you think it "was allowed" by? Nothing kills an edgy contemporary art platform faster than censorship, plus they would've got bogged down endlessly in fights about you let someone away with x so why are you blocking y. The place is called DeviantArt FFS.
Enough time has passed, I guess I can speak my mind a bit. I'm sorry, but in my opinion, The downfall of DeviantART was when Angelo fucked with Scott and Eric. Scott and Eric should have run it with Chris and Heidi. Kicking a co-founder out unceremoniously, and especially the co-founder who was responsible for the customers, that was really ill guided. I have nothing against Angelo personally, I'd still consider him a friend, but yeah, I truly believe dA would have been amazing today if that hadn't happened, everything got really fucked up after that imo.
Building DigitalOcean was fun, but building dA was 1000 times more fun, best times of my life for sure, very very grateful.
(I worked on gallery, help, irc, dAmn and a bunch of other stuff, 2001-2008 my emoji still exists :neom:)
I remember that. I was part of the group vocal about how messed up it was. I was at the first summit and it was a blast, took home a couple of those posters. So sad to see what’s happened to it.
So much of the DeviantArt story reads like Tumblr. Two platforms appealing to amateur and small artists grow to great relevance among a patchwork of subcultures. Then, they start trying to turn a profit and end up alienating the entire userbase that carried them to that point. DeviantArt is much further down that road than Tumblr is, though. It's sad to see. Both platforms were key to the WWW of my childhood.
I wish the artists well in their AI copyright legal pursuits.
Apple mandated the changes to Tumblr that pissed everyone off. I'd almost call this a forced error, but Apple's rationale for bringing the hammer down on Tumblr was App Review finding CSAM on the front page. Which is itself a failure of their moderation team.
In contrast, DeviantArt saw dollar signs from AI art and rugpulled themselves. Their business model relies on art remaining scarce enough to not exhaust the demand for art. A machine that lets you create unlimited art for the cost of some GPU time completely destroys the economic underpinnings of most artistic endeavor. While not all artists are solely economically motivated, the ones that are economically successful are the ones paying for dA subscriptions - the things that keep the site alive.
Tumblr's change in policy on NSFW content was bad enough, but what made it a complete disaster was outsourcing the enforcement of that policy to a crude image classifier. A lot of non-pornographic content got removed when that happened, and a lot of users never bothered contesting those removals (either because it was too much effort, or because they were no longer maintaining their account). So a lot of content on older Tumblr accounts is just gone.
It's possible that artists posting their art aren't a large enough demographic to produce enough economic value that can be harvested to feed a cadre of SWEs and PMs and SREs and executives and moderators and, and...
I think it's just not possible for a centralized social media service to avoid enshittification long-term, at least not if it has to make money directly. It remains to be seen whether decentralized options can provide a long-term alternative at scale.
For the same reason FOSS projects aren't funded in proportion to their criticality, and why taxes aren't voluntarily - given the option to use the service for free, most people will do so and choose not to donate. Any such project, to stay afloat, will likely end up depending upon a small number of donors who can then exercise political control over the platform.
A social network has to make money somehow because it has bills to pay. Hosts aren't free. Servers aren't free. The cloud isn't free. Staff isn't free. Moderators are usually free but shouldn't be.
> A social network has to make money somehow because it has bills to pay. Hosts aren't free. Servers aren't free.
Sure, but probably a FOSS social network would need far fewer of these than a paid one, because 99% of the server costs of something like Facebook or Twitter, go toward the backends, analytical DBs, and graphical / ML models used to power "features" that no user wants, but which make Facebook themselves money.
And a FOSS social network would just... not build those kinds of features.
Instead of, say, a feed constantly rebuilt to drive engagement and rage-bait, you'd just get a simple chronological feed of what everyone you're following is posting; with maybe the ability to dial down the number of posts you see from any given person you're following ("show me the only the most-liked Nth percentile of posts from this user") without unfollowing. But even that kind of filtering — in fact, even the merging of followed users' feeds! — could all be done client-side. The whole "feeds" part could be as simple as a post-triggered static-site-generator pushing JSON into an object-storage bucket hiding behind an edge cache.
That's basically Mastodon, which isn't free. Plenty of small instances that try the donation model or that are just funded out of pocket go under.
And I may be wrong but I don't think the recommendation algorithms and other such features take up as much of the cost as you're claiming. I think a lot of the cost of something like Facebook is probably taken up by infrastructure and storage. Recommendation algorithms probably aren't that expensive.
Having extra entire complete copies of the relationship-plus-posts graph, denormalized in various ways (incl. in ways that inherently prevent use of easily map-reducible algorithms, and so require heavy vertical scaling) such that you can run the algorithms, is what’s expensive.
And constantly feeding the data into those denormalized models, using specially-tuned realtime ETL technologies that themselves do distributed scaling to ensure no infinite queue backlogging from activity bursts, is also expensive.
In general i would argue that it is bloat that makes it not feasible to fund as a nonprofit, although people may have different ideas about where / what that bloat is. Recommendation algorithms, or unnecessary product changes, etc.
I don’t think it’s true that it’s intrinsically impossible for a public service to be self funding, and I think that not everything has to grow / change forever to remain relevant.
We need to figure this kind of stuff out, I mean Wikipedia is nice and all but it’s really bad that humanity in general has to rely on megacorp for things as basic as maps while we say we’re living in the Information Age
I don't think decentralisation is the solution because the problem is as much the lack of central authority as the presence of it. Enshittification happens fastest on platforms that are run by committees, who know they need revenue so take the path of least resistance, without a single clear owner who can resist it. Look at Google's decline since its founders left, compare to Facebook which - say what you like about it - is much the same user experience that it always was. (Hell, look at MySpace for an even more dramatic turndown than Google)
Social media sites that are still founder-owned or have strong individual leaders can continue fine (consider e.g. Dreamwidth). Though I guess whether you can sustain that past one person's lifetime is another question.
This comment discusses only centralized services. Decentralized services run on protocols such that no one service provider or software project can dictate the experience for all users.
ActivityPub, used by Mastodon, Misskey, Lemmy, and Pixelfed among others is an example of such a protocol. BlueSky's ATProto is another, though it's in an earlier stage without mature third-party implementations and service providers. Email, too is decentralized, though it may serve as a cautionary tale; spam, attempts to block spam, and feature stagnation have all degraded the user experience considerably.
> Decentralized services run on protocols such that no one service provider or software project can dictate the experience for all users.
And? I guess that somewhat hinders enshittification just by making it hard for the platform to ever evolve at all. But the cure is worse than the disease, you can't ever build something new that way nor can you really improve something that has any level of traction. Look at how IRC users revolt when you try to fix even the most glaring problems.
Just a regular story of capitalism and platform enshittification.
Whenever a platform is owned by shareholders who then need to extract rents from the ecosystem, this will happen. Whether it’s couchsurfing or twitter.
Expect it to happen to Reddit etc.
There is a direct line from the profit motive to platforms becoming enshittified, promoting the most outrageous content and making people emotional and angry.
The AI is just another level of appropriating human work. Whether it’s google’s disruption of publishers through AI-generated answers, or OpenAI training on artists’ work.
Is "profit motive" that different than "survival motive"?
These platforms need money to survive. Automattic, the latest owner of Tumblr wrote a great post on all the things they've tried and how Tumblr is still losing $20MM a year IIRC.
Wordpress by that same Automattic doesn’t need money to survive, in the sense of money going to one large corporation. Anyone can self-host their own copy of wordpress, buy plugins etc.
If you want to know more about how to monetize digital content without a trusted central actor, we are working on a Web2 version of that ecosystem btw: https://qbix.com/ecosystem
Also, science and wikipedia and openstreetmap are examples of open gift economies.
I persevered with your website because I am very interested in the ideas, but I have to say it was very hard going. Thousands of words about abstract concepts could easily be reduced to a few hundred or spread across multiple pages. The only comprehensive list of services actually on offer is a PDF? The videos describing the merits of these decentralised services are accessed through image links to YouTube! There's lots of low hanging fruit to improve usability for those less patient than me in my humble opinion.
Sorry the experimental stuff is not slick enough for you yet, we don’t have the resources of Facebook or even Automattic. We worked very hard for 12 years on the foundations at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform but I am sure you can find many faults there. (I’d like to hear about them btw.)
On the other hand, many other projects like the E programming language, Capn’proto, Linux etc. are also very complex and did not have fantastic and slick documentation, first adopters also had to read some words in order to get it.
This is an open source project. You are welcome to reduce the words and make a summary. Perhaps when we start marketing to a broad audience, we’ll reduce it to 10 word slides and sound bites, or jingles.
With your prickly response to some valid, basic feedback, I think everyone would be well advised to stay away from contributing to your project in any way.
DeviantArt was never perfect but it really is a wasteland now. Regardless of where you stand on the ethics of genAI the results in practice are just boring, the feeds are an endless stream of the same handful of prompt templates, and the volume of AI posts is so enormous that it drowns out anything else a hundred to one. Manual curation of good posts eventually hits a breaking point when the volume of white noise posts becomes so unbearable that the curators just give up and leave.
Even categories that are supposed to be for specific mediums where AI shouldn't be applicable are full of it regardless - just now I scanned the Photography section and almost immediately spotted a conspicuously three-fingered woman. Posts made using AI are supposed to be tagged as such so users can opt-out of seeing them, but that "photo" isn't tagged, nor is anything else on the uploaders profile despite all of it being blatant AI.
You could almost turn it into a game - pick a random category and see how far you have to scroll before you see anything at all that doesn't scream "babbies first copy-pasted MidJourney prompt".
It's everywhere. Google image results are already becoming heavily polluted with AI art (try searching something like "unicorn" for example). Someone posted a cool site here the other day that was a sort of automatically-generated encyclopedia, except that since it was automatically grabbing images, most of the examples of historical art styles had ended up being modern AI art instead. That wouldn't have been the case at all even two years ago, it's a bit scary.
Probably, either way they are doing a piss poor job of enforcing the rule so everyone loses. The people who don't want to see AI posts see them anyway and the AI models will end up Habsburging themselves.
There were always uneven applying of rules based on certain staff whims, and that of course, carries its own law of unintended consequences.
Now, with Wix in charge, and a handful of the roachier staff left (I'll name names, Realitysquared) the site has negative bupkes chance of content moderation/curation worth a wet damn.
It really needs to be said that AI "artists" have confused productivity with quality. I actually don't go to DeviantArt to see your ai generated garbage. I care more about people who are willing to do interesting things with their medium even if they takes a lot longer.
Yeah, it's almost comical the degree to which quantity has become emphasized over quality. More than a few times I've clicked through to an AI posters profile out of morbid curiosity and seen that they have thousands or even tens of thousands of uploads despite being active for less than a year or so. Even with the supposed productivity boosts that AI brings you can't convince me that someone posting 20+ pieces every single day like clockwork is putting any real consideration into them, but the magic of AI is that something with little time and zero thought put into it can still be superficially passable.
I am a bad artist but I do make art, and have been trying to make art over the past year or so. I've made less than 200 pieces over that time but I can still go back to work that I've spent hours on and remember the decisions I've made and the specific works that have helped me grow or that I'm proud of. Do you think AI artists remember the work they've produced?
I worked at DA in a volunteer capacity (Gallery Director mostly) from 2004-2008 and have been on the site since 2002.
I actually started writing a long screed about this on my own blog last year with the AI debacle but shelved it (now I feel compelled to return to it)
DA had plenty of small problems and a few big ones, exacerbated by incredibly green leadership at the top. It was pretty much run off the whims of the CEO, who even when he had good ideas, had no execution focus, and often outright ignored capable feedback from his lieutenants.
Things like having an app, an API, a GTM strategy that was remotely baked for feature releases was simply non-existent at BEST, and done in the most haphazard more typically.
DA eventually shredded its own community; exhausting most of its most dedicated members, and ignored offers for acquisition that made much more fiscal and practical sense then the pittance it eventually went for to that trashfire place called Wix, who in all likelihood will eventually sell off bits for scrap.
DA was a true gem for a decade, and then fell in spite of that due to categorical poor management and vision (or the execution thereof).
I'm pretty sure DeviantArt stopped being about actual "art" long before AI. Years ago I deleted my account because I didn't want to see my posts next to furry scribbles, softcore porn, and other low-skill fetish adjacent crap.
Professional digital artists post at Artstation now from what I can tell.
I watch porn but I don’t want porn on every site I use. Skill has nothing to do with it, it’s that adult content is generally meant for a different response from “awe”.
Some fringe content is downright disgusting and so far away from art that some people should put their pencils down and go to therapy.
ArtStation is also filling up with AI crap, though not to the same extent as dA quite yet. It's most obvious in the marketplace which is now full of paid "reference packs" that consist entirely of AI generated images, which rather defeats the point of using a reference.
There's still people on there selling good reference material but now they're buried between a few dozen variants of 6000+ WIZARD CHARACTERS IN 4K!! that someone churned out with Stable Diffusion in an afternoon.
The bot buying and selling network reminds me of the time KeyBase tried doing a giveaway of their crypto coin.
You needed a GitHub account and a KeyBase account. So people created as many accounts as their bot networks were capable of, and tried to get the crypto.
Thankfully KeyBase changed the requirements to include "account must be X weeks old".
Edited to add: I'm not sure if there's a way to prevent bots these days. Feels to me that we're lucky (more?) economic systems haven't been bled dry by bot networks.
I miss the promise of KeyBase. It felt like a real digital identity, but for whatever reasons it wasn't good enough to succeed.
the only thing I remember about keybase was when they did this crypto ‘air drop’ thing, and then a while later (months? years?) I realised I had this coin in my account and I sold it for like 70 Euros on some sketchy crypto marketplace.
Can’t complain to be honest, no other startup so far has just handed me 70 Euros without asking to at least harvest my eye data..
To me KeyBase always felt like grifters trying to co-opt grassroots identity stuff. IIRC they were sort-of-but-not-really OpenPGP at the start, pushing people heavily towards a not-your-keys not-your-crypto setup, and then at some point they completely removed the ability to actually control your signing keys yourself.
It’s just that bots haven’t been good enough yet. With the new LLM tech they can pretty much pass every hurdle you’ll throw at them. Even if you require people to show up in person, they’ll do that but then run a bot the rest of the time in their account.
I am sure that LLMs and bots will be able to fool many people on HN and run “rings” around dang’s ring detection software, in about 5 years. It’s a gameable metric, after all.
They were already able to do it on 4chan in 2020 with just GPT3! And the most impactful thing is users started accusing each other of being bots! It literally enshittified the whole forum overnight:
And to be more exact, GPT-4chan is based on GPT-J (same architecture as GPT-3 whose weights were never released) which only had 6B params and that was back in 2021-2022.
There's a straightforward but costly way, tie it to something that costs money, over the long term. E.g. Utility bills, bank account statements, etc..., for x number of years.
And manually confirm with the companies at random.
Ah, I remember deviantART, besides a gallery, was my JavaScript (userJS) playground. I found ways to automate giving llamas (for free points and for receiving 10000 llamas in return), discovered API paths to read hidden/deleted comments and journals (fixed now).
Since the aptly named "Eclipse" redesign it became terrible to use, so I stopped.
The lean into AI will just let it rot for a few more years than otherwise.
They embraced AI slop and now their site is a wasteland, the best they can hope for now is that like NFTs before them AI art becomes a useful route for money laundering.
Its a shame to see what its become, the ascension of AI slop means a site like it will never be possible again unless there is some incredible filtering capabilities available.
Art teacher speaking. The influence of DeviantArt (and now ArtStation) on young a tists is staggering, and not always good.
When I was a student, I got my eye candy from the school library, which provided context and history to the art. On these site, most images are presented without much context: what was this artist influenced by? How did they develop? Etc.
You can see who they follow and what they've written right there on the site, and you can move freely between works via tags and collections. If anything I'd say it's much easier to get more context on DA than in a physical gallery.
It's easy to blame AI (and yes, AI images spammers are a problem on every platform). But DeviantArt was in a decline way before Stable Diffusion became a thing.
Isn't the real problem here not Deviant Art, as much as people making low effort bot nets to trick Deviant Art into paying them?
It's a spam problem, only worse, because they're actively paying the spammers.
Even Spotify has this problem. All too often I'm getting recommended crappy remixes "slowed and reverbed" or "sped up". Just recently I got some guy's crappy techno with the artist field spammed with completely unrelated bands I follow. Of course, when I tried to report this, Spotify only cared if the guy was selling bootleg merchandise.
The whole thing made me click, "hide artist" and "hide song" for the very first time.
I'll drop a bit of deviantArt history that you're unlikely to find in an article like this, but which probably contributed to dA's initial failure to sustain its place as the preeminent platform for sharing art online as social media rose to prominence: its banning of sexualized nudity in 2006, which lead to the exodus of adult/adult-adjacent artists - and, particularly, furries.
That was the stumble that gave room for other platforms to grab pieces of its then-current and future user-base. Anyone can tell you that a very large portion of the money changing hands online for art (adult and not) is actually changing paws, so dA missed out of having a slice of that, whether through advertising or facilitating transactions. Worse, its reputation was tarnished among adjacent subcultures.
There have also been regular ToS panics every 2 or 3 years, where someone's (mis)interpretation of the licensing rights dA claimed for being able to modify and distribute artwork (i.e., make thumbnails and send images in daily update emails) caused users to swear off the site for fear of having their work "stolen". Add to that, quite a backlash against the recent site redesign (and the ones before it).
That is all to say, this really has been a long time coming. My account is nearing the 2-decade mark, but I haven't logged on more than a couple dozen times in the last half of that. There's just almost nothing there you can't find more easily or comfortably elsewhere.
Wasn't on dA in 2006, but the Eclipse redesign of the site to look more like Wix is what dropped my site usage to 0 even before NFTs and GenAI shit. The old design looked "dated" - so what? It was more intuitive, feature-rich, customizable, and distinct. dA was Xing its brand recognition before it was cool.
I posted a lot of my Disco Diffusion AI work on DeviantArt back in 2022 (2 centuries ago, in AI years) (https://www.deviantart.com/holosomnia/art/Sea-of-Color-92572...) as an example. At that time the AI hate machine wasn't as pervasive, and it was very well received.
Only when the crowd effect of "AI=bad" came along, the pitchforks came out. As someone to whom AI art has brought incredible joy, it's very disheartening to see artists and the public straight up refuse to understand both the technology and the artistic potential -- the human side of AI art.
In the same way that I would hope you would understand the problem with submitting 10000 drop shipped factory-made bowls or sweaters to a hand made competition or exhibition, I hope even if you appreciate AI art on the merits you can understand the frustration and challenges with trying to create them out of spaces intended for art created without AI.
One of the reasons I like computers is that they let me do things I couldn't do before even if others could without computers. I mean, think about the revolution in desktop publishing in the 1980s -- a person could use software to make a nice looking brochure or even a full book without any typesetting knowledge. And people were excited by it. They didn't say "You horrible person! You are trying to destroy the livelihoods of professional typesetters!", which I'd imagine would be the response if desktop publishing was invented now.
> a person could use software to make a nice looking brochure or even a full book without any typesetting knowledge
By using a template? Because based on my experience with inDesign and Affinity Publisher, it's still required to have knowledge about design and typesetting. They reduce the costs to get started and work in the domain, but the knowledge requirement was still there. Same with digital drawing and photo retouching. You're no longer gate-kept by the material costs. But AI is the equivalent of pressing X in a fight game and then saying you can do MMA and ready to go against UFC champions.
In no particular order, because I don't know which were profitable or which represented a larger portion of revenue:
- Subscriptions (users could pay for a few extra features and to disable ads on the site) - DeviantArt branded merch. - Prints and products with users' art printed on them - Sponsored Contests. These promoted movies or other media properties, or software of interest to artists. Often the prizes included Wacom tablets and Adobe Photoshop licenses.
During my time there a significant problem we were dealing with was due to deviantArt's stance on adult content. Anything was allowed as long as it wasn't outright pornography. In practice that meant that nudes were allowed but sexual acts were not. This had consequences for deviantArt's revenue. It meant that we could not run ads from the "reputable" ad networks and were forced to deal with seedier outfits that often (e.g. constantly) included malware in the display ads, exposing users to all sorts of nasty stuff. One of my projects was to detect and/or prevent the malware ads which proved challenging and at least given the amount of resources devoted to it, it was not very fruitful.
It really is sad for me to see what deviantArt has devolved into. Once the original founders sold out a few years ago I really didn't hold out much hope for the site's future.
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