[This entry was originally prefaced with a thumbnail for a Group journal. Neither the Group nor the journal survive, though the direct comment links still work.]

So from what I understand, upper management went on a firing spree in 2012 that gutted the site's creative and technical wings, and has been trying to compensate for this shot-in-the-foot ever since. Suddenly, all the bizarre decisions of the past few years become clear. I only joined dA in January '12, but the pattern I saw even from then was snap-decision changes, declining functionality, and for a supposedly community-oriented site, an embarrassing (and steadily escalating) contempt for the user base itself.

Remember when site updates were posted weekly? Even while most of it was just technical maintenance, and regardless of whether Community Feedback was a serious pulse-check or Staff just being polite, it was a regular and consolidated forum both for specific gripes and conversation about the site as a whole, and offered minor predictions on the direction dA was heading. When those updates stopped, which was shortly after Webcams were axed, I read it as retrenchment of public discourse. Sure enough, what have recent site update announcements been but unpopular changes touted as game-changing revolutions, hoisted on us out of the blue? There's a beautifully ironic quoteworthy by Canadian dictator Stephen Harper on accountability: "When a government starts trying to cancel dissent or avoid dissent is frankly when it's rapidly losing its moral authority to govern."

It's tragic, but perhaps not unexpected, that dA has fallen victim to the Management Primacy Paradigm, but the fact that the staff of an art site is sacrificing its actual workers is deeply alarming, especially given management doesn't seem to have a clue what it's doing. It forces in features no-one wants, removes what people found useful, and spends months trying to get it all to even work. It blows huge sums of money on a controversial rebranding that many say makes the site less identifiable. It's promised grandiose changes and never delivered—it's been well over a year since Webcams were axed and nothing concrete has been said on a replacement. In response to user bleed, management apparently thought the solution was to become every social media site ever, which as several comments to the article note, led to an oversaturation of 'noise' in the user interface that makes it piss-simple to fav on the fly, but does nothing to encourage direct interaction with the artist—which is completely counterintuitive to fostering a community. The consequence is an influx of social-media casuals that compound this attitude, and further alienation of older and professional users—Staff's trading gold for garbage, and calling it the better deal.

dA is in a dangerous position where all the decision-making power is concentrated in an upper management with no long-term vision, while its continuing staff cuts only hurt the site's basic operation. If the current trend is anything to go by, the best we users can do is raise awareness of the rot; there needs to be a leadership coup, and that can only be done by Staff themselves. If dA were publicly traded, I suspect it would have already happened.

"Objects need management. People need leadership."