seeing deviantart being bullied and burnt was genuinely pretty fucking funny. deviantart has been disappointing for a long while, and even more disappointing when it switched to eclipse. even during my times on the older layout, i still had some beefs with deviantart. but eclipse, and now this update - no matter if they've reupdated their update to tame the people holding the torches - has completely ruined deviantart for me.

to me, deviantart has been ruined for a while. to uncensored fetish art, to the annoying lack of care to people without core (even when i had core), to deviantart doing a "deviantart protection" tool for only core members & more. and then eclipse. as someone who was on deviantart for few years, i can surely say that DA has been dead (half exaggeration) for a while - the impact the eclipse had on the userbase was surely surreal. the amounts of viewers and faves that had drop on many people's artwork. the amounts of groups that has been inactive or extremely slow with letting others post submissions after a folder limit, to the point specific fanart would be harder to gain traction because of the specific fandom groups being dead/semi-active.

deviantart has been so close to tripping over the edge, and you can desperately see its trying to stand straight. it stings my heart. but not only because i hold some emotional attachment to the website, but because social media has been hitting their artists with a spikey bat for a long time. we can't just forget to mention that deviantart is just that one website.

there's a big key that makes its presence so unique to the point it can be hard to let go: professionals or hobbyists, artists with different skill levels, fanarts or original artists, many artists making simple-detailed or extremely-detailed art -- deviantart offered more opportunities for different types of artists to get popular more than social medias like insta and twitter. pixiv, furaffinity, and more could've easily replaced deviantart, but deviantart had stayed on top (and will continue to stay on top for a while) because its definition of "specific art you need to make for a presence, popularity, money" is more ranged than other websites - and offers more hype for various of artists or various of things to draw.

don't get me wrong, deviantart has its flaws that can fuck up artists as well. deviantart wasn't the perfect fucking heaven for every artist - and it certainly still isn't now. i'm an old user so deviantart could be transitioning to become like any other website right now and is being biased about specific artstyles/art. but i just can't deny deviantart's impact and that deviantart is pretty unique. and i hope one day, an art website that could have more mercy on artists gets launched.