But apparently social media has been overtaken by these crappy algorithms as well. For quite some time, Facebook stopped notifying me of new posts, pics, vids, etc. from pages and groups I actually follow, but lately, they now keep bombarding me with posts, pics, vids, etc. from pages and groups I don't even follow because they think I “may be interested” in them. Even though I left Twitter (or X, or whatever) even before Musk fucked it up, political trends is what they kept filling my feed with before I left, and I never even followed any politicians, or kept up with political discussions.

The worse thing about all of this is it's us little guys who suffer the most, because these algorithms are diverting traffic and exposure away from us; this is one of the main reasons why I've been struggling more and more to maintain and sustain an audience on YouTube over the past decade, because their algorithms haven't even been notifying many of my subscribers of new content I've been uploading - some have even told me directly they weren't even aware I was still uploading content because they never saw any of it in their subscription feeds or notifications. That, and I'm also aware YouTube prunes our subscribers every once in a while if their system detects accounts that don't appear to be watching out content anymore.

Yeah. Well, best to just ignore them. An ad only bothers you if you let it *shrug*

If anything, I don't think they'll be around for long.

Social media stopped being “social” years ago. Now it's just a tool for activists and propagandists to push their narratives with an army of bots. The recent revelations behind the scenes at Twitter should make anyone second guess the effectiveness of these platforms.

The “corporate internet” model has proven to be a MASSIVE mistake, and needs to just die already. I'll never understand why people suddenly decided, en masse, “Hey, you know those big corporations that manipulate us and screw us over on a daily basis? What if we gave them FULL CONTROL OF OUR PUBLIC DISCOURSE?”

Yeah, just using it until it Geocities itself for the next thing.

I felt very much reminded of this when I checked my old Deviantart-account yesterday, after not having bothered to for some time. I certainly didn't expect much, there are reasons why I stopped bothering with it, but I was again frankly astonished how much worse a hugely popular site like that can get in a relatively short time. To be clear: I've never considered Deviantart to be particularly user- or creator-friendly in the first place, but at least it used to make at least some sense to post there in terms of expanding your audience and connections to other artists and to have a place other than the Duck where you can also showcase any non-comic stuff you do. But now?
It's slow, it's unwieldy, it has a confusing interface, you can't find anything you're looking for - not even things you 100% know to exist - and it has all become a huge sell-out where more and more artists require you to pay or even subscribe for monthly payments before you can even look at their previews to find out whether it's anything you actually wanted to see. It's become way too AI-friendly for my liking, making it increasingly difficult to find actual art done by human beings in between all that generated shit, and making me increasingly nervous if my own stuff is really as safe from being nicked by these things as they keep telling everyone.
As they've always done, they keep telling their users a lot of things without listening to them much. I'm just glad I've never upgraded my account to premium, else I'd have a large waste of money to be angry at on top.
Not that any of this is new; there has been a long trend towards it for many years.
Honestly, the only reason I've still got any kind of account on DA at all is in order to keep in touch with a select few people I like (many of whom I originally got to know here on Drunkduck btw., only some of them left us at some point).
From what I see on my watchlist, they seem to be visiting DA less, too, which means it probably won't be very long now until I get off of that platform and good riddance.

What about those of you who used to have or still have a Deviantart account? Did you have similar experiences or is it just me, because I visited while in a particularly cranky mood? And do you know any good replacement?

Because here's the other thing with platforms like Youtube and Deviantart that I think contributes to their downward spirals in user-friendliness and how they treat honest hobbyist creators: there seems to be no real competition, so they can basically do what they want.
I know, some of you will now mention TikTok and Tumblr and such, but they're not what I mean by real competition, because their focuses are just different enough for them not to be an actual threat of enticing users away. I mean platforms that do exactly the same, target the same audiences and do it well enough to be a serious alternative. Of course, that kind of thing would be stifled, bought up and shut down as soon as it's online, but one can still dream, right?

PaulEberhardt wrote:
What about those of you who used to have or still have a Deviantart account? Did you have similar experiences or is it just me, because I visited while in a particularly cranky mood? And do you know any good replacement?

Ever tried Newgrounds? I would consider that one a legitimate competitor to sites like DA and besides art it offers other content such as animations, games and music, all free, all hobbyist made. Their art guidlines stated last time I checked that they don't allow AI-generated content unless there are special reasons that they can have exception with. Another site I'm on is Weasyl, altough its very furry centric and perhaps not what you're looking for.

Newgrounds is a discovery for me. Apart from that, I like to hang out at Artstation. Not to socialize, though. Before I got myself a sustainable smartphone some time ago, I left (afaik) all the networks that belong to the Zuckerberg empire. Only Mastodon remains, but there's not much going on there.
The Duck is the fairest place to be: small but nice! And there is also a life outside the internet.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
But apparently social media has been overtaken by these crappy algorithms as well.

I gave up Facebook a couple of years ago now. I'm so glad about that!
My account still had social interaction but it was just SOOOooo mediated by the structure there that it became weak and attenuated.

Since the ad people really took over power at Youtube it's become worse and worse. People still work to produce quality stuff to upload there (now more than ever), but the system that delivers it is just so icky. Going there is like taking a bath in excrement.

Someone once said “hell is other people”. Social media is other people (or at least their programming) so hell is social media.

Turn the stupid all the way up, I didn't want to work on stuff today anyway.

Mentioning Newgrounds actually made me explore the site a bit - as I haven't been all active there in recent times. And I stumbled across this series of podcasts in the audio section - where the music is - that got me hooked to the site again. So much so that I might start engaging with that site more regularly and start becoming detached from Youtube as should have happened a while back.

I stil use DeviantArt to get in touch with few people. Now with brand new account because previous one was banned for “unacceptable behaviour” - telling jokes online and having fun with friends.

This was also the reason why I gave up on Facebook few years ago. I got tired of getting banned every few weeks because someone had different opinion about some topics or they didn't like my edgy jokes. I didn't care for this website for years, but recently I was listening to some woman talking about it and she said that many people no longer talk there for the same reason. Whatever you said a year ago can become unacceptable because Big Corporation sais so.

As for youtube, I'm tired of having to fight a war with ads. I don't mind watching one or two to support creator I watch, but I just can't stand same ad of some trashy mobile game poping over and over. Luckily there are alternatives, like Rumble, Odysee and Bitchute. I try to watch videos there.

Ozoneocean wrote:
I gave up Facebook a couple of years ago now. I'm so glad about that!
My account still had social interaction but it was just SOOOooo mediated by the structure there that it became weak and attenuated.

Since the ad people really took over power at Youtube it's become worse and worse. People still work to produce quality stuff to upload there (now more than ever), but the system that delivers it is just so icky. Going there is like taking a bath in excrement.

Pretty much sums up what repulsed me from the whole thing. I could spend hours making a cool picture and it would go completely ignored, but someone spends two seconds reposting someone else's “MFW SHE GOT DAT BOOTY” meme or some copy-pasted political hot take and they get that sweet engagement money that buys them a few seconds of dopamine and literally nothing else. I know that sounds like I think I'm entitled to other peoples' opinions and believe me, I understand full well that I'm not, but my point is that social media only rewards certain types of content, most of it copy-pasted nonsense, and I see no reward in having to warp my own interactions into plastic nonsense just to feed some algorithm.

Juxtapose that hot mess with The Duck. We all have our different opinions, but we're here first and foremost to read and make cool webcomics. If I make a cool comic, or give webcomic advice to someone and they tell me it's useful, it feels like I'm actually contributing, instead of just throwing more junk into a sea of garbage. Same goes for all the other small sites. If I go to My Nintendo News, it means I'm there to read about Nintendo games and hardware, and maybe drop my two cents about them. Kerry Callen's blog? I want to see his silly but loving parodies of golden age comics. Dinosaur Dracula to revisit my childhood, and the list goes on. But social media? I'm basically swimming through a sea of crap trying to find a few undigested kernels of corn. Yeah, no thanks.

Hapoppo wrote:
Pretty much sums up what repulsed me from the whole thing. I could spend hours making a cool picture and it would go completely ignored, but someone spends two seconds reposting someone else's “MFW SHE GOT DAT BOOTY” meme or some copy-pasted political hot take and they get that sweet engagement money that buys them a few seconds of dopamine and literally nothing else. I know that sounds like I think I'm entitled to other peoples' opinions and believe me, I understand full well that I'm not, but my point is that social media only rewards certain types of content, most of it copy-pasted nonsense, and I see no reward in having to warp my own interactions into plastic nonsense just to feed some algorithm.

Juxtapose that hot mess with The Duck. We all have our different opinions, but we're here first and foremost to read and make cool webcomics. If I make a cool comic, or give webcomic advice to someone and they tell me it's useful, it feels like I'm actually contributing, instead of just throwing more junk into a sea of garbage. Same goes for all the other small sites. If I go to My Nintendo News, it means I'm there to read about Nintendo games and hardware, and maybe drop my two cents about them. Kerry Callen's blog? I want to see his silly but loving parodies of golden age comics. Dinosaur Dracula to revisit my childhood, and the list goes on. But social media? I'm basically swimming through a sea of crap trying to find a few undigested kernels of corn. Yeah, no thanks.

All of that. Sums it up perfectly.

And now with the crappy AI “art” generators even the few bits of art that DO get shared on social media aren't even real anyway… The tech-bros have even taken creativity out of social media now.
You just have some poor deluded munchkin who's inordinately proud of a generic early 2010s Deviant art style pic that a shitty AI spat out after they typed in 5 words.

Anybody aver check out NeoCities?
Looks cool

lothar wrote:
Anybody aver check out NeoCities?
Looks cool

I like its tagline: “Make the Web Fun Again”

Bring back html coded websites with the original MSPaint colour palette!!

lothar wrote:
Anybody aver check out NeoCities?
Looks cool

Looks promising to me. Very nostalgic in its look and feel.

Ah, now this is something that I miss about the earlier days of the internet: free fan sites. I ran and operated such a fan site myself back in the day . . . alas, that site is no more, because the service I used to host the site went from being FreeWebs to just Webs, and you had to start paying for their services. Fumsharg.

I used to host my own website from about 2002 until just a few years ago. I actually knew the guy who had the servers in a basement somewhere. I think he bought them cheap after the dot com bubble. I would pay a small fee to be hosted there. After I moved to Japan I forgot to pay but the store stayed up for years anyway. Then one day it was gone. I kinda of miss using dreamweaver and notepad and uploading stuff via ftp. It sucks that the domain names that I had back then now costs $6000.

PaulEberhardt wrote:
I felt very much reminded of this when I checked my old Deviantart-account yesterday, after not having bothered to for some time. I certainly didn't expect much, there are reasons why I stopped bothering with it, but I was again frankly astonished how much worse a hugely popular site like that can get in a relatively short time. To be clear: I've never considered Deviantart to be particularly user- or creator-friendly in the first place, but at least it used to make at least some sense to post there in terms of expanding your audience and connections to other artists and to have a place other than the Duck where you can also showcase any non-comic stuff you do. But now?
It's slow, it's unwieldy, it has a confusing interface, you can't find anything you're looking for - not even things you 100% know to exist - and it has all become a huge sell-out where more and more artists require you to pay or even subscribe for monthly payments before you can even look at their previews to find out whether it's anything you actually wanted to see. It's become way too AI-friendly for my liking, making it increasingly difficult to find actual art done by human beings in between all that generated shit, and making me increasingly nervous if my own stuff is really as safe from being nicked by these things as they keep telling everyone.
As they've always done, they keep telling their users a lot of things without listening to them much. I'm just glad I've never upgraded my account to premium, else I'd have a large waste of money to be angry at on top.
Not that any of this is new; there has been a long trend towards it for many years.
Honestly, the only reason I've still got any kind of account on DA at all is in order to keep in touch with a select few people I like (many of whom I originally got to know here on Drunkduck btw., only some of them left us at some point).
From what I see on my watchlist, they seem to be visiting DA less, too, which means it probably won't be very long now until I get off of that platform and good riddance.

What about those of you who used to have or still have a Deviantart account? Did you have similar experiences or is it just me, because I visited while in a particularly cranky mood? And do you know any good replacement?

Because here's the other thing with platforms like Youtube and Deviantart that I think contributes to their downward spirals in user-friendliness and how they treat honest hobbyist creators: there seems to be no real competition, so they can basically do what they want.
I know, some of you will now mention TikTok and Tumblr and such, but they're not what I mean by real competition, because their focuses are just different enough for them not to be an actual threat of enticing users away. I mean platforms that do exactly the same, target the same audiences and do it well enough to be a serious alternative. Of course, that kind of thing would be stifled, bought up and shut down as soon as it's online, but one can still dream, right?

I used Deviantart back in 2008 until 2012 or so. I was 12 when I first started, and it was heaven! I had made so many friends, and my art was doing real good! I even met random people in real life who knew me from my art! I always miss those days greatly. But, around the time I left, it was already doing pretty badly. You could feel the site was dying, and it only got worse and worse from that point on. And it got SO, SO bad.

Perhaps, the biggest thing they have taken away from us is community.

The internet today contains EVERYBODY. But I don't want to talk to, or share my art with a random crowd who won't get it.

Back in the day, like-minded people could find each other much more easily and it was so joyful to share things with each other. And when people created things, it was not for profit.

Today it's just millions of people fighting for the views and the money. It's a power struggle. And the audience is mostly just addicted consumers who see hundreds of images everyday.

There is so much out there but no mechanism to find the things that you wanna see.

edniz wrote:
Back in the day, like-minded people could find each other much more easily and it was so joyful to share things with each other.

I miss that more than anything, and honestly, it was this very reason why I had more true friends online than I did IRL, because the internet made it far easier to meet and commune with people who shared your same interests and passions, and engage in meaningful discourse with them on forums and message boards, which are virtual ghost towns nowadays . . . and believe me, growing up as an artist in a state where sports reign supreme, it was very difficult making friends growing up.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
But apparently social media has been overtaken by these crappy algorithms as well. For quite some time, Facebook stopped notifying me of new posts, pics, vids, etc. from pages and groups I actually follow, but lately, they now keep bombarding me with posts, pics, vids, etc. from pages and groups I don't even follow because they think I “may be interested” in them. Even though I left Twitter (or X, or whatever) even before Musk fucked it up, political trends is what they kept filling my feed with before I left, and I never even followed any politicians, or kept up with political discussions.

The worse thing about all of this is it's us little guys who suffer the most, because these algorithms are diverting traffic and exposure away from us; this is one of the main reasons why I've been struggling more and more to maintain and sustain an audience on YouTube over the past decade, because their algorithms haven't even been notifying many of my subscribers of new content I've been uploading - some have even told me directly they weren't even aware I was still uploading content because they never saw any of it in their subscription feeds or notifications. That, and I'm also aware YouTube prunes our subscribers every once in a while if their system detects accounts that don't appear to be watching out content anymore.

I'm pretty much in the same situation…and I have a pretty good “Google Presence”.

I've stopped trying to promote my Bloodwing Angel comic through social media platforms. I was told point blank by someone who had me on her Youtube show a while ago that “You're just a nice old comic book/animator who is making a good comic, but you don't create controversy. So, who cares what you're doing? The algorithms want shows that promote violent reactions.”

That's the last time I was invited to appear on her and many other shows. It also explains why my “evergreen” Youtube videos (I've got 95 on my channel) have dropped in numbers of views.

JohnCelestri wrote:
I've stopped trying to promote my Bloodwing Angel comic through social media platforms. I was told point blank by someone who had me on her Youtube show a while ago that “You're just a nice old comic book/animator who is making a good comic, but you don't create controversy. So, who cares what you're doing? The algorithms want shows that promote violent reactions.”

Ha! You have to indicate that your comic is pro or anti something in the popculture “wars” XD
It's the only way these days.

Maybe we need to make a collective on DD designed around assigning pro and anti stances to people and helping them incorporate them into their comics in an authentic way and then getting their work noticed on social media by the right people so they get all the views XD

Getting back to the original topic of algorithms, here is how messed up Facebook's has gotten recently. . . .

I hate Taylor Swift. I despise Taylor Swift. I don't follow her, I don't listen to her repetitive music, I don't watch her videos, I don't search for her, I don't even watch or follow any pages about her on Facebook . . . and yet, Facebook has absolutely infested my feed with her; they are seriously shoving her down my throat all the time now . . . and this was even before she undeservedly became TIME MAGAZINE'S Person of the Year.

And now they're doing the same with Elon Musk . . . and I cannot think of two more self-absorbed, conceited, entitled narcissists I could live without having to see, hear, or read about who I don't need infesting my Facebook feed.

If you mention a name only to say how much you despise them, the algorithm still picks up on the mention of the name. Any mention of the name. That's why people have taken to camouflaging such things.

I'm so far down the rabbit hole of pseudoscience and fraudulent archeology that nothing main stream pops up on my feed.

And it's great that scimandan made 500k subscribers. Take that flerfs!

The thing of it is, I never even mentioned or posted about her, their algorithms just started shoving her down my throat at random, and now I can't get away from her. Same with Elon Musk - never posted about the douchebag, and yet, he's infested my feed now too.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
The thing of it is, I never even mentioned or posted about her, their algorithms just started shoving her down my throat at random, and now I can't get away from her. Same with Elon Musk - never posted about the douchebag, and yet, he's infested my feed now too.

Psst– you just mentioned them. Any mention in any context. Any click in any context will get the algorithm going. That's how it works. So I never mention Elongated Muskrat or Tailor Slow.
You can actually get fed her content by discussing Jonathan Swift and Gulliver or Tom Swift and his rocketship.

bravo1102 wrote:

I'm so far down the rabbit hole of pseudoscience and fraudulent archeology that nothing main stream pops up on my feed.

Sounds good, weed out all the bull.

J_Scarbrough wrote:

algorithms just started shoving her down my throat at random

It is possible your hometown state keeps its population updated on it residents.

J_Scarbrough wrote:
I hate Taylor S…

Yeah I've never listened to her or seen her vids same with Kanye W and all the rest of the current crop of boobs.
I'm always bemused when people say they're musical geniuses 🤣
I really couldn't give a flying Fu.. fugglemuffin.

I prefer music all my old tunes.