Technology

3D artist here. I am active on numerous art websites, including DeviantArt and Cara.

I joined Cara quite a bit later than everyone else so I can't give too much commentary on it yet, but I will say that it is very much not dead. It certainly has an active and growing community, but it is still a niche site so don't go in there expecting it to be the next Twitter in terms of userbase size.

DeviantArt, on the other hand, is quite a bit more unfortunate. It actually has a rather sizeable community still but the heartbreaking part is watching the owners systematically sabotage it. Nearly everything they've done in the past several years has been catered towards driving AI use/growth while letting every other part of the site fester and rot. I don't share my DA profile with clients or family members because if they click off my profile there is an extremely high chance they will be hit by a wall of untagged fetish porn and AI slop that will never be tagged despite the ToS requiring such.

Just a few months ago DA removed their official app from mobile app stores for some reason and it became very clear that that was how many users engaged with the platform. Myself and many other artists on DA noticed a very sudden and very large downturn in user engagement and views. They also made some back-end algorithm changes that made this even worse but they have never confirmed that and I doubt they ever will. Membership subs basically exist just to give you extra AI prompt credits and cloud storage space and maybe better selling rates assuming you actually sell anything. The other features, like boosts, have been broken for months now.

Platforms come and go over the years but DA should go down in history as the one that turned to their core userbase, the very people that built them and funded them for so many years - and punched them right in the goddamn face.