Hello there, my dear followers!

So, in the last Journal I told you about my situation on DeviantArt:
https://www.weasyl.com/journal/175362/denouncing-deviantart

One of the worst things was (and it seems intentional) that I was cut off from the people I used to follow. So I have no clue if these suspensions were epidemic and reoccurring.

As I had no replies so far, I started to google for some similar cases, and I found a similar case from 2020, and the person could not recover its account. A person with 4k followers was wrongly banned and had the followers erased. Very shameful for a platform the size of DeviantArt.

So, when things go bad, we start to get suspicious and conspiratory, and I started to elaborate some theories.

Here in my country where private companies are very corrupt, there is a typical maneuver.
If you are laid off for no reason, companies have to pay you an unemployment insurance for around three months, so you still have an income while you for a new job. BUT if you quit, you get no benefits.
So, for the company it's easy: When they want you to go, they just the work environment unbearable enough so you quit on your own.

And what I theorize here is we are witnessing a post-modern design for a massive lay-off.
DeviantArt used to be good, and got greedy over the years as it is unavoidable with any company that grows too much.
They massively benefited from Artists feeding content in the last years, and now we are reaching the age of AI generated images, which is faster and generate more clicks, regardless of the dubious quality and morality behind it.

As our relationship with DA isn't exactly like a Job, they can't just lay us off.
So like the example I gave, they just have to make the platform less and less friendly to real Artists, and we will just go away by our own, as they convert into a AI image bank overtime.

With that in mind, here's the thing. If you're with them, you at least have some protection from being scraped on AI datasets (funny thing, they protecting us against themselves). If you're out, you got nothing.
Even worse, if by chance someone impersonates you and feed the dataset with your content, you're vulnerable.

So my current strategy will be I won't quit DA yet, but I won't feed them content either, I will just watch them closely. Friends close and enemies closer, right? Too bad an almost two decades relationship had to end up like this, but it is out in the open, absolutely NO company is to be trusted.

After that shameful advertising from Wacom using AI images, it is clear not only they do anything for profit, they'll be the first ones to shameless do it.

"It's a big club, and you are not in it. You and I are not in the big club. They don't care about you, they don't care about you at all." - George Carlin