The Great Deviant Slaughter of '09
Date: 08/07/2009
Context
This was originally posted on DeviantArt following an evening going through my list of people I follow on that particular site.
EDIT 26/10/26: the irony is not lost on me that I'm waxing lyrical here on what kind of presence we want to leave online while attempting to clean up these blog posts for the website revamp. I've also not touched DeviantArt in most of a decade, and the last time I checked it was infested with AI-generated art. Sad times.
The Purge
I've just spent the best part of two hours cleaning out my Deviant watch list, and its possibly one of the most bizarre mental experiences one can inflict on oneself.
This monumental task was brought about by my inbox, which gets flooded daily, a bit like Wales. And like Wales, I generally try and steer as clearly away from going there for as long as I can. Unlike Wales however, which is generally unavoidable due to extended family living there, I have no reason to come back to DA other than to catch up with several charming people who also happen to use this web service. I'm here more for the communication than the art, and I still refuse to get a Facebook account* just in case the machines rise up, since it's damn near guaranteed that they'd use the global social networking site to track down and maim every human listed there to death (and follow up by using Twitter to track down the celebrities), but I'm seriously digressing now.
*I obviously eventually caved in and signed up to Facebook, press-ganged into using it by university colleagues who insisted it would just be easier to use FB than use emails to contact each other.
The point is that I decided enough was enough, and have since excised about 30 people from my watch list. Have no fear, for I still have an astonishingly sizeable list of people I will continue to follow, and generally if I'm posting on your journals or occasional artworks then I'm almost certainly watching you. Or just posting to make it look like I am, because I'm a dick.
Now, I say that it's a bizarre mental experience for the following reason - DeviantArt is some sort of time sink. A temporal archive. Seriously. At least five of the accounts I axed from the list were long defunct, last updated in 2007 or even 2005, and that's depressing to me because these accounts were like a virtual footprint that the user had left. They had been and gone, but left something for you to remember them by (and we're talking about nice stuff here, not shit in a flaming bag on your doorstep). They had "moved on", so to say.
Then there's the accounts where people have "left" DA because of DA's politics, real-life, or for no reason whatsoever, and that's just as bad because half of the time I hadn't even realised that they were no longer "present" on this web service. The most disturbing ones are the users who just stopped updating, and left no word of their next web-based ventures. That lets the imagination run wild, I tell you.
Categorising the Purge
Anyway, to encapsulate my mini nostalgic adventure, here's an epic list of all the different types of accounts that were judiciously cut from my watch list:
- People who have moved on: as I said, life doesn't stop at DeviantArt. This category can be broken down further:-
i) Abandoned accounts - the utterly creepy pages that were last updated years ago. Like a ghost town that looks like it was evacuated suddenly rather than gradually, you can only hope the users are alright today, and that they're happy.
ii) Seriously underused accounts - accounts where you watched expecting more artwork, only for the artist to disappear either mysteriously or suddenly. Account might have been set up and then forgotten about. Not as creepy as the abandoned accounts as they generally don't have a lot in them to begin with, except squandered potential.
iii) Greener pastures - deviants who have posted that they'll be moving their art somewhere else, or that they're moving on with life, or that DA just isn't for them, etc. The kind of account that needs a soothing 90's pop song in order to dramatically herald in the fact that the user is moving on with life.
- Plz/icon accounts: I don't know why I fav this sort of thing, occasionally a really funny one turns up and some sort of reflex action causes you to +watch it, despite the fact that you'll never ever get anything out of it.
- Club accounts: these things rarely work. People end up faving the art hosted on the account rather than bothering to fav the original pieces, and sometimes the accounts can spend years at a time being dormant. I think the only clubs I've kept are for MGS and Lupin fanart.
- Talented artists: here's a little insight into what I do with DA - I rarely fav work that's done to the standard that's in, say, comic books or "the industry" and the like. There's never anything to say, other than licking the artist's shoes. I prefer watching people who have work that's a little rough around the edges, but made with complete enthusiasm. Take that as an insult or compliment if you wish, people who I still watch.
- Professional artists: people in the industry occasionally use DA. About once. And then they never update. And you never have anything to say about their work anyway, since it's so damn brilliant. And then if they do update it's usually plugging their new books. And then I stop raping the rules of how to write by constantly using "and" to start a sentence. Here's an idea I stand by - professional artists don't use DA. They're far too busy to use the correspondence features, and any self-respecting artist gets their own webspace and online portfolio. Just saying.
- People you watch just to get annoyed at: there was only one of these, and they shall remain nameless. Let's just say that, aside from a completely smug "look at me" attitude and an inability to do anything that wasn't clearly ripping off another artist (an artist who, I might add, I also have problems with, but who I cannot deny has immense amounts of talent I could only dream of possessing) had nothing to interest me. I thought it best for my health to remove this deviant from the list, since I get angry enough daily as it is. Also, a subsection:
i) People using DA as a soapbox - a pet peeve, and I realise the hypocrisy as I quite frequently type my lengthy opinions here myself. There was one case of a deviant whose art I had liked, but over the last year they had decided to instead use their account to advertise the teachings of the Bible, and there's nothing I find more offensive than religion, or more specifically the thrusting-in-my-face-large-chunks-of-religious-teachings-thereof. Let's just leave it at that, shall we?
- People who update far too much, whose stuff you just don't get: don't get me wrong, people should update as frequently as they like, express their creativity, utilise their imagination frequently and all that. Sometimes it really is a case where you just have to go "it's me, not you" and mean it. At least two deviants were cut since I'd watched them for one thing and found that their usual output bored/confused me, and their output frequency was often what filled my inbox and crushed my morale of using DA.
- People you watch just because you liked that one picture they did: we're looking at about 15 accounts I removed from the watch list. I advise checking through a person's gallery thoroughly before watching them. Perhaps if I'd only known this back in 2005 when I first joined DA.
The Digital Footprint
And there you go, that's what I learned from delving into the depths of my watch list. Everyone else is now organised into groups based on levels of friendliness, awesomeness, or familiarity within the actual physical world. It should keep me interested in using DA for a little while longer, but maybe one day I too will move on to pastures greener on this global interweb thingamajig*. If you've read this, there's something I want you to take away with you to think about.
*If you didn't already guess, I then went on to build this website. I still post to DA very occasionally though!
Just think, for a moment...what kind of presence do you have online? What kind of presence do you want to leave online? What do your virtual footprints look like? After all, I think the Doctor said it best: "a footprint doesn't look like a boot".
Perhaps it's time for you to clean out your watch list?