[HN Gopher] The Tragic Downfall of the Internet's Art Gallery
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The Tragic Downfall of the Internet's Art Gallery
Author : jfryusef
Score : 60 points
Date : 2024-05-16 17:12 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (slate.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (slate.com)
| ryukoposting wrote:
| So much of the DeviantArt story reads like Tumblr. Two platforms
| appealing to amateur and small artists grow to great relevance
| among a patchwork of subcultures. Then, they start trying to turn
| a profit and end up alienating the entire userbase that carried
| them to that point. DeviantArt is much further down that road
| than Tumblr is, though. It's sad to see. Both platforms were key
| to the WWW of my childhood.
|
| I wish the artists well in their AI copyright legal pursuits.
| EGreg wrote:
| Just a regular story of capitalism and platform
| enshittification.
|
| Whenever a platform is owned by shareholders who then need to
| extract rents from the ecosystem, this will happen. Whether
| it's couchsurfing or twitter.
|
| Expect it to happen to Reddit etc.
|
| There is a direct line from the profit motive to platforms
| becoming enshittified, promoting the most outrageous content
| and making people emotional and angry.
|
| The AI is just another level of appropriating human work.
| Whether it's google's disruption of publishers through AI-
| generated answers, or OpenAI training on artists' work.
| CamelCaseName wrote:
| Is "profit motive" that different than "survival motive"?
|
| These platforms need money to survive. Automattic, the latest
| owner of Tumblr wrote a great post on all the things they've
| tried and how Tumblr is still losing $20MM a year IIRC.
| EGreg wrote:
| That's only in the capitalist system.
|
| Wordpress by that same Automattic doesn't need money to
| survive, in the sense of money going to one large
| corporation. Anyone can self-host their own copy of
| wordpress, buy plugins etc.
|
| If you want to know more about how to monetize digital
| content without a trusted central actor, we are working on
| a Web2 version of that ecosystem btw:
| https://qbix.com/ecosystem
|
| Also, science and wikipedia and openstreetmap are examples
| of open gift economies.
| tweetle_beetle wrote:
| I persevered with your website because I am very
| interested in the ideas, but I have to say it was very
| hard going. Thousands of words about abstract concepts
| could easily be reduced to a few hundred or spread across
| multiple pages. The only comprehensive list of services
| actually on offer is a PDF? The videos describing the
| merits of these decentralised services are accessed
| through image links to YouTube! There's lots of low
| hanging fruit to improve usability for those less patient
| than me in my humble opinion.
| EGreg wrote:
| That is one page on the website, the rest of it is a lot
| more friendly (https://qbix.com/communities or
| https://qbix.com/invest for instance).
|
| Sorry the experimental stuff is not slick enough for you
| yet, we don't have the resources of Facebook or even
| Automattic. We worked very hard for 12 years on the
| foundations at https://github.com/Qbix/Platform but I am
| sure you can find many faults there. (I'd like to hear
| about them btw.)
|
| On the other hand, many other projects like the E
| programming language, Capn'proto, Linux etc. are also
| very complex and did not have fantastic and slick
| documentation, first adopters also had to read some words
| in order to get it.
|
| This is an open source project. You are welcome to reduce
| the words and make a summary. Perhaps when we start
| marketing to a broad audience, we'll reduce it to 10 word
| slides and sound bites, or jingles.
|
| Until then you can try it yourself, the documentation is
| at https://community.qbix.com and technical documentation
| is at https://qbix.com/platform/guide
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| With your prickly response to some valid, basic feedback,
| I think everyone would be well advised to stay away from
| contributing to your project in any way.
| EGreg wrote:
| I wonder why your account is a throwaway with a flagged
| "about" in your profile?
|
| I have had this same type of response on HN in the past
| with some regularity, any time I post anything that has
| to do with decentralized economies or Web3. It is usually
| not about any of the substance but some form of nitpick
| or outright hostility. So I am used to it by now. Given
| the character of the attacks on anything with this
| subject, it is unreasonable to expect the reaction not to
| be prickly.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| It's impressive how quickly you went for the personal
| attacks.
|
| I added the [Flagged] myself as a joke.
|
| The account is a throwaway for privacy reasons. So
| weirdos like you can't dig in and find out everything
| about me.
|
| > it is unreasonable to expect the reaction not to be
| prickly.
|
| So you're always gonna be a jerk, got it.
|
| BTW I maintain some popular open source projects. This is
| not the way to do it.
| EGreg wrote:
| If that's what you want to call it. Sure.
|
| As far as "always" going to be a jerk, I'd say Linus is
| much more of a jerk for much longer than I have ever
| been.
|
| So you're always going to be anonymous? I guess we won't
| find out what projects you maintain.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| Even if they make money, the next quarter must always be
| better than the previous one.
|
| At a certain point, people seem to start looking at self
| destructive options to make that happen.
| Zak wrote:
| I think it's just not possible for a centralized social media
| service to avoid enshittification long-term, at least not if it
| has to make money directly. It remains to be seen whether
| decentralized options can provide a long-term alternative at
| scale.
| bloopernova wrote:
| The bot buying and selling network reminds me of the time KeyBase
| tried doing a giveaway of their crypto coin.
|
| You needed a GitHub account and a KeyBase account. So people
| created as many accounts as their bot networks were capable of,
| and tried to get the crypto.
|
| Thankfully KeyBase changed the requirements to include "account
| must be X weeks old".
|
| Edited to add: I'm not sure if there's a way to prevent bots
| these days. Feels to me that we're lucky (more?) economic systems
| haven't been bled dry by bot networks.
|
| I miss the promise of KeyBase. It felt like a real digital
| identity, but for whatever reasons it wasn't good enough to
| succeed.
| EGreg wrote:
| It's just that bots haven't been good enough yet. With the new
| LLM tech they can pretty much pass every hurdle you'll throw at
| them. Even if you require people to show up in person, they'll
| do that but then run a bot the rest of the time in their
| account.
|
| I am sure that LLMs and bots will be able to fool many people
| on HN and run "rings" around dang's ring detection software, in
| about 5 years. It's a gameable metric, after all.
|
| They were already able to do it on 4chan in 2020 with just
| GPT3! And the most impactful thing is users started accusing
| _each other_ of being bots! It literally enshittified the whole
| forum overnight:
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/breaches-every-principle-huma...
| Tiberium wrote:
| And to be more exact, GPT-4chan is based on GPT-J (same
| architecture as GPT-3 whose weights were never released)
| which only had 6B params and that was back in 2021-2022.
| 2024throwaway wrote:
| > for whatever reasons it wasn't good enough to succeed
|
| The reason, imo, was the acquisition by Zoom and apparent total
| abandonment of the project.
| jonathankoren wrote:
| Isn't the real problem here not Deviant Art, as much as people
| making low effort bot nets to trick Deviant Art into paying them?
|
| It's a spam problem, only worse, because they're actively paying
| the spammers.
|
| Even Spotify has this problem. All too often I'm getting
| recommended crappy remixes "slowed and reverbed" or "sped up".
| Just recently I got some guy's crappy techno with the artist
| field spammed with completely unrelated bands I follow. Of
| course, when I tried to report this, Spotify only cared if the
| guy was selling bootleg merchandise.
|
| The whole thing made me click, "hide artist" and "hide song" for
| the very first time.
| jsheard wrote:
| DeviantArt was never perfect but it really is a wasteland now.
| Regardless of where you stand on the ethics of genAI the results
| in practice are just _boring,_ the feeds are an endless stream of
| the same handful of prompt templates, and the volume of AI posts
| is so enormous that it drowns out anything else a hundred to one.
| Manual curation of good posts eventually hits a breaking point
| when the volume of white noise posts becomes so unbearable that
| the curators just give up and leave.
|
| Even categories that are supposed to be for specific mediums
| where AI shouldn't be applicable are full of it regardless - just
| now I scanned the Photography section and almost immediately
| spotted a conspicuously three-fingered woman. Posts made using AI
| are _supposed_ to be tagged as such so users can opt-out of
| seeing them, but that "photo" isn't tagged, nor is anything else
| on the uploaders profile despite all of it being blatant AI.
|
| You could almost turn it into a game - pick a random category and
| see how far you have to scroll before you see anything that isn't
| immediately clockable as babbies first copy-pasted MidJourney
| prompt.
| __loam wrote:
| It really needs to be said that AI "artists" have confused
| productivity with quality. I actually don't go to DeviantArt to
| see your ai generated garbage. I care more about people who are
| willing to do interesting things with their medium even if they
| takes a lot longer.
| jsheard wrote:
| Yeah, it's almost comical the degree to which quantity has
| become emphasized over quality. More than a few times I've
| clicked through to an AI posters profile out of morbid
| curiosity and seen that they have thousands or even _tens_ of
| thousands of uploads despite being active for less than a
| year or so. Even with the supposed producivity boosts that AI
| brings you can 't convince me that someone posting 20+ pieces
| every single day like clockwork is putting any real
| consideration into them, but the magic of AI is that
| something with zero thought put into it can still be
| superficially passable.
| peter_l_downs wrote:
| Good riddance. Deviant "Art", indeed -- absolute degeneracy.
| underlipton wrote:
| I'll drop a bit of deviantArt history that you're unlikely to
| find in an article like this, but which _probably_ contributed to
| dA 's initial failure to sustain its place as the preeminent
| platform for sharing art online as social media rose to
| prominence: its banning of sexualized nudity in 2006, which lead
| to the exodus of adult/adult-adjacent artists - and,
| particularly, furries.
|
| That was the stumble that gave room for other platforms to grab
| pieces of its then-current and future user-base. Anyone can tell
| you that a very large portion of the money changing hands online
| for art (adult and not) is actually changing _paws_ , so dA
| missed out of having a slice of that, whether through advertising
| or facilitating transactions. Worse, its reputation was tarnished
| among adjacent subcultures.
|
| There have also been regular ToS panics every 2 or 3 years, where
| someone's (mis)interpretation of the licensing rights dA claimed
| for being able to modify and distribute artwork (i.e., make
| thumbnails and send images in daily update emails) caused users
| to swear off the site for fear of having their work "stolen", and
| quite a backlash against the recent site redesign.
|
| That is all to say, this really has been a long time coming. My
| account is nearing the 2-decade mark, but I haven't logged on
| more than a couple dozen times in the last half of that. There's
| just almost nothing there you can't find more easily or
| comfortably elsewhere.
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(page generated 2024-05-16 23:00 UTC)