Where the fuck did Deviantart’s “popular” page go?

…not that I discovered a lot of new art there lately, because I’m not into anime feet and body inflation, but ever since DA nuked its “random deviation” function, “popular” has been my backup means of discovering new artists.

(DA’s curated “daily deviations” page seems to skew toward things that the corpos think will make them a quick buck; lately it’s been DA’s in-house generative AI, now that NFTs and NFT-like “exclusive art” markets are falling out of favor. I’ve found some good stuff on “daily deviations,” but I don’t want to rely on it entirely. And I distrust DA’s home-page algo for the same reason.)

A quick side trip to the smoldering hellscape known as Reddit confirms that DA not only did in “popular” but “new”.

I guess this is another stage in DA’s years-long decay, just like its UI changes, its axing of no-fee commissions for already-paying subscribers, the abandonment of its (bad, IIRC) mobile app in favor of its (even worse) mobile web UI, the exodus of artists who didn’t want their work scraped and pureed into slop…

I’ve had a DA account for 16 years, and it still has enough art to keep me around… for now. And I don’t have an Artstation, Cara, or (whatever other platform comes along) account… yet.