I've used deviantART for a while, and have found it less than useful for promotion of my art. I've been thinking about what could be improved and here's what I've come up with:
There should be a robust recommendation system so that good art can easily spread virally across dA. Right now it takes a lot of effort to promote your art (presumably until you reach a certain point of popularity, which I have yet to get to). This could be handled much more organically. When someone faves a piece, they should be given the option to recommend it to a friend, or this could be done automatically based on options people have set on what type of art they like recommended. To keep recommendations from becoming spammy, users should have the ability to record the quality of the recommendation, so that they get less recommendations from people that don't share the same tastes as them, and more recommendations from those that do. By doing this, relatively unknown artists will have an easy way to quickly spread their work.

Let me know what you think of this, and who in the dA staff could be reached with this idea. Thanks!