This was a post I made on Tumblr last night, but I thought it was a little funny and I had fun writing it, so I decided to fix the formatting a little and add/clarify some details so that I could throw it on here...

Pre-Eclipse Deviantart

This term encompasses a few different designs seeing as it covers a span of 18 years, but these are all blurry memories by this point so lumping them together won't kill people, I think. Because this was the website I used in my formative years I compare every art-focused website to the idealized version of pre-Eclipse dA that exists in my head. We had folders. And a sidebar with categories on it and groups. And a decently pleasant shade of green. People used to get so fancy with the custom user boxes you got if you paid for premium I was always so jealous of these as a child (has nothing of value to say about this except for waxing nostalgic)

Deviantart Eclipse

I was an active Deviantart user during the time this redesign was looming and this was straight up apocalyptic. This genuinely killed the website like after it became mandatory people tried to hang on just because it was where all their stuff already was but a lot of people basically gave up after like a couple months. Even when the redesign was made mandatory and the old layout removed it was still unfinished, and it also inexplicably removed categories from the site's system entirely.
I know Sheezy doesn't really have categories either, and I'm fine with that here since it's been like that from the start, but Deviantart spent nearly 20 years with a system where it DID have categories, so getting rid of them that far in made it worse to look for old material. I remember once I was trying to find some obscure old Flash games so I could archive them (...or just keep them in a folder and never figure out how to give them to Flashpoint or anything...), and it was of course difficult to even find Flash posts at all, especially since they no longer worked on-site and only displayed as their thumbnails. (Last I checked the SWFs were still downloadable though, but I had to log in to my old unused account to be able to use the download button... (which didn't use to be necessary...))
It was baffling for me to see people still using the website as early as 2020. It honestly doesn't surprise me that they seem to have pivoted to AI as of recent, because like who else is even going to use it, everyone already left way before they did that. I think if Eclipse never happened then the site might look very different today. (Extremely literal statement)
Looking through old Deviantart posts and comments from like 2010 on the Eclipse layout feels deeply wrong, like seeing someone's childhood home paved over by an empty parking lot.

Shortlived and defunct website Buzzly.art

I was on this for like a month in early 2022, shortly before it imploded due to them sending out the most insane survey of all time. I remember really liking the layout of this one actually it was the most visually "old Deviantart"-style of the Deviantart replacement websites so I didn't feel like it was reinventing the wheel into a worse version of the wheel. Unfortunately every archive of it on the Wayback Machine seems to be kind of broken, so I can't find what a user page looked like, which would have been important...Looking at archives now the layout of the front page isn't that impressive, but this was the first post-dA-Eclipse art site I personally used, so maybe I was just glad to see a sidebar of art categories at all. Also, the only archive date of the site I could find that actually displayed images is one where the front page is full of drawings of middle fingers and people announcing other sites they were on, because it's from the point in time when the website was actively in the process of imploding.
I remember people used to make hexagon shaped versions of Deviantart stamps to play into the bee theme, which wasn't very practical but it was a little cute. I still have a template for that lying around in my downloads folder which is probably lost media I'm sitting on at this point

Sheezy.art (which is here !)

Only one in this list I actually use currently. This one is as alright as it gets nowadays, I think...Pretty good example of making a mobile-friendly website that doesn't regard you as a sick freak for using it on your computer. I'll make this section into a bullet list because this being the one website I actually use meant I had a lot of random things to say about it.

• The user page customization is fun and very welcome, though there is the inherent issue nowadays of people immediately using that power to make extremely neon "scenecore"-type layouts that do not comply with the geneva conventions. (It would be cool if you could also change the color of the pages for your art posts, but this would probably be too niche, and also violate even more geneva conventions...The standard background colors are totally inoffensive and unobtrusive next to every drawing I've seen though, so this would be entirely frivolous...)
• It's a little odd that for some reason the word limit on art descriptions is 200 words shorter than the word limit for comments, for some reason? That seems like it should logically be the same or the other way around. Really I feel like something about the art pages bugs me, but I struggle to place what it is. I thought maybe that the description/comments sections were too narrow, but when I look at it again it's actually completely fine...So why aren't I completely happy...
• The fact that newly posted art and journals always goes to the front page I guess makes sense, but it makes me nervous on occasion that at least for now you can't opt individual posts out of that (I wouldn't be surprised if they add such a thing in the future though), so I feel awkward when I'm posting something that I'm arbitrarily more shy about than my other drawings.
  In the case of journals, it also means that there are some uncommon occasions where you get posts like "This site is boring and nobody likes my stuff so I'm leaving -_-" hanging around on the front page for a couple hours, which seems awkward to have on the front page. Though this does usually mean that these kinds of posts get commented on, when otherwise they'd probably get passed over...
• I'm not sure why the link to the Feed page is in a dropdown menu and not just directly on the header. It's weirdly out of the way to get to it, so I rarely end up checking the posts from anyone I follow here...This is probably some kind of problem, but I see the same people that follow me in my notifications all the time so maybe it's just a skill issue?
• This isn't remotely web design at all but I like that you can upload .swf files because this is a very novel feature for a website to have in the 2020s. I have only used this power once. I have not yet figured out a good excuse to use it for a second time. But I <3 Ruffle anyway

Artstation

Have I ever given you the impression that I am an industry professional

Cara

This is just Artstation again. But if you scroll far enough on the front page it becomes Twitter? Why? Who cares

Artfol

I randomly remembered the name of this site while thinking of this post, and I remembered I'm pretty sure it was mobile only back when I learned of it, so I went to check if it has a desktop site now. It does but I don't like the layout. It definitely looks like the desktop site for something that is primarily a mobile app. I don't know anything about it

InkBlot

Doesn't seem to let you see the website at all without making an account so I'll never know! (Please god an art website is probably one of the worst places to engage in Glue Trap Web Design. A lot of people like looking at pictures but don't draw them. Come on)
* ("Glue Trap Web Design" is my own term I made up for when a website won't let you browse it normally without making an account, when there's no logical reason such a feature would need you to be signed in other than to artificially increase sign-ups. (Examples include things like login walls when you scroll too far on an Instagram profile, that thing mentioned earlier where Deviantart used to let you download files without being logged in but no longer does, not being able to see replies/full threads anymore on Twitter, basically anything Twitter is doing at this point, give up you idiot nobody is going back to Twitter, etc.) I think I'm the only person in the world who says this. You can say it too if you want to.)

Newgrounds

Honestly I like the layout on this one well enough. A couple slightly out of the way pages are a little confusing but most are understandable, and it's clearly A Website You Are Supposed To Look At On Your Computer. (I know mobile-friendliness is good, but it's made the world so boring...) Pictures are not extremely centered (Doctors will never figure out why I apparently don't like when the focal point of a page is in the center.) and it seems convenient that you can apparently put more than one image in a single post (I remember wishing Sheezy had this at some point, but I don't remember what I was doing that made me think I needed it...). It is only barely skeuomorphic by this point but still enough for me to go "woah skeuomorphism". I do not have an account despite thinking these things because the prospect of making a Newgrounds account and then having to either use it or awkwardly have it lying around seems kind of mortifying.