April is just a cursed month for me, isn't it?
For those of you who don't already know, just before 9:00 AM PST on April 16th, 2025, my second Deviant Art account, TheOneHungryLurker was, just like its predecessor, black-bagged and sent to the work camp/shallow grave of indefinitely suspended by the NKVDA, with no prior warning or lesser penalty, even in spite of my increased mindfulness of their stodgy, inconsistent, capricious, and frequently hypocritically enforced content policies.
My the-size-of-the-former-twin-towers-of-the-World-Trade-Center-quotation-marks "crime?"
"Attempting to evade a ban."
Apparently, also previously unbeknownst to me, the NKVDA will purge any new account you make if a previous account of yours was banned, even if it was over litigious, bad-faith enforcement of policies that proved to be so unpopular that they were revised to no longer be a ban-hammer-catching "offense." Despite citing them in the notice sent to me, this "no re-entry" policy even insinuated, let alone mentioned nowhere in their Terms of Service or Etiquette Policy.
I didn't write this sooner due to being very busy are work (Friday and Saturday were back-to-back 12+ hour shifts) and waiting on the results of my appeal, but after a curt response from either the AI or NPC "Nick," straight up asked me to snitch on anyone else who may have made a rebound account, AFTER upholding my second BS ban (nice negotiation tactics there, you feckless fuckwit; maybe read The Art of The Deal sometime, assuming it doesn't burn you eyes like a vampire staring into the sun), I've been stone-walled by silence.
I don't know if I myself was snitched out by any of the lifeless, loser spurgs I've antagonized over the years as an Eobard Thawne levels of petty slight (though I have my suspicions...), or if I fell afoul of the soulless AI that the NKVDA left in charge of content moderation, but in either case, I'm fucking done with Deviant Art. They've been persecuting blueberry inflation artists for twenty fucking years; Ive been around long enough to remember when they first started deleting Johnny Swell's posted pages of The Bizarre Adventures of Berrygirl.
You have made me your enemy, Deviant Art. I won't even help you get a single click more. I was only ever on your dog-shit, increasingly degenerating site for the (mostly) very fine people, anyway, and I will now do my part to lead away as many of them as I can, free like like the poor sods in Plato's cave, that you may be reduced to as an inglorious, ignominious, pathetic state as Tumblr, assuming you don't go the way of Sheezy Art.
Like Pontius Pilate practicing hygiene before the pharisees, I wash my hands of thee. "Deviant" Art has only ever been "deviant" like Hazbin Hotel is only safe edgy (and headed by honorless curs).
So, my denizenship on Deviant Art is done, but my time in hopefully greener pastures has only just begun. Last Christmas, I opened up accounts on both Twitter and Archive Of Our Own, but due to cramming to try and finish Christmas Eve with Genevieve and restarting the ultimately futile relaunch on DA, followed by precessions of one thing leading to another, I never got around to posting anything there. However, I have now begun to upload all applicable works to those websites as well, and they will become new mainstays along with Fur Affinity, Pixiv, New Grounds, and Itaku that will receive new uploads whenever I have them to post.
So, if you'd like to help me rebuild my following again (and reduce Deviant Shart to Deviant Fart in The Wind), you can follow me there, too.
https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheHungryLurker
And finally, speaking of murder at the hands of ideological zealots and resurrections, I wish you all (had) a Happy Easter.
Yatsufusa
Okay, so I 'could' say: "I get their point of view on this. On a regular platform, the process would be to appeal the ban of the old account, rather than just to brute force your way back in and 'hope you won't get caught'."
But I _won't_ say that. Because DeviantArt is known to put more stock in what a collective of obvious sock puppet-accounts have to say than an artist who uploaded the art before any other source on the internet. And suddenly somebody else owns all your art on DeviantArt! O_O
Instead I ask you: "Why did you want to get 'back' into that loony bin in the first place?"
TheHungryLurker
So, first of all, I did attempt to appeal the ban of the old account, which was banned over an overreach of their own policies that proved to be so unpopular that they revised them in between my first account's banning and the opening of my second. Second, I wasn't "hoping I didn't get caught,' because I didn't even know rejoining was a "crime" one could be purged over, which Is why I made no attempt to conceal who I am. Third, I didn't "brute force" my way back on, because I waited over eight months before I opened my new account, AND had most of my art reposted in a "teaser only" thumbnail if I thought it might even remotely piss off the NKVDA. If anything, my only "crime" was being too honest and trusting, foolishly believing acting in good faith would be respected and reciprocated.
Deviant Art is such a ramshackle abomination of stitched-together necrotic body parts that I'm surprised it's even still functioning at all, especially if it's as susceptible as you say to a sock drawer raid, like when 4Chan closed the pools in Habbo Hotel. And Hell, if even 4Chan can get hacked, and for the foreseeable if not indefinite future, rendered completely defunct, then Deviant Art -- a site filled with such incorrigibly retarded code monkeys that its Chat feature was in Beta for FOUR FUCKING YEARS and yet they STILL never got it to function properly -- then the whole site could probably collapse by the malignant codebase equivalent of a stiff breeze.
But why go back to that cesspit at all? A fair question, with a simple answer; the people.
Despite as dog shit and dysfunctional as Deviant Art's despotic kakistocracy undeniably is, for some baffling reason, it still remains the single largest website dedicated solely to hosting art in the world (excluding Twitter, since it's primary purpose isn't art posting), and even with the drastic reductions in discourse compared to its hay-day (before Twitter brainrot took over), still arguably remains the highest for engagement, if you can cultivate a meta of open discussion around your content. In spite of the deluges of dross posted to DA on a daily basis, there are still a lot of very talented artists and writers with both beautiful and scrupulously salacious works that I regret not setting aside the proper time to bestow upon them the praise they deserved. I met a lot of great and creatively-minded people who were and are both an inspiration for me and who I was an inspiration for, some of which have even become good friends. I had shockingly deep, personal, and profound private conversations that you wouldn't have even thought possible from people who's accounts are mostly dedicated to inflation fetish art of women turning into gigantic blueberries with giant breasts.
If I had as little engagement on DA as I did on Itaku, or frankly, here, then it wouldn't have been such a big deal, but my first DA account had almost twice as many more followers than all of my other accounts, combined. And the worst part, is I never even got to say "goodbye" to any of them.
There are a lot of good people on DA, but DA is the fucking matrix. I hope and intend to draw those people away, that the asshats and AI will be erased... puns only slightly intended.
Now to ask a question of my own, what brought you here to comment and inquire in the first place? You're not a listed follower of mine, and you don't appear to have an interest in blueberry inflation.