Editorial:
deviantART is possibly the most popular art community on the Internet. Its community has been friends with our community since the beginning of this site. Its adminstrators have hung out here and WC's admins have hung out there. With milliosn of visitors a month, dA seems on the precipe of huge success. But last week, the company that owns deviantART fired the popular community founder Scott Jarkoff (aka "Jark").

More troubling has been the seemingly rewriting of history. Most long time members of the skinning community remember that it was Jark and his friend Matteo who founded and nursed deviantART. That it was their site and their vision. Such communities regularly get bought out by companies but rarely are the original founders rewritten to be minor players in the tail.

The CEO of the company that owns deviantART wrote this in response to the recent uproar over the dismissal of Jark: Spyed's response:Link

Excerpt:

"jark and I have worked together on deviantART from day 1. A little bit after the first year, we were joined by $mccann who created the Sonique MP3 player back in 1998. He began providing us with technical and financial assistance to keep it going.

Before this, deviantART was quite small and the costs of operation were nominal. With it's rapid growth thereafter, it began costing an arm and a leg to operate.

I was the first person to work on deviantART full time in 2002, and am also the only co-founder who took the risk of working with no salary at all. That is how much I believe in this community. I have dedicated my life to it. The other two co-founders have never worked fulltime on deviantART. They have always had either college, or a full-time job to contend with. Without question, especially in the early to mid parts of deviantART's life, Scott (°jark) sacraficed all of his available free time. And this was a significant sacrifice.

The second fulltime employee of deviantART was $chris at around the same time I joined in 2002. He was our CTO; today he manages our architecture.

I personally hand built and "installed" deviantART's first 35 servers. Chris rebuilt and maintained all of deviantART's code-base, servers and architecture beginning in 2002. We're talking math, computer science, architecture. That kind of stuff."

But Archive.org's caching of deviantART doesn't support these claims. deviantART was founded in late 2000 and even going forward into 2001, Spyed is not listed on the contact page. Why would a founder of the site not be listed on the contact page? Even using their dates -- 2002, that's a full two years after deviantART was founded which is a long time in the Internet world. By then, deviantART was already a success. Archive.org cashes throughout 2001 and into 2002 all list Jark, Matteo and a handful of others as the ones in charge, no mention of Spyed at all. It wasn't until mid 2002 before Angelo Sotira began being mentioned as CEO of "deviantART, Inc.", two years after the site's founding.

This isn't to diminish the importance of good business, capital, and infrastructure in deviantART's successful history. But deviantART wasn't founded in mid 2002. It was founded in 2000. Had deviantART been founded in 2002, even with the investment their CEO had lined up, it is unlikely that deviantART would be where it is today. deviantART's success was was a matter of timing. It was one of the few established art-related community sites left when the dot-com crashed in 2001. Through the efforts of its original community founders, it was in a position by 2002/2003 to be taken to the next level by investors. Both the company and the community founders were crucial in the site's success. But it is unenthical to discount the critical contribution that a couple of visionaries had, back in 2000, to create deviantART in the first place.