Erica

At around that age and a little younger I was similarly obsessed with getting into to closed groups. I remember one time I made a whole application for a pokemon/animal crossing ARPG without knowing anything about animal crossing, just because I saw artists I liked getting into it.
I had to back out after getting in because I realized I didn't care at all about actually participating once I was there.
I'm better at fighting that impulse now.

Half Life 2 on your 2006 games-in-progress footer is VERY funny, though.

does bear do their own imagehosting 'cuz I... really like this

the photobucket watermark in your dA footer has aged me another 20 years

yeah i definitely commiserate with that feeling of chasing the viral hit... i think it's been a fundamental road block in my art for years now. honestly it may have soured into bitterness at this point and it's not motivating me to do more art.
as an insecure person i seek external validation for my work but social media has been a disastrous place to try to find it. cohost was a little nicer but i still got fixated on getting those notifications and mentally tallying reposts and follows...
idk what to do about it. "art sads" are the reason i only draw like once a month

The “popular” pages were mostly what got clicks in the last 24 hours—you rarely saw anything go viral there because it’d just be whatever the most already-popular artists had posted that day

god, I remember this structure used to cause its OWN bizarre externalities, where teenagers would become micro celebs in a specific fetish or fanart niche so their fans would push everything they made onto the front page, and then they’d get in huge fights with anti-fans who hated constantly having to see it

the name “snapesnogger” still periodically rears itself in my memory like an old war flashback lmao