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Comparing DeviantArt and Tumblr for their suitability for posting fanart
So I've been using DeviantArt a lot recently for a personal project. This combined with my Snowflake Challenge musings (where I pondered what is now the best site for posting adult art in the wake of Twitter's struggles) inspired me to write up a long comparison of how DeviantArt and Tumblr compare as sites for posting fanart. n = 4546 words.
Note: I could and probably should add Twitter, Instagram, and Pixiv to this comparison, as these are the other major places where people post fanart. However, I do not use them enough and am not familiar enough with their inner workings and how the sites have changed/developed over time for me to feel comfortable including them in this analysis. Therefore, I stick to dA and Tumblr only, which I feel confident evaluating like this as I use them both regularly (and have for over a decade(!)).
In my opinion, the biggest difference between DeviantArt and Tumblr is the permanence and stability of posts (in this case, art posts). DeviantArt follows an older, more traditional model of websites where content is organized into simple, stable pages. Tumblr is distinctive in that content is organized into individual blog feeds, where reblogging a post creates a copy on your own blog that is connected to, but otherwise independent of, the original. A user can add commentary to the original post that creates an alternative "version" of a post, and the original post can be deleted while all its copies remain up and able to be reblogged/circulated. There are some benefits to this odd/unique way of structuring data/content -- for example, it makes collaborative comedy easier. It also allows "zombie posts" to exist in circulation, where you can still view a piece of art years later even though the artist has deleted their Tumblr account (not an unalloyed good -- the existence of zombie posts damages the ability of artists to maintain control over their own art). That said, overall, I think this post structure (1) severely damages the quality of feedback artists get on Tumblr and (2) makes old art difficult to find.
- On Tumblr, comments are decentralized and not under the control of the post creator. One of the nice things about dA is that comments are collected into a single place: underneath the artwork. Therefore, anyone coming to an art post even years later can see the full set of discussion on this art piece and its full context. On Tumblr, however, it is possible for two very different versions of the same post to be in circulation and people only see one version, only one piece of the conversation related to this art, or just the art itself without any discussion. Tumblr has over time improved the ability to see all the responses to a post in a single place but it remains clunky. For example, you can see the full set of reblogs in the "Notes" view, but only atomic additions and not the thread the additions were added to, making it impossible to follow the full context of a conversation from the main post's list of notes only. "Replies" and "reblog additions +tags" remain in different tabs, meaning that you have to click at least twice in order to view all the responses a single post has gotten. Notes are not displayed by default even in a post's permalink view, making them a hidden aspect of art posts on Tumblr. There is not much an artist can do to control replies/reblog additions/reblog tags on their own art (aside from disabling replies entirely) -- the post model can't really support such functionality. Meanwhile, dA's comment section is visible by default, complete, and fully-threaded, making replies/dialogue clear at a glance, and the comment section is under the full control of the creator, who can delete comments that are off-topic, rude, annoying, etc.
Sometimes Tumblr's burying of commentary is nice -- as the YouTube comment section infamously demonstrates, sometimes seeing the full response a post has gotten isn't exactly a pleasant experience. However, when it comes to art, especially the "supportive concrit" that DeviantArt used to be especially known for, it is nice for people's responses to be collected in one place and easily viewable by anyone consuming the art, including years later. Having highly visible, non-ephemeral comments makes it more worthwhile for people to take the time to leave detailed feedback rather than silent reblogging. On Tumblr, because of the site's functionality, you unfortunately often have to choose between stuffing commentary and more detailed praise into less visible and more difficult to read/parse tags OR be forced to append your commentary on the post itself (thereby "polluting" the post with your unnecessary commentary and forcing people to either reblog that version or go back to the source post in order to remove your commentary). On Tumblr, reblog tags and other reactions to art are by design intended to be for the reblogger primarily -- organizing their blog and addressing their followers -- while the artist is relegated to something like a shadowy celebrity: you talk ABOUT the art and artist but you do not address (talk TO) the artist as a person.
In short, many aspects of Tumblr's site functionality actively discourage conversation and giving artists feedback and also damage the ability of the artist to control the response to their art and how it is shared. For all these reasons, I think it can be actively unpleasant to be an artist on Tumblr -- while at the same time, Tumblr provides one of the best platforms for both getting one's art out there and also finding great art being shared.
- How username changes are handled, or: the lack of real permalinks on Tumblr. Another contrast between dA and Tumblr is the way that username changes are handled. One thing Tumblr is infamous for is that username changes instantly break all links to posts. This doesn't have to be the case -- most websites, when a user changes their name, URLs containing the old username will automatically redirect to a location with the new username, ensuring that old links to art will not break when a user switches to a new name. These redirects have to be set up and remain in place more or less permanently in order to keep the old links from breaking. Therefore, they require a bit of work and also require the old username to remain unusable for future users (otherwise, there is ambiguity/a conflict between someone trying to access the content of OldUsername who is now NewUsername vs. someone who is trying to view the profile of the person who now has the username OldUsername). As a result, sites that provide URL redirections often provide limitations on how frequently someone can URL change to prevent a small number of users from permanently burning through a large number of non-reusable usernames. These restrictions can take various forms: literally associating name changes with a price (or paid account tier); limiting the number of times a user can change their username total or within a certain timeframe; or very slowly and carefully recycling usernames that are no longer being used.
Tumblr, however, chooses to go the exact opposite direction. It provides zero support for URL redirects; as a result, it also imposes zero costs on username changes: all users are allowed infinite, instantaneous URL changes, which break links. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to follow a link to a Tumblr post and got an unhelpful "There's nothing here" error message. Tumblr ALSO has the very odd and rather unique mechanism of recycling usernames of inactive accounts ("account dormancy"). That is, for users who have not logged into Tumblr for over a year, Tumblr will change their username to have a deactivated suffix and then recycle the original username, which someone else can later claim.
Compare this to other sites: On dA, name changes are a paid account feature and can only be done once every 6 months. AO3 allows free name changes on request but with a 7-day cooldown, while providing an alternative mechanism (pseuds) that allows people to operate under multiple usernames without physically changing the username they use to log into the site. Username changes automatically create URL redirects. Dreamwidth charges a fee for username changes, gives users the option to forward URLs or not, and very slowly recycles the usernames associated with deleted accounts.
Exacerbating Tumblr's odd functionality, Tumblr has long inculcated a culture that encourages frequent username/URL changes. Usernames are treated as an expression of one's personality, current hyperfixation, or funny jokes, all of which encourage people to change their URL when they're just not feeling their old URL anymore or when they notice a highly-coveted URL is up for grabs. In addition, Tumblr has had a long history of users doxxing and bullying other users, which has tended to also encourage username changes or account deletion to avoid harassment.
All of this is to say is that "permalinks" on Tumblr aren't actually real permalinks. If you want to manually link to a Tumblr post from an independent Tumblr post (as in, not in the reblog chain) or from an external site, those links are very vulnerable to being broken by username changes or account deletions. This makes activities like saving, bookmarking, or creating rec lists for art very difficult because the obvious way to keep a pointer to the art (its URL) can easily become entirely useless at finding the art again (assuming it even still exists). The only real way to archive art is to use Tumblr's reblog features (create a copy of the art under your control) and tagging mechanisms in order to create a searchable archive; it is difficult to make external rec lists, bookmarks, and such.
In other words, not only are Tumblr's innate search functions terrible for finding older art, its set of features ALSO hamstrings the ability of curators to archive and highlight older art through external methods. In short, Tumblr's peculiar design is terrible for finding older art.
On the other hand, Tumblr is hands down the king of post creation. Its features include: a quick and easy upload process; flexible post formats that allow people many ways of arranging up to 30(!) images in a post; powerful post-scheduling that allows people to effortlessly spread out their posts/reblogs; great display of images (solo images are not cropped, and large images are automatically resized to a reasonable size for browsing ("Do you love the colors of the sky" type posts notwithstanding), while the full size image is still able to be viewed at a couple of clicks if the user is interested. By contrast, here is where DeviantArt continues to struggle:
- DeviantArt forces all art posted to the site to have a title. This is frustrating! It's like posting fic on AO3 -- the last thing you want to have to do when you finish a piece and are itching to share it with the world is come up with a title for it... This is where alternatives -- Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram -- all are preferable: they allow the posting of art directly to the site without titling or having to fill out a form specifying various settings or properties of the art.
This is not all bad, though -- having a lot of settings does give artists fine-grained control over their art and forcing artists to title and write a description of their art helps with searching as it gives some text for a search engine to hang onto. (By contrast, Tumblr's search functions are almost entirely based around tagging.) But forcing a lot of steps to upload art really does slow down the process, and was especially bad during the initial dA Eclipse rollout in 2019 when loading times to do the most basic, essential function of the website (posting art) were so long as to make the site non-functional.
- To make this even worse, DeviantArt forces all works posted to the website to consist of a single file. dA is pretty flexible about format this file can be so it could be (e.g.) a zip file, but what this means when it comes to art is that you can't make a post containing multiple pieces of art collected together. If you want to post multiple related pieces of art on a single page, you have to manually photo-edit them into a single file. This is a pain when you have a lot of smaller pieces, sketches, rakugaki, etc. you'd like to just stuff into a post, or if you're just a very prolific artist and art dumps are just the easiest way to get your art out into the world. Pretty much every other art posting website (Tumblr, Instagram, Pixiv, even Twitter with some pretty restrictive limitations) allow you to post multiple pieces of art into a single post.
In short, DeviantArt really works more like a gallery -- a place to put the pieces you're most proud of and which can/should be enjoyed on their own. While DeviantArt does have a "Scraps" feature, all this feature does is hide your less polished pieces from searches and people browsing your main gallery. It does not actually relax the (relatively stringent) posting requirements when posting art. You still need to title every single scrap you upload, and you still can only include one file per piece. As a result, DeviantArt really does not really support posting dashed-off, lower-effort pieces or art dumps.
In short: The process of uploading art to DeviantArt is time-consuming. While this has some benefits in terms of increased cataloguing of art, it is something that overall discourages posting anything but high-effort pieces (high enough effort that you are willing to brave the upload process to share them with others).
Given how ~web 1.0 DeviantArt's interface is, it has always been a very clunky, slow-loading website that has been very difficult to use given that the pages it loads are fairly simple. The rollout of Eclipse, which was meant to modernize dA's interface, instead exacerbated these issues and made the site almost non-functional following its rollout.
However, coming back to the site several years later, I do think dA's devs have fixed up a lot of the bugs. At the same time, Tumblr in my experience continues to be slow-loading and extremely memory-intensive. I kind of feel like dA has managed to come out looking halfway decent here not because of its own virtues but because of the widespread failings of other social media sites that increasingly suffer from bloat.
In short: They're both usable but mediocre in terms of site performance.
Tumblr is decent at allowing you to create a workable gallery for your art. It has custom themes that specialize in displaying multiple posts (pieces of art) at once and gives pretty powerful tools for tweaking appearance if you're willing to deep-dive into HTML. For example, I've set up my Tumblr art blog with one of the free custom themes and have tweaked it slightly in order for it to display the information I would like it to display. I don't do any reblogs on this journal so as to keep its appearance clean and avoid duplicating any art. I also have a predetermined tagging system, which I use consistently, and provide a page of relevant tags as a way of making my art more searchable and filterable; otherwise, it would be tedious for people to quickly find the art they're interested in.
The main problem with creating a gallery view on Tumblr is that Tumblr is a "one-stop shop" kind of website, where all kinds of content tend to posted together in a mix -- memes and text posts and cute animal videos and art and ask box replies and reblogs of old posts (which is itself a separate post on your blog) and so on. This makes art difficult to separate from other conversation when browsing.
By contrast, DeviantArt separates out art into its own section (the gallery) and blog posts, replies, and other chatter into other sections (the journal and profile "wall"). Its galleries are powerful and allow users to split their work into named and labeled sub-galleries that allow people to more quickly find the art they're interested in (although this is largely dependent on the classification scheme the artist uses). You can do something similar with tags on Tumblr, but it requires a bit more manual setup.
That said, DeviantArt galleries are more rigid and "one size fits all." For example, when browsing someone else's gallery, you can't quickly click on a piece of art to enlarge it/view it at full size; rather, clicking takes you to that art's page. There is some core behavior that all users on the site share and this can't be changed or customized.
In short: DeviantArt unsurprisingly puts gallery view at the center of its functionality. With some setup and knowhow, however, you can get Tumblr to duplicate some of that functionality. Tumblr provides a decent gallery view experience but relies on a person carefully curating their blog so as to allow easy browsing of art rather than giving you this functionality by default.
One of the benefits of Tumblr, in my experience, is that everyone is here. Not literally everyone, but enough people that you can find a lot of the "familiar faces" in a fandom -- they have a Tumblr account and maintain a presence on this site. By contrast, many active artists just do not use dA at all, so it is impossible to view or respond to their work on that site because they're not posting there.
- "Is dA dead?" That said, in my experience, dA is still quite an active site. Every day, I get way more recommendations of awesome relevant-to-my-interest art than I possibly have time to look at or properly appreciate. I follow a lot of prolific artists who post a lot of amazing things on dA and if I had time, I'd love to be a better friend to. If you want art, dA's got plenty. It's also got plenty of journals/text post updates from any number of fascinating artists you might want to follow.
I will say that dA is similar to Dreamwidth/LiveJournal in that it has a thriving userbase while also still being visibly a hollowed-out version of what it used to be in its heyday, especially in the group/community spaces, leading to the impression that it is "dead" and no one uses it anymore. It used to be the case that community spaces on DeviantArt ("groups") were thriving and you could find a group of likeminded people to bond with over practically any interest you might have. Nowadays, while groups aren't entirely dead, most of the activity is concentrated in a small number of big, active groups while everything else is shuttered or fails to launch in the first place -- same as on Dreamwidth, where there are a small number of large, active, "beacon" communities, usually multifandom spaces, while most other spaces lack the critical mass to function. While there is an active userbase, there are many more inactive, dead user accounts.
That said, I think there is some variety from fandom to fandom with regards to the activity on each site. When I posted this Snow White fanart on Tumblr, it got a whopping... 3 notes. When I posted the same thing to dA it got 83 favorites, 6 comments, and over 9000 views, the most recent favorite being in February of this year. Similarly, when I posted this Medusa art it got 4 notes on Tumblr but 7 favorites on dA, the most recent of which was yesterday. Less dramatic, but in both cases it was clear that my art was actually seen on dA, while it more or less sunk beneath the waves on Tumblr.
Maybe I didn't use the right tags. Maybe my art got lost in the shuffle and so it just never got noticed. Maybe dA just has a huge fanbase for Disney and anime-style art, more so than Tumblr. Whatever the case, sometimes it is possible to get more feedback on dA than it is on Tumblr.
- Sidenote: Short-tail vs. long-tail feedback: One thing you might notice if you post fanworks for very different sized fandoms, e.g. on AO3, is that big fandoms and small fandoms work very differently in terms of feedback. In big, highly active fandoms, you get what is called short-tail feedback, where a lot of the response you'll ever get for a fic happens in the first 48 hours or so. In huge fandoms where a lot of content gets posted to a particular tag constantly, you're very reliant on things like rec lists (or be like a BNF with a ton of subscribers) for your work to have any more longevity than that. Otherwise, things easily get buried in the flood and finding your fic is like finding a needle in a haystack. In smaller and more dead tags, though, you get a different pattern of feedback, which is long-tail feedback. When you first post your fic, it will get crickets. But every so often, often years later, someone will stumble on it because they were looking for something just like this, or they got into this niche fandom and decided to binge the 10 existing fics for it.
In general, things that tend to lengthen the tail of attention/feedback:
- Small, inactive fandoms.
- Pages that highlight older works (archives, rec lists, bookmarks, etc.).
- Strong search capabilities that do not hide older works.
None of these things really apply for Tumblr, and the reblog structure of Tumblr tends to exacerbate this issue. On Tumblr, the main way of finding content is by watching other blogs and noticing unfamiliar posts through their reblogs. This means that posts largely propagate through viral/social mechanisms -- you see things only because someone you know has seen and shared them; when you reblog them, you share them with people YOU know; in this way a post uses social connections to spread. This propagation through social networks tends to lead to bimodal results for posts: either they are highly "shareable" (people are reasonably likely to reblog once they see this post), in which case the post rapidly goes viral (which can actually be an unpleasant experience), or a post doesn't quite reach that "highly shareable" threshold, meaning that the post eventually loses steam and fizzles out (also unpleasant, especially if it fizzles out long before reaching people most interested in the post).
The less you rely on social mechanisms for art (or other content) discovery, the less it will have these dysfunctional features (highly bimodal propagation). For example, global search functions that allow people to find the content they're interested in regardless of who they're following, communities that collect art for a particular interest in a single place, chronological feeds of all content related to a topic, etc. all have the effect of evening out highly uneven attention aspects created by social propagation. But Tumblr's functionality along all these dimensions is either non-existent or broken/non-functional in some way.
People often praise Tumblr for the ability to find years-old posts still circulating. It's true sometimes someone will like or reblog a post I made years ago and I'm just like "How did they find that...?" and I think the tagging and archive and even reblog systems can help in making older content discoverable. That said, I do think Tumblr tends to still be subject to the dysfunction of social media propagation (e.g. posts that tend to be shared/discoverable years later tend to be the viral type).
In short: DeviantArt generally isn't where all the fans are, and has a lot of dead accounts/groups that contribute to an impression the site is dead. This varies by fandom, though, and its mechanisms generally help art to be found by the people who want to find it, although on a longer timescale.
It used to be the case that DeviantArt was a bit of a nightmare to browse. Casual searches for whatever fandom you might be interested in would often be flooded or at the very least unexpectedly peppered with what might be called PG-rated kink. The most common type of this art is inflation art (art of usually female characters drawn fat or blown up like a balloon to the point of discomfort, often either naked or with too-small clothes digging into their skin). It was always difficult to figure out what to do with this art, which straddled the border of sexual and non-sexual (there was never anything overtly sexual about the art, but it was still clear from the prevalence and themes of the genre that it was a sexual kink), and which was a completely harmless kink that nevertheless the vast majority of users found disturbing and offputting, as the art was intentionally grotesque.
I think in the end, DeviantArt probably settled on soft-banning this art (making it not appear in most searches by default) while continuing to allow it to be posted. Of course, I do not actually know because DeviantArt's search and recommendation algorithms and content policy are very unclear/opaque to me, which isn't great. But it's been a long time since I've encountered inflation art while trying to do a generic search, which seems to suggest it is being suppressed in some way. This case is an interesting study on how to balance mildly irritating or undesirable art with freedom of expression on modern social media sites. But in any case, DeviantArt used to be quite annoying to browse due to the difficulty of filtering out unrequested kink but I think they have largely fixed this issue.
- Sidenote on adult content: Unfortunately, both dA and Tumblr both remain basically equally bad for posting adult content.
Ever since the December 2018 porn ban on Tumblr, posting any kind of adult content that might be auto-flagged as containing nudity (even drawn) made artists very reluctant to post even artistic nudity out of fear that their blog would be labeled a NSFW one, which essentially causes them to be soft-banned on the website (no longer appearing in searches). Last year, Tumblr softened their stance, introducing mature content labels that made it easier for people to mix mature and tame content in a single blog without being soft-banned and introducing new community guidelines that expressly allowed mature content that falls short of being a depiction of explicit sex. Tumblr is now slightly better for artists that draw (e.g.) tasteful/artistic nudity, while maintaining its hard ban on all forms of 18+ (explicit sex) content.
I am less familiar with how DeviantArt's adult content policy has changed over time, but currently, similar to Tumblr, it allows mature-but-not-explicit-sex content to be posted with a mature content warning/filter. Unlike Tumblr, it does allow 18+ (explicit sex) content to be posted but only behind a paywall, which is a bit baffling to me. It also bans a rather vague list of "fringe sexual fetish" content that includes "incest, necrophilia, amputation, cannibalism, and other similar themes."
Overall, I would say that while Tumblr used to be worse for artists who want to post mature content, it is now about the same as dA or even slightly better due to dA's vague ban on various kink content.
Finally, here is a table I made in order to summarize the above points:
Related reading:
Ables, Kelsey. "The Rise and Fall of Internet Art Communities, from DeviantArt to Tumblr." Artsy.net. April 19, 2019.
Reddit. "r/ArtistLounge: Do you think that Deviantart is dead?" Posted January 11, 2022. An interesting thread with some detailed accounts of experiences on dA and comparisons to other art sites.
Tumblr Community Guidelines: https://www.tumblr.com/policy/en/community
(You might also be interested in: Fanlore. "Female-Presenting Nipples". An archive of Tumblr's December 2018 porn ban, capturing the exact language that was used in the content policy. Note that drawn nipples/other nudity was supposedly allowed but artists were very leery of having their drawn content falsely flagged as NSFW and getting soft-banned that way.)
DeviantArt's adult content policy: https://www.deviantartsupport.com/en/article/what-is-deviantarts-policy-around-sexual-themes
Table of contents
- Pages vs. posts
- Post creation
- Site performance and loading times
- Creating an art gallery
- Userbase activity
- Browsing experience
- Summary diagram
Note: I could and probably should add Twitter, Instagram, and Pixiv to this comparison, as these are the other major places where people post fanart. However, I do not use them enough and am not familiar enough with their inner workings and how the sites have changed/developed over time for me to feel comfortable including them in this analysis. Therefore, I stick to dA and Tumblr only, which I feel confident evaluating like this as I use them both regularly (and have for over a decade(!)).
Pages vs. posts
In my opinion, the biggest difference between DeviantArt and Tumblr is the permanence and stability of posts (in this case, art posts). DeviantArt follows an older, more traditional model of websites where content is organized into simple, stable pages. Tumblr is distinctive in that content is organized into individual blog feeds, where reblogging a post creates a copy on your own blog that is connected to, but otherwise independent of, the original. A user can add commentary to the original post that creates an alternative "version" of a post, and the original post can be deleted while all its copies remain up and able to be reblogged/circulated. There are some benefits to this odd/unique way of structuring data/content -- for example, it makes collaborative comedy easier. It also allows "zombie posts" to exist in circulation, where you can still view a piece of art years later even though the artist has deleted their Tumblr account (not an unalloyed good -- the existence of zombie posts damages the ability of artists to maintain control over their own art). That said, overall, I think this post structure (1) severely damages the quality of feedback artists get on Tumblr and (2) makes old art difficult to find.
- On Tumblr, comments are decentralized and not under the control of the post creator. One of the nice things about dA is that comments are collected into a single place: underneath the artwork. Therefore, anyone coming to an art post even years later can see the full set of discussion on this art piece and its full context. On Tumblr, however, it is possible for two very different versions of the same post to be in circulation and people only see one version, only one piece of the conversation related to this art, or just the art itself without any discussion. Tumblr has over time improved the ability to see all the responses to a post in a single place but it remains clunky. For example, you can see the full set of reblogs in the "Notes" view, but only atomic additions and not the thread the additions were added to, making it impossible to follow the full context of a conversation from the main post's list of notes only. "Replies" and "reblog additions +tags" remain in different tabs, meaning that you have to click at least twice in order to view all the responses a single post has gotten. Notes are not displayed by default even in a post's permalink view, making them a hidden aspect of art posts on Tumblr. There is not much an artist can do to control replies/reblog additions/reblog tags on their own art (aside from disabling replies entirely) -- the post model can't really support such functionality. Meanwhile, dA's comment section is visible by default, complete, and fully-threaded, making replies/dialogue clear at a glance, and the comment section is under the full control of the creator, who can delete comments that are off-topic, rude, annoying, etc.
Sometimes Tumblr's burying of commentary is nice -- as the YouTube comment section infamously demonstrates, sometimes seeing the full response a post has gotten isn't exactly a pleasant experience. However, when it comes to art, especially the "supportive concrit" that DeviantArt used to be especially known for, it is nice for people's responses to be collected in one place and easily viewable by anyone consuming the art, including years later. Having highly visible, non-ephemeral comments makes it more worthwhile for people to take the time to leave detailed feedback rather than silent reblogging. On Tumblr, because of the site's functionality, you unfortunately often have to choose between stuffing commentary and more detailed praise into less visible and more difficult to read/parse tags OR be forced to append your commentary on the post itself (thereby "polluting" the post with your unnecessary commentary and forcing people to either reblog that version or go back to the source post in order to remove your commentary). On Tumblr, reblog tags and other reactions to art are by design intended to be for the reblogger primarily -- organizing their blog and addressing their followers -- while the artist is relegated to something like a shadowy celebrity: you talk ABOUT the art and artist but you do not address (talk TO) the artist as a person.
In short, many aspects of Tumblr's site functionality actively discourage conversation and giving artists feedback and also damage the ability of the artist to control the response to their art and how it is shared. For all these reasons, I think it can be actively unpleasant to be an artist on Tumblr -- while at the same time, Tumblr provides one of the best platforms for both getting one's art out there and also finding great art being shared.
- How username changes are handled, or: the lack of real permalinks on Tumblr. Another contrast between dA and Tumblr is the way that username changes are handled. One thing Tumblr is infamous for is that username changes instantly break all links to posts. This doesn't have to be the case -- most websites, when a user changes their name, URLs containing the old username will automatically redirect to a location with the new username, ensuring that old links to art will not break when a user switches to a new name. These redirects have to be set up and remain in place more or less permanently in order to keep the old links from breaking. Therefore, they require a bit of work and also require the old username to remain unusable for future users (otherwise, there is ambiguity/a conflict between someone trying to access the content of OldUsername who is now NewUsername vs. someone who is trying to view the profile of the person who now has the username OldUsername). As a result, sites that provide URL redirections often provide limitations on how frequently someone can URL change to prevent a small number of users from permanently burning through a large number of non-reusable usernames. These restrictions can take various forms: literally associating name changes with a price (or paid account tier); limiting the number of times a user can change their username total or within a certain timeframe; or very slowly and carefully recycling usernames that are no longer being used.
Tumblr, however, chooses to go the exact opposite direction. It provides zero support for URL redirects; as a result, it also imposes zero costs on username changes: all users are allowed infinite, instantaneous URL changes, which break links. I can't tell you how many times I've tried to follow a link to a Tumblr post and got an unhelpful "There's nothing here" error message. Tumblr ALSO has the very odd and rather unique mechanism of recycling usernames of inactive accounts ("account dormancy"). That is, for users who have not logged into Tumblr for over a year, Tumblr will change their username to have a deactivated suffix and then recycle the original username, which someone else can later claim.
Compare this to other sites: On dA, name changes are a paid account feature and can only be done once every 6 months. AO3 allows free name changes on request but with a 7-day cooldown, while providing an alternative mechanism (pseuds) that allows people to operate under multiple usernames without physically changing the username they use to log into the site. Username changes automatically create URL redirects. Dreamwidth charges a fee for username changes, gives users the option to forward URLs or not, and very slowly recycles the usernames associated with deleted accounts.
Exacerbating Tumblr's odd functionality, Tumblr has long inculcated a culture that encourages frequent username/URL changes. Usernames are treated as an expression of one's personality, current hyperfixation, or funny jokes, all of which encourage people to change their URL when they're just not feeling their old URL anymore or when they notice a highly-coveted URL is up for grabs. In addition, Tumblr has had a long history of users doxxing and bullying other users, which has tended to also encourage username changes or account deletion to avoid harassment.
All of this is to say is that "permalinks" on Tumblr aren't actually real permalinks. If you want to manually link to a Tumblr post from an independent Tumblr post (as in, not in the reblog chain) or from an external site, those links are very vulnerable to being broken by username changes or account deletions. This makes activities like saving, bookmarking, or creating rec lists for art very difficult because the obvious way to keep a pointer to the art (its URL) can easily become entirely useless at finding the art again (assuming it even still exists). The only real way to archive art is to use Tumblr's reblog features (create a copy of the art under your control) and tagging mechanisms in order to create a searchable archive; it is difficult to make external rec lists, bookmarks, and such.
In other words, not only are Tumblr's innate search functions terrible for finding older art, its set of features ALSO hamstrings the ability of curators to archive and highlight older art through external methods. In short, Tumblr's peculiar design is terrible for finding older art.
Post creation
On the other hand, Tumblr is hands down the king of post creation. Its features include: a quick and easy upload process; flexible post formats that allow people many ways of arranging up to 30(!) images in a post; powerful post-scheduling that allows people to effortlessly spread out their posts/reblogs; great display of images (solo images are not cropped, and large images are automatically resized to a reasonable size for browsing ("Do you love the colors of the sky" type posts notwithstanding), while the full size image is still able to be viewed at a couple of clicks if the user is interested. By contrast, here is where DeviantArt continues to struggle:
- DeviantArt forces all art posted to the site to have a title. This is frustrating! It's like posting fic on AO3 -- the last thing you want to have to do when you finish a piece and are itching to share it with the world is come up with a title for it... This is where alternatives -- Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram -- all are preferable: they allow the posting of art directly to the site without titling or having to fill out a form specifying various settings or properties of the art.
This is not all bad, though -- having a lot of settings does give artists fine-grained control over their art and forcing artists to title and write a description of their art helps with searching as it gives some text for a search engine to hang onto. (By contrast, Tumblr's search functions are almost entirely based around tagging.) But forcing a lot of steps to upload art really does slow down the process, and was especially bad during the initial dA Eclipse rollout in 2019 when loading times to do the most basic, essential function of the website (posting art) were so long as to make the site non-functional.
- To make this even worse, DeviantArt forces all works posted to the website to consist of a single file. dA is pretty flexible about format this file can be so it could be (e.g.) a zip file, but what this means when it comes to art is that you can't make a post containing multiple pieces of art collected together. If you want to post multiple related pieces of art on a single page, you have to manually photo-edit them into a single file. This is a pain when you have a lot of smaller pieces, sketches, rakugaki, etc. you'd like to just stuff into a post, or if you're just a very prolific artist and art dumps are just the easiest way to get your art out into the world. Pretty much every other art posting website (Tumblr, Instagram, Pixiv, even Twitter with some pretty restrictive limitations) allow you to post multiple pieces of art into a single post.
In short, DeviantArt really works more like a gallery -- a place to put the pieces you're most proud of and which can/should be enjoyed on their own. While DeviantArt does have a "Scraps" feature, all this feature does is hide your less polished pieces from searches and people browsing your main gallery. It does not actually relax the (relatively stringent) posting requirements when posting art. You still need to title every single scrap you upload, and you still can only include one file per piece. As a result, DeviantArt really does not really support posting dashed-off, lower-effort pieces or art dumps.
In short: The process of uploading art to DeviantArt is time-consuming. While this has some benefits in terms of increased cataloguing of art, it is something that overall discourages posting anything but high-effort pieces (high enough effort that you are willing to brave the upload process to share them with others).
Site performance and loading times
Given how ~web 1.0 DeviantArt's interface is, it has always been a very clunky, slow-loading website that has been very difficult to use given that the pages it loads are fairly simple. The rollout of Eclipse, which was meant to modernize dA's interface, instead exacerbated these issues and made the site almost non-functional following its rollout.
However, coming back to the site several years later, I do think dA's devs have fixed up a lot of the bugs. At the same time, Tumblr in my experience continues to be slow-loading and extremely memory-intensive. I kind of feel like dA has managed to come out looking halfway decent here not because of its own virtues but because of the widespread failings of other social media sites that increasingly suffer from bloat.
In short: They're both usable but mediocre in terms of site performance.
Creating an art gallery
Tumblr is decent at allowing you to create a workable gallery for your art. It has custom themes that specialize in displaying multiple posts (pieces of art) at once and gives pretty powerful tools for tweaking appearance if you're willing to deep-dive into HTML. For example, I've set up my Tumblr art blog with one of the free custom themes and have tweaked it slightly in order for it to display the information I would like it to display. I don't do any reblogs on this journal so as to keep its appearance clean and avoid duplicating any art. I also have a predetermined tagging system, which I use consistently, and provide a page of relevant tags as a way of making my art more searchable and filterable; otherwise, it would be tedious for people to quickly find the art they're interested in.
The main problem with creating a gallery view on Tumblr is that Tumblr is a "one-stop shop" kind of website, where all kinds of content tend to posted together in a mix -- memes and text posts and cute animal videos and art and ask box replies and reblogs of old posts (which is itself a separate post on your blog) and so on. This makes art difficult to separate from other conversation when browsing.
By contrast, DeviantArt separates out art into its own section (the gallery) and blog posts, replies, and other chatter into other sections (the journal and profile "wall"). Its galleries are powerful and allow users to split their work into named and labeled sub-galleries that allow people to more quickly find the art they're interested in (although this is largely dependent on the classification scheme the artist uses). You can do something similar with tags on Tumblr, but it requires a bit more manual setup.
That said, DeviantArt galleries are more rigid and "one size fits all." For example, when browsing someone else's gallery, you can't quickly click on a piece of art to enlarge it/view it at full size; rather, clicking takes you to that art's page. There is some core behavior that all users on the site share and this can't be changed or customized.
In short: DeviantArt unsurprisingly puts gallery view at the center of its functionality. With some setup and knowhow, however, you can get Tumblr to duplicate some of that functionality. Tumblr provides a decent gallery view experience but relies on a person carefully curating their blog so as to allow easy browsing of art rather than giving you this functionality by default.
Userbase activity
One of the benefits of Tumblr, in my experience, is that everyone is here. Not literally everyone, but enough people that you can find a lot of the "familiar faces" in a fandom -- they have a Tumblr account and maintain a presence on this site. By contrast, many active artists just do not use dA at all, so it is impossible to view or respond to their work on that site because they're not posting there.
- "Is dA dead?" That said, in my experience, dA is still quite an active site. Every day, I get way more recommendations of awesome relevant-to-my-interest art than I possibly have time to look at or properly appreciate. I follow a lot of prolific artists who post a lot of amazing things on dA and if I had time, I'd love to be a better friend to. If you want art, dA's got plenty. It's also got plenty of journals/text post updates from any number of fascinating artists you might want to follow.
I will say that dA is similar to Dreamwidth/LiveJournal in that it has a thriving userbase while also still being visibly a hollowed-out version of what it used to be in its heyday, especially in the group/community spaces, leading to the impression that it is "dead" and no one uses it anymore. It used to be the case that community spaces on DeviantArt ("groups") were thriving and you could find a group of likeminded people to bond with over practically any interest you might have. Nowadays, while groups aren't entirely dead, most of the activity is concentrated in a small number of big, active groups while everything else is shuttered or fails to launch in the first place -- same as on Dreamwidth, where there are a small number of large, active, "beacon" communities, usually multifandom spaces, while most other spaces lack the critical mass to function. While there is an active userbase, there are many more inactive, dead user accounts.
That said, I think there is some variety from fandom to fandom with regards to the activity on each site. When I posted this Snow White fanart on Tumblr, it got a whopping... 3 notes. When I posted the same thing to dA it got 83 favorites, 6 comments, and over 9000 views, the most recent favorite being in February of this year. Similarly, when I posted this Medusa art it got 4 notes on Tumblr but 7 favorites on dA, the most recent of which was yesterday. Less dramatic, but in both cases it was clear that my art was actually seen on dA, while it more or less sunk beneath the waves on Tumblr.
Maybe I didn't use the right tags. Maybe my art got lost in the shuffle and so it just never got noticed. Maybe dA just has a huge fanbase for Disney and anime-style art, more so than Tumblr. Whatever the case, sometimes it is possible to get more feedback on dA than it is on Tumblr.
- Sidenote: Short-tail vs. long-tail feedback: One thing you might notice if you post fanworks for very different sized fandoms, e.g. on AO3, is that big fandoms and small fandoms work very differently in terms of feedback. In big, highly active fandoms, you get what is called short-tail feedback, where a lot of the response you'll ever get for a fic happens in the first 48 hours or so. In huge fandoms where a lot of content gets posted to a particular tag constantly, you're very reliant on things like rec lists (or be like a BNF with a ton of subscribers) for your work to have any more longevity than that. Otherwise, things easily get buried in the flood and finding your fic is like finding a needle in a haystack. In smaller and more dead tags, though, you get a different pattern of feedback, which is long-tail feedback. When you first post your fic, it will get crickets. But every so often, often years later, someone will stumble on it because they were looking for something just like this, or they got into this niche fandom and decided to binge the 10 existing fics for it.
In general, things that tend to lengthen the tail of attention/feedback:
- Small, inactive fandoms.
- Pages that highlight older works (archives, rec lists, bookmarks, etc.).
- Strong search capabilities that do not hide older works.
None of these things really apply for Tumblr, and the reblog structure of Tumblr tends to exacerbate this issue. On Tumblr, the main way of finding content is by watching other blogs and noticing unfamiliar posts through their reblogs. This means that posts largely propagate through viral/social mechanisms -- you see things only because someone you know has seen and shared them; when you reblog them, you share them with people YOU know; in this way a post uses social connections to spread. This propagation through social networks tends to lead to bimodal results for posts: either they are highly "shareable" (people are reasonably likely to reblog once they see this post), in which case the post rapidly goes viral (which can actually be an unpleasant experience), or a post doesn't quite reach that "highly shareable" threshold, meaning that the post eventually loses steam and fizzles out (also unpleasant, especially if it fizzles out long before reaching people most interested in the post).
The less you rely on social mechanisms for art (or other content) discovery, the less it will have these dysfunctional features (highly bimodal propagation). For example, global search functions that allow people to find the content they're interested in regardless of who they're following, communities that collect art for a particular interest in a single place, chronological feeds of all content related to a topic, etc. all have the effect of evening out highly uneven attention aspects created by social propagation. But Tumblr's functionality along all these dimensions is either non-existent or broken/non-functional in some way.
People often praise Tumblr for the ability to find years-old posts still circulating. It's true sometimes someone will like or reblog a post I made years ago and I'm just like "How did they find that...?" and I think the tagging and archive and even reblog systems can help in making older content discoverable. That said, I do think Tumblr tends to still be subject to the dysfunction of social media propagation (e.g. posts that tend to be shared/discoverable years later tend to be the viral type).
In short: DeviantArt generally isn't where all the fans are, and has a lot of dead accounts/groups that contribute to an impression the site is dead. This varies by fandom, though, and its mechanisms generally help art to be found by the people who want to find it, although on a longer timescale.
Browsing experience
It used to be the case that DeviantArt was a bit of a nightmare to browse. Casual searches for whatever fandom you might be interested in would often be flooded or at the very least unexpectedly peppered with what might be called PG-rated kink. The most common type of this art is inflation art (art of usually female characters drawn fat or blown up like a balloon to the point of discomfort, often either naked or with too-small clothes digging into their skin). It was always difficult to figure out what to do with this art, which straddled the border of sexual and non-sexual (there was never anything overtly sexual about the art, but it was still clear from the prevalence and themes of the genre that it was a sexual kink), and which was a completely harmless kink that nevertheless the vast majority of users found disturbing and offputting, as the art was intentionally grotesque.
I think in the end, DeviantArt probably settled on soft-banning this art (making it not appear in most searches by default) while continuing to allow it to be posted. Of course, I do not actually know because DeviantArt's search and recommendation algorithms and content policy are very unclear/opaque to me, which isn't great. But it's been a long time since I've encountered inflation art while trying to do a generic search, which seems to suggest it is being suppressed in some way. This case is an interesting study on how to balance mildly irritating or undesirable art with freedom of expression on modern social media sites. But in any case, DeviantArt used to be quite annoying to browse due to the difficulty of filtering out unrequested kink but I think they have largely fixed this issue.
- Sidenote on adult content: Unfortunately, both dA and Tumblr both remain basically equally bad for posting adult content.
Ever since the December 2018 porn ban on Tumblr, posting any kind of adult content that might be auto-flagged as containing nudity (even drawn) made artists very reluctant to post even artistic nudity out of fear that their blog would be labeled a NSFW one, which essentially causes them to be soft-banned on the website (no longer appearing in searches). Last year, Tumblr softened their stance, introducing mature content labels that made it easier for people to mix mature and tame content in a single blog without being soft-banned and introducing new community guidelines that expressly allowed mature content that falls short of being a depiction of explicit sex. Tumblr is now slightly better for artists that draw (e.g.) tasteful/artistic nudity, while maintaining its hard ban on all forms of 18+ (explicit sex) content.
I am less familiar with how DeviantArt's adult content policy has changed over time, but currently, similar to Tumblr, it allows mature-but-not-explicit-sex content to be posted with a mature content warning/filter. Unlike Tumblr, it does allow 18+ (explicit sex) content to be posted but only behind a paywall, which is a bit baffling to me. It also bans a rather vague list of "fringe sexual fetish" content that includes "incest, necrophilia, amputation, cannibalism, and other similar themes."
Overall, I would say that while Tumblr used to be worse for artists who want to post mature content, it is now about the same as dA or even slightly better due to dA's vague ban on various kink content.
Summary diagram
Finally, here is a table I made in order to summarize the above points:
Related reading:
Ables, Kelsey. "The Rise and Fall of Internet Art Communities, from DeviantArt to Tumblr." Artsy.net. April 19, 2019.
Reddit. "r/ArtistLounge: Do you think that Deviantart is dead?" Posted January 11, 2022. An interesting thread with some detailed accounts of experiences on dA and comparisons to other art sites.
Tumblr Community Guidelines: https://www.tumblr.com/policy/en/community
(You might also be interested in: Fanlore. "Female-Presenting Nipples". An archive of Tumblr's December 2018 porn ban, capturing the exact language that was used in the content policy. Note that drawn nipples/other nudity was supposedly allowed but artists were very leery of having their drawn content falsely flagged as NSFW and getting soft-banned that way.)
DeviantArt's adult content policy: https://www.deviantartsupport.com/en/article/what-is-deviantarts-policy-around-sexual-themes