[HN Gopher] The Downfall of DeviantArt
___________________________________________________________________
The Downfall of DeviantArt
Author : jfryusef
Score : 251 points
Date : 2024-05-16 17:12 UTC (1 days 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
| anamax wrote:
| I see a lot of information about how to distribute
| content and revenues, but I don't see how you ensure that
| enough revenue comes in.
|
| Wordpress' Tumblr problem is that costs exceed revenue,
| not distribution.
|
| Note that "decentralized" doesn't reduce total costs - it
| just spreads them out. Server costs do not go down with
| the number of owners.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Tumblr: bought for $1.1B in 2013, sold for $3M in 2019.
| Now losing $30M a year.
| 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.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Automattic is not publicly traded.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| It is called inflation. If the next quarter isn't looking
| better then you are doing worse.
| EGreg wrote:
| Inflation is one thing. Rent extraction from the
| ecosystem isnt done only because of inflation, but
| because investors want profits from capital appreciation.
| That's one of the failure modes of capitalism. Sure it
| works well in early stages (providing capital to
| promising startups) but there are diminishing returns and
| ultimately huge negative externalities to this model of
| stock ownership forever. Whether by pension funds or the
| public, the incentives are just toxic.
| dgb23 wrote:
| A lot of social media platforms lose money because they
| decide they want to grow above and beyond, even after being
| well established. Same thing for other software products
| that are perfectly fine, even loved.
| 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.
| lmm wrote:
| I don't think decentralisation is the solution because the
| problem is as much the lack of central authority as the
| presence of it. Enshittification happens fastest on platforms
| that are run by committees, who know they need revenue so
| take the path of least resistance, without a single clear
| owner who can resist it. Look at Google's decline since its
| founders left, compare to Facebook which - say what you like
| about it - is much the same user experience that it always
| was. (Hell, look at MySpace for an even more dramatic
| turndown than Google)
|
| Social media sites that are still founder-owned or have
| strong individual leaders can continue fine (consider e.g.
| Dreamwidth). Though I guess whether you can sustain that past
| one person's lifetime is another question.
| Zak wrote:
| This comment discusses only centralized services.
| Decentralized services run on protocols such that no one
| service provider or software project can dictate the
| experience for all users.
|
| ActivityPub, used by Mastodon, Misskey, Lemmy, and Pixelfed
| among others is an example of such a protocol. BlueSky's
| ATProto is another, though it's in an earlier stage without
| mature third-party implementations and service providers.
| Email, too is decentralized, though it may serve as a
| cautionary tale; spam, attempts to block spam, and feature
| stagnation have all degraded the user experience
| considerably.
| dingnuts wrote:
| decentralization just multiplies the problem. instead of
| a gargantuan overlord, a million fiefdoms.
|
| it's no wonder that the fediverse is most active on the
| fringes, especially outside of tech bubbles who use it
| because they like the idea
| Zak wrote:
| I think this is part of what ATProto is trying to solve
| by decoupling identity provider, data provider, and
| labeling.
|
| That's not to say a million fiefdoms is necessarily a bad
| approach. A small server where all the members know each
| other is much more likely to be run in a way that's
| satisfactory to all its members than a big one.
| Furthermore, users have the option to maintain multiple
| accounts.
| lmm wrote:
| > Decentralized services run on protocols such that no
| one service provider or software project can dictate the
| experience for all users.
|
| And? I guess that somewhat hinders enshittification just
| by making it hard for the platform to ever evolve at all.
| But the cure is worse than the disease, you can't ever
| build something new that way nor can you really improve
| something that has any level of traction. Look at how IRC
| users revolt when you try to fix even the most glaring
| problems.
| vidarh wrote:
| Mastodon, Misskey, Lemmy, Pixelfed are all very
| different, with different feature sets, supporting the
| same basic protocols, and evidence you can build
| something new on distributed protocols.
|
| ActivityPub dictates how to meditate relationships
| between activities on collections of objects, and a few
| default objects types. It's specifically designed to let
| you "subclass" (not really inheritance, and more
| composition as you give a list of types with no enforced
| hierarchy) objects so you can create new object types
| nobody else understands but still give them another type
| that allows them to carry out basic operations on it.
|
| It's not perfect but it's far from as dire as you make
| out.
| Zak wrote:
| So far the situation with ActivityPub is that the
| protocol is flexible enough to allow very different
| feature sets and user experiences. The most popular so
| far are twitter-like and reddit-like, with multiple
| implementations of each. I don't think ActivityPub was
| designed with the reddit-like use case in mind, yet it
| works well for that. There's no user revolt because the
| creation of new software with new experiences doesn't
| have much impact on users of existing software.
|
| Enshittification is hindered not because nobody could
| create a Mastodon fork (or green-field project speaking
| the same protocol) that's riddled with ads, but because
| people can select a different service provider and still
| access the same network.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > Decentralized services run on protocols such that no
| one service provider or software project can dictate the
| experience for all users.
|
| In theory, certainly.
|
| In practice, one instance dominates and all the other
| instances have to censor accordingly or die.
| mapt wrote:
| Compare to Craigslist, or for a period of five or ten years
| after its inception, Google Search.
| derefr wrote:
| But why _does_ a social network have to make money directly?
|
| Why not start a centralized social-network service as a non-
| profit / benefit corporation, paid for by donation?
| krapp wrote:
| For the same reason FOSS projects aren't funded in
| proportion to their criticality, and why taxes aren't
| voluntarily - given the option to use the service for free,
| most people will do so and choose not to donate. Any such
| project, to stay afloat, will likely end up depending upon
| a small number of donors who can then exercise political
| control over the platform.
|
| A social network has to make money somehow because it has
| bills to pay. Hosts aren't free. Servers aren't free. The
| cloud isn't free. Staff isn't free. Moderators are usually
| free but shouldn't be.
| derefr wrote:
| > A social network has to make money somehow because it
| has bills to pay. Hosts aren't free. Servers aren't free.
|
| Sure, but probably a FOSS social network would need far
| fewer of these than a paid one, because 99% of the server
| costs of something like Facebook or Twitter, go toward
| the backends, analytical DBs, and graphical / ML models
| used to power "features" that no user wants, but which
| make Facebook themselves money.
|
| And a FOSS social network would just... not build those
| kinds of features.
|
| Instead of, say, a feed constantly rebuilt to drive
| engagement and rage-bait, you'd just get a simple
| chronological feed of what everyone you're following is
| posting; with maybe the ability to dial down the number
| of posts you see from any given person you're following
| ("show me the only the most-liked Nth percentile of posts
| from this user") without unfollowing. But even that kind
| of filtering -- in fact, even the merging of followed
| users' feeds! -- could all be done client-side. The whole
| "feeds" part could be as simple as a post-triggered
| static-site-generator pushing JSON into an object-storage
| bucket hiding behind an edge cache.
| krapp wrote:
| That's basically Mastodon, which isn't free. Plenty of
| small instances that try the donation model or that are
| just funded out of pocket go under.
|
| And I may be wrong but I don't think the recommendation
| algorithms and other such features take up as much of the
| cost as you're claiming. I think a lot of the cost of
| something like Facebook is probably taken up by
| infrastructure and storage. Recommendation algorithms
| probably aren't that expensive.
| derefr wrote:
| The algorithms themselves aren't expensive, no.
|
| Having extra entire complete copies of the relationship-
| plus-posts graph, denormalized in various ways (incl. in
| ways that inherently prevent use of easily map-reducible
| algorithms, and so require heavy vertical scaling) such
| that you can _run_ the algorithms, is what's expensive.
|
| And constantly feeding the data into those denormalized
| models, using specially-tuned realtime ETL technologies
| that themselves do distributed scaling to ensure no
| infinite queue backlogging from activity bursts, is also
| expensive.
| photonthug wrote:
| In general i would argue that it is bloat that makes it
| not feasible to fund as a nonprofit, although people may
| have different ideas about where / what that bloat is.
| Recommendation algorithms, or unnecessary product
| changes, etc.
|
| I don't think it's true that it's intrinsically
| impossible for a public service to be self funding, and I
| think that not everything has to grow / change forever to
| remain relevant.
|
| We need to figure this kind of stuff out, I mean
| Wikipedia is nice and all but it's really bad that
| humanity in general has to rely on megacorp for things as
| basic as maps while we say we're living in the
| Information Age
| noirscape wrote:
| Do keep in mind that Mastodon _is_ build on a tech stack
| that 's mainly known for not being very efficient since
| it solved the scaling question with the answer "throw
| more computer at it". (In other words, it's a Rails app.)
| It's not very suitable for a free social media network
| since it's designed in a way to encourage large silos
| since that's the only way Rails scales from a financial
| perspective; you need more from a smaller core of users
| as opposed to having every user pay a tiny amount.
|
| There's other AP implementations that aren't a constant
| server hog like Mastodon is and can run on much weaker
| hardware (some of it can run on a raspberry pi). You
| don't need a full rails stack if your user count never
| exceeds 100 (which y'know, is the ideal state of AP -
| small communities who can remotely interact with each
| other).
| neonsunset wrote:
| Someone ought to rewrite it in something less
| embarrassing given you only need to be protocol
| compatible.
| ebiester wrote:
| The second system will always be playing catchup to
| Mastodon features or they will fork in features, meaning
| clients will have to support both or take sides.
| Zak wrote:
| Multiple people have written multiple compatible
| alternatives that are lighter weight. Pleroma and its
| forks (Akkoma looked good last I checked) are popular for
| single-user servers.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > nstead of, say, a feed constantly rebuilt to drive
| engagement and rage-bait, you'd just get a simple
| chronological feed of what everyone you're following is
| posting; with maybe the ability to dial down the number
| of posts you see from any given person you're following
| ("show me the only the most-liked Nth percentile of posts
| from this user") without unfollowing. But even that kind
| of filtering -- in fact, even the merging of followed
| users' feeds! -- could all be done client-side. The whole
| "feeds" part could be as simple as a post-triggered
| static-site-generator pushing JSON into an object-storage
| bucket hiding behind an edge cache.
|
| Modern Usenet :-)
| krapp wrote:
| Ah Usenet, that bastion of civil, intellectual discourse
| where the most brilliant minds of the day mingled in the
| rarefied air of their own fart clouds.
| evanelias wrote:
| > 99% of the server costs of something like Facebook or
| Twitter, go toward the backends, analytical DBs, and
| graphical / ML models used to power "features" that no
| user wants
|
| This is incorrect. From direct personal experience, I
| strongly believe the backend infrastructure and staff
| required _just to operate the core product functionality_
| of a successful large-scale social network massively
| exceeds what could be provided by donations.
|
| Just in terms of core product OLTP data, Tumblr hit 100
| billion distinct rows on MySQL masters back in Oct 2012.
| At the time, after accounting for HA/replication, that
| required over 200 expensive beefy database servers. This
| db server number grew by ~10 servers per month, because
| Tumblr was getting 60-75 million posts/day at this time.
|
| Then add in a couple hundred cache and async queue
| servers, and over a thousand web servers. And employees
| to operate all this, although we kept it quite lean
| compared to other social networks.
|
| Again, this was all just the core product, not analytics
| or ML or anything like that. These numbers also don't
| include image/media storage or serving, which was a
| substantial additional cost.
|
| Although Tumblr had some mainstream success at that time,
| it was still more niche than some of the larger social
| networks. At that time, Facebook was more than 2 orders
| of magnitude larger than Tumblr.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| > From direct personal experience, I strongly believe the
| backend infrastructure and staff required just to operate
| the core product functionality of a successful large-
| scale social network massively exceeds what could be
| provided by donations.
|
| Because these social networks are designed for analytics.
| It's in their blood. It permeates everything they do, and
| causes immense overhead.
|
| Check out mailing lists or usenet.
| evanelias wrote:
| No, nothing about this is related to analytics. I was
| strictly describing storage, caching, and compute for
| _core product functionality_ in my previous comment,
| which is written from direct first-hand experience
| working on infrastructure for social networks for a
| decade, including the two social networks I referenced in
| my previous comment.
|
| Social networks store a lot of OLTP data _just to
| function_. Every user, post, comment, follow /friendship
| relation, like/favorite/interaction, media metadata --
| that all gets stored in sharded relational databases and
| retrieved in order for the product to operate at all. For
| successful social networks, it adds up to trillions of
| rows of data (on the _smaller end_ , for something like
| Tumblr) and that requires a lot of expensive
| infrastructure to operate. Again, _none of this has any
| relation to analytics_.
|
| As for usenet, what? It's basically dead, after becoming
| an unmanageable cesspool of spam (or worse) more than two
| decades ago. It was great in the 90s, but the internet
| population was substantially smaller then.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| > As for usenet, what? It's basically dead, after
| becoming an unmanageable cesspool of spam (or worse) more
| than two decades ago. It was great in the 90s, but the
| internet population was substantially smaller then.
|
| Yeah, because no one is interested in promoting it
| because it doesn't have analytics baked in so you can't
| make money from doing so. Of course it deteriorated over
| the years. It's also cheap to run and can handle a
| massive amount of users.
|
| > store a lot of OLTP data just to function
|
| Right, so they can run analytics. You could reduce your
| tracking data to aggregates, but then you can't go back
| and run analytics on your users. You don't need to keep
| that data forever.
|
| Especially with modern social media where content older
| than a day is effectively dead and ignored.
|
| > it adds up to trillions of rows of data
|
| This was a lot of data a decade ago. Nowadays a single
| postgres instance will handle billions of rows without
| breaking a sweat, and social media content is
| exceptionally shardable.
| evanelias wrote:
| > Right, so they can run analytics.
|
| Stop gaslighting me, it's not OK! I'm describing first-
| hand experience of things that were not related to
| analytics IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM.
|
| Try running OLAP queries on a massively sharded MySQL 5.1
| deployment, or any aggregation at all on a Memcached
| cluster. These technologies were designed for OLTP data,
| and were woefully incapable of useful analytics over
| massive data sets.
|
| I was Tumblr's fourth full-time software engineering
| hire. When I joined (nearly 4 years after the company was
| founded) the only thing remotely related to analytics was
| a tiny Hadoop cluster, where logs were dumped and largely
| ignored. Nothing about analytics is "in their blood". All
| you needed to sign up for Tumblr was an email address.
| WTF do you even think they are "analyzing"? Your comments
| are completely fabricated BS.
|
| > You could reduce your tracking data to aggregates
|
| Once again, _I 'm not describing "tracking data"_! I'm
| talking about things like content that users have posted,
| comments they have written, content they have favorited,
| users they are following. These are _core data models of
| a social network_. It has nothing to do with tracking or
| analytics.
|
| > You don't need to keep that data forever.
|
| The OLTP product data I'm describing _does_ need to be
| kept forever. Users don 't like it when content they have
| written on their blog _suddenly disappears_.
|
| > Nowadays a single postgres instance will handle
| billions of rows without breaking a sweat, and social
| media content is exceptionally shardable.
|
| Yes, but running a massive cluster of hundreds or
| thousands of sharded database servers _is still very
| expensive_.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Check out mailing lists or usenet.
|
| These aren't really good "social media" examples. Both
| mailing lists and Usenet have limited retention, with
| mailing lists there may be almost no retention beyond the
| amount required to deliver a message.
|
| While low retention might be a desirable feature and
| something you might actually want in a FOSS social
| network, it means old content _will_ disappear from the
| central server. If it 's not archived by clients it can
| easily disappear or end up locked away only in private
| backups. Google's buyout of Deja News should be a
| cautionary tale of retention and the locking up of public
| data behind a private gate.
|
| Usenet history today is largely only available because
| someone at Google hasn't noticed Google Groups still
| exists and terminated it yet. If that happens tomorrow
| there's not any good complete archive of historical
| Usenet content. There's no guarantee Google won't kill
| those Usenet archives in the next year let alone the next
| five years.
| xg15 wrote:
| I think this reflects very much the Silicon Valley way of
| thinking about internet governance, in which there seem
| to exist only two imaginable forms of it: Either anarchy,
| in which there are no rules at all and the only limits
| are technological, with full-on tragedy of the commons
| unfolding - or oligarchy/corpocracy in which whoever is
| the most powerful private actor gets to make the rules
| and then of course gets to make them in their own
| interest, not the common interest.
|
| Didn't we have some more forms of government available
| for discussion?
|
| E.g., after the xz backdoor, I read a call of OSS
| maintainers that critical OSS projects should be state-
| funded as they literally comprise critical
| infrastructure. Why couldn't we do the same with social
| networks?
| krapp wrote:
| >I read a call of OSS maintainers that critical OSS
| projects should be state-funded as they literally
| comprise critical infrastructure. Why couldn't we do the
| same with social networks?
|
| If the goal is to avoid "enshittification" I don't think
| the solution is to have governments control social media
| and then have those platforms be subject to bureaucracy,
| decency and profanity laws, surveillance and propaganda
| (more so than currently) and the fickle wrath of the
| taxpaying voter. Realize how little critical
| infrastructure actually gets funded, and then add the
| psychotic dog-water paranoia of half the US thinking that
| infrastructure is a psyop by communists and "groomers" to
| turn their kids gay, and making that an issue in the
| polls.
|
| PBS is probably the closest analogue to government run
| social media I can think of. Half the government and
| their constituents consider it "liberal propaganda" and
| want to defund it entirely, and it has constantly has to
| go begging hat in hand just to stay afloat, and then
| pursue commercialism to make up for the deficit.
|
| You think social media is bad now? Imagine if you're
| required by law to sign up with proof of citizenship and
| your SSN is your password. And every platform is
| constantly putting Wikipedia style donation popups. And
| it's a misdemeanor to post swear words or material deemed
| "inappropriate."
| fragmede wrote:
| Depends on how you want to define social network, but
| Signal has a stories feature and is paid for thusly.
| intended wrote:
| Which is why expect to see a government run social media
| platform in the next few years.
|
| Functionally, the "public good" part of social media
| networks is almost certainly better served by a single
| organization.
|
| However, the "freedom of speech and ideas" part, runs in
| horror at this idea. (rightfully so).
|
| The best middle ground concept I've heard is to contrast
| the current state of the web with libraries.
|
| NB: Enshittification is going to become a term like "Fake
| news", completely divorced from its original roots.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| > Which is why expect to see a government run social
| media platform in the next few years
|
| I would expect government run social media to be
| especially enshittified, honestly
|
| Just for different reasons
| intended wrote:
| Yup :D.
|
| There are countries which CAN make it work, but man, a
| central nervous system co-opted by oligarchs, tyrants or
| other worst case scenarios, would be the outcome for most
| of the world.
| imsaw wrote:
| Another perspective of resources are tackling adversary
| bots. It's difficult to strike a balance between enough
| good features to have your platform likeable and useful for
| users while maintaining security from bad actors who'll
| find clever ways to exploit vulnerabilities.
| beeboobaa3 wrote:
| the problem isn't making money, the problem is chasing
| continuous growth and ever increasing profits
| dgb23 wrote:
| Enshittification is not a necessary consequence for a
| sustainable business. But I think social media platforms are
| susceptible to forces that pull beyond that.
| numpad0 wrote:
| define sustainable - I mean, do non-growing businesses seem
| allowed to exist these days?
| wuj wrote:
| Part of Tumblr's downfall also comes from their change of
| stance on NSFW contents.
| raincole wrote:
| Quite an understatement.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Tumblr's change in policy on NSFW content was bad enough, but
| what made it a complete disaster was outsourcing the
| enforcement of that policy to a crude image classifier. A lot
| of non-pornographic content got removed when that happened,
| and a lot of users never bothered contesting those removals
| (either because it was too much effort, or because they were
| no longer maintaining their account). So a lot of content on
| older Tumblr accounts is just _gone_.
| vkou wrote:
| It's possible that artists posting their art aren't a large
| enough demographic to produce enough economic value that can be
| harvested to feed a cadre of SWEs and PMs and SREs and
| executives and moderators and, and...
| kmeisthax wrote:
| Apple mandated the changes to Tumblr that pissed everyone off.
| I'd almost call this a forced error, but Apple's rationale for
| bringing the hammer down on Tumblr was App Review finding CSAM
| on the front page. Which is itself a failure of their
| moderation team.
|
| In contrast, DeviantArt saw dollar signs from AI art and
| rugpulled themselves. Their business model relies on art
| remaining scarce enough to not exhaust the demand for art. A
| machine that lets you create unlimited art for the cost of some
| GPU time completely destroys the economic underpinnings of most
| artistic endeavor. While not all artists are solely
| economically motivated, the ones that are economically
| successful are the ones paying for dA subscriptions - _the
| things that keep the site alive_.
| noirscape wrote:
| To my understanding, what happened with Tumblr was moreso a
| compounding situation; the Apple app store reviewer managed
| to just find NSFW content in general, forcing Tumblr to
| change the app to remove it.
|
| Before, under Yahoo, they'd just put some new hoop in the app
| to prevent users from accessing adult content, but by the
| time this particular Apple review rolled around, the sale of
| Tumblr to Verizon had already been finalized. Which created a
| situation where an outgoing management pretty much ordered to
| not bother fixing it and just banning it all, hoping that
| Verizon's "family friendly" policies meant that it wouldn't
| jeopardize the sale (which it turns out, the sale wasn't
| jeopardized).
|
| You can still kinda see it in how broken the actual removal
| was; they just excised the NSFW from the frontend by marking
| the posts as sensitive on the API and then preventing the
| frontend from viewing anything sensitive. For years (and
| maybe even today) you could just scrape the API to find NSFW
| posts, although that's on the decline since most NSFW Tumblr
| accounts have been deleted entirely by the actual people
| behind them.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > Apple mandated the changes to Tumblr that pissed everyone
| off.
|
| That's not true - Tumblr already had their "no adult content"
| plans in place well before the CSAM problem caused Apple to
| temporarily suspend them from the app store. That suspension
| just brought the plans forward by 6 months in a panic rush.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| Apple will find the sexual content and push for its removal.
| Not just the stuff on the front page, but anything that gets
| surfaced within a reasonable browsing session (that includes
| popular items, keywords etc.)
|
| And it's not just Apple, payment processors also have strong
| opinions.
|
| In general, sexual/erotic stuff has become a really hard
| thing to keep allowing in mainstream platforms.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Then how is there a Reddit iOS app?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| I don't have the app anymore, but I'd assume you don't
| end up in r/GoneWild with 3 random clicks from opening
| the app as a new user, nor that porn is prominently in
| the default subreddits.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| It's harder to accidentally reach porn on Reddit than it
| was on Tumblr ca. 2018. You could follow tags like #cute
| and #fox because you liked a cute fox picture and the
| next day get somebody's Sonic and Tails furry futa fanart
| on your dash because they used those tags.
| 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.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| There's a straightforward but costly way, tie it to something
| that costs money, over the long term. E.g. Utility bills,
| bank account statements, etc..., for x number of years.
|
| And manually confirm with the companies at random.
| EGreg wrote:
| Tie what?
|
| They'll just check in and then run bots in their account.
| Line a chess bot for example
| 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.
| lmm wrote:
| To me KeyBase always felt like grifters trying to co-opt
| grassroots identity stuff. IIRC they were sort-of-but-not-
| really OpenPGP at the start, pushing people heavily towards a
| not-your-keys not-your-crypto setup, and then at some point
| they completely removed the ability to actually control your
| signing keys yourself.
| chromakode wrote:
| Keybase always performed crypto on-device using their open
| source client written in Go. What not-your-keys not-your-
| crypto setup are you referring to?
| __jonas wrote:
| the only thing I remember about keybase was when they did this
| crypto 'air drop' thing, and then a while later (months?
| years?) I realised I had this coin in my account and I sold it
| for like 70 Euros on some sketchy crypto marketplace. Can't
| complain to be honest, no other startup so far has just handed
| me 70 Euros without asking to at least harvest my eye data..
| throwaway562if1 wrote:
| There really aren't many major platforms left for artists at this
| point - DeviantArt and ArtStation have both dove down the AI
| hole, Twitter needs an account to view now, that leaves what,
| Pixiv and Tumblr?
| 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.
| growingkittens wrote:
| It's not Spotify's fault that bots exist, but _is_ their fault
| that they don 't care.
|
| DeviantArt built a system that pretends bots are not a problem
| on the Internet...and gave them a profit motive.
| 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 at all
| that doesn't scream "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 productivity 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 little time and zero thought put into it can
| still be superficially passable.
| __loam wrote:
| I am a bad artist but I do make art, and have been trying
| to make art over the past year or so. I've made less than
| 200 pieces over that time but I can still go back to work
| that I've spent hours on and remember the decisions I've
| made and the specific works that have helped me grow or
| that I'm proud of. Do you think AI artists remember the
| work they've produced?
| arvinsim wrote:
| They will not remember the prompt that created them but
| by default AI art encodes that information into the image
| metadat.
| chefandy wrote:
| Not that same thing, though. Reproduction isn't the
| purpose of considering artistic decisions you've made--
| it's to reflect on and refine your eye, ability to
| communicate things visually, and your trajectory as an
| artist. That capability is entirely separate from the
| medium you use, or the source of your work. Indeed,
| nothing in AI image generation makes that less possible
| than in physical media, but metadata has a very different
| use case. The entire point is that you need to pay
| attention to your output enough to parse the extreme
| subtleties, and posting dozens of pieces per day negates
| that.
| Devasta wrote:
| > Posts made using AI are supposed to be tagged as such so
| users can opt-out of seeing them
|
| While this is the official line I'm fairly certain the real
| reason for stuff like this is to prevent AI models consuming
| their own output.
| jsheard wrote:
| Probably, either way they are doing a piss poor job of
| enforcing the rule so everyone loses. The people who don't
| want to see AI posts see them anyway and the AI models will
| end up Habsburging themselves.
| zeruch wrote:
| There were always uneven applying of rules based on certain
| staff whims, and that of course, carries its own law of
| unintended consequences.
|
| Now, with Wix in charge, and a handful of the roachier
| staff left (I'll name names, Realitysquared) the site has
| negative bupkes chance of content moderation/curation worth
| a wet damn.
| Nition wrote:
| It's everywhere. Google image results are already becoming
| heavily polluted with AI art (try searching something like
| "unicorn" for example). Someone posted a cool site here the
| other day that was a sort of automatically-generated
| encyclopedia, except that since it was automatically grabbing
| images, most of the examples of historical art styles had ended
| up being modern AI art instead. That wouldn't have been the
| case at all even two years ago, it's a bit scary.
| tdeck wrote:
| Pro tip: You can add "before: 2023" to your image search
| prompt.
| Nition wrote:
| Thanks, that actually does an extremely good job on the
| "unicorn" search of filtering out all the AI unicorns.
| xandrius wrote:
| Woah, never knew about that one. It works wonders!
| 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". Add
| to that, quite a backlash against the recent site redesign (and
| the ones before it).
|
| 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.
| egypturnash wrote:
| This sounds like about the right time for DA's major drop in
| relevance given that my Furaffinity account was made at the end
| of 2005.
| underlipton wrote:
| It may have been sometime in 2005, now that you mention it.
| Recall's a little fuzzy (it HAS been 18+ years)... I was
| going off a particular memory of sneaking access to it and a
| certain specific queer-focused art platform during the summer
| of '06.
| irusensei wrote:
| - alternative culture is born or aglomerate around internet hub
|
| - hub tries to monetize its audience, rightly so for
| sustainability of the platform. Server costs, management,
| moderation etc etc.
|
| - it takes just a few years for hub to become a corporation
| full of clueless corpos who have no idea about the initial
| culture and core audience.
|
| - hub is bleached beyond recognition because corpos are scared
| of anything that is slightly controversial - including the
| original culture hub was about.
|
| - "That's not family friendly! We also need those ESG and DEI
| labels to attract investors! The advertisers won't approve
| their brand associated with this!"
|
| The current term for this is "enshitification" right?
|
| - hub dies, culture might disperse, corpos get their golden
| parachute and latches into the next big project.
|
| It seems to be a very common story. Reddit, DA, you can think
| go a lot of examples. It WILL happen with big Mastodon and
| BlueSky instances.
|
| If you think about it you gotta give credit for 4chan keeping a
| big chunk of its soul, rather you like the site contents and
| its users or not.
| underlipton wrote:
| To be fair...
|
| 1) ESG/DEI stuff wasn't even a whisper on the wind when this
| stuff went down. It was still very much DADT, Jack Thompson
| lawsuits, elected-Bush-twice America. In other words, the
| complaints were mostly coming from the center/right (and Joe
| Leiberman, if you still considered him a liberal).
|
| 2) 4chan was in the "advantageous" position of never being
| able to attract major advertisers in the first place. And
| while a good bit of the old culture is still extant, the
| post-Trayvon-murder/GG/Trump-meme-magic era did a number on
| its userbase's ability to focus on the lulz instead of
| descending into conservative (if not just straight-up Nazi)
| rhetoric (and not for laughs).
|
| But, yeah, the rest of this tracks. It's basically inevitable
| unless the site admins get to a point where they're happy
| with the userbase size/culture/whatever and decide there's no
| need for any more changes. Examples: Craigslist, SA (to a
| degree), FA (despite controversies and the recent UI change,
| which users can mercifully opt out of). In fact, I would say
| that unnecessary or large-scale UI changes are good heuristic
| for determining when things are about to go downhill.
| lxe wrote:
| I posted a lot of my Disco Diffusion AI work on DeviantArt back
| in 2022 (2 centuries ago, in AI years)
| (https://www.deviantart.com/holosomnia/art/Sea-of-Color-92572...)
| as an example. At that time the AI hate machine wasn't as
| pervasive, and it was very well received.
|
| Only when the crowd effect of "AI=bad" came along, the pitchforks
| came out. As someone to whom AI art has brought incredible joy,
| it's very disheartening to see artists and the public straight up
| refuse to understand both the technology and the artistic
| potential -- the human side of AI art.
| jhbadger wrote:
| One of the reasons I _like_ computers is that they let me do
| things I couldn 't do before even if others could without
| computers. I mean, think about the revolution in desktop
| publishing in the 1980s -- a person could use software to make
| a nice looking brochure or even a full book without any
| typesetting knowledge. And people were excited by it. They
| didn't say "You horrible person! You are trying to destroy the
| livelihoods of professional typesetters!", which I'd imagine
| would be the response if desktop publishing was invented now.
| skydhash wrote:
| > _a person could use software to make a nice looking
| brochure or even a full book without any typesetting
| knowledge_
|
| By using a template? Because based on my experience with
| inDesign and Affinity Publisher, it's still required to have
| knowledge about design and typesetting. They reduce the costs
| to get started and work in the domain, but the knowledge
| requirement was still there. Same with digital drawing and
| photo retouching. You're no longer gate-kept by the material
| costs. But AI is the equivalent of pressing _X_ in a fight
| game and then saying you can do MMA and ready to go against
| UFC champions.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| It ... really isn't. The one thing that an AI tool does do
| is create an image that looks like something right out of
| the gate. That might fool you into thinking it's easy.
|
| However, getting the picture _you want_ , consistently, is
| a little bit more work. You might need to involve many more
| tools, including some old ones (blender for setting up,
| photoshop or gimp for post-processing) , and some weird new
| ones (like what the heck is a LoRA?)
|
| It's like the one time I wrote an essay using LaTeX. Even
| when I was half-way done. It looked really well typeset and
| professional from the get-go, but of course half of the
| text was missing and still needed to be added.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| You're describing art. Most people who make "AI art" are
| not making art: they're using the computer as their own
| personal content mill.
|
| Well, "most people" might be inaccurate. By volume, the
| people causing AI-generated content to come into
| existence are overwhelmingly just cranking the handle to
| churn out content, and that volume overwhelms everything
| else to the extent that it appears to be "most people",
| but might only be a few hundred. In the time it takes you
| to produce one artwork, they've got ten thousand
| 4096x4096 squares.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| In the same way that I would hope you would understand the
| problem with submitting 10000 drop shipped factory-made bowls
| or sweaters to a hand made competition or exhibition, I hope
| even if you appreciate AI art on the merits you can understand
| the frustration and challenges with trying to create them out
| of spaces intended for art created without AI.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| The link links to 46 images. Not 10000.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| Oh I wasn't talking about their work, I was talking about
| other AI "artists" that are poisoning the well for people
| like OP. I was trying to find some common ground between
| people like me, who are sick and tired of AI spam, and OP,
| who is sick and tired of reactionary responses to any
| attempts to incorporate AI into the creation of art.
| raincole wrote:
| > Only when the crowd effect of "AI=bad" came along
|
| It only came along after a crowd of "AI artists" who are just
| spammers came to the platform. I mean every platform.
| rstat1 wrote:
| You don't understand why the actual artists from which your AI
| "art" tools stole from to become viable, dislike these tools?
|
| Really?
| lelanthran wrote:
| > I posted a lot of my Disco Diffusion AI work on DeviantArt
| back in 2022 [...] it was very well received.
|
| > Only when the crowd effect of "AI=bad" came along, the
| pitchforks came out.
|
| You don't see how you spamming "a lot of" work onto a site
| reduces the value of that site? What you call the "AI=bad
| crowd", others were calling the "anti-spam" crowd.
| Kim_Bruning wrote:
| There's 46 images at the link provided . There's some recent
| ones, and some examples of early AI art there that must have
| taken quite a bit of work to get right. Surprisingly the
| style has remained fairly consistent over the two years.
|
| I'm not sure how you would characterize this as spam.
| Devasta wrote:
| They embraced AI slop and now their site is a wasteland, the best
| they can hope for now is that like NFTs before them AI art
| becomes a useful route for money laundering.
|
| Its a shame to see what its become, the ascension of AI slop
| means a site like it will never be possible again unless there is
| some incredible filtering capabilities available.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Wasn't on dA in 2006, but the Eclipse redesign of the site to
| look more like Wix is what dropped my site usage to 0 even before
| NFTs and GenAI shit. The old design looked "dated" - so what? It
| was more intuitive, feature-rich, customizable, and distinct. dA
| was Xing its brand recognition before it was cool.
| sideshowb wrote:
| You've just helped me realize that when it comes to ui these
| days "dated" basically means "useful".
| lancesells wrote:
| Welcome to Google Universal Analytics going to Google
| Analytics 4.
| pentagrama wrote:
| The site in question to judge yourself
| https://www.deviantart.com/
| raincole wrote:
| It's easy to blame AI (and yes, AI images spammers are a problem
| on every platform). But DeviantArt was in a decline way before
| Stable Diffusion became a thing.
|
| It was mostly social media, really.
| 20after4 wrote:
| I worked at deviantArt from 2009 to 2013. It was my dream job. At
| the time deviantArt made money a few ways.
|
| In no particular order, because I don't know which were
| profitable or which represented a larger portion of revenue:
|
| - Subscriptions (users could pay for a few extra features and to
| disable ads on the site) - DeviantArt branded merch. - Prints and
| products with users' art printed on them - Sponsored Contests.
| These promoted movies or other media properties, or software of
| interest to artists. Often the prizes included Wacom tablets and
| Adobe Photoshop licenses.
|
| During my time there a significant problem we were dealing with
| was due to deviantArt's stance on adult content. Anything was
| allowed as long as it wasn't outright pornography. In practice
| that meant that nudes were allowed but sexual acts were not. This
| had consequences for deviantArt's revenue. It meant that we could
| not run ads from the "reputable" ad networks and were forced to
| deal with seedier outfits that often (e.g. constantly) included
| malware in the display ads, exposing users to all sorts of nasty
| stuff. One of my projects was to detect and/or prevent the
| malware ads which proved challenging and at least given the
| amount of resources devoted to it, it was not very fruitful.
|
| It really is sad for me to see what deviantArt has devolved into.
| Once the original founders sold out a few years ago I really
| didn't hold out much hope for the site's future.
| neom wrote:
| imo once the suicide girls and the suzi9mm stuff started to be
| "the thing" - and we allowed a bunch of people from that crew
| into GD, things started to change really quickly. Honestly, I
| hated it so much, it made me really upset. I have no issue with
| that style of art, but it really took over the narrative for a
| while, and that was silly, and I'm still surprised some 20+
| years later it was allowed to happen.
| lmm wrote:
| Who or what do you think it "was allowed" by? Nothing kills
| an edgy contemporary art platform faster than censorship,
| plus they would've got bogged down endlessly in fights about
| you let someone away with x so why are you blocking y. The
| place is called DeviantArt FFS.
| neom wrote:
| I'm happy to say it: Daniel and Richard. But especially
| Daniel.
| nox101 wrote:
| > Nothing kills an edgy contemporary art platform faster
| than censorship
|
| I don't know the solution but isn't 4chan an example of
| what happens with no censorship? That would also kill an
| edgy contemporary art platform as the "4 teh lulz" crowd
| drowns out the "for the art" crowd.
|
| As another semi-related example. Imgur used to be
| interesting "images" but now 25-75% are posts of text (like
| a screenshot of a tweet for example, or of a blog post,
| etc...). That might be good for Imgur's bottom line, I
| don't know, but it's not the site it started as.
|
| To be the site it started as would require somehow
| disallowing images of text but magically allow meme images
| (some text). That might end up starting an arms race as
| users skew their messages onto billboards, tvs, signs, and
| other things to try to make them not look like just an
| image.
|
| Like I said above, I have no idea if they want the site to
| be mostly images instead of mostly text. Only that it's
| another site that changed character over time and I'm sure
| didn't start as a site expecting mostly images of text.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| 4chan has censorship and extensive and active moderation
| but the levels for what is acceptable are lower than most
| other sites. Unlike Reddit, moderators are hidden there's
| no way to know if a user is a mod or not. I like this way
| of removing ego and moderator abuse but this makes the
| place seem more chaotic, unaccountable and lawless.
|
| In theory it's possible to have the same kind of site
| with the regular family friendly content and with strict
| (i.e. normal) levels of moderation. In practice we don't
| see this.
|
| I think it's because the levels of active moderation by
| humans needs to be high. So 4chan can get away with less
| spent on moderation because their levels are lower.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| > but this makes the place seem more chaotic,
| unaccountable and lawless
|
| That's how exactly how reddit mods operate, no?
| vkou wrote:
| Reddit admins, employed by the site serve as a line of
| (corporate) enforcement.
|
| Otherwise, reddit isn't a democracy, the mods can do what
| they want (within limits set by the admins), just like
| they can do what they want _here_.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Perhaps Ironically, (or perhaps just tellingly), there
| was a very large overlap between the 4chan and DeviantArt
| user base back when I worked there.
| araes wrote:
| Unfortunately, Imgur also largely ceased being memes and
| / or discussion board include image storage (Reddit) and
| starting being a lot of TikTok / Vine / Youtube Short
| cross-posts. "Here's my dog / cat, my dog / cat's cute."
| "Here's us in our car, we're very clever." "Here's us in
| softcore dress-up, look at how attractive we are."
| There's memes, just not that many unless you mostly
| subscribe to sub domains (#meme, ect...).
| sph wrote:
| > This had consequences for deviantArt's revenue. It meant that
| we could not run ads from the "reputable" ad networks
|
| Advertising: perhaps the best and most effective involuntary
| ally of the Puritan movement.
|
| It is a shame that the Internet that we have created depends
| pretty much solely on that form of revenue.
| eloisant wrote:
| It's not just ads, it's a lot of B2B services that ban you if
| you don't have a strict rule on sexual content (or even
| nudity).
| zbentley wrote:
| > Advertising: perhaps the best and most effective
| involuntary ally of the Puritan movement.
|
| The usual defense by advertisers is that their clients do not
| want their businesses to be associated with adult material,
| so they insist that advertisers do not place ads on adult-
| content-friendly websites to reduce the risk of that
| association happening due to ads adjacent to adult content.
|
| I'm curious as to how valid that is. Are many/most businesses
| (or many/most businesses that are highly valuable to
| advertisers) materially concerned enough about association-
| with-adult-content-via-ad-placement that they would switch
| advertisers over it? Or are advertisers manufacturing family-
| friendly ad placement as a competitive selling point that
| their customers never really asked for?
|
| I'm also curious about the next level down the stack, as it
| were: if a significant subset of businesses who hire
| advertisers _are_ concerned about adult-content-association-
| via-nearby-placement, why is that? Is it merely disgust
| /discomfort on the part of business leadership and prevailing
| culture? Or does data indicate that there's a material risk
| to enough businesses' bottom lines that it's fiscally prudent
| to avoid that association?
|
| (Reasoning from first principles without data, so probably
| wrong) I'm skeptical about the validity of both claims. Adult
| content is _really_ popular across many demographics whose
| behavior is otherwise quite different. Given that broad base
| of popularity, is it really that risky for a business to have
| its brand appear in an ad next to pornography compared to,
| say, appearing on a politically extreme news site, or next to
| algorithmically-prioritized ragebait content on social media?
| Unlike adult content, I feel like the associations formed by
| seeing a company mentioned next to something anger inducing
| are more likely to be negative than the associations formed
| by seeing it next to adult content that the viewer presumably
| sought out. In both cases, the chance of behaviorally-
| significant associations being formed at all seems quite low,
| so I 'd imagine that effects here (if there are any) would
| only be visible in the very very large.
| mavhc wrote:
| People who hate nudity will organise protests and get news
| coverage, giving more voice to a minority. Same with
| anything, the ones massively for/against something will
| spend money time/money on complaining that the passive
| majority. See gun control in US for an example
| smogcutter wrote:
| https://hbr.org/2024/03/lessons-from-the-bud-light-
| boycott-o...
|
| Advertisers don't have to believe the content is actually
| objectionable to fear reprisal. Outrage machine types on
| all sides will make an issue out of anything they can use
| to score points for themselves.
|
| The marginal value of putting a Johnson & Johnson ad (say)
| in front of some furries is nothing compared to dread of
| the headline "J&J wants your children to be furries!"
| 20after4 wrote:
| > putting a Johnson & Johnson ad (say) in front of some
| furries
|
| A very real possibility when advertising on DeviantArt.
| But a no-adult-content policy would have (probably)
| satisfied adsense terms but would not have eliminated
| (most) of the furrie content on DeviantArt.
| silenced_trope wrote:
| This.
|
| The advertisers care about getting bad press and having
| to do the rounds in the "news cycle".
|
| By now everyone knows that advertisers don't choose which
| posts, tweets, images, etc. their ads are shown next to,
| but that still won't stop the CNNs of the world from
| writing a "<Brand> advertises next to Nazi content on
| <Platform>!" article.
| zbentley wrote:
| While many media outfits are very good at manufacturing
| outrage, I'm not sure whether a big ad farm putting (say)
| Walmart ads on PornHub would materially move the needle
| on bad-press-risk.
|
| Like, if a media outlet or politico wants to make hay
| about Walmart being advertised next to nazis, I'm sure
| that's trivially easy to find today (and you only need to
| find one instance of that adjacency to make hay for a
| news cycle).
|
| So why isn't this already an issue in the status quo? Why
| aren't brands being pressured into changing their ad
| placement habits right and left?
|
| Sure, some businesses are being called out for things
| they explicitly endorse (e.g. Budweiser pride ads), but
| that's not the same thing as running an ordinary ad in a
| questionable place.
|
| Perhaps advertisers have written off adult content sites
| as places where there isn't enough money to be made to
| risk it? If so, I'm curious what consumer behavioral data
| backs up _that_ conclusion.
| realusername wrote:
| > The usual defense by advertisers is that their clients do
| not want their businesses to be associated with adult
| material
|
| That's the biggest joke in the world, the largest diffusers
| of explicit content are by far the advertisers which they
| use to sell anything, from cars to shampoo
|
| The advertising industry is the very last industry which
| can claim a moral high ground on anything.
| mikestew wrote:
| Reread what you quoted. The advertising industry isn't
| claiming the moral high ground on anything, they claim
| their client are. And their clients will tell you, no,
| it's the customers who will throw a fit at the slightest
| hint of nipple.
|
| It's buck-passing all the way down.
| Lammy wrote:
| > the largest diffusers of explicit content are by far
| the advertisers which they use to sell anything, from
| cars to shampoo
|
| Relevant Bill Hicks:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4NyMJHWVHw
| otikik wrote:
| They lie outright. The other day I saw an ad of a body
| lotion that "modifies your skin DNA", according to the
| ad.
| elevatedastalt wrote:
| It ultimately all happens due to news media. While there
| are many journalists who work hard to earn the high status
| that was accorded to the profession in the past, the news
| industry as it stands today, by and large, exists mostly to
| foment outrage and spread strife.
|
| If the media stopped writing shrieking news articles about
| "X brand promoting Y evil", we could all move on
| collectively as a society.
| patrickmay wrote:
| > I'm curious as to how valid that is. Are many/most
| businesses (or many/most businesses that are highly
| valuable to advertisers) materially concerned enough about
| association-with-adult-content-via-ad-placement that they
| would switch advertisers over it? Or are advertisers
| manufacturing family-friendly ad placement as a competitive
| selling point that their customers never really asked for?
|
| I've worked in a couple of digital advertising roles (mea
| culpa) and brand safety is a very big deal. No-one wants
| their product associated with porn, extremism, or even
| politics. eXtwitter's revenue implosion due to advertisers
| pulling out (pun not entirely intended) is one recent
| example of the importance placed on brand safety.
| bitcharmer wrote:
| Yet somehow being a nuisance streamer on platforms like
| twitch or kik still yields insane profits. Just don't show
| your ass and you'll never get banned for anything. Bonkers.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Religion is the source of that nonsense. Help bring it down
| any legal way possible. Ridicule it, expose it, help people
| realise it's just a bunch of fairytales, most often useless
| and sometimes actually damaging.
| jimmygrapes wrote:
| Sounds like a very religious way to handle your issues
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Your are correct. Religion taught me this. So why not let
| it backfire on them.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Yes, when they famously declared "there's no sex in USSR"
| it was because USSR was a theocracy.
| cynicalsecurity wrote:
| Communism was a religion.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| There are plenty of feminists that are as militantly
| atheistic as they are militantly anti-
| pornography/prostitution/female nudity. The modern Moral
| Majority isn't just composed of religionists anymore.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I would have to pick my jaw up off the floor if militant
| feminists composed even 2% of the general population.
| IG_Semmelweiss wrote:
| you are right in calling out these people are a tiny
| portion of the population, yet here in 2024, their
| numbers don't seem to matter... as they have been wildly
| successful in moving the overton window
|
| In summary, they are a tiny % , but by no means
| insignificant in terms of impact.
| dialup_sounds wrote:
| Just to calibrate your sense of scale: 1% of the United
| States population is still _3 million people_.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Okay but would you want your ads on a porn site if the
| business was yours? That makes it seem like you approve of
| that behavior (e.g. drug use, gore, etc).
| tail_exchange wrote:
| What does porn have to do with drug use and gore?
| chrisallenlane wrote:
| > Advertising: perhaps the best and most effective
| involuntary ally of the Puritan movement.
|
| Which is weird, given that "sex sells."
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| It needs to be teased not given away.
|
| > If music be the food of love, play on; > Give me excess
| of it, that, surfeiting, > The appetite may sicken, and so
| die.
|
| The point is actually to suggest sex. Keep you aroused, but
| not let you finish.
|
| Imagine, if Budweiser ran a brothel and buying their beer
| actually got you laid. You'd get laid, forget about sex for
| a while, and the association between the beer and sex would
| not entice you to buy the product.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| What doesn't make sense to me is why the major ad networks
| don't just have a setting for advertising on NSFW sites, or
| for that matter on NSFW _pages_.
|
| They're just leaving money on the table. Ads are sold at
| auction, so the auction price on NSFW pages would be lower,
| but _because_ it would be lower then some advertisers would
| want the discount. The alternative is that the ad network
| bans them and gets nothing, the advertiser loses out on cheap
| impressions and the site goes bankrupt.
|
| Sites like Deviant Art could have a policy to the effect of
| "NSFW content is allowed but you have to mark it" and then
| advertisers who don't want to be seen next to NSFW content,
| aren't. Hypothetically some user could post something NSFW
| without marking it, but the same is true on sites that ban
| NSFW content entirely.
|
| Then the site itself gets the full payment on the majority of
| pages that are safe for work, still gets something from the
| ones that aren't, and doesn't have to deal with shady
| malware-laden ad networks.
| scotty79 wrote:
| > It meant that we could not run ads from the "reputable" ad
| networks [...]
|
| It's funny how significant percent of Facebook ads I see are an
| outright scam, phishing etc.
|
| It's been like that for years.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Back in 2012 there was a very large gap between the quality
| of ads on Google AdSense vs. all of the other options.
| DeviantArt was banned from using google adsense and thus had
| to run ads much more similar to the crap you see on Facebook
| these days.
| 20after4 wrote:
| For what it's worth, I really think DeviantArt should have
| focused much more on the other revenue sources and abandoned
| display ads. I'm not sure how that would have turned out but I
| suspect it might have been good for the company. The
| sponsorships were far more aligned with the interests of
| deviantArt's users and I think it was a significant source of
| revenue that could have been expanded with the right focus and
| execution. I'm pretty sure that sponsorships amounted to $60k
| to $150k per deal which usually ran for 1 or 2 weeks with a
| sponsored art contest, judging and awarding prizes, it wasn't a
| lot of administrative work for deviantArt AFAIK.
| numpad0 wrote:
| Then credit card payment processing/PayPal would have been
| weaponized earlier, and the result would be the same.
|
| It's App Store. Centralized censorship through App Store
| destroyed the Internet.
| neom wrote:
| For what it's worth, a very very long time ago, when it was
| just getting going, 500px had me design a go to market for
| them, that is what I designed.
| 20after4 wrote:
| Interesting!
| Tronno wrote:
| I'm pretty sure DeviantArt stopped being about actual "art" long
| before AI. Years ago I deleted my account because I didn't want
| to see my posts next to furry scribbles, softcore porn, and other
| low-skill fetish adjacent crap.
|
| Professional digital artists post at Artstation now from what I
| can tell.
| romwell wrote:
| Ugh.
|
| You sound like someone who missed the word _deviant_ in that
| website 's name.
|
| Care to share a link to the art you make?
|
| Really curious about what kind of sophistication you're
| producing that would be tarnished by being seen next to furry
| scribbles.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| "Deviant" and "good" aren't mutually exclusive. Just wanted
| to clear that up for you.
| romwell wrote:
| >"Deviant" and "good" aren't mutually exclusive. Just
| wanted to clear that up for you.
|
| Great. Give yourself a pat on the back for that one.
|
| Now that you've had your smug moment, note that the parent
| comment wasn't concerned with the _quality_ of content, but
| the _category_.
|
| _" Furry smut isn't art"_, brought to you by _" Rap isn't
| music"_ people.
| jsheard wrote:
| ArtStation is also filling up with AI crap, though not to the
| same extent as dA quite yet. It's most obvious in the
| marketplace which is now full of paid "reference packs" that
| consist entirely of AI generated images, which rather defeats
| the point of using a reference.
|
| There's still people on there selling good reference material
| but now they're buried between a few dozen variants of 6000+
| WIZARD CHARACTERS IN 4K!! that someone churned out with Stable
| Diffusion in an afternoon.
| kunagi7 wrote:
| I use several sites like ArtStation, Pixiv and aggregators to
| download new wallpapers for my devices.
|
| This used to be an entertaining experience to see all the
| kinds of beautiful art people used to create... But as you
| said it is getting filled by AI crap. I noticed the same
| thing with Pixiv, even if I opt-out from AI art, new results
| from several popular tags are filled with badly tagged AI
| images.
|
| Now the experience feels tiresome, in some categories I waste
| too much time filtering between real and AI art. I started to
| search things produced before 2022-2023 to avoid AI.
|
| This "art" should be uploaded to its own subdomain and never
| get mixed up with real art.
| zeruch wrote:
| I worked at DA in a volunteer capacity (Gallery Director mostly)
| from 2004-2008 and have been on the site since 2002.
|
| I actually started writing a long screed about this on my own
| blog last year with the AI debacle but shelved it (now I feel
| compelled to return to it)
|
| DA had plenty of small problems and a few big ones, exacerbated
| by incredibly green leadership at the top. It was pretty much run
| off the whims of the CEO, who even when he had good ideas, had no
| execution focus, and often outright ignored capable feedback from
| his lieutenants.
|
| Things like having an app, an API, a GTM strategy that was
| remotely baked for feature releases was simply non-existent at
| BEST, and done in the most haphazard more typically.
|
| DA eventually shredded its own community; exhausting most of its
| most dedicated members, and ignored offers for acquisition that
| made much more fiscal and practical sense then the pittance it
| eventually went for to that trashfire place called Wix, who in
| all likelihood will eventually sell off bits for scrap.
|
| DA was a true gem for a decade, and then fell in spite of that
| due to categorical poor management and vision (or the execution
| thereof).
| 20after4 wrote:
| The engineering team was really great. Perhaps that helped the
| site persevere for as long as it did. I credit $randomduck for
| a lot of the site's technical success. He is a top-notch
| engineer and a great tech manager.
| zeruch wrote:
| The tech side, while having (IMHO) some quirks, did really
| well under the poor leadership. Chris Bolt was walking glue
| and baling wire, and I was always impressed at what he could
| keep going under a shoestring budget. Ryan Ford was a great
| UX guy.
|
| So yeah, I have no disagreements with you there, but imagine
| what they could have done with a real product roadmap that
| didn't change on a whim?
| neom wrote:
| Enough time has passed, I guess I can speak my mind a bit. I'm
| sorry, but in my opinion, The downfall of DeviantART was when
| Angelo fucked with Scott and Eric. Scott and Eric should have run
| it with Chris and Heidi. Kicking a co-founder out
| unceremoniously, and especially the co-founder who was
| responsible for the customers, that was really ill guided. I have
| nothing against Angelo personally, I'd still consider him a
| friend, but yeah, I truly believe dA would have been amazing
| today if that hadn't happened, everything got really fucked up
| after that imo.
|
| Building DigitalOcean was fun, but building dA was 1000 times
| more fun, best times of my life for sure, very very grateful.
|
| (I worked on gallery, help, irc, dAmn and a bunch of other stuff,
| 2001-2008 my emoji still exists :neom:)
| dawnerd wrote:
| I remember that. I was part of the group vocal about how messed
| up it was. I was at the first summit and it was a blast, took
| home a couple of those posters. So sad to see what's happened
| to it.
| xandrius wrote:
| I tried looking up :neom: but couldn't find any hit on images,
| got a link to share, I'm curious now :D
| neom wrote:
| People think it's the f'ing monkey emoji tho:
| https://e.deviantart.net/emoticons/n/neom.gif :| :| :| :| :|
| :| :| :| :| :|
| ezekg wrote:
| What was so interesting to work on at dA? Multiple people in
| this thread have mentioned how fun it was. I'm wondering what
| was so fun about it. Seems like a pretty simple application
| from the outside, but maybe there were some fun technical
| challenges?
| neom wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13719127 :D
| Daub wrote:
| Art teacher speaking. The influence of DeviantArt (and now
| ArtStation) on young a tists is staggering, and not always good.
|
| When I was a student, I got my eye candy from the school library,
| which provided context and history to the art. On these site,
| most images are presented without much context: what was this
| artist influenced by? How did they develop? Etc.
| lmm wrote:
| You can see who they follow and what they've written right
| there on the site, and you can move freely between works via
| tags and collections. If anything I'd say it's much easier to
| get more context on DA than in a physical gallery.
| pram wrote:
| DA has been "declining, dying, or already dead" for the past
| decade.
|
| Not saying it doesn't suck but ALL websites have an AI spam
| problem. Twitter, Pixiv, ArtStation etc are no exception.
| Grom_PE wrote:
| Ah, I remember deviantART, besides a gallery, was my JavaScript
| (userJS) playground. I found ways to automate giving llamas (for
| free points and for receiving 10000 llamas in return), discovered
| API paths to read hidden/deleted comments and journals (fixed
| now).
|
| Since the aptly named "Eclipse" redesign it became terrible to
| use, so I stopped.
|
| The lean into AI will just let it rot for a few more years than
| otherwise.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| Deviantart was full of crooks 20 years ago. I was looking for a
| good logo artist. They all had these beautiful, well made logo
| portfolios that immediately made you salivate. One day I sent a
| few letters to some of these very good logo artists.
|
| Sent over what I wanted, some initial payment... and then around
| 1 week later, they showed some hideous, horrible, amateurish
| logos that had nothing in common with those that were promoted on
| their page. Of course my money was taken, some even told me I
| can't do anything with them. And that was true.
|
| Well, it took them a few decades to implode...
| amne wrote:
| I struggle to understand how you can mark work as "not for AI
| training"? Might as well mark it as "do not get inspired by
| this".
|
| If I'm a painter and I look at a picture of a drawing I'm going
| to catch some of the style, some of the color palette, some of
| everything. My next painting will inevitably have some influences
| from that drawing .. and the other thousands I've seen. Why is it
| because it's now done in binary is it any different?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I suspect we'll be seeing a lot more of this stuff, but
| DeviantArt has been a difficult place to navigate, for some time.
|
| A number of years ago, someone posted an outstanding wireframe
| that I wanted to license. I was willing to pay quite well. I had
| just started a company, and the wireframe would have been quite
| useful in branding. I probably would have contracted the artist
| to do the rendering, as well.
|
| I found it pretty much impossible to initiate contact with the
| artist. I think I got through, but I have no idea if I was
| successful, as they never got back to me.
| nbzso wrote:
| A little off-topic. As an artist, I have a big problem. Look at
| 17-18 centuries art. Nudity is not a cardinal sin. Today, in the
| era of OnlyFans and porn normalization, posting nude art is
| censured publicly. I cannot post anatomy tutorials on YouTube
| because some puritan soul will see things that fire the eternal
| rage. How is this democracy? How is this an advanced society? We
| have a serious issue with society values alignment.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| You are free to purchase a domain from a registrar, setup a
| server or purchase hosting and bandwidth, and display any legal
| content, including nudity, on the internet for all to see.
|
| >How is this democracy?
|
| If you are in a democratic country, you can vote for
| representatives, or run for office yourself. Has nothing to do
| with you being able to host something on someone else's
| computer.
|
| >How is this an advanced society?
|
| Because you can upload functionally limitless digital content
| to someone else's computer and someone else halfway around the
| world can almost instantly view it on a handheld device.
| Obviously restricted to the rules of the entity paying to host
| said content.
| nbzso wrote:
| So you solved the issue? Right?
| klaussilveira wrote:
| For the nostalgic readers of this thread, here's the website in
| 2000:
|
| https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/deviantar...
|
| And 2012, which I consider peak DeviantArt:
|
| https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/gallery/deviantart-in-2012
| mo1ok wrote:
| Wow, thank you for sharing this. I miss the old 00's era of
| maximalist web design.
| trustno2 wrote:
| the 2012 DA is so comfy.
|
| oh well, it's not 2012 anymore, let the past die.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| There's a brick and mortar retail problem in these dinosaur sites
| no one wants to address.
|
| In DeviantArt's glory days, 50% of the content was derivative fan
| art. Machines are pretty damn good at making things that already
| exist.
|
| That's not a direct contributor to the demise of an image sharing
| site, no matter how much DeviantArt dresses itself up as a Web
| 2.0 era hub. "It's like a virtual silk road specifically for
| artists all over the world!", wonder how long that can stand in
| the age of monolithic social media platforms. Sites which are
| more than capable of serving what DeviantArt specializes in.
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