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Comment by sideproject | Hacker News Reader

Would you care to elaborate what was so amazing about the dA community? I ask sincerely as someone who was never a part of the community. I've visited the site in passing a few times, so I know of it. But would love to hear the specifics as to what makes (or made) dA such a great place for you (and others of course!)

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DA has always had a culture of being a safe place online to post something you've made without fear of ridicule. I joined in 2001 as a person-who-liked-drawing but had no scanner, so I tried out writing, since that was a category on there that other people were doing, and I got terrific feedback from a handful of strangers, who quickly became friends. Now I consider myself a writer. Programmer/writer, but writer nonetheless, and I don't think that would have happened without DA. I eventually became a programmer there for a while too, so maybe I wouldn't have become either of those. ;)

Anyway, as far as I could see, that welcome-to-the-community experience was happening to everyone who joined, if they were participating at least. It's bigger now, so it's hard to bump into the right people when you're new, but that same DNA is still there. Read the comments on any popular piece - it's usually positive and constructive. And often extensive.

I don't know if I'm replying well; I feel like this ultimately just sounds like "you had to be there" - but when it comes down to it, I believe the amazingly positive culture is the answer to "what was amazing?"

I think this is exactly it. Kindness was something built-in from day one, it was core to everyone who was responsible for steering a community. We talked about loving each other and loving the community very often and publicly and loudly. It also came from the top. Scott Jarkoff (co-founder) and especially Eric Kolb (dir of community) are really great people, they encouraged and in fact mandated a general idea of no assholes. Everyone on the community team had a lot of lee way to ban, and we banned liberally and often for anything that was even remotely off tone or out of culture. The cool thing about banning from the admin side is it was build in a "time out" manner, when you banned someone you would generally set a period of time the ban was for, and it was pretty difficult to ban someone for life. Rehabilitation was something we actively promoted. We worked pro-actively to resolve conflicts out in the open. We also made a pretty deliberate effort to instill a culture of positive critique and criticism. If someone posted something that was harsh or to the point, you could generally expect an experienced community member to reply with a suggestion to start with a compliment or something similar. Sometimes someone would even re-write a whole crit for a new member to show how it's done. We tried to humanize the site as much as possible too, profiles became very important, we encouraged people to be very personal in their journals. It was for sure lots of little things, such as around 2005 (I think but don't quote me) the community staff started talking among themselves about having a photo as their profile, not an avatar. The IRC community was also quite large and vibrant, and again the tone was always positive. Pedanticism was STRONGLY discouraged. Every time I was coached by Eric or Scott, it was always super: "you are awesome here is how you can improve btw we love you, be more awesome, you are awesome." - This is what Scott wrote on my linked randomly one day, you can get a sense of the type of dude he is: http://john.je/jIP5 -- As a note, this is the exact same way that the DigitalOcean community was built. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13714513

This culture sounds awesome. Prescient and rare nowadays.

fear of ridicule you say.

I deleted my account because a workmate found my lightsaber rotoscoping on DA.

I guess they mean you wouldn't fear ridicule from other DA members. But this is still the internet, people will find your stuff and possibly make fun of you because some people are just plain idiots.

I thought it was cool to learn rotoscoping i was trying to be the star wars kid or anything.

personal hug box, with areas to challenge your creativity and request the harshest of criticism if you so desired.

putting yourself out there in this way was also part of the networking aspect, as it was hard to get any attention to your artwork.

as we've seen to this day across a plethora of networks, nobody has come up with a real solution to discoverability in the face of volume, and I fear machines are just going to learn to do it the same way as humans.

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