The Astonishing Hypocrisy of DeviantArt

The original logo of DeviantArt. People who've used the platform in the past often think this logo represented the "good old days" of the website.

DeviantArt was never the premier website for the art community on the Internet, but during the 2000s, it was one of the most popular places for people to express themselves and set their imaginations free to compose whatever it was that they decided to do. True to its name, however, DeviantArt would indeed draw the real "deviants" of the world - that is, the unsavory members of society - to their platform and thus give a microphone to the voices of seriously damaged and depraved minds. Many of the members who use the platform are quite frankly overtly sexist, very immature and have a fragile sense of the world. The website is riddled with soft pornographic content, hentai, and crudely drawn "artwork" that at best serves as narrow-minded, infantile obsessions and points the way for further excursions into the darker side of the Internet as a whole. And the fact that DeviantArt's staff takes an embarrassingly long time to remove some of the more offensive content on their site is truly perplexing.

However, DeviantArt has long since become a very hollow shell of itself, and is not really about creating art anymore but is now a website with the pretentious aura of being all about creativity, and is nothing more than catch-all terms and smoke and mirrors. General hobbyists who don't create art for a living and most amateurs and professionals were never given a real chance to promote their content on the platform, and since being bought out by Wix in 2017, DeviantArt began to really give its community the proverbial golden shower. With forums no longer watched like a hawk by its staff - the "administrators" and "moderators" - and would inevitably devolve into a cesspit of instigators desperately looking for their fifteen minutes of fame and only the top professional artists being able to showcase their craft on the website's associated social media platforms, it became increasingly clear that the website's golden age was long over and that the game was up for members who only wanted to merely express themselves. 

Since the advent of the 2020s, a radical re-design of the website known as "Eclipse" stripped the platform of its heart and soul and made the overall experience more unpleasant. Browsing DeviantArt became more confusing for those searching for a particular niche that they enjoy, and literature pieces - be it journals, "status updates" (which DeviantArt designed in the spirit of trying to compete with Twitter/X and Facebook) or full-length stories, were now given snippets that say "## minute read," which was both a middle finger to the very author(s) who put all of their mind, heart and soul into their craft and the details that go with writing and was emblematic of a culture that does not put effort into comprehension of the written and spoken word. People these days like to give others the impression that they're educated, well-versed and intelligent, but this is betrayed simply by an arrogant impatience for those who want to convey and illustrate the subject(s) at hand. And it was no longer enough to DeviantArt's corporate powers that be that the website's community express themselves through their content - members now are encouraged to "benchmark" themselves by competing with other members so as to perpetually grind themselves to the dog-eat-dog, Gordon Gekko uber-capitalistic hamster wheel of promoting not their artwork, but instead driving up the bottom line and prevalence of DeviantArt the website. Making the website yet another vicious cycle was an insult to injury to the many people who struggle to make a comfortable living pursuing their passions and talents, but it was a sign of the times that DeviantArt, just like any other company, would have the treacherous corporate nature of the organization model where only money matters and nothing or no one else.

Then DeviantArt decided to fully embrace artificial intelligence (AI), thus giving everyone on the platform, even the most esteemed and well-respected professional artists, the middle finger with both hands. Remember the movies where robots and super-computers were taking over the world and threatening the existence of humanity, and how those movies and concepts were all the rage in popular culture from the 1980s to the early 2000s? We are entering the film set of that movie as we speak when the elite and powerful these days choose to exploit technology to further limit the human race to those who can afford the most lucrative objects of desire and those who will struggle throughout their existence to attain even the essential means to carry on with their lives and can only lush after the most luxurious goods. With AI, most people these days will be forced to look for new careers and ways of life in order to survive, and the fact that DeviantArt, choosing to be something it was never designed to be by becoming this corporate monstrosity of soulless excess and number-crunching, this further shrinks the ability of average people to find somewhere on the Internet where they have a voice and can find a place to contribute. DeviantArt's members are not artists anymore, they've just been mere cogs in a machine that only looks out for its own material importance and survival. It's a cheap excuse and a real disgrace considering human beings are social creatures who like to follow their hearts and open their minds up to the ways of the world, to further deny people the right to express their imagination is an austere, draconian disservice. There is no articulate purpose in using AI to create "art," it just relegates and beats the art community down to a pulp and erases their future. These ends do not justify the means, but hey, try convincing DeviantArt's board of directors that removing the individual trains of unique thought is a bad decision for business, especially when they want to give the illusion that they're about creative inspiration.

Ultimately, DeviantArt will go down in infamy as yet another acid casualty of a culture that is increasingly consumerist and with a diminishing patience for intellectual thought and the full picture. The website's biggest problems all along is its inability to weed out the trouble-makers and its lust for relevance, and they will be the website's downfall. They've already fallen out of grace with the art community long ago, and unless someone can resuscitate the platform in the near-future and bring the site back to a natural life of good-natured and productive imaginations and the wisdom of a thoughtful, engaging community, very little of artistic value will be lost in DeviantArt's demise.