Daily Deviations Descriptions

Greetings!

My name is Danielle or moonbeam13, and I'm the Director of Community Relations here at deviantART. During the course of my day part of what I do involves shaking things up and testing new ideas to keep things fresh in the community.  Most of these ideas stem from community feedback - things the community has related back to my team of volunteers or to me directly.

Such is the case with Daily Deviation descriptions.  First, let's clarify what was tested and what the end result is because there is some confusion.

Originally, I had requested that the volunteers not reuse descriptions sent to them by suggesters.  I know it seems nutty but there was a period of time where I was receiving an unrelenting amount of complaints about us just 'pasting what the suggester said' and so I decided that for a short period I'd let the community see what it looks like when we don't do that. As suspected the amount of complaints about 'no descriptions' was almost as high The other change is a character limit to the descriptions because the long ones were breaking the interface and offsetting the page.

The official guideline to volunteers is:

1. There is a 400 character limit (this limit is being played with) on descriptions so we don't break the interface with long descriptions.

2. You may choose to use a description the suggester has sent you with the DD suggestion.

3. You may choose to write a description of your own

4. You may choose to not write a description.

Now that we've cleared that up, let's talk about descriptions in daily deviations as I'm clearly not a description writer.  First things first, in regards to 'reusing something the suggester said', I have no problem with that.  Like our community, the volunteer team are not all "English as a first language" and finding the right words is not as easy as you may seem.  If the suggester sends something awesome, I say use it! To that same end, I'd hate to not feature a great piece of artwork just because someone couldn't think of flowery words to accompany it.

Descriptions are not a defense - they don't exist to defend why the piece was selected and they shouldn't be required to do so.  It's safe to assume that the piece being featured is something the selector feels needed to be shared with a wider audience and that's it.  I've had the Art is Subjective argument (ahem debate ) more times than I can count but I truly believe that to the core.  I am emotionally driven by most of the pieces I select and you can probably recognize how I'm feeling by the favorites I've selected that day.. that week.

Art in every medium can affect you this way.  The music you listen to, the movies you watch, think about it.  In the same way that whatever you listened to when you were 14 maybe doesn't resonate with you now when you're 22.  There are so many factors that go into the emotional connection to art that it's sometimes a wonder to me that we don't disagree more on "What is Art".  There are the hardcore components of technique and technical skill I suppose but I've seen that line crossed on walls of great museums and there's entire art movements that don't particularly appeal to me.. (I never really got the red dot on white canvas rage thing) but if art is about self expression, I'm just the voyeur into someone's internal voice and who am I to judge that?

I spend an inordinate amount of time looking at art and contemplating it as I'm sure many people here do.  I like to consider the internal voice of the artist as well as the overall visual effect of the piece. When it comes to descriptions on daily deviations, I'm one of those people that opts not to write one.  I haven't written one for a very long time and it's not because I'm lazy it's because I felt my descriptions were leading people to see the image in the same way that I did and I wanted the viewer to experience it for themselves.  

This is not to say that descriptions should go the way of the Dodo bird, I believe people in the community and volunteers love them but there is no one way to do things that will appeal to everyone so my decision is to give the volunteers a choice as stated above.  If you are someone who loves descriptions, I highly encourage you to include them in your suggestions to the appropriate volunteers

I want to remind everyone that if the volunteer team or Community Relations seems to be doing something crazy it's probably my doing and I encourage you to speak to me directly via note or email moonbeam13@deviantart.com and share your thoughts and concerns.  Feel free to reach out to the volunteers as well but please, don't blame them for my actions as 99.9% of the time it's my doing so to lash out at the incredibly amazing volunteer team is misdirected and unfair.

Last but not least! To my incredible team of volunteers, thank you for enduring my crazy ideas - I am honored to spend my days alongside you all