The internet can be a terrible distraction when what you mean to do is get up, uncap those tubes of paint, and do your best to commit the image that's behind your eyes to some vague approximation on canvas.
Art takes time-- time to scale your own wilderness, sometimes in the dark-- and the internet has a way of leaching every last hour from the day before you've even noticed it's gone.
Then, one day, you stumble on to dA, and there they are: your actual peers, throughout the world, all striving for the same things you've been striving for; some are offering sage advice, some are heaping abuse wherever it will land, and a few are just killing time-- but mostly, you'll find artists engaged from both the right and left sides of their brains in the full-time obsession of art.
We're told that the left side of the brain is where language and logic abide, and the right side is where imagery and intuition brew, and for artists, the trick throughout their lives will be to reconcile the processes of one side with those of the other.
A right side impulse might result in a surprising choice of color, a sudden shard of inspired brushwork; an unexpected solution to any number of visual problems.
Explaining any of that in words with other artists, who understand the basic impulse, requires grappling with language from the left side of the brain, and can prove to be morale boosting, hysterically funny, or extremely sobering, and can lead to life-long friendships and working partnerships.
All of that happens because artists come together here with their own words and their own unique images; deviantART provides and maintains an infrastructure that makes it easier to do, and on an international basis.
Even if you never get to meet the friends you make here, and look them in the eyes, deviantART provides you with the means to see what really goes on behind those eyes; there is no stronger basis for friendship than that.
