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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2Srhl4r
walburgablack:
the shit thing is, I love dreamwidth but I joined tumblr so I could mindlessly infinite-scroll my way through pictures and occasionally read meta.
yeah. dreamwidth doesn’t really meet that need. i’ll be delighted if more fannish creators wind up over there– it is INFINITELY superior for text-based works and actual conversations, and I have been acutely suffering for that lack– but it’s not designed for anything to go viral, and it’s really not ideally suited for visual stuff. I was just admiring what a revolutionary concept the “gifset” is, and I know it was a native artform to Tumblr.
I love the visual stuff, and being able to put it in a queue. When I go to the farm and have 3 minutes total to spend online per day for a week or two at a time, it’s really nice to have left with a full queue and come back to my blog having been a little active without me, and to scroll through the pages of notes on the things I reblogged and see people’s reactions, and what conversations that sometimes started.
Of course, no conversation was sustainable beyond maybe two exchanges. But I sure got a lot of conversations started.
It was a good way to do fandom-culture-osmosis, too. You’d inevitably follow people who were into stuff you were Not Into, but in scrolling past those gifsets, you could absorb enough of what the thing was that you could recognize it, and if it was something you were maybe into, that was a great way to find out for sure before wasting your time consuming the source material.
But I’m talking about it in past-tense. Lots of people seem to believe this isn’t The End, and I’m sure it’s not, but understand, once widescale bot-driven censorship begins, nothing is safe; it is the end, in practical terms, if not literal. You can deem yourself Unproblematic all you like, but there’s no appeals process here; they’ve given a list of what they say they’re banning, but I’ve seen enough examples to understand that, no. That list is not what they’re after. It’s what they say they’re after. What they’re really after is entirely up to them, and has nothing to do with what you’re hoping it will be. (What I have seen flagged: a clothed author selfie with her new book, a photo of a puppy, a collage of menorahs, black-and-white pencil drawings of men standing talking to one another, paintings of clothed men hugging, a largely text post talking about how the content moderation isn’t likely to work on a technological level, art of Spiderman fully clothed sitting on a balcony, anti-censorship blogs’ entire blogs, and of course, Truth coming out of her well to shame mankind.)
This site was largely built by sex workers and fandom, but that’s not who they want using the site. They want aesthetic bloggers and corporations. They want pop culture without the troublesome fen who insist on reading the TOS and wanting them to abide by it. Since when has this site ever worked? Since never, and all of us who use browser extensions to make it actually usable are unwelcome. They don’t want power users. They want casuals they can advertise to.
They won’t get what they want, because as all corporations misunderstand, the power users are the ones that make the site cool. You need the uncool geeks to get the bleeding-edge content.
Dreamwidth will never be slick. Arby’s will never open a shitposting account there. In fact, I don’t know that you can really “shitpost” at Dreamwidth; I’ve been wondering, but I’ll probably have to rely on Twitter for my shitposting needs. (But at what cost…)
Meanwhile my Strikethrough post has taken off again so RIP my dash.
(Your picture was not posted)
walburgablack:
the shit thing is, I love dreamwidth but I joined tumblr so I could mindlessly infinite-scroll my way through pictures and occasionally read meta.
yeah. dreamwidth doesn’t really meet that need. i’ll be delighted if more fannish creators wind up over there– it is INFINITELY superior for text-based works and actual conversations, and I have been acutely suffering for that lack– but it’s not designed for anything to go viral, and it’s really not ideally suited for visual stuff. I was just admiring what a revolutionary concept the “gifset” is, and I know it was a native artform to Tumblr.
I love the visual stuff, and being able to put it in a queue. When I go to the farm and have 3 minutes total to spend online per day for a week or two at a time, it’s really nice to have left with a full queue and come back to my blog having been a little active without me, and to scroll through the pages of notes on the things I reblogged and see people’s reactions, and what conversations that sometimes started.
Of course, no conversation was sustainable beyond maybe two exchanges. But I sure got a lot of conversations started.
It was a good way to do fandom-culture-osmosis, too. You’d inevitably follow people who were into stuff you were Not Into, but in scrolling past those gifsets, you could absorb enough of what the thing was that you could recognize it, and if it was something you were maybe into, that was a great way to find out for sure before wasting your time consuming the source material.
But I’m talking about it in past-tense. Lots of people seem to believe this isn’t The End, and I’m sure it’s not, but understand, once widescale bot-driven censorship begins, nothing is safe; it is the end, in practical terms, if not literal. You can deem yourself Unproblematic all you like, but there’s no appeals process here; they’ve given a list of what they say they’re banning, but I’ve seen enough examples to understand that, no. That list is not what they’re after. It’s what they say they’re after. What they’re really after is entirely up to them, and has nothing to do with what you’re hoping it will be. (What I have seen flagged: a clothed author selfie with her new book, a photo of a puppy, a collage of menorahs, black-and-white pencil drawings of men standing talking to one another, paintings of clothed men hugging, a largely text post talking about how the content moderation isn’t likely to work on a technological level, art of Spiderman fully clothed sitting on a balcony, anti-censorship blogs’ entire blogs, and of course, Truth coming out of her well to shame mankind.)
This site was largely built by sex workers and fandom, but that’s not who they want using the site. They want aesthetic bloggers and corporations. They want pop culture without the troublesome fen who insist on reading the TOS and wanting them to abide by it. Since when has this site ever worked? Since never, and all of us who use browser extensions to make it actually usable are unwelcome. They don’t want power users. They want casuals they can advertise to.
They won’t get what they want, because as all corporations misunderstand, the power users are the ones that make the site cool. You need the uncool geeks to get the bleeding-edge content.
Dreamwidth will never be slick. Arby’s will never open a shitposting account there. In fact, I don’t know that you can really “shitpost” at Dreamwidth; I’ve been wondering, but I’ll probably have to rely on Twitter for my shitposting needs. (But at what cost…)
Meanwhile my Strikethrough post has taken off again so RIP my dash.
(Your picture was not posted)
