My Open Letter of Protest to DeviantART

My primary objection to the recent overhaul known as Eclipse is the sheer ineptitude by the staff and owners to produce a unique user experience distinct from similar platforms. Not only is the site a pale imitation of ArtStation, but the months' worth of troubleshooting, delayed updates, and bug hunts both leading up to and following the launch further demonstrate a disconnect between DeviantART and its users. These technical issues are to be expected with any website that goes through a major update, but the scale and duration in this case, coupled with the development team essentially working from a cheat sheet, is unacceptable. This is not the site I signed up for all these years ago, and I have invested too much of my time and effort into it to abandon it completely over this matter. Many users are proposing a halt to using the site for the first 3 days of May to make their voices heard. I applaud this effort, as well as the numerous petitions seeking to get fundamental changes and fixes made. I may or may not participate in the upcoming boycott, and I have certainly signed a number of petitions, but I will offer my own mission statement moving forward in terms of my use of the site.

Put simply, I refuse to pay for something that has failed to imitate another site under the false premise of innovation.

• I will not renew my Core Membership, nor will I be gifting any to others.
• I will not be using the new Wix integration to make a portfolio. 
• I will not participate in any contests, events, giveaways, or promotions.
• I will not seek badges of any kind, and all llama badge trading is halted.
• I will not make any direct purchase from the platform, including prints.
• I will not use any media sharing options that will direct traffic to the site.

You will have to rely on advertising revenue exclusively to receive any cooperation and participation from me. Lest we forget, Patreon nearly imploded due to a policy change nobody asked for, which punished patrons for supporting multiple creators at once while pretending to be for the benefit of the creators when it only hindered their efforts to grow and prosper. Voices were raised, words were heeded, and Patreon reversed the decision. Please take note of this.

To any users reading this, I invite you to follow my example and/or those of others airing their grievances. 

Goodnight, and good luck.