Hm. It seems like I misspoke: it's been on a plateau for the last year, but earlier it grew in size quite a lot. However, I don't know how much of that is throu

Hm. It seems like I misspoke: it's been on a plateau for the last year, but earlier it grew in size quite a lot. However, I don't know how much of that is through smart business moves and how much it is through sheer inertia spreading the site. I have an admittedly biased point of view. I'm developing a site that's somewhat of a competitor; I interned for Aviary, which is another competitor (though it's much more professional). DeviantART is a huge site, but that's largely because when you think of art online, there's no other site to think about. People have so completely abandoned focusing on artists that there's nothing really dedicated for people that paint, say. As a result, if you want to put your stuff online, there's no real other choice. It's a terrible site, but it's the only site. My anger at DeviantART stems at the fact that it calls itself an art site, when it's not. It's a social site. The focus is on smiley faces and talking and drama rather than on people who want to make good stuff. Angelo Sotira embodies that: he isn't an artist at all, and yet he runs the site. He can't write, he can't draw, he can't take photos. His online journal looks like the journal of a bright-but-immature 20-something kid. He's thoroughly unprofessional, bans users who dislike the stuff he does, hides moderator corruption, and generally is just an awful CEO. I used DeviantART when I was younger, thinking it would make me better. I was lucky because at a really, really young age I got to talk to a professional editor and she really got me on the right track, writing-wise. Five years later, there are people at my college, sitting in the classroom I'm in now, who are less progressed as writers than I was at 14, and that's because their writing circle is DeviantART, and that leads to no growth. But that's a totally different argument. As you pointed out: I was wrong regarding the site's earlier growth. I still don't think that was the result of excellent business decisions, I just think the site itself is in a good niche. And it bugs me that the article cites Angelo as the founder, when he wasn't, and it bugs me that they praise the site he made, when it's so thoroughly reprehensible.