Did you spend time on DeviantArt back before the catastrophic redesign? Greetings, comrade!

…rough clunky personal websites. Broskoski, of are.na, who was involved in net art communities in the 1990s, remembered making a site called “Welcometohell.com,” which listed links to other websites—a common practice at the time. “You were sort of making or creating who you were by pointing at the other things that you liked,” he explained. Visiting early personal sites fe…

This is one of the biggest motivations for me for how I approach the internet. “Blogging is pointing at things and falling in love.”

…arkoff have not met in person.) When “Deliciously Deviant Deviant Art!” went live in August 2000, it focused on wallpapers and webskins , though it eventually branched …

Huh! I spent long enough on that website I ought to have known this.

… a lot of the stuff as we went.” In doing so, DeviantArt created templates for later social sites, rolling out the ability to create avatars and write on each other’s profiles, the latter of which would eventually be adopted by Myspace and Facebook. In addition, “[DeviantArt] had the ability to follow people long before that ever became an idea,” Jarkoff explained. Maja Wronska, a Polish artist w…

[citation needed], my friend. Those features felt pretty standard, at least by the time I was aware.