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dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2Bgp9PQ
So I have my queue set to run out on Sunday the 16th, and I’m probably going to unfollow everyone I’ve found on other platforms, everyone who isn’t a mutual, everyone who I don’t interact with at all, and I’m just going to leave it so my Tumblr dash is those of you who haven’t given me any alternate contact but who I don’t want to lose track of. So I’ll pare that way down; I’ll probably start unfollowing people soon. @unicornduke mentioned how much time it frees up to no longer scroll Tumblr endlessly taking in the firehose of reduplicated constantly-updating shit, and I admit, my DW Reading List pretty much fills that niche in a quarter of the time and about a thousandth of the wank. (I had my Tumblr dash pretty curated but I still saw a lot of you noble souls leaping to defense of people who were getting wanked about, and that’s noble, but not strictly necessary, in terms of picking battles, for me to be reading the defenses, you know? For the record I’ve had the phrase “q slur” blocked for like two years now, and if any of y’all used it unironically I had y’all blocked too, for fuckin’ real.)
After the 17th I’ll probably take a little Tumblr break, and then re-evaluate– how many of you all are left here, whether the site is really still worth looking at, etc.
I do know my presence on Pillowfort will probably be minimal. The recent clarification to their TOS has pretty well convinced most of the knowledgeable veterans I know that these people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Putting anything subject to interpretation right out there into the TOS is just demanding wank. And I’m tired, and I don’t want to see it. Literally anyone who has done this before could have told them not to do this, and there they are doing it: not only do they not know what the fuck they’re doing, they also can’t even take fucking advice about it. So forget that. It’s a shame, I was interested to see where it went, but I don’t need any more drama factories, I’m old and tired and fucking sick of the way people like to police women’s bodies and sexual expression especially. You’re really gonna fling yourself into the aftermath of “female-presenting nipples” with a fuckass stupid phrase like “appear to be underage” followed up with “discretion of the moderator”– oh my god it’s like none of the struggles which have come before ye even happened? We are not allowed to learn from history, we are only going to assume that we know better than those dumb old biddies. Fantastic. (And it’s not just the TOS… it’s things like accessibility, best practices, the rest of it. Christ on a popsicle stick. Nope.)
Some of y’all, that’s the contact info I have for you, so I’ll poke in there a while, but like. I’m not gonna get invested just to watch it burn down when the inevitable bad-faith exploitation of “discretion of the moderator” meltdown occurs.
(Your picture was not posted)
So I have my queue set to run out on Sunday the 16th, and I’m probably going to unfollow everyone I’ve found on other platforms, everyone who isn’t a mutual, everyone who I don’t interact with at all, and I’m just going to leave it so my Tumblr dash is those of you who haven’t given me any alternate contact but who I don’t want to lose track of. So I’ll pare that way down; I’ll probably start unfollowing people soon. @unicornduke mentioned how much time it frees up to no longer scroll Tumblr endlessly taking in the firehose of reduplicated constantly-updating shit, and I admit, my DW Reading List pretty much fills that niche in a quarter of the time and about a thousandth of the wank. (I had my Tumblr dash pretty curated but I still saw a lot of you noble souls leaping to defense of people who were getting wanked about, and that’s noble, but not strictly necessary, in terms of picking battles, for me to be reading the defenses, you know? For the record I’ve had the phrase “q slur” blocked for like two years now, and if any of y’all used it unironically I had y’all blocked too, for fuckin’ real.)
After the 17th I’ll probably take a little Tumblr break, and then re-evaluate– how many of you all are left here, whether the site is really still worth looking at, etc.
I do know my presence on Pillowfort will probably be minimal. The recent clarification to their TOS has pretty well convinced most of the knowledgeable veterans I know that these people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing. Putting anything subject to interpretation right out there into the TOS is just demanding wank. And I’m tired, and I don’t want to see it. Literally anyone who has done this before could have told them not to do this, and there they are doing it: not only do they not know what the fuck they’re doing, they also can’t even take fucking advice about it. So forget that. It’s a shame, I was interested to see where it went, but I don’t need any more drama factories, I’m old and tired and fucking sick of the way people like to police women’s bodies and sexual expression especially. You’re really gonna fling yourself into the aftermath of “female-presenting nipples” with a fuckass stupid phrase like “appear to be underage” followed up with “discretion of the moderator”– oh my god it’s like none of the struggles which have come before ye even happened? We are not allowed to learn from history, we are only going to assume that we know better than those dumb old biddies. Fantastic. (And it’s not just the TOS… it’s things like accessibility, best practices, the rest of it. Christ on a popsicle stick. Nope.)
Some of y’all, that’s the contact info I have for you, so I’ll poke in there a while, but like. I’m not gonna get invested just to watch it burn down when the inevitable bad-faith exploitation of “discretion of the moderator” meltdown occurs.
(Your picture was not posted)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 04:14 pm (UTC)Just, unbelievably, yikes. I'm not entirely sure how they didn't think their flagging and review process through, or why they'd think the internet runs on good faith but just. Wow. Nope.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 09:10 pm (UTC)That's what gets me!!! Do they think all us dumb old hags who've been saying hoe don't do it since this all started are just wicked morons to whom it never occurred to just be nice? I mean? what the fuck.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-13 02:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-13 04:45 am (UTC)https://www.pillowfort.io/posts/232963
https://www.pillowfort.io/posts/236678
The TOS announcement was made after the ban was enacted which is deeply infuriating - I don't even mind the ban but just, deeply, yikes.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-13 11:15 am (UTC)Yeah. I could see a situation where they've been debating it a while and are like ok we're almost ready to put out our TOS and then they see this user whose art offends them and they're like, ok, that's example #1 of what we don't want on here, but like... you send that person an email, you know?
And THEN you make your TOS update.
And you give that person some specified period to be in compliance.
And THEN you give a deletion warning.
And then you don't have a fuckass-stupid subjective TOS, you come up with something ironclad, and Christ almighty, as a woman who grew noticeable boobs at age 11 I am SUPER OVER breasts as an indication of sexual maturity ok, but that's a separate issue.
Sorry, that's how you run a small self-moderated LJ community you really just intended to be used by yourself and your friends, ok, not a whole-ass site.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-13 12:06 pm (UTC)And yeah, that would have been a more sensible way to go about it and idk, it seems like the intuitive, business-friendly one? Like *waves hands* its basic fucking logic, goddammit. You at LEAST inform the person and give them time to respond to the TOS update.
What gets to me more than anything else is the apparent absence of a flagging and review email! Even Tumblr does that! Even Tumblr has clarity on what the process on a TOS appeal is - but here's the thing, Pillowfort doesn't even HAVE a flag, review and blog deletion policy in their TOS. And I'm going to keep harping about this till I go to my grave, probably, but I emailed them about this months ago when that person - menderash - made that "lol this is totes not a callout but here's someone doing gross content on the pillowfort" post to BetaUsers thing (and people were talking about compiling communities that "encouraged" "gross" content) and they never got back to me. They had every opportunity to clarify and they didn't. It really comes across as though they think this is like running a small self-moderated LJ community but marketing themselves as the alternate to tumblr.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Doesn't exactly give me much reassurance that they're going to be able to reinforce the TOS in any coherent and reasonable way.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-13 12:32 pm (UTC)EXACTLY. Like, there are some communities I've been involved with where there was totally subjective shit, and it just had to be like that, but at least I knew there were some pretty efficient/fair/ruthless types at the helm who would be reasonably impartial. It's never a good situation, but if everyone has reason to have faith, then it's tolerable.
The first times I saw anything negative about Pillowfort I totally was like aww you big meanies be nice!!! and I look back on that and have to kind of put my head down on my desk. Like... oh.
You can pull the "aw they're just getting started out!" card for like. A month. maybe. It's been years now. I have been seeing posts about this for years. They're not just getting started out, at this point they have a lot of people's money and have made no attempt to follow any industry-standard best practices about anything.
They totally think it's the same as having a private little LJ comm for their friends only with real money and bigger, and they're totally going to try to make everyone on it be friends.
:( :( :(
WE WERE ALL ROOTING FOR YOU
no subject
Date: 2018-12-13 06:19 pm (UTC)Same! I was prepared to defend them and give them the benefit of the doubt, till recently but between the security shutdown and this - and what feels like a complete lack of transparency and communication (so. much. corporate. speak.) they're kind of making it hard for anyone to keep cheering them on.
Maybe if they showed some kind of responsiveness, or transparency! But, well. Either they learn from this or they tank.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 06:51 pm (UTC)I gave them $35. Ah well. It felt good to hope while it lasted.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 09:08 pm (UTC)I should at least f-lock the backlog but honestly that shit has been up since 2001 and has already caused all the drama it's going to, probably?
But maybe I'll get famous or something and wish I had. We'll see. It took me nine years or so to actually check and make sure the import had worked. (It said "failed" but gave no further information than that, and somehow I just couldn't bear to verify?)
PF might yet learn? I just feel like... part of the strength of the Fandom Community is that we do have so many Olds, and beyond that, people who are experts in such a wide range of fields, and so it's so accessible to get real, excellent, professional advice on so many different fronts, and PF just seems to have ostentatiously........ not.
I don't know! Maybe I'm so biased, as an Old myself, and I'm out of touch and shaking my cane at these whippersnappers for ignoring the wisdom of their elders (imagine all the sibilant sounds in there pronounced with a Disney-style whistling noise behind them a la whatever character that was) and so wrapped up in that that I'm just missing whatever it is from their perspective that makes, say, the hard lessons of DW re: payment providers, or the terrible saga of SixApart deleting things without warning or advance notice, into some kind of irrelevant side cases that don't apply here to this brave new world they're creating.
It blows my mind because their entire plan for this brave new world seems to consist of just... assuming everyone's got the same goals and is going to at all times deal in good faith with everyone else. It's *got* to be a perspective issue, there's gotta be something I'm missing, but I can't see what it is.
Really, though, it's that they deleted someone for violating the TOS they hadn't actually announced that really gets me. That's the red flag, and that's what most of the people I've seen reacting to it are really upset about.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 10:58 pm (UTC)Wired said that Baritz is a software developer in her own right and left her job to work on Pfio full-time. I don't know who she worked for or what software she worked on, though.
Like, when I found out that .io does not allow sexually explicit content even indirectly, that was disconcerting because that information is right there on the website on the page of rules. It's not hidden, and it's not the worst lawyer-speak I've ever read, and even if it were, wouldn't it behoove you to read the whole thing and make damn sure you're in compliance with everything before you register the domain name that you're hoping to turn into a replacement for one of the major social media websites on the planet? It seems super careless.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-13 02:20 am (UTC)And I'd seen a lot of weary grumbling from the beginning, by Fandom Elder types, and I was bummed and wanted them not to be so negative, but as soon as PF put out their first version of the TOS with the no-callouts clause-- I mean, I read it and was like "oh that sounds great" and then someone pointed out that how were you supposed to warn others about, say, known fandom predators like Andy Than and the like, if you can't ... say... negative... things about people? It rapidly becomes like the current kerfuffle with the GOP Senators getting mad that Google returns negative news stories about them. Maybe if you weren't a piece of shit, Steve King, there'd stop being so many results about what a piece of shit you are. Etcetera.
Overall the aesthetic and ethos of Pillowfort seems to be "We have the best intentions and so should everyone else!" and that is super great except that there are people with bad intentions in the world, and also not everybody's good intentions are going to align, and you can't just deal with that by getting mad at people for not being you, y'know???
I'm not consigning them to the abyss-- I'll totally still mirror some content there, and check in once in a while, and maybe there'll be some good art communities there after all?
Or maybe their moderators' discretion will have the usual chilling effect on creativity, and they'll end up a kind of weird insular little clique you daren't cross. I mean. Shrug. It could go either way and I'm largely reserving judgement, beyond not putting my eggs in that basket particularly.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-13 02:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-13 11:17 am (UTC)Mmmmmmmmmyep.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-12 11:08 pm (UTC)You can't help people who won't be helped.
Er. Hi!
no subject
Date: 2018-12-13 02:37 am (UTC)Hi! Do I know you from Tumblr or are you just a DW person? It doesn't matter, I'm just trying to achieve some vague sense of where I know people from, and it's a losing battle anyway but I'm trying. :)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-13 02:42 am (UTC)