Looking at 2010s deviantART made me sad. | 08/29/26

The other day, I thought it would be kind of neat to go on archive.org and look back at deviantart when *I* was active on there- which would have been around 2013 (I know I’m old, thank you)...and boy, it brought back some memories.

I had a, shall we say, “sordid” past on dA. NO, I wasn’t posting Sonic x Shadow fanart or writing explicit fanfictions. I was posting drawings of Adventure Time OCs- which, not to get off on a tangent, I remember sending a sketch of to Cartoon Network at the time. It won’t surprise you to find out: they didn’t use them in the show :’) Besides that, I thought I was pretty slick for posting sketches that I traced from those Christopher Hart anime books that were popular at the time. Needless to say, I was eventually found out （￣ε￣）

The best place to find me, though, was in the Complaints forum. THIS was the epitome of 2010s angst, and I was right there in the middle of it. The hit of dopamine I would get from arguing with adults 10-20 years older than me was nothing short of a drug addict getting a fix. I had to fit in, and eventually, I was welcomed into the “cool club”...which was just a bunch of cringe adults whining back and forth with each other in a Skype group. My time with them was short, but it’s still one of those bittersweet memories that hangs in the back of my mind.

I remember the love/hate relationship people had with llamas, OH the llamas . If you were in the know, you would have had the “one-click llama” button installed. I truly wish websites still had cute little FREE badges like that. Now that I’m reminiscing about it, I remember the cake badges too… these were the holy grail of badges. You had to pay points to get them; if you had a huge cake badge on your page, you were that guy.

Then, there was the page customization. The most vivid widget in my memory was the “webcam”, where you could showcase any silly internet gif that you wanted to. There was a shoutbox, polls, showcase…but the one I coveted the most was the custom box. This was where you could put anything. I was so envious of people that had these displayed on their page- but, in order to do any customization, you needed points.

As with vbucks, robuxs, etc. today is with the kids, that’s how points were with any internet artist at the time. Points separated the plebs from the upper crust, and the best way to showcase that was through page customization. And I did everything to get them. I tried to capture the kiribans. I joined all the free giveaway contests. I even watched those shady “free points” pages that totally didn’t keep all those points to themselves (ಠ⌣ಠ) I joined art contests, which users would host through their journal entries, and…only won a singular time. Through all of my blood, sweat, and tears, I finally scrounged up enough points for a core membership.

Thus started my custom box craze. After a few years of being on deviantart, I eventually started to make premade custom boxes for free use, and this earned me a pretty decent following. I was making stamps and page deco left and right. Looking back on it, I didn’t really use deviantart for its intended use of art showcasing (〃￣ω￣〃ゞ

The years rolled by, and the interaction that I had with other users on devianart dwindled. Forums were being used less, groups even less than that; so eventually, you were lucky to even get comments on your uploads. Then, in 2017, came the announcement that Wix had bought deviantART. If you read the article, you can understand why this was a MAJOR disappointment for everyone that had been active on dA for a long period of time. They were focused solely on branding/advertising/monetization; they no longer cared about community.

Here is a great illustration of what direction the site is taking now compared to what it was like in 2013.

Kind of ironic how the website titled “deviantART” became the very corporate slop that it originally pushed against. dA was supposed to be the outlier, the edgy social media that promoted originality and individuality (ಥ﹏ಥ)

I realize that dA isn’t the only website this happened to; basically every modern website is like this now. I think that’s why neocities is so popular- it gives people an outlet to be human. I’m also not saying it’s a bad thing to want to earn money from your hobbies/creativity, I just don’t understand why these corporations find it so hard to own a website without sucking the very life out of it.

So there you have it: looking at old deviantart pages made me kinda sad and nostalgic for those old days of the internet; a time when things were more carefree, when worries were small and insignificant. Such is the passage of time, I suppose. I hope that this shed a little bit of light on how deviantart USED to be in its heyday.

(PS. Today's featured song is "Danger" by f(x). I recommended this song in particular, because it was around 2013 that I discovered K-pop for the first time. f(x) was one of the first, and still holds a very special place in my heart ^v^)