The NEK ZONE

Margo’s on the prowl

Drawn in honor of my late friend who helped pick her name. Miss you, man. 😭

Every art website totally sucks.

Xwitter

I’m just gonna say it: Twitter sucked ass even before Elon came along. As soon as Tumblr banned porn, and all the people who made that site unbearable came over and mingled with the bad apples who were already on Twitter, it was all over.

Quote Retweets are the single worst feature I’ve seen on any website; it only enables the most obnoxious people you’ve ever fucking seen to “dunk” on each other and push drama onto your timeline, and you need a browser plugin for the option to hide them (please support that developer btw).

Of course now after the rebrand to “X”, this place has become a nuclear shithole. Alt-right bullshit gets promoted to the top of your feed unless you use plugins to fine-tune the hell out of it. The reply sections make it clear that this site has become Gab with an actual userbase. You now have to share web space with Grok, which is best known for letting its users generate CSAM and other non-consensual imagery.

Bluesky

God damn it, Bluesky. You were supposed to be the one to save us from Twitter. Why are you so VIBE-CODED??

This site is held together with duct tape and Facebook prayers. You can’t go a week on this fucking website without it slowing down or breaking completely. Everybody’s screaming at them to just allow uploading images in private messages, but they’re doing everything in their power to not add this feature that every other website has.

All these problems make it even more annoying to cope with the fact that half the artists you wanna follow are staying on Twitter, until it pulls a Tumblr and bans them.

DeviantART

Man, DeviantART used to be so cool. Now it needs to be put out of its misery already.

It has the stupidest moderation I’ve ever seen. They do fuckall about the stolen artwork from Twitter that takes up 70% of the home feed, but had zero problem removing one of my posts for…showing pubic hair? I don’t know, they didn’t tell me anything other than “You violated some guideline. Which one? Fuck if we know, lol!” And at the same time, people are uploading hardcore porn and completely slipping past the radar.

Oh and the AI slop. Cut me a break. It’s bad enough that the site became so overrun with AI that not even the “Suppress AI” filter can catch it all, but the site itself embraces it by offering its own AI generation tool. Kind of the polar fucking opposite of what artists want, don’t you think?

If it’s not AI slop or stolen artwork from Twitter, then of course there’s what DA is best known for: people with the mindset of children (or perhaps actual children) using it like it’s Photobucket, uploading barely-edited cartoon screenshots and making the worst “memes” in existence.

Mastodon (Any instance)

Cool idea, but nobody uses it. Federation just isn’t a feature anyone gives a rat’s ass about, and that’s the only thing it offers compared to Twitter. I can easily see normies getting confused over the mass amount of different Mastodon instances and giving up on it, on top of the nonexistent userbase compared to even Bluesky.

Pillowfort

God… I miss Pillowfort so much. I wish I was still on there. But after that disaster of a launch, good luck finding anyone who still uses it.

That Operation Bluebird thing

No. I’m sick of Twitter. It sucked before Elon. No one’s gonna pay $20 to leave the audience they have on X.

Okay doomer, what should a good art website have?

Glad you asked:

Zero tolerance for AI. This is non-negotiable. No generative AI posts, no vibe-coding on the backend. You can build shit without Claude, people have been doing it for decades.
Allow NSFW. This too is non-negotiable; look what happened to Tumblr and Imgur. And for those who don’t wanna see it, have a filter like Bluesky or deviantART.
Actually be focused on art and not just generic “posts”. Otherwise, people are gonna shit it up with politics, drama, and reaction gifs real quick. If you must, add separate journals like DeviantART.
Oh and speaking of reaction gifs, no images allowed in the comments sections. Reaction images get really annoying really quick.
Have a grid view of any given user’s posts. Tumblr’s archive pages are a great example.
Have a good tagging system. I like how Bluesky and Mastodon allow you to choose between seeing a specific user’s posts with a certain tag, or the whole website’s posts with that tag.
This should go for any website, but please no algorithm bullshit actively burying people who I’m following. Give me a nice, unfiltered view of every post from everybody I’m following.
Don’t be another Twitter clone. Half the reason people aren’t flocking to Bluesky or Mastodon is because they offer nothing substantially different from Twitter. We don’t want Twitter anymore.
Use decent compression if you must have it. Don’t turn everything into crusty jpegs. Don’t turn gifs into weird videos that don’t loop properly.
If video is supported, make sure the video player is actually fucking good. Tumblr’s video player wasn’t good, Twitter’s was worse, Bluesky’s is completely fucking broken.
This one’s dorky and no one cares, but RSS support is always cool to see.