As per Malcolm X: "If you aren't careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing."

Indeed, and at the time the people fighting the Luddites were also pro-slavery, racist and pretty much everything the average modern western person would be appalled at. Yet Luddites are depicted as being a bunch of uneducated apes with Enoch hammers trying to keep us in the dark ages just for wanting fair wages and were both the poor and middle class people. Makes me wonder what else has been defiled in history, we're all expected to take history for granted and fact yet the same kind of people who burnt books are teaching us "selective" history today.

Taking an anti-fascist approach to resisting AI, if AI is to be "inevitable", as according to autho- and anarcho- capitalists alike, then it should be in the hands of people to make sure that every single profession in existence is automated. But the rich don't want that, they want to automate what is consumable, what can reduced to quantity en-masse, if that were not the case we'd have had personal robots long before these consumeristic AIs.

We pay money to the machines that automatically create things for us, so why is it that that isn't treat as an investment in the machine itself? How comes it's owned by the person who runs the warehouse and not the people paying for the machine directly? In reality, their "private property" is in fact public property, invested by us, so why is it that they take the profit for it? Likewise, why is it that when we make art, we would get compensated less than those who would sell our art? It's just that capital enables people to own others' work instead of the worker owning their own work. Similarly, how's it that if I work for a company to provide food to others, I get less money per hour than the cost of how many products I had created for them? When they need no workers, that becomes 0$ return, so if no one is earning, how do they expect people to pay for their produce anyway? Like Marx said, through automating everything through greed eventually you wouldn't be able to sustain income from an unpaying audience, so either way you take the painful route to post-scarcity or the route where workers get paid and we reach post-scarcity anyway. It's like the liberal idea of paying everyone via UBI, if everyone working all pays the same amount, then the poor working class ends up paying UBI to itself so that doesn't work. Hence you'd have to take money from the rich and they're doing their best to prevent that by pretending the rich don't take from the poor intellectually or by labour, as such they data launder and obfuscate our labour so they don't have any "legal obligation" to return anything to us.

So we can only accelerate this if they want to destroy our livelihoods regardless, as the comic points to. But again, that's something that needs either people power or capital...

Also just found this video, it makes some good points on AI in general https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDz08HMLIQ0

Most crucially is the idea of being separated into smaller and smaller groups, like in our case, non-AI sites which don't have the exposure nor capital to market themselves as openly as say, DA.

They've brought back favourite search which is the first positive thing that happened on this site for a long time, but honestly it's such a dump at this point that I doubt it's fixable without scrapping the whole thing and starting anew. dA is such a fucking mess.

the return of Favorite's search bar can make me use Deviantart at least bit more, but main search bar of Deviantart curently is still broken as shit

People have been saying that for ages and I just don't get it. When I've used DeviantArt, I've used it to share my stuff and it works. I've used it to interact with others and it works. I've used it for staying in touch with the latest stuff and it works for that too. I can't understand what people are using it for that a few idiosyncrasies on their part cannot be tolerated (I mean compared to the norm). This is a question for this whole thread by the way.

I have seen other websites try their hand at succeeding where they think DeviantArt fails, and they only end up failing more miserably than DeviantArt. For example, Buzzly for a time was the most fetish-regulated of any of the art websites. That turned into their biggest failure before their actual biggest failure because they had a hard time defining those rules, where the line would be drawn between a red flag and an okay work. Another example is Inkblot in the context of AI. Inkblot brands itself as being harder on AI than any other website. How do they know the absolute difference between AI art and human art? That's the neat part, they don't. And they're so determined they don't want to admit they have moments of oversight as well as false flags.

I'll say being signed up for hundreds of websites opens one's eyes a little.

Deviantart groups being neglected did mess up with my fanproject

Buzzly drama did killed Buzzlyart for even me(from myself finished the quiz that killed Buzzly for people), and my gripe with Inkblot lies on it asking us our phone numbers as well it's group feature too placeholder-y for me(so far).

At least Artspacious still have any chance to see the light of the day(despite it's developers only work on the site when they're not busy from IRL jobs), Artfol is adding group features, and Artgram(basically Artstation that bans AI arts)?

Have you tried Reddit? Just curious... this is a question for the whole thread too. I know it's the last place on most peoples' minds when sharing art, but in hindsight I wish it was my first. As long as one knows where to put an artwork, it helps a lot (they don't even close many threads anymore), and the only reason I don't use Reddit more often is because I'm probably close to filling up my Reddit storage very quickly. Side 7 easily comes in at a very close second place (due to the forums and photography being allowed).

Oh, did I mention Devdazzle yet? Unlike the other websites, which are off-shoots, this one is supposed to be branded as directly appealing to DeviantArt artists. I'm actually helping at the project... not as an admin or mod but side help (which is how I know about it, that and they're subscribed to me on my Twitter account, TYL80737692). So there is hope. Their Twitter page is Devdazzle_art and that will show their URL.

Regarding Buzzly, for those who don't know, long story short, there were two top admins of Buzzly, and they developed different enough website visions that, in anger, one caused cancel culture to erupt on the other before thanosing half the website. One wanted it to be like DeviantArt, the other an adult website. Years later, the manager of Inkblot would come to bring this to mind alarmingly well and really likes being in control (which is the politest way I can say that). You may notice this in the requirements to sign up, the site rules encroaching on actual legal processes, his over the top attitude towards AI art, his "if you are not with me, then you are my enemy" mindset, his losing conflict with the r/InkblotArt subreddit, the fact you can't view whole galleries if you're not signed up, etc. the last point ruining the whole point of an art website since it means you can't show your work to strangers.

Non-DA sites appearing to fail is a bit of an illusion. On the internet there is only pages. Of course for convenience people prefer all their eggs in one basket, so to speak. And DA is just familiar to them, so why reach out to other sites?

However smaller sites are a great opportunity for growing artists. I don't even think I can name too many artists off of DA compared to other sites. I tend to remember artists better if I'm browsing conglomerating sites like boorus which is kind of interesting.

Which makes me wonder, may be boorus are a better format for art sites for both audiences/consumer and artist. As opposed to boorus that just repost other people's art. Since audiences/consumers and artists alike do prefer tags, for both relevancy and in some cases, reference.

The only issue is AI models and such, when scraping, rely on tags so boorus make it even easier to associate images with certain tags. May be there's just too many posters and not enough curators as well. Curating should assist artists and watchers rather than just create a measure of quality alone. I think artists shine best when they feel "connected" to a greater potential of audience which is why sites like DA shine, but artists are starting to realise also that AI counters this, so there is no doubt that DA is on shaky ground.

In that sense, it may be better for DA alternatives to find ways to help artists feel rewarded, exposed and involved with one another rather than to just market themselves on being new and safe spaces, that might just create a feeling of disconnect. In an absence of exposure to the site itself, though, it's possible to credit artists in other ways that makes them feel wanted and engaged in that community. Or to make them feel connected to their fellow art appreciators or clients, such as by encouraging co-followership, collaboration and to make using the site addictive itself in a way that encourages growth of artist and site.

Death by a thousand cuts. dA is technically functional at the base level, but the broader infrastructure (especially social infrastructure) has been in steady decline for over a decade, and the 2010s in particular marked a schism as its corporate management pivoted to chasing the bottom line at the expense of its artistic community. A once-comprehensive category tree was abolished by crowdsourced hashtags; profile customization was bulldozed by Eclipse, and its replacement has been a watered-down drip feed of inferior tools; literature was all but thrown under the bus if you don't upload it as PDF. They've played around with multiple different algorithms, one specifically intended to provide greater exposure to smaller artists, and none of them work (or work too well: Recommended cycles the same set by the same artists)—hell, a user that does nothing but kid-friendly cartoons keeps getting hard fetish content Recommended on the side. Meanwhile, the front end is a mish-mash of half-baked Permanent Beta and outright broken script: Three years into Eclipse and my text cursor still jumps around when I start a new line—for a site in business since Y2K, this is farcically bad maintenance.

dA's capitulation to AI is merely a symptom of the same "money talks" approach that begat the YouTube Adpocalypse: dA is prioritizing people* who'll "pay to play"—you'll notice that all the AI accounts are Core(+). I do know that means they get priority support (whatever that means anymore), and presumably, higher placement in the Algorithm: as multiple users have complained, they're still being shilled AI works even if they've shunned the category in their preferences. Meanwhile, the small names, the people who sought the site for artistic community and don't have a marketing team backing them up, have been turned into product for DreamUp and the site's advertising sponsors. I joined the site back in 2012, and within six years most of the top-line professionals I followed had either gone dark or quit entirely; virtually none of the Watchers I acquired that weren't friends from off-site actually interact with me, and even most of them say they can barely tolerate using the site more than a few minutes at a time.

And then, of course, there's the fact that moderation has been wanting even before the disastrous venture with the automod: a colleague was complaining just the other day that blatant flaming and harassment is going unaddressed, and apparently hardcore NSFW is getting posted without even a Mature flag in flagrant contempt of the TOS, but hey, they're Core+ so why step in? Never forget that the head of marketing refused to call the Wix buyout a buyout: the user base has been gaslit, lied to, and/or outright ignored for literal years, and they have the gall to charge us more for less.

Sure, if you're using dA as a storage shed, and you're not an industry professional whose livelihood is in the crosshairs of Stable Diffusion, you can grin and bear it. If you've been using it as a living space, and now you're shunted into a basement room as the strangers that drove out your roommates offload their porn mags and raid your fridge and the cops you're complaining to say they got paid so it's not their problem... you might be just a little peeved.

Dislike of Reddit Culture™ aside, social media platforms are simply no replacement for a purpose-built gallery: as someone who's worked in archiving, nothing quite gets under my skin like those people cheering sites like Discord as the death of forums: they're a nightmare for organization and nigh impossible to search with any degree of accuracy. A friend-of-a-friend runs a private server for their art, and trying to track down works older than a couple days typically means a manual slog through the logs over multiple channels.

I'd like to correct some of the statements on Buzzly: it wasn't the devs in conflict with each other, it was the devs against their moderators. Apparently nobody took the time to decide what sort of site they wanted to make before going public, and the aforementioned pogroms were an extension of the staff's own infighting. I wrote an overview of the fiasco in "Spreading the Word" that includes offsite links to a detailed breakdown of what went wrong, where, when and why.

I'm vaguely aware of Jay having a beef with r/inkblot but I'm totally ignorant about the forum drama, besides the Buzzly shills slandering it for being a Black enterprise. This is the first I've heard you need a phone for an account (I certainly didn't); what's this about the site rules being illegal?

(Side note but not being able to view galleries as a guest is likely not by design, but one of the site's many "Permanent Beta" bugs.)

I'm only cursorily familiar with boorus, and I suppose the biggest stumbling block as a substitute to 'traditional' galleries is that they require a certain degree of depersonalization in both organization and artist control, but it does strike me that crowdsourcing the curation is an extremely useful means to standardize things like search tags. As someone who's managed two wikis with some very lazy contributors, I can testify that such sites make or break themselves by the integrity of their custodians.

Circling back to the start of this post, DeviantArt's salient feature was its sense of community, and nothing betrays its moral failure more than how it's done everything to cut out its own heart for a fire sale. It seemed to me back in 2015 when the Webcams fiasco galvanized the first (to my eyes) concerted push for a split, that all a challenger really needed to do was take up that community mantle and the volunteers would rally 'round—and I was half-astounded, half-deeply-frustrated that Side 7, a site that completely slipped under the radar for two decades, is the first and only to actually strike the heavenly chord of Well-Managed, Well-Designed, and Online.

Thorvald:

chaseawaythedark:

People have been saying that for ages and I just don't get it. When I've used DeviantArt, I've used it to share my stuff and it works. I've used it to interact with others and it works. I've used it for staying in touch with the latest stuff and it works for that too. I can't understand what people are using it for that a few idiosyncrasies on their part cannot be tolerated (I mean compared to the norm). This is a question for this whole thread by the way.

Death by a thousand cuts. dA is *technically* functional at the base level, but the broader infrastructure (especially social infrastructure) has been in steady decline for over a decade, and the 2010s in particular marked a schism as its corporate management pivoted to chasing the bottom line at the expense of its artistic community. A once-comprehensive category tree was abolished by crowdsourced hashtags; profile customization was bulldozed by Eclipse, and its replacement has been a watered-down drip feed of inferior tools; literature was all but thrown under the bus if you don't upload it as PDF. They've played around with multiple different algorithms, one *specifically intended* to provide greater exposure to smaller artists, and none of them work (or work too well: Recommended cycles the same set by the same artists)—hell, a user that does nothing but kid-friendly cartoons keeps getting hard fetish content Recommended on the side. Meanwhile, the front end is a mish-mash of half-baked Permanent Beta and outright broken script: Three years into Eclipse and my text cursor **still** jumps around when I start a new line—for a site in business since Y2K, ***this is farcically bad maintenance***. dA's capitulation to AI is merely a symptom of the same "money talks" approach that begat the YouTube Adpocalypse: dA is prioritizing people* who'll "pay to play"—you'll notice that all the AI accounts are Core(+). I *do* know that means they get priority support (whatever that means anymore), and presumably, higher placement in the Algorithm: as multiple users have complained, they're still being shilled AI works even if they've shunned the category in their preferences. Meanwhile, the *small* names, the people who sought the site for artistic community and *don't* have a marketing team backing them up, have been turned into product for DreamUp and the site's advertising sponsors. I joined the site back in 2012, and within six years most of the top-line professionals I followed had either gone dark or quit entirely; virtually **none** of the Watchers I acquired that weren't friends from off-site actually *interact* with me, and even most of *them* say they can barely tolerate using the site more than a few minutes at a time. And then, of course, there's the fact that moderation has been wanting even before the disastrous venture with the automod: a colleague was complaining just the other day that blatant flaming and harassment is going unaddressed, and apparently hardcore NSFW is getting posted without even a Mature flag in **flagrant** contempt of the TOS, but hey, they're Core+ so why step in? Never forget that the head of marketing [refused to call](https://www.deviantart.com/spyed/journal/DeviantArt-and-Wix-With-a-Kindred-Spirit-665239030) the Wix buyout a buyout: the user base has been gaslit, lied to, and/or outright ignored for literal years, and they have the gall to charge us more for less. Sure, if you're using dA as a storage shed, and you're not an industry professional whose livelihood is in the crosshairs of Stable Diffusion, you can grin and bear it. If you've been using it as a *living space*, and now you're shunted into a basement room as the strangers that drove out your roommates offload their porn mags and raid your fridge and the cops you're complaining to say *they* got paid so it's not their problem... you might be just a *little* peeved.

Quote:

Have you tried Reddit? Just curious... this is a question for the whole thread too.

Dislike of Reddit Culture™ aside, social media platforms are simply no replacement for a purpose-built gallery: as someone who's worked in archiving, nothing quite gets under my skin like those people cheering sites like Discord as the death of forums: they're a nightmare for organization and nigh **impossible** to search with any degree of accuracy. A friend-of-a-friend runs a private server for their art, and trying to track down works older than a couple days typically means a manual slog through the logs over multiple channels. I'd like to correct some of the statements on Buzzly: it wasn't the devs in conflict with each other, it was the devs against their moderators. Apparently nobody took the time to decide what sort of site they wanted to make before going public, and the aforementioned pogroms were an extension of the staff's own infighting. I [wrote an overview](https://www.side7.com/forums/thread/674/1#5844) of the fiasco in "Spreading the Word" that includes offsite links to a detailed breakdown of what went wrong, where, when and why. I'm vaguely aware of Jay having a beef with r/inkblot but I'm totally ignorant about the forum drama, besides the Buzzly shills slandering it for being a Black enterprise. This is the first I've heard you need a phone for an account (I certainly didn't); what's this about the site rules being illegal? (Side note but not being able to view galleries as a guest is likely not by design, but one of the site's **many** "Permanent Beta" bugs.)

Inafox:

Which makes me wonder, may be boorus are a better format for art sites for both audiences/consumer and artist.

I'm only cursorily familiar with boorus, and I suppose the biggest stumbling block as a substitute to 'traditional' galleries is that they require a certain degree of depersonalization in both organization and artist control, but it does strike me that crowdsourcing the curation is an extremely useful means to standardize things like search tags. As someone who's managed two wikis with some **very** lazy contributors, I can testify that such sites make or break themselves by the integrity of their custodians.

Quote:

... Or to make them feel connected to their fellow art appreciators or clients, such as by encouraging co-followership, collaboration and to make using the site addictive itself in a way that encourages growth of artist and site.

Circling back to the start of this post, DeviantArt's salient feature was its sense of community, and nothing betrays its moral failure more than how it's done everything to cut out its own heart for a fire sale. It seemed to me back in 2015 when the Webcams fiasco galvanized the first (to my eyes) concerted push for a split, that all a challenger really needed to do was take up that community mantle and the volunteers would rally 'round—and I was half-astounded, half-deeply-frustrated that Side 7, a site that completely slipped under the radar for *two decades*, is the first and only to actually strike the heavenly chord of Well-Managed, Well-Designed, and Online.

Apologies for quoting the whole thing, but...

Inkblot has a very justice-oriented set of rules. They have two pages for them, but they both have things like "you won't be allowed here if you have a criminal history with a certain type of crime" and "you must not lie about your sexual orientation" and so on. Now if that kind of thing didn't require a warrant to actually confirm, it would be within their right as a website to enforce what they want, but you can't just investigate whether someone has something like a criminal history. So either they know these are unenforceable rules they included or they don't and they're going to encroach.

As for Jay's beef with r/InkblotArt (not r/Inkblot as had more to do with actual inkblots), he kept saying he didn't like it posing as official, but this has been shown to be a cover. One thing led to another and he banned a certain moderator of the subreddit from the Inkblot website despite promising he wouldn't if the subreddit distanced itself from the website, so all incentive was lost to oblige and it continued to associate with the website. A few months later, he realized he was still angry because the subreddit was being advertised on Twitter and rounded his followers up to mob the Twitter and Reddit pages associated with the subreddit. Twitter, however, remained 100% neutral, and Reddit faculty, themselves realizing they had had enough of Jay, sided with the subreddit and banned all the mobbers from Reddit. So Jay took to Tiktok to complain about "woe is me" and took to a very "we don't interact with that side of the family" kind of stance, excommunicating the subreddit and going so far as to have people confirm their social media accounts when signing up so they know who to blacklist (and here I am all like "dude there's only 30 people in the subreddit, what are they gonna do, nibble your bums"?)

Not sure what I think to Inkblot because the site doesn't work my end very well, the terms links at the bottom are completely errored and there's a bizarre message at the top that I can't close telling me to check the website version. Needs some fixes and clarity.

Oh, I thought you meant they hadn't rehosted their documentation from the Closed Beta, but they're literally unclickable unless you're logged in.

Good ol' Streisand Effect. I originally called InkBlot "Twitter for Art", but in that I meant the UI. Seems my description is more comprehensive than I anticipated. o_0

Yeah I joined, logged out and in again and I still can't click. Search engine found it though. I don't mind joining all the sites, but I'm more likely to spend time with sites with a forum lol. I spend enough time working alone let alone not taking social breaks

me too, at least in "Joining all sites" part here

Same.

how's the updates of Deviantart's lawsuit case: https://stablediffusionlitigation.com/case-updates.html

I have high doubts in that lawsuit ever materializing. I'm not saying this because I think lowly of said lawsuits, but threatening a lawsuit being so typical a tactic of political intimidation now, combined with the fact DeviantArt is simply a host and the AI art scene is probably well versed in lobbyism, that there are bad odds of a major court seeing it as much of a threat as people who say they're affected by the advent of AI art see it as. And to be honest, there are better ways of dealing with this issue, a few of which I talk about at https://www.reddit.com/r/DeviantArt/comments/138ruo1/comment/jizkp9q/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 because the alternative to adaptation is uninvention.

Except the lawsuit has materialized, else Midjourney et al. wouldn't have motioned for dismissal. The question is whether the suit goes to trial, and the fact the Supreme Court effectively upheld the U.S. Copyright Office's verdict last year that AI-gen is ineligible for copyright provides the pretext to take this to the courts. Because given all the existing firefights, a legal precedent will be established sooner or later, and the plaintiffs are hoping to get the first shots in at the waterline where the AI debate at large dovetails with something that corporate law is much more familiar with: IP theft and breach of contract.

With respect to the Reddit post, those are analogous to tips on fire-proofing your house while the forest's ablaze, when what we want to do is control the fire itself.

I mean, 
I would uninvent the A-bomb in a heartbeat.

I'll wait and see what happens after this lawsuit, knowing DA, they'll just act like they're perfect in any way, just like every filthy company out there. The only thing I'll do is wait.

DeviantArt nowadays is making more or less the same mistakes like the smaller sites(I've been on a few too like eg buzzly) but they have more leeway due to historical inertia, they can tank bad decisions that kill small sites due to larger userbase, the question is for how long that can go on. I'm also getting the impression that they seem to give paying customers preferential treatment and are willing to ignore their own rules. I'm still using the hidden 'new deviations' portal since there's still good art to be discovered and report rulebreaking content, but I noticed that sometimes the accounts posting rulebreaking content have galleries full of obviously rulebreaking content(like hardcore pornography, graphic masturbation, fluids etc, or obviously copyrighted content where the uploaders didn't even bother obscuring the watermarks or site adresses) having being reviewed by staff and deemed safe, usually on core+ accounts and the like. It's either that or some mod ignoring their own rules individually.

And for the smaller sites they tend to fail simply because the people running them make alot of obvious errors that simply shouldn't be happening(like eg unclear rules/TOS, staff infighting, incompetent moderation etc). Many of those things could've been avoided with proper planning and looking at what made other art communities fail. Buzzly is a prime example with the staff still bickering about what content should be allowed on the site after 6 months of the site being online already, and the owner going rogue doing shady stuff like that weird poll to change the content rules because he wants to see more dog dicks or something like that. I was there when this shit happened, decided to go silent after posting a couple critical journals highlighting mistakes that were made, occasionally checking in to see if things have improved only to find my account banned with no explanation. The main reason that most of these sites don't take off or fail after their initial blooming is mere incomptenence from my impression.

I wonder if those who refuse to leave DA because of "watcher numbers" would join places that offer automatic watcher tally the same they had on those sites. I mean it's just a number. I had an account on Twitter that had like 30,000 followers and hardly any correspondence, and then 300 watchers on DA with more. And a lot of these people attached to the watcher count don't actually get correspondence, it's just a number, it's not like people see beyond the home page and actually look at the watcher pages anymore.

Not saying S7 etc should offer that, I just find people's adherence to numbers instead of quality audiences to be counter to their success. I'm apparently well-known on DA for criticising AI images among the AI community, probably far more than any AI poster knows another AI poster. People remember artistic vision and style and identity, not consumeristic mass-productive spam. People staying on DA are just serving against themselves, I'm only staying there to gain notice and encourage artists to go elsewhere until my membership runs out.

Low-quality watchers are going to migrate to AI because they don't actually care about the artist and treat DA as a visual spoon-feeding machine. High-quality watchers are respectable human beings who love and respect human efforts of hard-working artists.

If people don't serve to their aspirations then I guess the film idiocracy was right, automation and the replacement of intellect in favour of consumerism will destroy the human race. AI is only a threat for intelligent people, and those who are dumb need not fear of their intelligence being replaced.

Ever since protesting, AI does seem to be curbing on the main page but definitely not the bulk of the site according to AI detectors. I've been running a sample every month on the 10th (I just remembered to do it just now lol). I don't think think this what DA intentionally wants per se, since Premium Downloads suggested is literally still 90% AI. https://i.imgur.com/ofOwiOH.png

If this is consistent with others on DA I've come to the conclusion that this is down to the nature of DA's algorithm which as I recall wouldn't be putting irrelevant AI posts on my home page to begin with based on historic trends. It's rather DA has been forcing it onto the home page and there's actually less AI posters than there is AI posts coming from the same person. It's clear that DA also deliberately puts AI as the top category, saying it's alphabetic is a load of bs, for "A" Anthro is a bigger category and doesn't even make the cut of the front page. And it's not about "minorities" either, let's consider that Anthro, nomadic, ethnic and various other communities are from minority backgrounds with various social issues. And now with AI they're out to target adoptables as well, a large source of income for poor prominently LGBTQ and minor ethnic artists. Many of which that would never afford the GPUs or electricity to process these custom plagiarist AI models in en-masse spam either. Right now DA is seizing the means of production of images in the art industry and their site rather than compensating artists of the producers to these means.

So it's a good and a bad sign, because the payment portals are full of AI, but not inherently the home page.

I've seen and understand both sides of the "preferential paying members" debate. On the one hand, those who oppose it say it's like a kind of nepotism. On the other hand, those who oppose the opposite bring up how it might be unfair to pay for something and not be seen as anything more than a regular member who just happened to give them money. Imagine paying a hundred dollars for eternal core membership and then are treated as if your voice does not matter "more" than other people. Where am I on this? I think it's a false dichotomy and nobody can see that because it's one of those "everyone is the ahole" (Reddit terminology there) type of things. To your credit, DeviantArt didn't exactly go it safe by having a tripartite oligarchy (core membership = wealth, volunteer mods = power, senior members = fame) or appealing to the dark side of the downtrodden. Like bears to a bakery.

Despite what could be argued to be two massive flaws, sometimes, just sometimes the people are at fault. In the examples I give, the people demand action taken against X and expect the websites to do Y when you just can't map out what Y would entail. This applies to everything we both just mentioned. And then people complain about a lack of guideline clarity. Do you see where I'm going here?

I've edited the previous post of mine to clarify that the thing about ditching current dA and starting anew was meant in a technical sense because the site currently is a Frankenstein mess stitched together from various previous incarnations of the site combined with eclipse with all the associated problems. The thing about preferential treatment for paying customers doesn't mean that paying customers shouldn't have special privileges, but that these privileges should be clear. AFAIK dA softened some of the upload rules for paywalled content and communicated that, but the rules for publicly visible deviations are the same across the board, regardless of who uploads them. Which in turn means that whoever mod who greenlighted these obviously rulebreaking deviations after them being reported is either rogue, or ignoring the site rules when it comes to paying accounts, either on their own, or by orders from above. It's a case of dA is simply failing to put their money where their mouth is. In any case it's a case of mismanagement that doesn't reflect well on deviantArt, and just one of many examples of mismanagement there, and similar to the behavior that leads to smaller art communities failing. A respectable website has clear rules and TOS that leave as little leeway for interpretation as possible, and the means of enforcing them.

Yeah DA is a Ship of Theseus. No wonder regurgitation of existent artistic achievements appeals to them. The site reminds me of some old decaying cyborg that is patchworked with various aging technologies lol, AI just adds to it.

Soon, Deviantart will have 23rd birthday, and how's upcoming 23rd birthday of Deviantart?