I finally got around to cleaning this account out. I've been fairly uninterested over the last two months, and that's pretty much all down to the bullshit with subscribers and ads. Although the topic itself didn't stress me much, the way that everything was handled by the admins was ... words fail me really. It showed a complete lack of respect for any of the subscribers that just left me staggered, and in the end convinced me that I really didn't want to leave my material on deviantart any more.

As a relative newcomer to deviantart, events around July with regard to jark's dismissal and all were like walking into a room and turning the lights on, only to find 20 or 30 people standing there with bloody knives in various states of stabbing the other 20 or 30 people... most of whom immediately hid them with a "what? me?" expression.

However, I got to watch the ad stuff happen. There wasn't much in the way of ambiguity, or confusion - from the pov of just a random schmo, all I could see was arrogance and disregard from the admins. I'm still angry, which distresses me somewhat - I've avoided devart ever since because it just ruined the last little bit of hope I had that devart could continue to be somewhere I wanted to be associated with.


In the spirit of perhaps providing some feedback, or at least highlighting what it was that made me so mad:

A Short Customer Service Test.

1) You provide a paid service to your customers, but the service is going to change in the near future. Do you:
a) Make changes to the existing service in preparation with no announcement
b) not say anything about the upcoming changes
c) warn people the changes are coming
d) lay out the plans you have and welcome feedback.

2) Customers have noticed that you have changed your service, and they ask questions. Do you:
a) Respond vaguely in a way that implies its a problem you are fixing.
b) Respond with an explanation of what is happening, but leave the change
c) Apologise, reset the change and explain what is going to happen soon
d) Reset the change, apologise and offer small reparation for the distress

3) The day has come! Your changes are ready to be released.
a) make an announcement of the new situation without giving any explanation about the old facilities that you have retired
b) make an announcement of the new situation and note why the old facilitiy has been retired
c) make an announcement of the new situation, and for the customers that have lost a facilitiy they paid for, provide some credit toward the new facility

4) Bonus question - assuming you answered (a) for the above 3 questions....
When your customers complain do you:
a) ignore them for a time
b) reply in a snarky fashion
c) switch the facility back on, in effect suggesting that it never needed to be turned off.
d) all of the above.


Guess what answers DevArt provided?
Maybe the business needed to make the changes. I dunno. I don't really care, because my problem isn't with the changes, its with how they were handled. Its with the complete disregard for the people THAT PROVIDE THE ARTWORK without which deviantart doesn't exist - and in this case, those specific people that are paid subscribers, not just the random passersby who generate advertising revenue. To make that clear, it was the disregard for the people who though this service was cool enough to go out of their way to support it not just with artwork, but with cash.

I don't comprehend how any business expects to continue when they behave this way towards the people who use their service.

So, I'm gone.