Communities on the web often formed around common interests and niches. As they grew, their utility began to shift to more mainstream elements
Most people think of the web as a magical other life, as someplace else and not, in point of fact, real. That’s bunk. Our web lives are real. So just like real life, communities tend to cluster together around ideas, and form microcosmic subcultures in the process. Sometimes, this leads to terrible groups feeling empowered by their own echo chamber. But as the web grew over the years, other groups began carving out a small space for themselves. Friendly, welcoming spaces with a set of procedures, social norms and unwritten (and sometimes written) laws. They are at once strange and wonderful and anarchic and structured and an important fabric of the web.
There’s a thread that makes its way through these communities. They often start with a simple idea and a domain name. But as that idea begins to resonate out with a larger and larger group of users, the sands shift, and the community transforms the site from the inside in a sort of symbiotic relationship with the site’s owners.
Like, for instance, Newgrounds. Newgrounds was not the first community site on the web, but it was a fairly powerful one that grew organically over the years with, of course, some help from its users.
Newgrounds was created by Tom Fulp in July of 1995, at a time so early in the web’s history that CSS was still basically just an idea. It started out as a website version of Fulp’s video game zine, but in the late 90’s, Fulp discovered Flash. He began making some pretty innovative, though fairly controversial, games using Flash and decided to throw them up on the site so others could play. These games were primitive, but they resonated with a good amount of people. And Fulp built a following.
In April of 2000, he officially made Newgrounds a community by opening up a new section of the site called The Portal, allowing anybody to submit and post content to the site. This was just the chance a lot of Newground visitors were waiting for. They quickly posted games, artwork, and videos in the hundreds, soliciting feedback and creative inspiration from others. Fulp’s followers flipped the script. As The Portal grew, Fulp took the lead from his new community and began to hear them out when they wanted something new. Which is why Newgrounds was the first site to allow user voting, the first site with ad monetization and hosted the first ever “viral” videos the Internet had seen.
During this time, Newgrounds adopted a new slogan. “Everything, By Everyone.” This wasn’t just lip service, it was a statement.
The site welcomed users with cheeky handles, like LegendaryFrog (creator of One Ring to Rule Them All) and the Super Flash Brothers. These creators brought a raw aesthetic to the site, which began to find a true niche with budding amateur animators experimenting with Flash for the first time. The community grew together, and users learned from one another, even informed one another’s style.
By the time Newgrounds reached it’s peak in the mid-aughts, it was leading a new animation revolution. There are quite a few professional animators that got their start posting to Newgrounds. Like Studio Yotta, a pair of Newground devotees that have since animated shows on Cartoon Network and Nick.
Web communities, though, come in different shades, there’s hardly a mold that can contain them. So someone could take the Newgrounds formula, spin it around, change it here and there, and create something entirely new. Which is exactly what happened with DeviantArt.
DeviantArt launched in August of 2000, and was originally just a user submission extension of the DMusic Network, a site owned and operated by one of the three DeviantArt co-founders. Its expressed purpose was to collect user contributed Winamp skins. But that purpose didn’t last long. Within months, users had flooded the site with submissions from across the creative spectrum, from comics to drawings to animation. Through a little bit of direction from the site’s creators, and a whole lot of creative exchange and chance, the DeviantArt community found one another.
If Newgrounds was subversive and organic, DeviantArt skewed more towards the whimsical and polished. At the center of it all was the profile page. It stood as an online extension of its user’s artistic identity, decorated with their latest “deviations” freely organized into very neat (or very messy) directories. Each time a user posted something new, they could solicit feedback from and toss around ideas with a group of collaborators and fans.
These pages became a place of conversation and confidence, and a way of announcing ones artistic endeavors to the world. It was extremely personal and the members of DeviantArt were particularly picky about the amount of control they were given over these pages.
Because, as you probably know, site owners and their community don’t always agree. Which tends to lead to some friction. In 2009, DeviantArt put up new share icons next to each deviation, which allowed visitors to post to social media platforms, and even embed images on their own site.
The only issue was, these buttons were not optional. And sharing might be a given today, but it wasn’t always. Some members even saw the act of sharing as equivalent to that of stealing. At the very least, giving users access to an embed link made art much easier to rip off. Others had simply built semi-private pages and followings for themselves. They knew they could be found (everything was public after all), but that it wasn’t very likely. Sharing threatened the foundation of this idea and some users most sacred of spaces.
At the behest of their users, DeviantArt eventually made these share links optional.