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It looks like the site lost a large part of its community and visitors with the redesign. It makes me curious about how this process proceeded from the viewpoin

It looks like the site lost a large part of its community and visitors with the redesign. It makes me curious about how this process proceeded from the viewpoint of the site's owners. Any redesign will upset people who invest a lot of time in a website, but there must come a point where metrics show that the new website caused a drop in visits and uploads with no sign of improving. What I wonder is if despite the general impression that the site has failed it is still meeting the goals set by its owners, and what does goals might be. As a casual visitor, the site's redesign thoroughly broke searching and browsing art for me, and it soon started to get a graveyard kind of feel.

iszomer 5y ago
Yes, the UX deteriorated over the years. DA was my main source for desktop wallpapers and Winamp skins until newer repositories sprang along, such as wallbase/wallhaven and most recently webamp as highlighted by a recent HN post.
20after4 5y ago
> What I wonder is if despite the general impression that the site has failed it is still meeting the goals set by its owners, and what does goals might be. I can't imagine that it's meeting any goals at this point. It appears to be mostly on life support. The site sold for an incredibly small sum of money. I believe it was less than $1 million. Considering what it once was, the sale price was astonishingly low. I think the founders chose the only apparent option that would keep the site alive and save at least a few of the core staff from losing their jobs. I will give them credit, the management team really did care about the site and the users when I worked there, which was from early 2009 to early 2013. It was the best job I ever had and I loved every minute of the nearly 5 years I spend there. I learned more from that job than any other time in my career and it was really formative for me as an engineer. They had an amazing engineering culture which I haven't found elsewhere. At least sometime in the past they had a really strong drive to create the best place for artists and an incredible team working on making that happen, despite some missteps and controversial decisions. I think what they achieved is remarkable, especially given the small amount of outside investment they took. It was once among the very top sites on the internet, running on a tiny budget with a small team executing really well. I credit much of the engineering culture to $randomduck and $mccann but there were a lot of brilliant engineers and inspired people working there. I'm happy the site survives in some form but it's sad to see how far it's fallen.

iszomer 5y ago

Yes, the UX deteriorated over the years. DA was my main source for desktop wallpapers and Winamp skins until newer repositories sprang along, such as wallbase/wallhaven and most recently webamp as highlighted by a recent HN post.

20after4 5y ago

> What I wonder is if despite the general impression that the site has failed it is still meeting the goals set by its owners, and what does goals might be. I can't imagine that it's meeting any goals at this point. It appears to be mostly on life support. The site sold for an incredibly small sum of money. I believe it was less than $1 million. Considering what it once was, the sale price was astonishingly low. I think the founders chose the only apparent option that would keep the site alive and save at least a few of the core staff from losing their jobs. I will give them credit, the management team really did care about the site and the users when I worked there, which was from early 2009 to early 2013. It was the best job I ever had and I loved every minute of the nearly 5 years I spend there. I learned more from that job than any other time in my career and it was really formative for me as an engineer. They had an amazing engineering culture which I haven't found elsewhere. At least sometime in the past they had a really strong drive to create the best place for artists and an incredible team working on making that happen, despite some missteps and controversial decisions. I think what they achieved is remarkable, especially given the small amount of outside investment they took. It was once among the very top sites on the internet, running on a tiny budget with a small team executing really well. I credit much of the engineering culture to $randomduck and $mccann but there were a lot of brilliant engineers and inspired people working there. I'm happy the site survives in some form but it's sad to see how far it's fallen.