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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

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 https://qbix.com/ecosystem Also, science and wikipedia and openstreetmap are examples of open gift economies.
    - tweetle_beetle 2y ago
      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 2y ago
        That is one page on the website, the rest of it is a lot more friendly (https://qbix.com/communities https://qbix.com/communities or https://qbix.com/invest 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 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 https://community.qbix.com and technical documentation is at https://qbix.com/platform/guide https://qbix.com/platform/guide
        2024throwaway 2y ago
        [flagged]
        EGreg 2y ago
        [flagged]
  - nitwit005 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      Automattic is not publicly traded.
    - Nasrudith 2y ago
      It is called inflation. If the next quarter isn't looking better then you are doing worse.
      - EGreg 2y ago
        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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      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
wuj 2y ago
Part of Tumblr's downfall also comes from their change of stance on NSFW contents.
- raincole 2y ago
  Quite an understatement.
- duskwuff 2y ago
  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.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
vkou 2y ago
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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
  > 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 2y ago

EGreg 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 https://qbix.com/ecosystem Also, science and wikipedia and openstreetmap are examples of open gift economies.
  - tweetle_beetle 2y ago
    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 2y ago
      That is one page on the website, the rest of it is a lot more friendly (https://qbix.com/communities https://qbix.com/communities or https://qbix.com/invest 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 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 https://community.qbix.com and technical documentation is at https://qbix.com/platform/guide https://qbix.com/platform/guide
      - 2024throwaway 2y ago
        [flagged]
        EGreg 2y ago
        [flagged]
- nitwit005 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    Automattic is not publicly traded.
  - Nasrudith 2y ago
    It is called inflation. If the next quarter isn't looking better then you are doing worse.
    - EGreg 2y ago
      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 2y ago
  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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
  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 2y ago
    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

wuj 2y ago

Part of Tumblr's downfall also comes from their change of stance on NSFW contents.

raincole 2y ago
Quite an understatement.
duskwuff 2y ago
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.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

vkou 2y ago

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 2y ago

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 2y ago
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 2y ago
> 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 2y ago