Ever since you were little, parents have always warned you not to buy anything unless it's truly work your money. (At least I assume they did) Whether it was in the candy section of the store, or whether it was the toy section, I always wanted to buy whatever I felt that I wanted in that moment, but my parents kept on reminding me. As you get older, you learn to actually check for quality before buying anything, as if you retained that habit from when you where little. Here are the reasons why I think premium membership in deviantart is complete and utter nonsense:

Just looking at the subscription features, half of them should be available for non-subscribers. On any other website you visit, there is an option to view things according to the order you want them. But deviantart is a special case. They want you to PAY to view more artworks per page. I find that a little strange, if not despicable.

Also, when displaying pictures on your profile page, they all show up in a small size and you have to have premium membership to display them in full size. Again, this brings me to the whole point of viewing artworks in a different way, which should be FREE and not worth purchasing.

Another feature is the "critique" section that you will be able to put if you have premium membership. Are comments not enough? Honestly, if people can tell you the same criticism in the comment section and critique section, why does the critique section exist in the first place? If I like a picture, I can just as easily critique it in one comment, rendering the critiques feature completely useless.

There also a feature for  able to use journal skins. Seriously? You need to pay to colour a journal? How will that affect the overall journal? The reader will still get the message in a journal whether it has some fancy doodles or not. Sure, you could argue that it's eye-catching, but you could easily make it eye-catching through bigger fonts, emoticons, or other icons which you can post FOR FREE. Yet another useless feature.

And what about the shoutbox? Does it not do the same thing as the comment section? Again, brings me back to the same conclusion that it is extra and unnecessary. Also, being able to display one of your gallery folders on your page is unneeded. Visitors can just as easily click on your gallery link and browse through it, it's completely free!

And because of this whole premium membership business, you have random people going around begging for points, which kind of ruins the whole deviantart user experience. The rest of the features are extras which you can easily live without, and should not be advertised in the huge amount that they currently are. Frankly, they're just not worth it.