When I'm not writing my sentence, I spend most of my time studying web design. It's a fascinating subject. One of the unfortunate side effects is that you realize VERY quickly how godawful some sites are. MySpace is one of them. MySpace is the worst, actually. Large swaths of Yahoo! are. DeviantART is pretty damn high on the list. It's one of the reasons I've stopped using.

I know people here won't like my saying that. Let's stop for a moment, though, and think for a bit about how deviantART works.

When you submit work, you need to pick a category first. This calls up a blocky window that gives you choices. Every time you click a choice, something new loads. It's completely inefficient, and it could easy be replaced by a sliding category set (you click Categories and the choices unfold on the screen) for the same screen efficiency. That's basic stuff. That's a minor thing for picking art, and it's already something that's screwed up.

Next, you get a "filespace." Here's how this works. When you create content online, you often upload it. Most sites give you a no-crap thing called an Upload button, and once you upload, it shows you what you uploaded. With deviantART, you can upload several files and publish only one of them at a time. It takes up space on the screen and looks rather stupid. What's more, there's no mass publisher. You can't create multiple submissions at once. So the filespace is completely NOT helping anybody with efficiency.

For writers, it's an even better set-up, because deviantART can't process anything other than .txt files. Anybody using any sort of modern text editor gets shut out, which is ridiculous. And writing text means opening up a separate window so you can write. Inefficient.

Comments is fine. You can't crew up comments. But deviantART tries: you get to PREVIEW your comments, because looking at how text is going to display, when the built-in text editor already shows the font format being used, is just SO necessary. And editing is not a simple matter of using the blank space on the side, either. It shows inside the comments box. You need to click again to edit. In an age where showing a live preview is so amazingly easy, deviantART chooses once more to mix the worst of old and new.

We also get keywords, to describe our art. Not that keyword shows up anywhere on the site. Does it help search? Maybe. We don't know. But what makes this so utterly ridiculous is the fact that sites have these things, you know, called "tags," where you USE things like keywords to GROUP things. So rather than having ridiculous categories that make deviantART a combination of elitist and ineffectual (elitist in that it fosters set groups of artists, rather than a sense of community, ineffectual in that it makes things so damned hard to use effectively - and if you look around, you'll see how caught up in these cliques some users are), we could use a BUILT-IN taxonomy system to navigate the site more effectively, and to give more power to users. Instead, we get to humor ourselves and make up all sorts of tags.

We also get a drop-down to deal with comments. On any rational site, there are two options: yes, and no. DeviantART, however, decides to "mix it up" and let us tell people how much we want them to say. This affects nobody, because nobody looks at that box, because nobody offers advanced critique, and because the artist is allowed to encourage critique elsewhere. Remember the "artist's comments" box? It's put there for a reason. And this isn't just basic ineffectuality here. We're talking a deliberate EFFORT to make things take longer.

Then we have two boxes saying we agree to whatnot. They're checked in by default. Honestly, what's going to happen? Are people really going to stop at this point, say, "You know what, I think I'll read these terms of service and then choose whether or not I agree to them," and then just uncheck that box and see what happens? No. They're going to submit their work because let's face it, they're already on the page and they're lazy. A simple "By clicking submit you're agreeing with our stuff and whatnot" message at the bottom would be just as effective, and far less cluttered.

I've written before about how awful deviantART's profiles are, and how awful their comments are. You can find the commentary around, I think. The overall message, however, is that deviantART is horribly cluttered and makes working horridly. I should be able to go through these things in as few steps as possible. I shouldn't need to know HTML to write. I should see the Submit information on one screen, no scrolling down, and just be able to pick a file and create my artwork. If I write, I want it to be as painless a writing process as possible. DeviantART doesn't give that to me, and it's entirely because of a lazy set of designers. We don't get directors that constantly tweak the system, like Facebook's designers (blog.facebook.com) and Google's designers (googleblog.blogspot.com and assorted blogs) and Digg's designers (blog.digg.com) do. We get the people running this site rambling about girlfriends, taking potshots at other users, and holding contests. Rarely is there talk about improving the system, with the exception of perhaps two "grand launch" days. The Internet does not need grand launches. This isn't software. We need constant tweaks, and developers making the system slimmer and slimmer. We do not need chatter.

I write this because DeviantART claims to be an art site. It's not. It's a place for social gossip and masturbatory self-congratulations. It's poorly-designed and it doesn't focus on quality whatsoever. It's a cesspool of artists who are mostly poor - most artists are poor - and who never get told what they're doing wrong.

Writers: right now there's no hope for us. There's no good writing site online. I'm trying to develop one, but until I'm done with my project it's on the sidelines, so don't expect anything before the summer at the earliest.

Visual artists: there's a bit more hope for you. Flickr.com is excellent for photographers. (Unlike DeviantART, actual professionals use it. This is a sign.) The service I just got access to, [link], isn't just an art site, it comes with its own top-notch editors. You can be professional online. Writers will have their day someday, but you're already free to go out and be profesisonal and make money WITHOUT lurking on a site that appeals largely to fifteen-year-olds.

For the record, I know it's mostly futile to write to a group of people largely known for immaturity. But there're good people out there on this site. I hope they see this, for their sakes. I hope they realize that staying here isn't helping them at all.