DA appears to have done away with its categories, and focuses instead of tag-based organisation of submissions.

Now, its categories were an absolute dumpster-fire with how broad they were in some places but specific in others but oh my god this will have broken finding millions of submissions.

I went to search for a reference and found some easy enough by virtue of choosing the right keywords, but casually browsing something like... Windows UI skins... is going to be impossible now.

It's agonising that there's no good websites for artists. DA's shitting the bed, FA's admins suck, Weasyl is stuck in the loop of no traffic.

I hate what Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr did to the internet. I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it i--

Why even bother with these massive public spaces? They either leave you open to harassment, remove control from your own content, or you get lucky and become popular and untouchable.

Yet it's impossible to escape them because the euphoria of attention is intoxicating.

Focusing on small self-made communities would be nice.

Some people seem capable of doing it more than others. Some people make no effort to break the cycle of latching onto that attention and show little empathy towards others if it doesn't satisfy that attention.

Even if DA and the rest were effectively social networks too, there was no structure forcing endless engagement and growth. They celebrated art, not commodified it.

Or maybe I'm kidding myself and it was just as bad (given the existence of points and the print system), but at least we had art, rather than angry microblogging.