I may come here everyday, but the reality is I only do so to read $liquisoft's journal. Sometimes I'll catch a deviation in my dash to clear out my message center as quickly as possible, but otherwise I'm a fairly inactive user.

It's hard to imagine now how this site was the hub of my life just 4 years ago. For three years I litteraly grew up here, this was the Facebook of my youth. I was fortunate enough to meet some great people along the way too. The Summit and devMeets in Wisconsin and Illinois were some of the best times to date becuase of those people. deviantART's effects on me echo on to this day, if it wasn't for deviantART I probably wouldn't have even known such a thing as graphic design existed, becuase my High School guidance counselours sure as hell didn't.

At some point though it just all semed to go to hell in a handbasket. My friends where no longer here, and what people refer to the "good old days" had come to an abrupt halt. Everyone moved on, and I did so as well. The site had become so chaotic and massive that it was becoming more noise then signal for me, esspecialy considering the heavy skew towards anime at the time. Any attempt to come back in the last 4 years and reconnect with the site has been increasingly frustrating as well. My friends weren't here and wading through all the new people was an unplesent idea.

I still go to devMeets, and meet some cool people occasionaly, but at this point in time I'm not familiar with 90% of the people who work and run deviantART, the star artists in the community, or what the latest silly drama is (terms of service still a thing every year?). So I mostly stick to the KATG forums and design forums.

But at the HQ World Tour stop over in Toronto Friday I was supprised to see what could be a turning point, Groups.
Of course anyone who's been around a while will roll their eyes when I say the G word, having been hearing about it for 4 years now, but this time it looks like it's going to be a reality, and it looks like it will be able to cut through all the noise and give some of us old folks some signal again.

The idea of micro-communities, a portal for like minded people so much more powerfull then clubs could ever have been is something I can see putting the wind in our sails again.

Still one thing is lacking. Some sort of friend managment tool. I'd love to clean up my list of people I watch, but whenever I go to do so I get overwhelmed by the shear size of the list and the way it's designed. It's a wall of names I no longer know, and check boxes.

It was great to see $spyed again and meet $Heidi finally and feel like a part of the community again.
Everyone else I meet was super cool as well (the list would be too long). Except for `neom he was a real mean guy.