deviantART

deviantART was established in the year 2000 during the uneasy [Web 2.0] changeover. Previously, digital artists might host their own creations at a Geocities page on a website rolled in Macromedia Dreamweaver. But a service like deviantART offered the convenience of having a free and convenient place to exhibit your works as well as a community of fellow creatives to rate and comment on your posts, without having to fiddle around with setting up your own guestbook and traffic counter and somehow attracting traffic to your portfolio site, likely through [webring] membership. In this sense, DA was for visual artists what MySpace was for bands: early, pre-enshittification social media that really greased the rails on networking among people with a shared special interest.

DA was originally intended as a place for people to share their new custom interface artwork (or "[skin]s", or this site's unique coinage "deviations") for popular programs such as WinAmp, but strong interest led them to quickly expand their focus to a much broader scope of visual art practice. Indeed, between the late-'90s collapse of the BBS / IRC-based artscene and its subsequent 16c / Blocktronics-era revival on Facebook, deviantART was briefly a hub for the rump [artscene] activity still going on during that time, presided over by [Diamondie]. DA's founders were artscene-adjacent, and extraordinarily the site even offered native ANSI art image processing for uploads.

Artscene activity was already leaving DA in favour of Facebook before DA's fortunes changed dramatically, first through its gradually filling up with low-quality fanart submissions by aspiring artists who couldn't wait to develop their skills before sharing their exercises, and then later rapidly alienating its userbase by allowing its corpus of user-contributed content to be used for AI training purposes.