So I like having a Premium here on dA, I like the extra stuff it grants me, the journal skins, the insta zoom, the 120 deviations a page. The problem is, I'm not sure I want to renew it. The reason is . Po was one of my favorite artists on here. I love his work and frequently look through his gallery. Or did. I can't now. He's banned. He was banned for posting an image, that contained a thumbnail of a previously posted image for a previous dispute that proved the image was originally not a violation of the rules. In essence, he was banned on a technicality, because someone has a grudge against him.

Why do I say that?

It's because Po's art is tasteful, unless he's otherwise commissioned. So his work, all of which is great, and none of which as violated the rules in any extent worth being perma-banned, is discarded. It's not worth keeping. Yet this [link] an image of a 14 year old character, squatting and giving a panty shot has remained on deviant art for four years and is the first image you see when you search the characters name. Or this [link] a badly photoshopped image of some woman's underside that's on the front page when you search Tulip, which has also remained on dA for 4 years. Or this [link] which bears no artistic value, it is simply a woman spreading her ass cheeks so the world can see something that frankly I don't care to see. Or this [link] piece.

All of this, is allowed. All of this is fine. All of this doesn't get deleted. Report it, nothing happens. Do you know why? because the adminship is apparently to busy looking for reasons to ban actual artists. They're too busy trying to take the professionalism out of this site, they're too busy attempting to stifle actual creativity and promote these galleries as places for Webcam photos of your dangly bits and rule 34 trips and quick snapshots of a woman's breasts. They claim that the reason they want the .ART domain is so that it can remain with the artists, when they can't even keep the artists here, they drive them away of their own volition. This is slowly becoming less deviantART and more deviantARSE and that, is why I hesitate to renew my Premium.

Addendum: Yes I had almost forgot, another reason. The complete disregard of normal (read non-famous) users in regards to customer support. I gave give you two examples. One that is personal, and one that was very public. The personal one, is whenever I find myself unable to load portions of the site. I do some searching and find, others can't as well. Tickets submitted about these are handled one of two ways. Either the issue as marked as resolved and 'information has been passed along to CS for further investigation, or, just as commonly blame is placed upon me. Because surely it is the fault of me and the others experiencing these connection issues, not potentially dA's own servers.

The other clear example of disregard for normal users happened A year or so ago. There was that mass string of accounts being hacked into and deleted/deactivated. At first deviantart claimed there was no issue, that it was not a pandemic. Beyond that however they also said there was nothing they can do, once an account is deactivated, an account is deactivated. That changed however. , well known for his work with the Udon Group, had his account hacked, and then deactivated. He went public with this, and it just so happens they gained the ability to reactivate accounts that had been deactivated. For months, an issue that "didn't exist" was "beyond their control" until someone with weight in the art community was effected and made a stir about it, then suddenly they took issue with what was going on and magically gained the ability to fix it.

These are issues that pester me, whenever I go to reactivate my premium, it always nags at me "Why am I giving them money when clearly me, and this community, means nothing to them?"