The Rise of Virtual Communities by Amber Atherton

Author:Amber Atherton [Atherton, Amber]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781484292976
Publisher: Apress
Published: 2023-04-12T00:00:00+00:00

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023

A. AthertonThe Rise of Virtual Communities https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-9297-6_8

8. Angelo Sotira

Cofounder of DeviantART

Amber Atherton1

(1)San Francisco, CA, USA

DeviantART is the world’s largest virtual art community, in which artists and enthusiasts can meet, share, and sell their art. Founded in 2000 by Angelo Sotira, Matthew Stephens, and Scott Jarkoff, it was one of the first social networks, pioneering in permitting users to create free profiles, a space to post artworks and converse. Innovative features of DeviantART include the ability to comment with a drawing tool, instead of words. Llamas became an important mascot to the DeviantART community, added in response to an Internet meme as something that could be gifted between users. Sotira bootstrap funded DeviantART in 2000 with $15k, and it grew on cash flow until 2007 when it raised $3.5 million Series A from software developer DivX. In 2009, DeviantART raised a further $10 million and launched a world tour to ten cities globally, connecting the community in real life. The platform now sustains 30 million members, 65 million unique visitors per month, and 350 million artworks. In 2017, Wix acquired DeviantART for $36 million.

Atherton: Tell me about your early experiences with virtual communities. You became involved in Bulletin Board Systems when you first moved over to the US from Greece to Fairfax, Virginia, is that right?

Sotira: Yes, being 12 I was the perfect age to get a computer with a modem, so I was dialing into every BBS that I could find. Every time you logged in to one, you would get phone numbers for more BBSs. I became obsessed with profiling, documenting, and reporting on BBSs, then building community, telling people I met online which BBSs I thought were cool, asking for their opinions and recommendations. BBSs provided a place where you could chat, but were also used for the distribution of illegal files, games, and cheat codes. After a while, I landed on the Netherworld BBS.

The Netherworld was amazing. As a major BBS, the Netherworld came with a feature for game connection, like what we would use Xbox for now, but you could also hang out, exchange files, and so on. It was built by someone with the username Strider in his spare time when he was working at AOL. He made it for a similar audience to those who played Doom and Heretic, the first-person shooter games in the early 1990s. I spent a lot of time on the Netherworld board and got involved, designing maps and building some of the myths and laws. I made a lot of friends in the Netherworld, some of whom remain friends to this day. A lot of the roots for my projects in online communities came from that BBS. Back then, computers were really in need of a lot of work, so you needed friends who knew solutions, so you could make your computer work properly. Or even upgrade it to have that little performance boost which could give you an edge, perhaps on getting an extra frag, a kill in a first-person shooter game.

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