Oh Deviant Art, what are we going to do with you?

For many years now I have been a member at Deviant Art, sometimes active, and sometimes not.  An early criticism of the site was that it was a marketing engine and not a community as one might think of a community.  Who really cares, right?  It is up to them to make their money and they don’t have to promote themselves as an actual community.  I am sure a site of that size and traffic would require a healthy amount of money thrown at it in order to keep it working.

My interaction with that site has been both positive and negative, with most of the negative stemming from their print program.  I have long been a heavy critic of that service and also seen it drastically improve.  I had a membership for about a year which has since expired, so now I have been getting a taste of what a free member experiences.  And I am nauseated. Read more »