Hello there,

After two months of roaming around on DeviantART, I think I'm finally getting the hang of it. Now I know what I want, where I should go or where I should stay away.

At the start I was thinking to get a lot of views and comments on my pictures, but soon I realized the cold truth: if you don't go to them, they won't come to you. So I started commenting all the way! And the more I did, the more I enjoyed it, people are always so cheerful when receiving comments. Especially the ones that don't get a lot of comments. Why bother writing a comment for a work that already received more then 1000 comments, who would read it? And second of all: the creator won't even come close to replying to it. Nah, I rather go through the list of newest photos, if I see what I like I'll tell the artist why. If I think it's close to good, I'll tell him what to improve. If I don't like it, it's probably just not my style. And what seemed to be a rough start, suddenly became joyful: nice discussions about pictures. Sharing thoughts about a certain subject can be so much more fun then counting your amount of received views everyday. So why would one even bother looking at how much views one is receiving?

A second thing is the favorites: I'm really wondering if those that have 1000+ favorites ever look at those pictures/works again after favoring them? I think people enjoy it more if people post a meaningful comment instead of favoring their work (at least I do). It even costs more time to comment on a work then favoring them. Only the very best should be favored. The ones that you want to see back, because there's a certain feeling that you loved about it. But I know myself, I'm not the guy who reads the same book twice (I like reading books though!), and most of the times that's the same with viewing pictures... Even some of my own pictures I only look at once, after I've taken them. Or sometimes a second time when choosing a picture to post here on DeviantART.

One real disappointment during my stay were the forums though... When I entered the forums: all just topics about nothing important, or topics that wouldn't be interesting to read, because everyone posting in there is just an unknown to me anyway. But when I entered a more serious topic the first comment was: "this topic is now about cupcakes", or something like that, you can guess what the rest of the topic looked like. Bye, bye forums! Instead of wasting my time there to create mass friends and watchers, I'll go back to the real stuff: discussing pictures. Discussing pictures that symbolize life. Discussing pictures about nothing and everything all at once.

Dunno if anyone will read this whole message, but if you do: feel free to comment and tell me what you think about your stay so far.

Greetings from Belgium,
Beirre Bibber