There is nothing more irritating for me about v7 than logging in, seeing 5 or 6 "feedback" messages, clicking excitedly (I always get excited when I receive
any sort of feedback) only to learn that they are all birthday reminders.
Birthday reminders? Yep, so I can conveniently purchase them a Cake badge or something like that.
Birthday reminders are not "feedback". They never have been. It's not something that one deviant is giving me or doing on my behalf (i.e. +watch, +fave, etc). It's pretty dumb if you ask me. I watch people for their art (or other reasons), not because I want to buy them something.
This is yet another step dA has taken towards becoming a knockoff of MySpace. And I thought the "moods" were bad when they came out in v5. Personally I don't like this sort of direction. It makes the whole dA experience feel more shallow. I know this site played a huge part in me figuring out that I wanted to become an illustrator to begin with, but it just feels now that this site is more concerned with its image (hence the yearly makeovers that add more headaches than functionality) than it is with promoting artistic progression and development.
And really, the birthday reminders are a small part of the issue. There may or may not be some switch I can turn off in the Settings so I don't see them, but that's not really the point. Why do all these bells and whistles have to be "opt out"? It's just a hassle, the way I see it.
Anyway, that's all I have to say there.
Stay classy, folks.
-DC
`anmari has been spreading her infectious positivity throughout our community for over 6 years. Throughout this time Ana has been at the core of all things devious, passionately developing an eclectic gallery, helping organise devmeets, participating in chat events and also recently completed dedicating her time as a Community Volunteer. We are absolutely delighted to bestow the Deviousness Award for May 2013 to `anmari, congratulations! Read More
Sta.sh
Theme
Total prizes reach 1000 
!!!! 
But of course there are always the rules......
Please please please fave the journal!
Make another journal about this giveaway and provide a link of that journal in the comments (this will help spread the word about this giveaway)
this journal 
Rules
Should be about School Times!
oints:
, comment and watch!
Zeal 
Its started to effect me now. the llama badges were bad enough. now this....I wouldn't mind these if they didn't count as messages..
Usually i say "DO NOT REMIND ME PLEASE!". And try to hide the date.
And wow. So much people will see that i have a birhday.
This is crap.
All that started to happen to DA is useless and just make it bad.
I'm sad.
...anyway, I personally feel that a good portion (not all, mind you) of the updates to functionality are good. I like them. Not all of them of course, but not enough to upset me.
But birthday notifications and that crap are not an addition to functionality. They are spam, plain and simple. I *do* like the Llama Badges though, but that is primarily because I see it as a fun little adder that helps cultivate the image of DA (which is Fellas and Llamas IMHO).
While I don't see a problem with Llamas, the movements towards making DA more like MySpace (or any social networking site for that matter) is how DA is viewed in the real world. By 'real world' I mean by businesses, court systems and that sort of thing. The reason why this is a problem is because a lot of these folks view DA *as* a social networking site and end up treating it as such. This is a problem because the imagery found on these sites are considered to be free for unlimited public use.
Businesses that are habitually VERY careful about copyright infringement roll though DA and just start pulling stuff from galleries for t-shirts, graphics, magazine covers and the like not so much because they can, but because of the nature of what a social networking site is. And while DA does try to protect the artists, a lot of the copyright stuff that DA uses may simply be ignored in courts because DA is viewed as a social networking site and the images on a social networking site may not be protected under copyright laws.