#what part of me makes social media algorithms think i will enjoy seeing that instead of blowing up in frustration

[the-geeky-fangirl]

heartstopper isn't cringe it's just sincere and you guys are weak as fuck

#oh no an emotion without any irony whatsoever how will i survive #that's what i hear anytime i see someone call heartstopper cringe #which keeps happening for some reason #what part of me makes social media algorithms think i will enjoy seeing that instead of blowing up in frustration #heartstopper #heartstopper season 2 #nick and charlie #tao xu #elle argent #tara jones #darcy olsson #tara and darcy #tao and elle #issac henderson #alice oseman #kit connor #joe locke

[umber-cinders]

Hey fic writers, can I just-

This is my blog so Imma get on my soap box for one more thing about the whole "spam likers should be blocked" rhetoric.

People seem to have taken the idea from places like Instagram that spam liking gets you shadow banned because the algorithm thinks they're bots and—let me be clear when I say this:

THAT IS NOT HOW IT WORKS ON TUMBLR

Bots do not like your fanfic and fanart posts and tumblr does not ban you for getting multiple likes in a row!!!

Likes are literally part of the algorithm because tumblr has changed from the way it was back in the 2010s. Reblogs are absolutely one of the most helpful and valid ways to see posts on here—and people should definitely be encouraged to reblog and share with others, but reblogs are not the end-all-be-all of pushing content on here anymore.

The posts that the algorithm shows you takes into account the posts you yourself have liked and what those you follow/interact with have liked. You know these little feature here in preferences?

THEY ARE ALL BASED ON LIKES AND FAVORITE TAGS

Its why you see posts like this if you turn on the option.

Likes have become almost as equal in the algorithm as reblogs. Nowadays, a lot of people on tumblr's userbase only views the site via the mobile app instead of a laptop/desktop. It means that they're more likely to hit the like button on a post and scroll on so they can go back and find it later than they are likely to stopping every second to reblog each post.

That's just how things are now 🤷🏾‍♀️(and yeah that sucks lol)

If you don't believe me, the next time you see a post that has a lot of notes suggested to you in a search, tag or on the For You page—or anywhere on here, check the reblogs vs likes. Sometimes they're relatively equal

But I have noticed that a lot of the posts suggested to me also have way more likes than reblogs.

Again, I am NOT dissing people asking for reblogs because people really should be trying to reblog things from your favorite artists/writers/fandoms, but sometimes people will look at a post with a lot of notes and are more likely to reblog it. If you're looking for engagement then likes count towards that.

Social media has trained us to look at posts with a lot of traction (notes in this case), and make us more likely to share it. When you discourage and block people engaging with your posts via likes, you're just making the algorithm less likely to push your posts in the first place unless someone reblogs it.

And hey, if that's your jam, go on ahead, but even posts with ZERO notes that haven't been liked by people I follow get pushed to me if the algorithm thinks I'm going to enjoy it based on what I post and have liked before.

I could also get into the fact that with the way tumblr is set up, you could be blocking people that have to like posts and follow you from their main blog and reblog via a different side blog.

You could be blocking people that are too shy to openly engage with certain content right off the bat.

You could be blocking newcomers into your fandom.

You could be blocking people that see your content promoted to them in passing and might decide to come back and follow you later.

If you don't care about likes and only care about exposure via reblogs, then uh...ok. But my point is: please stop spreading the idea that likes mean nothing on tumblr 🙃

With all that being said:

PLEASE LIKE AND REBLOG YOUR FAVORITE ARTISTS, WRITERS AND FANDOM CREATORS✨

#aight stepping done from the soap box now #ao3 #archive of our own #ao3 fanfic #ao3 writer #fanfic #fanfics #fanfiction #tumblr writers #writers of tumblr #Bipoc writers #black reader #x black reader #black writblr #tumblr

[kissa-pgdl]

The Great Unfriending Experiment

As an active social media user, specifically Facebook, I have friends that I linked in various reasons like; hobbies, interest, humor, and close related people (like my family and friends).

How did you choose the friends you unfriended?

As it was instructed I unfriended 5 "not-so-close" friends and 1 close friend. I directly scan through my lists of Facebook friends and found people whom I shared interests before, and most of them are from friends of friends that I am not familiar with. The one close friend I chose is one of my best friends.

For each "level" of friendship, how did you feel about unfriending?

For 'D', I was fond of the book she was role playing back then that I constantly chat with them, sadly, she is now inactive, and I wasn't that interested anymore.

Same as through with 'A', we share the same interest back then.

For 'K', and 'J' they were a friend of a friend, as I stalked them, I realized that I am not even acquainted with this person, so I took them out of my list.

For 'V', they were an active poster of their daily lives, and I was so entertained, they were rich, and travels a lot, we had the same interest but I found out she left Facebook.

I didn't feel much when I unfriended the said person above, because we weren't close, or just slowly drifted apart. I would say that 'V's content will be the things I would miss most because the posts she shares are very interesting.

And lastly for the only close friend-- 'F', we have a group chat that is active everyday, we share most of our daily lives and some juicy gossips, we see each other rarely nowadays because they are having their busy year in college. I was hesitant when I choose her to be part of this experiment and was afraid of her interpretation about it.

How did your friends find out they were no longer friends and how did they react to it?

The 'not-so-close' friends and my close friend, weren't able to notice that I have unfriended them, since Facebook doesn't notify their users when someone unfriended them. So, it was kind of disappointing to have never received a 'why?' from them.

When you were choosing between two friends to unfriend, what made you decide to choose one over the other?

In my circle of close friends, I only have 2 of them, and it such a coincidence that one of my closest friends is also my classmate, so since she knew and is going to do the same activity as I do, I choose the other one instead and it was, 'F'.

Who is the one friend you think you'll never unfriend?

It is hard to choose between my group of close friends, so I would say that I would never unfriend my all time partner, my cousin whom I grew up with and enjoyed childhood with. We share a lot of stories now that we're apart and help each other when in need. They rarely visit home now, so unfriending them would not make me keep in touch with them, anymore.

How did your friends react when you have "friended" them again?

When I added my close friend (F) again, they thought Facebook was having problems, when in a matter of pact, it was my doing. She still accepted my friend request after revealing to her about the experiment. And the rest, I didn't added them back.

During the experiment, I had not-so-tough decisions for this experiment. When I choose the five not-so-close friends, I also had to visit their profiles, some really was not that active anymore and some are not that close with me, rather have friends that I am mutually friends with on my account. It was rather nerve-wracking when it came to my best friend, not knowing what their reaction would be, would it create unnecessary riot within the group, or would it lead to ‘friendship over’? I unfriended them and didn’t add them back for almost the whole day just to really test if Facebook would show signs, like literally sending them a notification that I have unfriended her, but there wasn’t any shocking or confused reaction from them. I was able to understand how Facebook algorithm works for unfriending accounts and never sent notice to the unfriended friend. So, I was relieved when I found out about this to those 5 friends I unfriended, that I didn’t add back after this experiment. To my close friend, whom I added back was then, just getting notice of me asking to be their friend again. The sign of confusion was then evident there, as Facebook informed them. They chatted on our group chat and asked, “anat kwen yu? Hahahahhaa” and sent photo of me and our friend, who is also my classmate in this course, of us sending friend request at the same time.

#COM120 #com120 #com 120

[chrisaldrich]

#FeedReaderFriday: A Suggestion for Changing our Social Media Patterns

In the recent Twitter Migration, in addition to trying out Mastodon, I’ve been seeing some people go back to blogs or platforms like Micro.blog, WordPress, Tumblr, WriteFreely (like Mastodon it’s a part of the Fediverse, but built for blogging instead of short posts) and variety of others. They’re looking for a place where they can truly own and share their content, often in healthier and more humane ways. Many are extolling the virtues of posting on their own website so that they own their content to protect against the sort of platform problems many are now seeing and experiencing on the rapidly dying birdsite. I’ve seen a growing number of people in/on several platforms reviving the early Twitter practice of #FollowFriday to help people discover new and interesting people to follow.

As a result, while everyone is exploring new platforms and new online spaces for maintaining their identities and communicating, I’m going to suggest something else interesting to shift our online social patterns: Instead of spending time on Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram, or other major social platforms, start practicing #FeedReaderFriday by carving out some time to find and follow people’s websites directly with a feed reader or social reader. Then engage with them directly on their own websites. 

I already spend a reasonable amount of time in a variety of readers looking at both longform articles as well as social media posts (status updates, notes, bookmarks, and photos), but starting this Friday, I’m going to practice #FeedReaderFriday. Instead of opening up Twitter or Mastodon, I’ll actively and exclusively reach for one of my feed readers to read people’s content and respond to them directly.

As part of the effort, I’ll share people’s sites I follow and enjoy. I’ll also suggest some feed readers to try out along with other related resources. I’ll use the tag/hashtag #FeedReaderFriday to encourage the website to website conversation. If you’re interested in the experiment, do come and join me and help to spread the word. 

Currently I’m relying on readers like Inoreader, Micro.blog, and Monocle, but there are a huge variety of feed readers and a nice selection of even more fully featured social readers available.

Just as many people are doing the sometimes difficult but always rewarding emotional labor of helping people migrate from the toxicity of Twitter and its algorithmic feeds, perhaps those of us who have websites and use social readers could help our friends and family either set up their own spaces or onboard them to social readers in this effort? Mastodon’s decentralized nature is an improvement and provides a reasonable replacement for Twitter, but eventually people will realize some of the subtle issues of relying on someone else’s platform just as they’ve seen issues with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or the now defunct Google+. 

Feel like you’ll miss people’s content on traditional social media? There are definitely a variety of ways to follow them in a variety of feed and social readers. Not sure what RSS is? Feel free to ask. Know of some interesting tricks and tools you use to make discovering and subscribing to others’ blogs easier? Share them! Have fantastic resources for discovering or keeping up with others’ websites? Share those too. Not quite sure where to begin? Ask for some help to better own your online identity and presence. 

It may be a slow start, but I think with some care, help, and patience, we can help to shift both our own as well as others’ online social reading and correspondence habits to be kinder, smarter, and more intentional. 

What will you read on #FeedReaderFriday? Who will you recommend following?

Featured photo by Dulcey Lima on Unsplash

#digital humanism #fediverse #feed readers #FeedReaderFriday #FollowFriday #Mastodon #micro.blog #RSS #silos #social media #social readers #Tumblr #Twitter #Twitter migration #WordPress #WriteFreely #IndieWeb

[letoscrawls]

Hiiiii

I hope you're doing well!

I would like to ask if u have and advise about starting and art account on insta. I have a small one here on tumblr but people say insta is better for art accs. So I just create an account and start posting? Or do I promote myself in some way, maybe taking dtiys and other challenges?

Thanks in advance:D

Hi! thank you so much for checking on me! :) 

okay, i get this question quite often and i wish i could give you solid advice, but the problem with instagram right now is its algorithm. when i started my account it wasn’t that fucked up, so i don’t really know how it is for new artists who have just started their accounts now! but i can tell you that it really affected every artist, even the bigger ones, so please keep that in mind. if you “fail” to reach your audience it’s not your fault, instagram is literally sabotaging artists and i don’t know for how long it’ll be “the best platform for art”. so just to warn all of you, i don’t want you to compromise your mental health for a social platform that makes money out of our stress and insecurities, i’ll try to share what i think could work because sharing art can be really rewarding and shouldn’t be an ordeal so i’d be happy to help somehow!!!!!

so this is the “algorithm tricks” part: 

when i first opened ig, i remember my stories were viewed by at least 100 people for the first two days even though i had less than 10 followers, so i think that’s instagram way to encourage you to keep posting, so my first advice would be to post your art in the stories too, at least for the first week or something?? now, i know the algorithm is currently promoting reels, so if you’re skilled with those go for it! make videos of your creating process and stuff like that. it’s important to inform your followers when you make a new post bc the chances of it being noticed are higher, you have to do the work bc ig won’t show that post to most of your audience (did i mention that i hate whoever made this algorithm?? yes??) i’m not really sure about this but i think ig prefers the reels you make with their set of editing tools instead of just uploading a pre saved video (i think it’s their way to sabotage those who post their tiktoks), i’ve never tried them so i don’t really know what they’re like, but i’m pretty sure tiktok is way better. i read somewhere that IGTV aren’t ig big thing anymore, so i don’t think you’d get much engagement from them. in general i’d say to always promote your posts in your stories and to wait at least an hour before editing a post bc i think you’ll lose engagement if you edit it right after posting (i know, it’s so stupid).

the use of hashtags is the only thing that i approve, because it’s an helpful tool made by social media before it got so bad and they really help you to reach more people (that’s like their purpose, i just wish there weren’t dozens of other stupid rules to follow in order to be noticed besides hashtags). so using tags like “art”, “artists on instagram” and “daily art” along with tags related to the pic you posted (like the name of the character or the fandom etc) is really helpful, just don’t use unrelated tags bc it’s annoying and idk how convenient it is :P the last thing is promoting your posts by using the sponsored feature; i never used that because i’d rather eat a slug than give money to instagram, but if you have the possibility and you are okay with that then you could try!

now for the “artsy” part

artists have found many ways to bypass the algorithm and keep the community alive over the years, challenges are probably the best way to do so! dtiys are awesome, not only they help you get more recognition, but they also make artists incredibly happy! i should host one very soon myself, i’m looking for a pose and an outfit to draw one of my ocs in, hopefully you’ll see it soon! i cannot explain how happy it makes me to see people draw a character of mine, and it’s great to see them in so many different styles, so i highly recommend dtiys! usually the artists who host them post the entries in their stories too, so yeah, you should definitely try those! there are other challenges like art vs artist, memes etc, it’s incredible how creative the community is despite all! and lastly, draw fan art! contributing to a fandom with your art is so cool, personally i prefer it over original content most of the time, i feel the need to share my point of view and to let out all the idiotic thoughts i have when i consume some kind of media so i’m really biased, but every artist is different, so don’t force yourself to do something if you don’t feel like doing it! drawing something you don’t particularly enjoy because you want to get recognition is gonna make you burnout REALLY BAD, trust me, i personally think that passion>effort, so never forget to put your enjoyment first!!!! 

okay this took me a while and i hope it was helpful! good luck!!! i definitely forgot something dskfjhis

#ask #faq #art tips

[msgrumpygills]

Social Media Anon Here!

Firstly, never change Grumpy ;) you are probably the only person on Tumblr to LISTEN to another view and let it change a prejudice.

Secondly, the Padagram/Social Media change bus continues. Don't be fooled people will be looking at positive and negative reactions to that change on social media.

So here goes!

1. They are starting to market season 2 of Walker in Hiatus. That really doesn't happen. That means they know they need to target new viewers. They are acknowledging they have a problem. The main problem is Jared either didn't learn enough about production quality on SPN (Jensen/Misha were both more interested in behind the camera's) or that he thought he could stick a Stetson on and we all had such sh1t for brains we'd watch anything. So they need a viewer boost DESPARATELY and are going all out to (a) persuade Walkers remaining viewer(s) that it's worth sticking around and (b) get back old viewers or convert 1m+ viewers to season 2. So now we see all the cast (and Keegan has more followers than Jared and Lindsay has a VERY engaged following) trying to persuade their followers how fabulous Walker is. Expect this scrabbling to continue if they want their COVID paychecks.

2. Connected to 1, Jared has started trying to break out of the fandom bubble. I don't think he's trying for power couple (the clue in a power couple is that two FAMOUS people get together and create a super brand, here we have one niche C famous guy and a hanger on wife), I think we are in Jared profile raising and trying to raise his recognition score, which is probably a little low having half assed it in the last year and a half. He's doing it by scatter-gunning so I'm not sure it's going to stick.

3. Connected to 2,

(i) if I run my algorithm clean laptop with a "Jared Padalecki" news search, I get (a) a daily mail article on Jared "clarifying the rift" (b) a "hello" magazine saying he's been "inundated with support after death of "family member"" (c) the new york times article on Walker and Supernatural. It then goes into a variety of articles about Jared raising money for Holly's family (fucking atrocious in my view to use her death for publicity) and a series of derivative articles on his mantrum and later explanation. ONLY THE NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE MENTIONS WALKER other than as a throw away, all of the others link to Supernatural only. Walker isn't on the main radar of anyone as a show. It's not mainstream enough to mention. it has ZERO buzz.

(ii) if I run the same search on my compromised tablet, I get a SEA of fluff articles "jared padalecki goes to venice", "jared padalecki's wife wishes him a happy birthday" "jared padalecki goes to watch soccer" "jared padalecki goes to the wrestling". I'm expecting "Jared Padalecki defecates regularly" tomorrow.

At the end of that I get the same articles as in (i) but the majority of his publicity is still going through the fandom and the, not very viewed, endless zine type websites that update on every episode of every geek show every day.

So we are seeing, and I expect it to continue, a break out Padalecki, (who knows he and his forehead may wish to have a final crack at films), and a fluff Padalecki, trying to stay relevant a year after SPN relevance ended, because he hasn't got the same push for season 2 of Walker as he had for season 1 and Walker has zero presence. No one, not even the fans are talking about Walker.

Will it work? I don't think so. Keegan has 7m followers on Insta and that's because he's a photographer and writer and it's interesting. I would follow his account (I don't), but certainly it isn't a Walker instagram.

Jared is a clever guy, but he's boring on social media. He has a limited appeal. He does family snaps, hunk snaps, flogs orange pee and flogs his show. He says "family" and "mantra" a lot but that's really it. The clue is, if you didn't know who he was and came across his instagram you wouldn't follow him. Why would you? For a video of a guy running up steps? A smug picture of two middle aged men trying to flog you something?... (oh and lots of "brother" comments on Keegan's social media, which is irritating. It's like he thinks that is his repeatable formula and it isn't).

His media approach won't work because advertising and exposure pushes a product. In TV's case, it's not a one off product and there is a lot of competition. Product Jared needs to be more interesting (his mantrum's are the only exciting thing about him - and that is tragic) and his TV show just needs to be BETTER, well, a LOT BETTER.

Soooo, expect the Padapush to continue, but it's not about a couple, it's about individual marketing and for Jared breaking out of SPN bubble. For Gen, it's her tag along profile that she'll never break out of. She'll have to be satisfied with her superpower of being able to persuade people to buy toothbrush's and dog food (if she can).

Expect though the couple's bit to die off a little. Jared is getting over exposed. His engagement rating is plummeting (nearly 3% is a plummet) because of the repetitive photo content. He'll have to back off or people will switch off (I have already). What makes me laugh is.... from the dawn of time when cavemen took their wives 2 miles away for a new cave weekend.... NO ONE HAS EVER BEEN INTERESTED IN SOMEONE ELSE'S HOLIDAY SNAPS.... Gen and Jared apparently need to learn that lesson...

I might stop these posts now because, well, it's gotta be a bit boring for you and I write LONG. :)

Stay safe and wear your masks ;) xxx

I don’t want you to ever ever change, lovely! Also, I’m NEVER bored by your messages! You put so much effort into the research you do and the messages you send and it’s appreciated! <3 

I started following Lindsey on IG because she seems pretty genuine, and her cat is way too cute! Plus, I like her attitude. I haven’t followed her for the whole Walker season, but even she doesn’t post a lot about it. She posts interviews and then posts about that night’s episode, but other than that, nothing.  Can’t speak for Keegan, but how are fans and non-fans supposed to be excited about a show when the people STARRING in the show can’t be bothered? Maybe they’re all aware of how shitty it is or maybe they’re lazy, but it doesn’t make sense. 

I’m always interested to see the difference in an “algorithm-free” setting and one that has an algorithm. I always figured Google was the same for everyone, but seeing the difference in articles you’ve outlined is insane. It really just goes to show that Jared isn’t the star that his stans think he is. He’s not as important as they think he is, he’s just an actor.  It’s even more jarring to see just how little Walker is talked about at all. All of my devices probably have been “contaminated” when it comes to algorithm so I can’t really speak personally about the public and fans talking about Walker or not talking about it. I can say that on the posts about Walker from the Supernatural Facebook page, a good chunk of the comments are people saying they stopped watching, never got into it, or thought it was trash. There are only a handful of comments talking about how they enjoy the show. 

I think it was disgusting for him to use a fan’s passing for publicity. And no, I don’t think it was anything other than a PR stunt. Her family had a GFM going that was promoted by plenty of the case INCLUDING GEN, so you know he knew about it. But for him to make his own special one and then have articles posted everywhere about how charitable he is? That’s gross PR bullshit and I hope it backfires. 

I still follow a few Supernatural fans, Jared fans, Jensen fans, etc. on Tumblr and even they aren’t mentioning it. I think maybe the hardcore Jared stans post gifsets or whatever, but I don’t see much praise for the show itself, just Jared’s looks. Even the fans aren’t biting and that would make me reevaluate everything if I was Jared. 

I'm expecting "Jared Padalecki defecates regularly" tomorrow. This made me laugh way too hard!

who knows he and his forehead may wish to have a final crack at films You are on a ROLL!  Maybe I’ve become biased, but I can’t see Jared doing films. I mean, I could see him doing like a side character role or something small, but I can’t see him having a big part of a movie. Like I said, maybe that’s me being biased but I see him staying in TV. I could be proven wrong, but I don’t know. 

I agree about Jared being boring on SM. I used to get some giggles from his Twitter posts and even some of his early IG posts because they were goofy, clever, and candid. It showed his humor and was more personable. Now it’s just all fake and comes off as someone whose only motivation to engage with fans is money and that’s a big turn off. 

For me personally, I think that if instead of the “couple goals” bullshit that they try to push for their lavish trips, if they just posted cool pictures they took of different locations, activities, food or whatever, that would be more palatable than all the “Look at my hubster and I! We’re in Italy! Look at how in love we are!” But maybe that’s because I’ve become a bit of a photography nerd? 

I guess time will tell whether or not Jared will make positive changes and if Walker can be saved, but I’m not really optimistic about it. 

I AM optimistic about your takes on things so keep them coming! Long posts or not, I love them! <3

#grumpy answers #social media anon #anti jared padalecki #anti walker

[morethanaprincess-a]

I know this is quite a bit of time after I posted this meme, but I wanted to respond to all of the kind comments I received on the positivity meme when I really needed some last week! So I thought I’d save it for a Munday post, complete with pet tax beneath the cut. Mundays are better with pet tax, right?

@electricea

Thank you so much for your compliments, Jassi! I adore writing with you too, it’s so much fun coming up with new AUs for Ryuji and Sonia (and expanding on our established verses as well). You’re such a positive and encouraging person in the tumblr RPC and I’m pretty sure your dash agrees. Here’s to more IC adventures and me sending you ramen related news and saying “we’re working this into a thread, right? Right??”

Does Ryuji have the ramen pool float/raft already? Because that needs to happen.

@cadcnce

So uh, on a scale of 1-10 how mad will you be if I get a draft back to Eira by mid-week? To be fair, it’s not the same day please don’t point that gun at me

Joking (about what will likely happen on my dash) aside, I love writing with you and your many muses too! Bonus that we have plenty in common too, including being Old Muns with Old Mun Problems. Like roleplaying before tumblr and the fact that pogs are a bottle/milk cap game (I think I had close to 100 of them as an elementary school student, before I said I wanted beanie babies instead).

In short, I have so much fun both writing IC and just chatting about fandom and life OOC. Though the more I keep looking at Las Vegas-related things for RP research I’m just “Well, now I want to go and not gamble at all but do everything else.”

But I’ll finish with this: I do try to put my happiness first, and for me that’s when I’m writing every day and have a consistently-running queue. This is partly due to how organized I am about my work and my hobbies, and partly due to content creation and social media being a large part of my professional life. It’s not that tumblr RP is work, it’s that I can’t help but approach it, in a way, in a professional sense, taking in algorithms, patterns, activity, etc. into consideration. I look at a variety of statistics tumblr provides on my blog and often make judgement calls about content I post here that way.

It’s super nerdy and I know it. I also just can’t help it because it’s ingrained in me at this point: content planning, creation, calendars, analytics, etc. Pain for me is disorganization, a queue that isn’t updated, or answering asks/taking on more threads when I have replies I could write. 

@despairfiles​

Excuse me, every hour is Sin loving hours! Thank you so much for your encouraging feedback. You’re absolutely right: I’m definitely someone who likes to develop complex, long-term interactions over a variety of interesting situations. I know that can be frustrating sometimes with queued replies and wall-of-text replies, but it really is fun for me to show so much of a scene: the setting, the dialogue, the action, the thoughts and feelings. I tend to come up with most of my headcanons through threads at this point, too.

And I’m always going to say ‘challenge accepted’ when it comes to writing new stuff with Hajime and Shirou. If you feel compelled to bring Hajime back at some point I’m always here to write with you, and there’s so much story to tell with Sonia and Shirou too. I actually have a plot idea development for one of our verses on that front, I just haven’t put it into words yet!

Oh, and of course: Chatting OOC with you is one of the best parts of my day! Politics, spilling tea, me bemoaning that England lost Euro 2020 (the rest of the world doesn’t agree with me and I know it), you sharing your adorable dogs and wine sodas (I’m going to find the wine soda here. Somewhere.), agreeing that Lord El-Melloi II is a SNACC even if the fandom doesn’t agree with us, I adore it all. 

Seriously though I love him he is A++++ husbando material. This is where Sonia and I differ: she loves Shirou and I’m here just “He’s a professor who barely adults and realizes it is, indeed, a crisis when your favorite tearoom is closed. Husband material right here.”

@phantasmalcalamity​

Thank you so, so much for your compliments regarding my Sonia portrayal! That’s really nice of you! I’m not sure that my version is perfect by any means as plenty of people offer different takes on her, but I’m so glad you enjoy writing with her! Our Sonia/Gundham threads have been such a joy to write so far and I hope to continue and do more of them (without adding too much to your plate of course. I’m hoping you start feeling better, first and foremost!). You’re also wonderful to chat with OOC and I love seeing your costumes when you share them. It’s so cool having RP partners who are also cosplayers because you understand that unique struggle of “do I write drafts or do I work on costumes for upcoming con/event?”

I’m trying to balance both but it’s been interesting. Definitely after the fall cons/events I should have some more photoshoot stuff to share. I miss cons and photoshoots so much!

And as promised, some pet/life photo tax underneath the cut!

One of the two usual views I have when writing drafts/shitposting/chatting with you all on discord. Princess Molly received a new bed recently, befitting her royal status. She’s judging the quality of my drafts and wondering when she will be given pets.

And the other view I usually have while on tumblr. I’m missing Paris (and London. And Edinburgh. Let’s just put missing the U.K. and France in general here) quite a lot. I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to go back (probably whenever I go on my honeymoon), so I’m having a small taste of it at home. My family’s going next month, but work wouldn’t give me the time off to join them. 

The Laduree Marie Antoinette tea is my favorite version of the MA tea, and with shipping so expensive, it made sense to grab some macarons to go with it. 

I just miss Europe so much right now. Most of my off-tumblr friends are trying to plan trips to Japan next year, and I’m over here just “I actually miss Heathrow and Charles de Gaulle.”

#more-than-a-princess musings #(Happy Munday! Here's a too long Munday post) #(But at least there's pet tax)

[questsofagoddess]

Professional Communication Foundations Blog

From Systems to Social Networks

Systems thinking is a new concept for me, I’ve never thought of problems in a circular way like in the feedback loop. This way of thinking really fascinated me as it showed me how a communication problem isn’t always straightforward and until now I’ve always thought of communication problems in a linear way. Applying the connection circle to the first assessment definitely helped me see connections I wouldn’t have in the past. I struggled to draw the circle at first however watching the example of how they use it in kindergartens actually really helped me to grasp it, being put in such simplistic terms and understand the conflict resolutions feedback loops present. 

The other systems thinking tools were a lot more clear cut like the stock and flow map what goes in and what comes out which is rather straight forward. The ladder of inference made sense to me however it was a bit more challenging to create. The ladder of inference also really helped me find solutions for the PR challenge presented in assessment one. 

I didn’t realise that systems thinking not only helps communication problems but can also assist in making connections and understanding communication in a deeper way. Applying the systems thinking exercises to a social media influencer really made me understand what value they provide to their followers and understand the relationship between their followers and them on a deeper level. The Behaviour over Time Graph really helped identify and categorise the relationship with their followers and how it can change over time. I didn’t realise how effective these exercises would be for examining and defining communications relationships for business purposes and how useful they can be in a commercial sense. I would really love to implement these for my own social media business accounts and to help build the relationship with my followers over time. 

2. Pitching as Storytelling

This was definitely one of my favourite workshops as I really enjoy storytelling, being a creative person. I liked the point about when pitching and not just introducing a problem to the client because it can be rather off putting. However I like to think of the act of storytelling in a pitch as performative. Something that I’ve learnt from being a musician and voice coach is that if you are enthusiastic or passionate about something it is contagious and your audience will reflect that passion.

I was really proud of the story I brainstormed for our pitch about the dreaded group assignment as I think it’s highly relatable for uni students, which is the clientele that the library project was aimed for. I also think using that story on our initial pitch really helped us to launch our ideas at the client instead of dragging on about the problem. I definitely think pitching is one of my stronger skills so I would really love to use pitching to further my career. As an artist it’s definitely something that I have to do a lot in a performative sense and also in the industry. 

I can definitely see why people relate to stories and why our attention span is changing like in some of the readings for this course work have suggested. We can watch netflix for hours (probably due to its narrative nature) whereas we can’t focus for long periods of time in a meeting. So it definitely is an indicator that we need to change how we do things now to accommodate for this and implement the story based method of pitching. 

I also really enjoyed the exercise on reframing the conversation because I think that’s a highly important skill to have particularly in developing the growth mindset. If you can reframe a negative into a positive it can only help you to learn and build upon your mistakes and also it’s a positive spin is a more attractive quality in pitching and I think clients are more likely to go for that.

 3. Podcasting

This was definitely one of the most important topics for me as I’ve recently started recording my own podcasting and also because I would like to do it professionally in my career and possibly even go further as to enter the radio industry. I learnt a lot about podcasting that I didn’t know about such as the history, the many different types and that it’s an unregulated industry. I found the exercises very beneficial, I arrogantly assumed that the group podcast exercise would be incredibly easy however it was not. A big part of this was lack of planning and also not having our cameras on so we either ended up talking over each other or no one would talk at all. I think this workshop really taught me how to plan a podcast as well, I really enjoyed the tips at the end of the Caroline Crampton reading. Particularly the making a timetable and sticking to it, I’ve found recording my own podcasts they can very easily go over time and I think podcasts that are too long can get a bit boring after the first half hour. 

The common mistakes to avoid in the podcast article are all definitely things I want to apply to my own podcast. I clearly haven’t done enough planning like it suggests. It even suggested to do a month of planning before recording at all, which is what I’m lacking in my own podcasting efforts. I am yet to release the podcast too and I noticed that the second tip was to release it on a planned schedule to allow regularity for listeners to engage with the content. The other tip it gave which is something I also will ensure to do, is to promote the podcast, which wasn’t something I also haven’t considered in the planning process. I would really like to build it up and then use the podcast as learning exercise and experience to help give me a foot into the radio industry. 

4. Online Communities 

I think online communities are one of the best things to come out of the digital age. It gives people a shared connection. I myself am part of lots of online communities which have rules and regulations. I think these rules are also essential as they can help to avoid some of the negative communication that is a side effect of the digital age. 

 These communities can help us to connect with people even from behind our screens which is a definite needed form of communication especially since our social media isolates us. Particularly in the last year with the coronavirus pandemic, online communities have played a more important role than ever. Whether it be meme communities or self help or even online communities in which you can find furniture in your area. I think they all have a part to play in helping keep us connected. I have actually found lots of other musicians and work due to the online communities I’m a part of and they have even resulted in great friendships so they are definitely not to be overlooked in the communication world. Social Networks definitely use ‘homophily’ in connecting us which can really give us a one sided view of the world and really narrow down our beliefs. Whereas in online communities, yes we are connected in a sense by our ‘homophily’ however that brings also us together. It can definitely be a glass half full or glass half empty situation. Whereas the algorithm that social networks use overall can encourage this more negative connotation of closing off ourselves to and living in our own filter bubble. This workshop really highlighted the importance of getting perspective by being part of a the much larger global community which helps us to grow as individuals. We can see from Hofstede’s six dimensions of national culture how our society and business as a nation is defined and why we are the way we are and where we fit in, in terms of our global community and why it’s important to see beyond our nation.

 5. Internet History & Economy

This was a really interesting lecture as I knew some information about the history of cassette tapes and CDs but I didn’t know that CDs were made the same size as tapes so they could be placed in cars. It was interesting to see the commercial side and how it cancels out other business models like CDs to cassettes, Ipods to CDs. I never actually thought much about how the internet takes a massive toll on the environment which ultimately makes total sense. The photos that were shown of the Google Data Centre actually quite shocked me, I didn’t realise the full extent of it. 

 I knew that the communication parameters today have been turned upside down because of our technology which feels frustrating at times. Even after reading the article about social media not actually being social, it makes me question how this affects our growth as humans, surely depriving us of face to face conversations would take its toll in various forms. 

It scares me that our communication and technological advancements are born out of corporate greed no matter what the cost is to us as humans. Listening to Zeynep Tufekci’s ted talk and hearing about persuasion architectures in the digital world which are handcrafted for the user just confirms this fear. While watching the talk, all I could think of was ‘The Social Dilemma’ and how our data is now being used against us with algorithms. I actually read a quote around New Years that said ‘Say your 2021 goals out loud so at least the Instagram Algorithm will hear you’. It scares me the lack of knowledge we have as humans about the technology that we use every day. Listening to Zeynep Tufekci talk really demonstrates the digital dystopia we are currently living in and how it can be used to control and keep us under surveillance. 

 6. The Public Sphere in the Networked Age

It was interesting to see where the notion of the ‘public sphere’ came from, I found the Greek history quite a revelation in being able to look at where our communication means today were born from. Even though we now live in a digital world that threatens our human means of communication, I think that no matter how far we dive into technology, it will never take away our baseline need for face to face communication. It’s really obvious to see the filter bubbles and echo chambers that we face day to day in the digital world. The blurring of the public and private that has been brought on by the internet is quite evident particularly in the case of the celebrity. The 2000s gave us a regular look into the private lives of celebrities courtesy of the internet and now we can see that the idea of the celebrity has nearly been destroyed by the very thing that aided it, this blurring of public and private. Now anyone with a camera can build their own personal brand or empire by inviting their followers into their private life. The idea of the Public sphere is now clearly a rather complicated concept courtesy of the internet.  

The internet definitely brings on a whole new world of dilemmas that we didn’t have in the days of Ancient Greece. I’d like to think that class wars have been destroyed and we all as humans have more of a voice now with the internet however that would be naive of me. Seeing some of those ‘internet’ dark spots in the Internet History & Economy workshop proved clearly that we don’t all have equal access to this communication means. Even our filter bubbles and echo chambers destroy our idea of reality or at least warp it. The internet has become the stomping grounds for trolling, abusive language and a whole array of communication issues. The unhealthy ideas of cancel culture, which we can see happening right in front of us to Justin Timberlake in regards to his involvement in the Britney Spears documentary. 

 7. Ethics and Communication Practice

When talking about ethics in communication and the media, we are living in a time of polar opposites. Yes the practice of journalism lives under the microscope however for an unregulated industry it contradicts itself. Journalism practices reflect where we are in society however where we are is political correctness gone mad. Journalistic practices of late have promoted; cancel culture, disinformation and a vast array of other toxic practices in order to appear to be ‘politically correct’. After studying the introduction to journalism, it gave me a whole new respect for journalism and the ethics that hard news abides by however there are endless amounts of journalism practice that violate that very code of ethics. The workshop highlighted how advertising itself just reflects the society that we’re living in and we can see from social media, technology and the internet as a whole that we are living in a time of corporate greed. Where our data is bought and sold and used against us in prolific advertising. 

The irony is companies have to maintain their corporate social responsibility as we place them under the microscope however media practices have got free reign and act as the authority in our society. Their commercial focus often results in clickbait tactics and violating their own code of ethics in order to drum up salacious press. The media becomes the microscope for companies, brands and organisations and society yet somehow the media is nearly exempt from this microscope. 

In some ways our new media and digital landscape is also an explosive territory of landmines for journalistic practices. The unparalleled global reach via social networks also brings about a heavy responsibility on journalists in informing the publics like during the covid crisis. However we can see that that some forms of media who ignored this unseen ethical code by spreading disinformation and conspiracy theories only adding panic to the global crisis we are currently facing.

[aahsoka]

So having been on tiktok for a bit I wanna talk a little about it.

What I like

It’s actually rather entertaining to scroll through up to 30 second videos one after the other. Sometimes the humor falls flat or it’s not your taste, but the algorithim is quite good at recommending the kind of content you will like.

I joined right when there was a big trend going around about sharing your culture, and soon after a Blackout trend where non-Black creators stopped posting for a day & spread/supported videos by Black creators. So I ended up with a fairly diverse fyp or “for you page”. It also quickly gathered that I am bisexual, so I get plenty of lgbt+ content. There’s some art mixed in there, some cosplay, some historical costuming/seamstresses, lots of avatar jokes lately, musical theatre content, fashion, girls in bikinis on rollerskates (in outer space), commentary on political issues, body positivity, all the kinds of stuff I like. To get a feed that caters to your interests you just have to watch & like videos you’re interested in & eventually it gets a feel for what you’ll watch and what you won’t.

Theres a trend where people say which ‘side’ of tiktok they’re on and I get ‘science side of tumblr’ flashbacks but I’ve mostly avoided the “straight” and conservative sides of tiktok. I would be considered a part of “woke”, “alt” (as in alternative) and lgbt+ tiktok (there are separate ones for each letter of the acronym). Possibly also “theatre” and “cosplay” tiktok. These categories are nebulous and you’re usually part of multiple communities; its just as arbitray as ‘science side of tumblr’ was.

The format reminds me of snapchat a little, and I love to talk to myself on video & post dumb thirst traps for my friends (none of which I’m attracted to so idk what my goal is there) and make stupid jokes. So this app is kinda perfect for my attention seeking side & hyperactive tendencies. Its very easy to consume on a short attention span, though not as easy as vine was.

Being in quarantine, its a way for a lot of people to engage in hobbies that involve community. Cosplay is pretty popular, as its a fun way to show off a costume & dress up & have fun without having to attend a convention. I enjoy the way lip synced audios can be used to emulate the character someone is dressed as; that’s something you couldn’t really do unless you were really good at impressions. Its a nice succinct way to show the process of creating a cosplay as well.

Those who enjoy theatre, but cannot perform in shows at this time, are able to create mini-monologues & sketches as well as sing parts of their favorite songs. Its an avenue through which to perform without putting anyone at risk of the virus. It’s also an easy way to show off your talents without having to go through the audition process & actually get cast in a show as a prominent enough role that someone will notice it.

It’s a convenient format for discourse and educational videos. Nice, short, easily digestible tidbits that stay in your mind. This extremely catchy song, for example: “Black neighborhoods are overpoliced, so of course they have higher rates of crime, and white perpetrators are undercharged, so of course they have lower rates of crime. And all of those stupid stats you keep using are operating off a small sample size. So, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up”.

As well as other videos where people take the time to explain historical events, satirize racist arguments to demonstrate why they are wrong, talk about prevalent tropes in movies, teach a few signs in ASL, share facts about their culture, etc, etc. I have found there are quite a lot of people there from unique and fairly unknown cultures and backgrounds- and this is a place where they’re able to share their culture & existence with people all over the world. There are a thousand different viewpoints. Their videos are doing far more for diverse representation than any other platform, I’d argue, as everyone is extremely visible on the app. (‘Their’ as in the creators, not the app itself).

I also have enjoyed coming across new artists on the app. It’s really fun to watch the process they go through, as most art videos deal with the whole creation of a piece. It’s inspiring. I have also come across a painter who’s work I’m in love with, and a woman who makes and sells the CUTEST ceramic mugs, and I need to purchase some stuff from them both.

Now onto the bad:

Unfortunately, the app doesn’t have much in the way of a filtering or warning system. I talked about that tiktok of the kids coming across human remains? That was just on people’s fyp. Just popped up. No warning. No reason for it to still be up. Traumatizing.

You can click on a video and say ‘not interested’ (I do this to literally every video I get where some girl is thirsting after kylo ren 🤮..... like I want the star wars videos just not THOSE videos). However, it doesn’t seem to know exactly why you weren’t interested, because I still get those videos from time to time. There’s no content filter where I can blacklist the kylo ren or any other hashtag.

There’s some very shitty content. There are racist conservatives. Misogynistic teen white boys. Really weird thirst traps. Videos where people lip sync to something with a straight face and tag it with #acting. Harmful body image trends. I thankfully stay very clear of this, but this kind of content makes me worry for the minors on the app. The one’s who don’t have enough of a concept of self yet to realize they don’t need to be able to do the newest pointless beauty trend to be beautiful, to realize it’s ok for them to be gay, to realize how predatory some adults can be, etc etc.

It is extremely easy to come across minors on the app who don’t look like teens. One time I went to a girl’s page and it said she was FIFTEEN. I’m usually good at guessing ages but something about this app messes that up. I wish there was a way to separate people under 18 and adults. Where I don’t have minor’s thirst traps popping up on my fyp. Where pedophiles don’t get a chance to curate that fyp intentionally. If anyone reading this has kids, I highly recommend they make their tiktok private or only viewable to friends.

Just like any site, there are plenty of bigots. Lots of racist comments. Plenty of transphobia. Any hatred you’ve seen elsewhere, of course it exists on tiktok. I have actually zero clue if you can report people & if it works. Most people seem to send a video commentary to their haters or duet a video of a racist pointing out their racism. I’ve heard of creators blocking people, however. I remember a tiktok of a Black woman who’s video somehow went fairly viral in Poland and now she gets a lot of racist comments from this large group of random racisf Polish followers she has and its extremely time consuming to block them all, as there’s no mass block feature.

The rumors about what works with the algorithm and doesn’t abound. I’ve heard well lit videos get more views. Many people suspect they have been shadowbanned for speaking out about current events. TikTok will remove the audio from videos sometimes if they deem it controversial enough. Most of us know they were criticized recently for intentionally keeping Black creator’s videos from being seen (a catalyst for the Blackout, actually). Or you may also recall when it was criticized for widely removing lgbt+ content. Those creators are fighting to be seen the same amount as straight cis white creators are allowed to be seen with no effort.

The effects some trends could have on teen girls. So many of them are already so uncomfortable in their own skin simply because of societal standards, but the absolutely meaningless challenges people come up with on tiktok make it so much worse. One trend was based around whether your finger touched your lips when you put it in your nose. Or if you could get your clasped hands around the back of your legs and over your butt (if they get passed, you have a flat ass, if they get stuck, its big). These completely arbitrary signifiers of the things you need to have in order to be pretty, are far more ridiculous that anything I have seen yet in my life. I worry about little girls taking these ideas to heart. There is a very kind body positive community on the app & I hope more people can find that.

There’s also that thing where they steal your data. Like most apps. But apparently they got a lot more invasive than usual, so I would look into it before making an account; if you want to do that.

I think the apps users can be great & its a pretty intuitive set up. It certainly deserves its popularity solely as a creative form of social media. That being said, its owners are so so insidious & do the worst things. Just like all other social media, its controlled by the worst kind of people. Who can never figure out how to effectively get rid of nazis or keep kids safe from adult content.

These are my less serious gripes with the app:

1) Lip syncing

When people lip sync and don’t do any kind of skit, joke, etc, just look as if they’re saying what someone else said; I hate that. I have to go back and find the original tiktok so I can like it instead. You literally did nothing interesting by ripping off someones audio and moving your lips along to it. So many people on this app are creative and so many others lack any semblance of creativity.

Also people are too easily impressed by lip syncing to kinda-fast songs. I lip synced to like....10 seconds of the devil went down to georgia and two people praised my lip syncing abilities. Like, I can also sing and talk fast, out loud, isn’t that more impressive? more skillful? The fiddle playing in that song is impressive, not the fact I can lip sync ‘the devil went down to georgia, he was lookin for a soul to steal, he was in a bind, cause he was way behind.’ Have you ever seen someone play Johnny’s fiddle solo????? It’s insane!!!

Rather than see someone lip sync to the verse in Stressed Out 2x faster than normal (which is, extremely simple and the song was overplayed and ingrained into our collective consciousness) and go WOW what about someone.....doing the verse out loud. You can litterally just mouth random words and look like you’re saying the right ones. It’s driving me crazy lmao. I’m set to become a God of tiktok because I have a repertoire of fast songs and rap verses memorized. It’s not even an uncommon skill to speak or sing quickly, people literally make rap music for a living! Listen to it maybe.

2) “Acting”

I am begging you to stop making me sit through those horrible POVs. I cannot take another girl not quite fake crying towards the camera as she lip syncs the words from a song that apply to the random situation she decided she was in. I cannot take another boy who thinks its sexy to stare into a camera and smirk in every single situation he creates.

Back to lip syncing, making facial expressions along to words isn’t really acting. Try saying the words out loud perhaps? The inflection you use with your lines is a pretty big part of acting. Like you can lip sync all you want, just stop tagging it with #acting.

3) Comedic timing, or lack thereof

You don’t need the entire intro to sit there looking at the camera waiting until the first line starts and you can lip sync to the part that’s the joke. You could cut off at least 15 seconds. Brevity is the soul of wit.

When your joke involves both reading text on screen and listening to the song for the punchline, if it isn’t done prefectly, its so difficult to follow. I can’t read a paragraph in 5 seconds. Paraphrase.

4) self deprecating artist audio

the audio thats like ‘this wont get views’ ‘I suck’ ‘you probably won’t see this anyway’ LOVE YOURSELF

It sucks when people dont enagage with your art but it sucks worse when your value in yourself and you art is based solely on receiving that validation. Please find a healthy medium.

Also you’re asking for pity, and you don’t want that. You want people who genuinely love your art for what it is.

5) editing videos is really hard how do you make such cool & smooth transitions????

please help me I don’t understand

Finally

here’s my account if you’re interested

#this long ass opinion article no one asked for #tiktok #social media #jordan talks #long post /

[hrmphfft]

controversial opinion time I guess but

hey gang? hey, gang. gang, hey. blaming your fans for them not reblogging your content enough (and saying that they’re Directly Responsible For Tumblr Dying) is an extremely passive aggressive, mean thing to do, and also completely ignores so many other reasons as to why engagement has changed on this site and posts don't circulate like they used to.

for one thing, whenever I see these posts, I rarely see the ops acknowledge the HUGE HIT to tumblr's userbase following the 2018 policy change/implementation of tumblr's terrible content filtering algorithm. tumblr lost roughly 1/3 of its engagement (https://mashable.com/article/tumblr-lost-a-third-of-its-users-after-porn-ban/) and countless content creators with it. some of them migrated to twitter and other sites, some of them seem to have straight-up vanished into thin air, and countless others lost their biggest or main userbase with barely any time to shift gears to something else. that's a huge, website-shaking change! but so often in these 'reblogs vs. likes' posts I don't see anyone acknowledging that and it makes me really upset!

you can't talk about the ways tumblr has undoubtedly changed these last few years and NOT address the nsfw ban! it's completely unfair to your fanbases to shift the blame of the biggest displacement of users the site has ever experienced on...the users who had no say in the policy change and reacted accordingly when the site started softbanning everyone, and filtering all sorts of tags from the search function (including important sfw ones, lest we forget The Entire Furry Fandom on tumblr discovering that basic-ass tags like #furry and #anthro were being blocked when the ban rolled around), and making uploading anything vaguely beige-colored a dice roll. tumblr still hasn't recovered from that, and unfortunately probably never will, not without some hail mary of policy changes and overhauls.

I've seen some pretty ageist shit regarding content engagement as well that tries to paint younger users as just Not Getting how tumblr functions vs. other social media sites like instagram and twitter, and on top of that just showcasing a really uncomfortable disconnect/animosity towards new users whose only crime is being younger than op and also more experienced with other social media platforms, it also is just. it's really unkind? it's super rude? how can you call your followers too clueless to know how reblogging works and then expect them to support your content via reblogging and not feel like you're insulting them until they give you the result you want?

moreover, lots of young/new tumblr users get the gist of tumblr's controls and get it very quickly! technology literacy is becoming more and more a part of everyday life for everyone, and if you really think that a teenager can't understand that reblogging puts a thing on their follower's dashboards, one of the main functionalities of the site (and also very similar to twitter, one of tumblr's main competitors), I really don't know what to say. sometimes people just straight-up don't want to reblog stuff to their blogs, and that's okay.

there's also a tendency to ignore the ways that blogging on tumblr has changed as its userbase has became more well-versed in its functions and, frankly, a portion of the userbase has grown up on this site. when I first started blogging on here, I was 17, I didn't use tags, I commented unrelated (and frankly sometimes really regrettably rude) replies directly onto artist's posts, and I basically just reblogged whatever I vaguely liked, and a lot of things I didn't totally get but thought Looked Cool/Funny so I reblogged anyways.

and that's fine, that's pretty par for the course of being young on the internet and doing whatever you want and having a good time (barring the rudeness, being respectful to people is the ideal), but as time went on my interests changed, my time spent online changed (I went from highschool to college to a full-time job that limits my time on social media), and I began engaging with tumblr's content differently. I made sideblogs for interests and content themes I didn't want on my main blog, I started liking stuff and then going back through my likes to reblog posts later, and generally speaking my number of posts a day dropped and I stopped being able to catch up on my dashboard every single day. and I'm sure my experience isn't unique for some other people on here.

a lot of the tumblr users I've known for a while just don't have the same level of intensity in fandoms like we did years back, not because of any malice or selfish, content-hogging intent, but because our priorities have changed. I definitely miss a lot of things about years past on tumblr when fandoms were booming and new Big Name Creators were cropping up all the time, and to be fair that's still happening on parts of the site if you know where to look! it's just different now. time has passed. people have changed!

that isn't to be defeatist and say that we can't show up for content we enjoy and reblog it, but instead that people can feel differently about stuff they used to adore, and be more particular about one thing or another they reblog, and straight-up miss stuff that they would have really liked but just didn't catch up on for a myriad of reasons. and that's also okay. engagement on tumblr is really, really tied up in personal preferences, and sometimes it feels like it does that more than most other social media sites. this is kind of the wild west of internet presences and everyone operates differently on here as a result.

and probably the most touchy point of all: no one is obligated to give you validation on the internet. no one. not even if they've read all of your fanfics you've worked really fucking hard on for forever and a day, or your comics that you've spent months, years, a lifetime researching and creating, or your beautifully, painstakingly timed and masked fan videos. they can absolutely consume any of these, and more, and they're still not obligated to reblog your work or promote you. it's not fair, yes, and it's completely understandable and super relatable to want recognition for the work you've done and the ways you've brightened other people's lives, but online most of your fans are still total strangers to you, and trying to control the behavior of total strangers because you’re owed their acknowledgement isn’t a healthy mindset to have.

and you can say that any fan of yours stops being a fan after they drop you for you lashing out at them for not unquestioningly giving you space on their blogs like you're owed, but being upset at being accused of bad behavior for what amounts to not wanting to reblog something this time around and changing your opinions based off of that is also a very understandable thing to do.

and that isn't because of any sort of innate cruelty, or pointed attack towards you. it's just because there is always a disconnect between the creator and the creation, and some people will never bridge that gap and engage with you more, or build a parasocial relationship with you, or seek out ways to support you. and plenty of others will do the exact opposite! it's a total dice roll because you're dealing with a lot more people than you realize scrolling past your content, and every person is different, and some of them don't fully understand how reblogs help a creator, and some of them do but just don't want that content on their feed, and none of them are inherently bad people for that.

I'm not saying creators have to be perfectly kind and civil and praise their fans all the time, but when you engage with your followers like it's a battle where you have to keep devising new ways to get them to share your content, it just comes across as super disingenuous, and people cop to that very fast. 

it also, frankly, can make longtime fans who reblog your work regularly feel like their interest doesn't matter, and wasn't good enough, and that then it really is their fault that other people (other STRANGERS ON THE INTERNET) don't engage with your content the way you wanted them to. you don't owe them perfection, but that doesn't mean it isn't still an unkind thing to do.

so like. what can we do about this?

asking users to reblog your work is totally fine and can help! calls to action work more than nothing at all. it's possible to be respectful when asking people to reblog your work without also guilt-tripping them with "likes < reblogs" banners and passive aggressive tags/comments. generally speaking guilt is a really shitty motivational tool, and tends to breed more resentment than actual outcomes people want. like this post for example! I wouldn't have sat down and typed this all out if I didn't resent the hell out of being told I'm, personally, the reason tumblr is demonstrably not an ideal website for building a fanbase anymore. if I had that much power over this website I would have given the whole thing to the xkit team years ago and reveled in a functional website instead.

changing the way you post content might help! every site has its ideal posting days, times, and reasons for why some are ideal for one site and not another. doing a little research (https://sproutsocial.com/insights/best-times-to-post-on-social-media/) will yield some potentially helpful tips and tricks that might result in a post reaching more people. utilizing tumblr's search function is also important, and understanding the limits of the tag function (ie. only the first 5 tags of a post are used for tag searches) can help change one's habits to something a little more effective. this is why I tend to leave my tag babbling until after the main fandom/category tags on my posts, so that tumblr's jankass search has a better shot, haha

broadening your online presence can definitely help! this is by far the most terrifying option since it involves branching out onto other social media platforms, some of which really don't lend themselves to whatever fandom/content one produces, so like the other two above it's only a suggestion.

I keep coming back to twitter and instagram, but that's mainly because they're the two other powerhouses of social media right now, though admittedly they only really cater towards visual media (and mainly imagery, not longer video pieces), and they have their own weird quirks to learn and jank to deal with. but given how precarious tumblr's status has become in some ways, trying to build a presence on multiple sites means that you reach more people across the internet, and also means that if tumblr does yet another website-shattering policy change, your eggs aren't all in one basket.

of course these options aren't foolproof, and won't work for everyone in some cases or not at all for others, but my main point in all this is this: tumblr has irrevocably changed, its userbase has changed, and we are limited in the ways we can directly influence it, but there are still options. I'm by far not a social media expert, but then again none of the posts I've seen so far were made by social media experts either, so I honestly don't feel too bad for throwing my hat into the ring while we're all thrashing about in confusion

y'all aren't wrong that things have changed, but I'm begging you to have some compassion and to try not to turn the relationship between creators and consumers of content into a battleground, especially when a lot of the influences on these changes are things entirely outside of any of our's direct control.

also because it makes y'all sound exactly like this:

#long post #site engagement #a big long pissy rant because I am so goddamned tired y'all #especially because I can't escape these Hot Takes because none of them are tagged consistently #and new ones keep cropping up all the time #it's like whack-a-mole #every post I block sprouts another a few months later #tone doesn't carry through the internet very well but rest assured when I see shit like this #paired with people's screenshots of their like/reblog ratios #and it turning into a 'u think those notes are small check this out' party I get #really goddamned fed up with it #this is of course not comprehensive and mainly just me whingeing @ the whingeing but sometimes u just gotta

[nickgerlich]

Inconvenient Truths

If we have learned anything in 2020, through the pandemic and the lead-up to the November election, it is that social media is really nothing less than a battle ground of opposing ideas. It is where relationships are splintered, where liars and fakes are as common as truth-tellers and the legit, where conspiracy theories come home to roost, where curated content begins to sound a lot like an echo chamber.

And where we go to replenish our dopamine drip.

It doesn’t take a social scientist or tech whiz to tell us these things, but when they do, as in The Social Dilemma, a Netflix Original docu-drama, it speaks volumes. After all, the people interviewed in the 90-minute social media bashing are all former employees of some of the biggest, baddest blue ribbon tech firms in the world, or noted academics who have more chops than a butcher.

If Netflix was hoping to sound a call to action, they are probably a little late. We’ve known for a long time that social media and even email sites have their tentacles wrapped around us, that advertising has become more direct and specific, that we are--just like the point was made multiple times throughout the film--the product itself. After all, we don’t pay for these things, unless you are one who pays for the premium LinkedIn access.

In other words, the price of free, or to be a little less blunt, the price of participation, is that we must endure a lot of inconvenient things we may not otherwise like, but are willing to tolerate because the sites and services allow us to stay in touch with so many people.

Let’s look at some of those inconveniences. We are barraged with a steady stream of advertising that has been fired with laser accuracy, thanks to the sites’ knowing practically everything there is to know about us. My Facebook and Instagram feeds are littered with bikes, cameras, craft beer, and vegan recipes. Somewhere along the line I made it abundantly clear that these are high-interest areas in my life.

We are followed wherever we go. Yes, occasionally we have to answer a little question on our phones about the apps we install, and whether it’s OK for them to keep up with us. When I look at my Google tracks, it basically serves as a mapped history of everything I have done, everywhere I have been. By the way, how do you think Google Maps knows to make the freeway color red, indicating a slowdown? Simple. It is monitoring the speed of everyone on that same road who happens to have the same app as you. The result is crowdsourced information without anyone having to tap a single letter or number.

These sites can also track how long we linger in a given location. Thus, they have correctly deduced that I not only go to craft breweries, but (at least before COVID) am also highly likely to blow--I mean spend--an hour or two there. And I’m not just whistling Dixie, you know. So many beers, so little time.

They know the hotels I frequent (Hilton properties, in case you were wondering). They know I am a rare customer indeed at a chain restaurant, although I do have a minor record of dining at Red Robin or Mellow Mushroom. They know where I buy my gas. They know I tend to take the old two-lane roads. And they know that I stop the van for every old neon sign I have never yet photographed. Don’t believe me? Check out my Insta feed someday (@nickgerlich).

I could go on, but the point is clear: Our lives are open books on social media, and not just because of the things we post. The book of our life is open to them specifically because we allowed them to read it. Those apps, our phones...they are just the facilitators in this game. When we skipped through the Terms Of Service agreement and checked the box without reading a word, we gave them carte blanche.

And guess what? I have no problem with any of this. I actually like being considered “the product,” because it means they are trying to sell to me. I am in control of my wallet, not the other way around, and if in the process of all this, I receive ever more accurate advertising catered to my likes, my life is better. Think about all the crap you see advertised on network television on any given evening. They are using a shotgun in hopes of hitting a few targets along the way. Social media sites, though, are shooting rifles.

In other words, I am not afraid of them. No, they should be afraid of me. I am the one whose money they covet. I understand and accept their revenue model imperative, because as long as they can sell ads, I can keep using the site for nothing. I am willing to trade parts of my life in exchange for what I see as entertainment, even with all the warts and pimples that over-use and addiction can render.

As for all of those former employees appearing in the film, I suspect they all just started feeling a little bit guilty of the successes their efforts and employers were enjoying. The market cap on some of these firms is mind-blowing, testament to the fact that wealth is not finite, but instead created based on the faith that investors have in these companies. I’m not sure what these people are going to do in their self-exiled unemployment, unless they were able to sell off a bunch of stock to fund their guilty conscience.

We must remember this important point: no one made any of us sign up for Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, etc. We did it of our own volition, and how we use it is our business, whether we simply scroll through once in a while, or whether we use it to score enough Likes and Loves to make us feel liked and loved ourselves. Dopamine feels pretty good, doesn’t it? It is implicit that we accepted the terms of engagement, even if we didn’t really read them. “You want to advertise to me while I post pics and videos? OK. Knock yourselves out.”

And even if social media have torn asunder more relationships this year than we would like, we can even control that. Simply quit interacting with the folks whose opinions you loathe, and the algorithms will take care of things pretty quickly. They’ll just fall off your feed. Kinda like I did about six weeks ago. I didn’t have to unfriend, unfollow, block, or delete anyone, and already my feed is like a breath of fresh air.

I just wish I had enough money to buy all those cool bikes and cameras I’m seeing. Cooking dinner is easy enough, but the big boy toys cost big bucks. Hey, can you give me a little love on this?

Dr “No Dilemma Here“ Gerlich

Audio Blog

#marketing #social media #The Social Dilemma #ethics

[charissekenion]

What systemic racism in the British beauty industry looks like

Remember when Black Lives Matter content filled up the feeds of your preferred social platform? While the message still burdens many within the black community — as well as some allies — on a daily basis, for many it is business as usual; even one of my regular online beauty go-to’s has that in their homepage banner. I’m sure it’s more about things being back to ‘some kind’ of normal post-Covid, but who knows? To me, it seems like everyone is tired and weary of the triggering message of BLM and I believe that’s a sign that, if systems are not changed, things are likely to return to what they used to be, the word diversitybecoming one of those words people say out loud while using air quotes. I’ve already written about my own personal experience as a mixed/black woman in the beauty world, but I wanted to try and tackle the systems within the beauty industry. If I’ve missed anything, let me know!

Brands/Agencies Throughout the early days of BLM, brands and agencies around the globe paid close attention to where their ads were appearing. It wasn’t a moral stance however; brands had learned that ads placed near George Floyd or protest-related content, monetized at 57%* lower than other news content. The investment simply wasn’t worth it and words/phrases such as Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, Minneapolis and Black people were put on industry blocklists. While blocklists surely began as a way for the industry to ensure it wasn’t placing insensitive ads, in 2020 brands are using them purely because of the bottom line; revenue.

For me, the brands that have stood out during BLM are the ones that are more thoughtful in how they can help, long-term. Praise was given to Emily Weiss of Glossier for starting a grant for black-owned beauty businesses. Another stand-out show of support came from Caroline Hirons, a brand in her own right.

Hirons is known as the queen of skincare amongst the UK press — and she knows that is a very white press. She took a few days to get her ‘ducks in a row’, early on when BLM was being heavily supported, ensuring her donations were able to have Gift Aid applied (more of the cash actually going to the organisation), before announcing that she would be giving 100 percent of the 2020 proceeds from her best-selling Double Cleanse with Pixi to Black Lives Matter. Pixi duly matched her donation.

But for every positive there were several embarrassing examples of how notto do it. I don’t have the time or energy to give a comprehensive list of just how many brands got it so wrong during the days that followed #blackouttuesday for instance.

I’m not about forcing anyone to do anything, because if you don’t care, why would I want your help? For me the blame lays with brands who have the means to send out the right messages on the daily via social and in the media. It wasn’t just about calling out RMS Beauty on their Instagram for hiring such an insensitive social media manager. It was more about checking out the feeds of Maybelline, Chanel Beauty, etc, etc, and seeing if they had ever shown diversity in their campaigns. The results were lacklustre to say the least, but, if there was one truly classic example of what not to do, the medal would go to Marcia Kilgore (founder of Beauty Pie, Fit Flop, Bliss). I’ve been a diehard fan of Kilgore and her work ethic for years and I’ve lost count of how many interviews I’ve listened to of Kilgore sharing her business journey.

But throughout BLM I’ve seen some shockers coming from (seemingly) Kilgore’s own hand. I’ve been sent screenshots of comments on Instagram (later deleted) including one that shows Kilgore using the shrugs emoji. One of Beauty Pie’s diehard (white) fans just didn’t get why Beauty Pie was receiving negative feedback after not standing up soon enough or strongly enough for BLM. Kilgore replied to her fan with the shrug — she might as well have said: ‘gee, we just can’t seem to please these people.’

The Influencer Whether you love influencer culture or not, it’s clear that, for now, it’s here to stay. Mostly dominated by (white) women, with some being worth over £4million here in the UK, whatever their chosen area of specialisation, there seems to be a very cookie-cutter approach as to what and who’s adored and accepted. Look at wellness, look at fashion, and of course, beauty, and you’ll find that the popular accounts are usually owned by very blonde, very slim women. Life is just one long Instagram Story compiled of working out in Lululemon, wearing makeup from an expensive brand that’s never looked past 10 shades, sipping an iced green tea and getting your wedding paid for by your clever agency rep who’s reached out to countless companies that are guaranteed to find you so palatable and on-brand.

Now, I am not coming for these women; these women can exist alongside the women that I choose to follow — the women that can and do in fact influence me and how I purchase, whether they get paid or not. And there’s the rub. Brands have been making tons of excess profits from women of colour who just love that brand — essentially unpaid micro influencers.

As a self-confessed beauty addict, I know the allure of the ‘next big thing’. I know how it is when you feel, or felt, that that brand actually understood you. When that new shiny purchase arrives from the likes of Glossier, you’re like, ‘hey friend’, and off you go, sharing your unboxing for your fellow beauty enthusiasts to swoon over in the comments.

Like I said, many true beauty influencers are micro influencers, doing their thing purely for the love, and not a pay check, but that’s in sharp contrast to those who are actually paid to do so. These paid influencers put in the work, styling their stories to appeal to their audience and also the audience of the brand that’s paying them.

One such influencer, someone I’ve been following a while as I enjoyed her fresh aesthetic, is also a PR. To be fair to her, I’d become so used to seeing her bounce across fields of tulips and daisies, that I wasn’t expecting anything from her when it came to ‘real life’. However, I did happen to see her Instagram Stories late one night, where she ‘appeared’ to be crying about BLM. I say appeared because honestly, I’ve seen better performances at my nephew’s nativity play. I even recorded the crying just to check I wasn’t being too dismissive.

The next day I saw that she’d finally posted an image she’d found elsewhere (i.e. not spent time creating) and given information on how to donate and research. It all seemed very rushed and frankly, I imagine that zero attention was given to the words. I wondered if she’d been pressured to post, and apparently she had been, after being tagged in a post that prompted people to call out influencers and brands who weren’t stepping up.

She dutifully posted a black square when it was ‘expected’ of her on #blackouttuesday — which she has since deleted.

On top of that, behind the scenes she was contacting various bloggers — I can’t confirm race ratios. She sent DMs that did not address the individual, did not ask the person how they were doing at this truly tiring and stressful time. Instead she asked if they were supporting black-owned brands (she asked this of a mixed-race woman who identified as black and had been posting tons of information on her Stories…) Clueless, lazy — or worse?

She mentions in the DM that one of her clients is a black-owned business and asks if the blogger might be interested in talking about it. The following day I kept wondering, ‘okay, if you’re so supportive, why not post about this black-owned brand on your own feed?’ Or, how about you offer your services to black-owned businesses at a reduced rate? Not because you should, but because, after all, you are performing as if you care.

**Dominique, a black, London-based PR shared her thoughts on how her frequent social media support of a beauty brand (self-created and not paid for, purely because she wanted to), soon started to feel as if she was being treated as a token when she was shown as the only black face in the company’s newsletter. She also tells me of a black influencer in the UK who had been promised payment for several pieces of promo work and yet had gone unpaid and ignored. It wasn’t until her loyal followers bombarded the brand’s social media platforms that the brand paid her, in full, with no argument, or apology.

“It’s so intrinsic, and so embedded,” says Dominique. “Whether it’s content creation or Instagram — which is the first port of call for every business — it’s also the tech, it’s the algorithms used. It’s the influencers, it’s the appropriation, it’s the fact that black influencers aren’t on PR lists, and aren’t being paid the same rates.”

Dominique also talks of the pressure of ‘black guilt’ that black influencers and creators can feel: “You kind of hope and root for the brands that you spend your money on, that you will see a change. And then also, you kind of assimilate in your feed to try and see if that’s gonna help you build a following. I’ve done it. Black people have learned to compartmentalise to survive and it comes down to assimilating and trying not to broadcast your blackness.”

The PR I think, in some ways, the power of the beauty industry PRs often goes unnoticed. These are people who are in the business of carving out a niche for a brand, making it the ‘next big thing’; they advise clients on everything, from tone of voice to the right faces to use in an ad campaign to which influencers to send product to, and which influencers to offer lucrative ambassadorships to.

As most UK PR firms are owned by white men and women, it’s easy to see why inclusivity might not even enter their heads. Why would it? Let’s not forget, for decades the ideal beauty has been that of a very Eurocentric look. PR firms, alongside the rest of the industry, play their part in affirming this beauty standard — it isn’t their job to actually change it. But with more and more voices calling for change, and in the era of cancel culture, PRs are likely to be forced into taking a more active role.

For example, the labeling of BLM being a political rather than human issue by the head of CrossFit was clearly a PR nightmare of huge proportions, and no-one in the multi-billion dollar beauty industry wants that to happen to them. As a recent article on the Business of Fashion stated; too often public relations execs go along with what their client wants, and if ever they do try to steer the client in another direction they are often left unsupported or removed from the account completely.

The Magazines As someone who’s been a hair and beauty editor and writer for 15 years, I’ve seen a lot of trends come and go. But one trend that remains the same is that of the ‘spot the black journo in the room’. While things may be slightly more progressive in the US, here in the UK I can say that I have never seen more than three black or non-white journalists at a press event at the same time. And don’t get me started on the staff within the publications themselves.

I remember when former British Vogue editor-in-chief Alexandra Shulman shared an image of her team in celebration of her last issue in 2017 — with not one black or brown face. I had long stopped my subscription to British Vogue, but when her replacement, Edward Enninful arrived, the man who had inspired me for years during his time at i-D magazine, I bought each issue with renewed excitement; oh how things would change!

But Enninful is one black man. And when Enninful himself is racially profiled while entering the doors of Conde Nast, you know that the problem goes way deeper. Add to that the fact that Vogue is still going to have to bow to its advertisers — the brands that keep it in print. It’s not us with our £2 ‘special price’ purchases that are keeping Vogue and others like it alive.

Elsewhere on Instagram, former Glamour editor Jo Elvin was bemoaning the fact that it wasn’t always the editor’s fault that there were no black models on the cover. Elvin said that black models often declined being on the cover (am guessing maybe it was because it was a pretty crap magazine back then?) because they ‘thought it would hurt their chances of getting covers with the high-end mags’.

And what is wrong with that? It’s far tougher for a black woman to get a Vogue cover, so if that’s that model’s goal, what’s it to Elvin and her crew? Perhaps they could seek out an unknown, rather than relying on the top three black faces over and over? Thankfully, Elvin was prompted to elaborate on her flippant comments, by none other than the aforementioned Caroline Hirons. Hirons ended by telling Elvin that the numbers don’t add up, and that bias is ‘systemic in Conde.’

I remember once going for a meeting with an online brand I avidly read. Naturally I was excited and flattered to be told: ‘you look so [insert brand name here]!’ as if I had just earned a special badge. Aside from the flattery, it really meant a lot to me and I was genuinely excited at the opportunity to write and shoot for them. I left the building buzzing, but over the coming weeks, my numerous pitches seemed to fall on deaf ears. ‘Hmm, she’s probably really, really, busy,’ I told myself.

Weeks later I noticed a new name on their writer roster and wondered if the fact that she was also mixed race was something to do with it; perhaps two was one too many? I think this is something we see and fear in many industries, but especially within fashion and beauty. While a non-black editor might enjoy being seen as the progressive one, he or she might also be nervous of ‘opening the gates’ and only employing non-white people! I’ve heard this from several black and brown people in the industry also. Once you get that role, you want to keep it both for career and financial reasons.

It’s clear that, across the board, work needs to be done, and we also need the work that is supposedly being done, to continue. It makes me nervous to see brands jumping on the Diversity Officer job role, while only offering six-month contracts. Does this mean that they hope BLM will just go away and people will just stop expecting their voices to be heard and their rights acknowledged? Are we all just so nostalgic over what normal used to be that we’d rather enter another year with blinders on?

It’s okay to admit that you’re completely unprepared for this fight. If you’ve never had to care about this fight, I get that. But whether you chose to use #blackouttuesday to gain some new fans, or you actually wanted to begin making lasting change, it’s clear, it’s going to take a lot more than a black square followed by vague epithets. Show the work; talk to your audience. Literally no-one can claim to be perfect right now, but if you want to build an anti-racist brand, take the steps, because we are all watching.

*Statistic taken from this NPR article: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/27/884213471/why-advertisers-wont-run-ads-on-black-lives-matter-content?t=1597134345822

** Name has been changed

Image: Photo by Hazel Olayres on Unsplash

This article also appears on Medium

[ingek73]

08-06-206:00 PM POV

Prince Harry: Social media is dividing us. Together, we can redesign it

Amid a crisis of health, hate, and truth online, companies need to take a stand for a more compassionate digital world, writes Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex.

Prince Harry: Social media is dividing us. Together, we can redesign it

[Photos: Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty Images; Pixabay/Pexels]

BY PRINCE HARRY THE DUKE OF SUSSEX

7 MINUTE READ

A little over four weeks ago, my wife and I started calling business leaders, heads of major corporations, and chief marketing officers at brands and organisations we all use in our daily lives.

Our message was clear: The digital landscape is unwell and companies like yours have the chance to reconsider your role in funding and supporting online platforms that have contributed to, stoked, and created the conditions for a crisis of hate, a crisis of health, and a crisis of truth.

We did this at the same time as the launch of a civil rights and racial justice campaign called Stop Hate For Profit, which sought to change online policies around hate speech—in this case, policies at Facebook—by urging companies that regularly purchase digital ads on the platform to withhold their advertising spending for the month of July. As of the end of last month, the campaign (led by respected organisations like the Anti-Defamation League, Color of Change, and the NAACP) sent a $7 billion message through withheld ad dollars.

Some may ask why a change campaign would take aim at online advertising. Well, many of us love and enjoy social media. It’s a seemingly free resource for connecting, sharing, and organising. But it’s not actually free; the cost is high. Every time you click they learn more about you. Our information, private data, and unknown habits are traded on for advertising space and dollars. The price we’re all paying is much higher than it appears. Whereas normally we’re the consumer buying a product, in this ever-changing digital world, we are the product.

While companies made their own decisions about what to do in July, we felt it necessary to say our part about the rise of an unchecked and divisive attention economy. We’ve always believed that individuals and communities thrive when the frameworks around them are built from compassion, trust, and wellbeing. Sadly, this belief is at odds with much of what is being experienced by people on social media.

From conversations with experts in this space, we believe we have to remodel the architecture of our online community in a way defined more by compassion than hate; by truth instead of misinformation; by equity and inclusiveness instead of injustice and fearmongering; by free, rather than weaponised, speech. This remodeling must include industry leaders from all areas drawing a line in the sand against unacceptable online practices as well as being active participants in the process of establishing new standards for our online world. Companies that purchase online ads must also recognise that our digital world has an impact on the physical world—on our collective health, on our democracies, on the ways we think and interact with each other, on how we process and trust information. Because, if we are susceptible to the coercive forces in digital spaces, then we have to ask ourselves—what does this mean for our children? As a father, this is especially concerning to me.

In the 1970s, there was a groundbreaking study on the societal effects of lead exposure and kids. The research found a clear connection between lead accumulation in children and their mental development. There’s no debate over the dangers of lead today, but at the time, the development was met with strong resistance from industry leaders (lead was used widespread in products like gas, house paint, and water pipes). Eventually, sweeping health and environmental reforms were put in place to change this. We knew something was harmful to the health of our children, so we made the necessary changes to keep them safe, healthy, and well.

Researchers I’ve spoken with are studying how social media affects people—particularly young people—and I believe the book of data that we will look back on one day will be incredibly troubling.

WHEN WE DO THE RIGHT THING, WHEN WE CREATE SAFE SPACES BOTH ONLINE AND OFF—EVERYONE WINS.

Around the world, for many reasons, we are at turning point—one that has the potential to be transformative. In all areas of life, a rebuilding of compassionate, trustworthy communities needs to be at the heart of where we go. And this approach must extend to the digital community, which billions of us participate in every day. But it shouldn’t be punitive. When we do the right thing, when we create safe spaces both online and off—everyone wins. Even the platforms themselves.

Meghan and I heard similar arguments made by humane tech leaders we convened at Stanford University earlier this year, by internet law experts, by neuroscientists, and most importantly by young people who have grown up in a fully connected world.

We have an opportunity to do better and remake the digital world, to look at the past and use it to inform the future. We must take a critical eye to the last two decades, where advancements in technology and media have outgrown many of the antiquated guardrails that once ensured they were being designed and used appropriately. It shouldn’t be seen as a coincidence that the rise of social media has been matched by a rise in division amongst us globally. Social media’s own algorithms and recommendation tools can drive people down paths towards radicalism and extremism that they might not have taken otherwise.

There are billions of people right now—in the midst of a global pandemic that has taken hundreds of thousands of lives—who rely on algorithmically-driven information feeds to make judgments about fact vs. fiction, about truth vs. lies. One could argue that access to accurate information is more important now than any other time in modern history. And yet, the very places that allow disinformation to spread seem to throw their arms up when asked to take responsibility and find solutions.

We all need a better online experience. We’ve spoken with leaders across the racial justice movement, experts in humane tech, and advocates of mental health. And the collective opinion is abundantly clear: We do not have the luxury of time.

We need meaningful digital reform, and while the role of policymakers and regulators is important, we can’t just wait for them to take the next steps. This is a moment for companies around the world—companies with business and advertising models directly tied to digital platforms—to consider how they can bring about reform to ensure the betterment of all.

WE HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO DO BETTER AND REMAKE THE DIGITAL WORLD, TO LOOK AT THE PAST AND USE IT TO INFORM THE FUTURE.

It was reported recently that, for the first time, spending on digital advertising is set to eclipse ad spending in traditional media. Think about what this means. The standards and practices advertisers rely upon when placing their commercials on television, for example, do not apply when it comes to the online space—arguably, the largest broadcaster in the world. And for the first time in history, the ad spend in this relatively lawless space is beginning to overshadow the more traditional spaces. No manufacturer is likely placing their television soap ad next to this type of toxicity, yet due to the nature of the digital world, that advertisement could be sandwiched between inciting propaganda.

So there is huge value in advertisers sitting at the table with advocacy leaders, with policy leaders, with civil society leaders, in search of solutions that strengthen the digital community while protecting its free and open nature.

For companies that purchase online ads, it is one thing to unequivocally disavow hate and racism, white nationalism and anti-Semitism, dangerous misinformation, and a well-established online culture that promotes violence and bigotry. It is another thing for them to use their leverage, including through their advertising dollars, to demand change from the very places that give a safe haven and vehicle of propagation to hate and division. We’re hopeful to see this approach amongst industry leaders become reality. For one, the industry group GARM—the Global Alliance for Responsible Media—has committed to evaluating standards and definitions around online hate speech.

But this is just the beginning. And our hope is that it’s the beginning of a movement where we, as people, place community and connection, tolerance and empathy, and joy and kindness above all. The internet has enabled us to be joined together. We are now plugged into a vast nervous system that, yes, reflects our good, but too often also magnifies and fuels our bad. We can—and must—encourage these platforms to redesign themselves in a more responsible and compassionate way. The world will feel it, and we will all benefit from it.

Prince Harry is the Duke of Sussex

#royals #prince harry #duke of sussex #fast company #social media

[awed-frog]

When you say romance should be 18 and over do you mean the brand of romance we know today (aka toxic) or romance as a whole? If we wrote healthy romance aimed at younger crowds or presented unhealthy behaviour as unhealthy behaviour in regular romance (for older crowds) would that be a good solution?

Well - I see three questions here, all of them incredibly complex and beyond interesting: should art be political and is censorship ever a good idea and also is the romance genre okay? The answer to all of them, in my opinion, is ‘no but’.

1) Should art be political?

The stupid thing is, art is inherently political, whether you want it to or not, but art that’s deliberately political tends to be awful, and that’s a universal truth both for left-wing stuff and for right-wing stuff. When you willingly create political stuff, what you’re crafting is propaganda, and proganda is generally sad and bad. I guess there is propaganda that’s also good art - Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs comes to mind - but the problem is, not all of us are Victor Hugo. 

That said, since whatever we create is political (because man is a social animal) and will have some kind of moral message, yes - ideally we want more art with an ethically ‘good’ moral message than we want garbage, because art (and here I include everything: books, movies and so on) is perhaps the most effective and impactful mind-shaper ever. That’s why Disney is doing its very best to be a monopoly, after all. But: I don’t have a good solution for how to ensure art is nice. I think art is nice when artists are nice, and artists are nice when they grow up in good, healthy societies. So the more a society rots from the inside out, the more likely it is you’ll find art that’s also rotten. I mean, while romance as a genre was always a bit dodgy (see below), what that article was talking about - the rise of the possessive, violent boyfriend and domestic abuse as the great love story - is sort of a recent phenomenon, and goes hand in hand with the deterioration of women’s rights in (Western) society. 

(As an aside, I’m not sure I agree (young) women are necessarily misogynistic for reading crap like Fiftfy Shades: I think (young) women are exhausted. Fifty Shades is, more than anything, an ode to undeserved capitalism - the only kind that seems open as an option today. After all, we know trickle-down capitalism doesn’t work and most of us will toil and toil for very little; Christian Grey is the antidote to that, the guy who shows up, basically kidnaps you, and smothers you in a life of riches for which the only thing you must do in return is give up. Having someone else decide on your job, your car, your possessions and clothes, where you’ll live, what you’ll eat and when, whether you’ll take birth control (lol: obviously not), when you’ll see your friends and family plus when and how you’ll orgasm - what women tried to escape for generations is suddenly the dream for many of us - not because of any new political ideology, but because we’re beyond tired. Women, like men, are now crushed in a neverending cycle of bs, underpaid jobs, and are apparently fed up enough in taking responsibility for anything that not only romance and ‘superhuman’ characters are booming, but a very specific kind of subset of that: essentially, slave fics. 

Just give up your agency, and you’ll be taken care of and cherished - forever.

I understand a kink is not the same as your actual political opinion, but still - I’m not enthusiastic about this trend, and I’m even less enthusiastic when it gobbles up young women who haven’t had time to experience real life relationships.)

No, I think that in the end, the answer is - if you reverse the rotting of society, automatically - statistically - you’ll get healthier artists and a healthier audience. So, really, the fight is always the same: better paid jobs, better (and free) schools, more opportunities for continued education of any kind, more democracy and transparency, more green spaces and better living conditions.

2) Is censorship ever a good idea?

Sadly, no. You’d think the logical conclusion of what I just said would be, ‘In the meantime, let’s ban the most dangerous stuff’ or something, and while part of me is tempted to support that, censorship has a way of ending very badly no matter how good and noble your intentions are.

(Self-censorship should be more of a thing, though: not everything that goes through our minds deserves to be seen and shared.)

What sucks at the moment is that on the one hand, capitalism is operating its own censorship; and on the other, its desperate search for new markets has led to a disastrous disintegration of actual human interactions.

So, problem one is that we only publish and market what makes a lot of money, and while that’s normal, to an extent, the result today is that everything is ‘almost the same’ as the previous thing (think sequels, prequels, remakes, obnoxious book covers for books that are basically all the same). So if ‘asshole boyfriend who beats you up’ suddenly makes money, it becomes very hard to escape the trope, because what will be offered to you everywhere is exactly that. This was less of a thing back when our main sources of entertainment were shared (movie theaters, the one family TV, school libraries and so on); now, it’s an epidemic, and as we see with Youtube algorithms, a dangerous one, because this obsession with watching and rewatching ‘almost the same’ inevitably leads to more and more extreme stuff.

Meanwhile, problem two is that the more tailor-made our entertainment is, the less we connect to real people. I know I sound about 90 here, but when all family members are glued to a different screen - mom watching the 50th remake of Eat, Pray, Love, dad down the rabbithole of lizard conspiracy theories, big brother now exploring some milk&peanut butter weirdness on Youporn and younger sister 30 fics deep into Stucky high school AUs - what do they have in common? What do they talk about? What can they even learn from each other? Until recently, and for aeons, fiction was shared, and its primary goal was to form a connection between group members. Now, that’s gone. We destroyed it, without even realizing what we were doing, in the space of twenty years. And yeah - I know you can create new communities, but a) these communities are virtual (which means, for the most part: not real) and b) they tend to connect like with like, which is comforting, perhaps, but not very useful. The whole point here is that we need to learn how to feel empathy and trust for those who’re different, and build a community with them - instead, what the internet is doing is isolating us inside our little bubbles, so much so that any minor disagreement is now seen as good reason to break off contact.

Censorship, however, doesn’t solve any of this. For starters, we need more regulation on how big corporations can get, what social media companies can and can’t do and who can access what kind of material. And it’d be great if we could all unplug a little, but uh - fat chance of that.

3) Is the romance genre okay?

Again, just my opinion, but personally, I mistrust it. There are no romance books for men? Instead, books for men feature a Main Character doing stuff and improving himself while accidentally meeting a Sexy Lamp he can go home to at the end of the story. And, well, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but isn’t this a healthier way to look at life? While good relationships are very meaningful (or even the most meaningful) part of any human life, if your goal is to get them, they won’t grow right. You shouldn’t be hyperfocused on finding love; I think it’s much better to be like Main Character: you work on your drawing skills, try a new sport, read poetry, defeat evil Russians, thus developing inner happiness and self-confidence, thus leading you towards towards a partner who’ll fall in love with who you are - not a partner who was looking for some empty shell to fill with their own expectations and preferences.

And I know - romance books and movies are full of exciting non-romantic events and stuff - but still, the fact they’re classified and intended as romance does imply that finding a romantic partner is the ultimate goal. Which, I don’t know, I don’t think it’s healthy, and is a particularly inappropriate message for young women. After all, why is it okay that young men are encouraged to go on ghost hunts, study dinosaurs and save the world while young women are taught to wait around for a broken (possibly violent, but it’s not his fault) bad boy only they can fix? It’s messed up, is what it is, and I may be extreme here, but even the tamest, sweetest romance revolves around the same message: that you’re not complete on your own, and that you should focus on relationships as a way to become a better, happier human being. 

Now, as much as I love this quote -

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.” — Oscar Wilde

- obviously there’s no direct cause-and-effect here - you don’t read one book and become a mindless Stepford wife - so I’m not saying, ‘no one should read romance ever’. It’s just - as I said in that other post, we should all enjoy diverse stuff. Read your romance novels, but also read the classics, read some philosophy, a random poem, a badly-written thriller - read Stephen King, read how the OED was written, or a Wikipedia article on the French resistance - anything and everything. Because of capitalism, because of this push towards personalized entertainment, we’re being forced and pigeonholing ourselves in smaller and smaller cages, and the worst thing is - we’re comfortable inside them, because this is the awful truth: cages are comfortable, and that’s why we need to get out before we forget what cages are for.

[As a final point: you say ‘if we wrote’, does it mean you’re an aspiring writer? If so, you shouldn’t worry about any of this. You write what you want, you write the stories you want to read. Just remember to get out of your cage as well - experience, discover, grow, read, dare - and then put all that into your books. I’m sure they’ll be great, whatever your favourite genre.]

#ask #books #romance #entertainment #capitalism #ya #fifty shades of grey #narrative tropes #old woman yells at cloud #the end is nigh #i miss the 90s #potentially unpopular opinion

[cvickery-blog1]

WR 303 Network Analysis

The following has been created for the Oregon State University online class WR 303: Writing for the Web:

Within the past thirty years alone, the world of digital communication has become not only a fun and integrative way of communicating with family and friends, but a vital component of some of the largest global corporations in history. Digital communication comes in almost too many forms to count; advertisements in which companies large and small can reach potential clients and customers, platforms like Facebook Messenger, and even “comment” sections below everything from YouTube Videos to your favorite website full of funny cat pictures are all ways that we can now communicate what we like and don’t like, what we want and don’t want, and why. Today, platforms of digital communication, specifically social media platforms, dominate the digital world with the way that they incentivize their users. Becoming a YouTuber is now an actual career in which someone can make more money than the best doctors, Facebook and Instagram rising stars are essentially worth as much as a major startup company, and platforms like Vine and TikTok have become so lucrative that users are quitting their jobs to achieve the dream of making more than a living wage off of ten-second videos. However, all of these platforms have been developed to tailor to different audiences and provide different routs of generating revenue for both the company itself and the creators of the content. Even the smallest variations in how digital communication platforms function and portray the content that is uploaded to them can mean the difference between a successful and user-friendly way of communicating and an unsuccessful startup that crashes after only a few months of being online. By analyzing the data that I’ve collected by posting regularly to a Facebook group with a specific audience in mind, I’ve been able to delve deeper into learning about how various platforms function and how even minor changes to a post can determine the popularity and circulation of a simple phrase or photo.

           The differences between various digital communication platforms can be startling if taken at face value, but the foundational idea of all of them remains the same: to generate income, and a lot of it. This is the case for every social media platform, every blogging website, and every video sharing community that exists on the Internet today. Even if the communities didn’t initially begin that way, the influence of the dollar has become so potent that platforms are being created faster than could’ve ever been predicted in an attempt to obtain just a fraction of the global wealth that circulates among the popular ones. One such platform, which was the primary component of my research, was Facebook. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard University Student, in 2004 when he was only nineteen years old (Brügger). The platform was originally meant to be only for Harvard students, but over the course of only a few years, it exploded in popularity beyond the University and became one of the largest and most well-known social media platforms to ever exist. For this reason, I chose to focus my research around Facebook and how it and its users function. There were other things that drew me to Facebook though, including my own familiarity with it and how its algorithms track the users’ usage and interests.

           Before I began my research, I knew a few different things about Facebook and how it functioned, but there were many things that I discovered along the way. “Social network sites deeply penetrate their users' everyday life and, as pervasive technology, tend to become… widely adopted, ubiquitous, and taken for granted” (Debatin, et. al.). This was one of the most obvious things that I’ve noticed about Facebook. It has become an integrated part of every user’s life, whether they know it or not. As a regular user myself, I’ll see advertisements or other information presented to me that relates to things that I’ve searched for on Google or Amazon, even if they have nothing to do with different pages or groups that I’m a part of on Facebook. However, I did notice that many of the advertisements and other pages that would be “suggested” to me had hundreds to thousands of “likes” or similar “reactions” to them. I wanted to know; how do pages gain so much popularity? How is each individual post crafted to gain the most attention from the widest-spread groups of people? These were all things that I experimented with during this project, and the results yielded results that were a combination of expectations and surprises.

           In choosing a Facebook group to post to, I knew that I needed to choose a group that was relevant to my interests and contained people with similar backgrounds and knowledge. As a bearded dragon owner, I chose to contribute to the Facebook group “Bearded Dragon Fanatics”, a collection of individuals based out of the United States and Canada who were bearded dragon owners, experts, and newcomers alike. This diverse group of over 8,500 members contained contributors of every age and race, making for an excellent runway for my social experiments to take off from. This group also has rules and restrictions which prohibit its members from posting grotesque content or inappropriate language, as well as several unofficial, unspoken rules, such as not speaking (too) badly of the animals to which the group is dedicated. My first post was published on Saturday, October 12th at 11:40 AM. It contained a photo of my most recently purchased juvenile bearded dragon, and two short paragraphs asking for advice with the temperament of my reptile. Here is a screenshot of my initial post:

(Vickery, “Post 1”)

The feedback that I got was relatively surprising, as I thought that I would be getting advice from members left and right, but instead I only received a total of thirteen comments and a total of three “reacts” to my photo. Little did I know that this would be the most reactions that I got to any post that I would publish for this assignment. Over the next two weeks, I published two more posts and expected more reactions as I tried different strategies to gain more attention. Here is my second post, originally published on Wednesday, October 16th, at almost 3:00PM:

(Vickery, “Post 2”)

           My strategy for my second post was slightly different; I changed the way that I formatted the questions, added “emojis” in an attempt to focus my audience’s attention more on the topics at hand, and published my post on a weekday rather than a weekend. This yielded negative results, with only one person within the entire online community commenting on my post, and a total of four “likes” for my two photos. The next week, I attempted to change my style again.

Here is a screenshot of my final post, published on Friday, October 22nd, at 5:38PM:

(Vickery, “Post 3”)

           When it came to my final post, I realized that it made no difference whether I added emojis or didn’t, and I tried to be much more direct by asking only one question but providing a little bit of detail. However, there were several small things that I tried to change in between each post, which allowed me to discover a few valuable components that are key in creating a successful publication. First of all, I realized that the time and day that a publication is made public is key in gaining immediate feedback. The first post that I published was created on a Saturday morning, a time when most people are off of work and able to relax and enjoy browsing their social media pages. The least popular of the three posts was my second one, which was posted in the middle of the week during a time at which most people are at work. This tells me that, in order for any kind of post to be successful, it needs to be published at the right time of day, on the right day of the week, and I would argue that even the time of year is important. Another thing that I noticed with each post is that if too many questions are asked, readers could get lost and not answer all of them. It’s important to keep posts short and to-the-point, as I tried to do in my first and third posts. Furthermore, the posts should be eye-catching. I think that the photos that I included in my posts may be one of the only things that kept my publications afloat, especially my second one. If it has been a post with only words and nothing to immediately catch readers’ attention, I doubt that I would’ve ever gotten any feedback at all. Finally, and most importantly, I’ve learned that your audience and their interests matter. While all of these posts were seen by everyone that I’m friends with on Facebook, I’m the only reptile owner that I’m aware of, and not a single person that I’ve met offline commented on a post or “reacted” to a photo. Only those who are members of the Facebook group to which I posted seemed interested enough to “react” to a publication or even go so far as to comment on it.

           There are so many things that social media users can learn from interacting with networked communities. After seeing the results of my experimental posts, I truly believe that people who spent several hours every week on any form of social media have more skills as a media marketing manager than people who have a degree in it with no experience at all. Hundreds of factors affect the popularity, and therefore marketability, of a published work, and learning what to add to a post or leave out could truly mean the difference between a post to be buried and never see the light of day, and a photo or video that could circulate the entire globe within a matter of hours. The world of digital media has become a global component in creating thousands, if not millions of networks which people are a part of. They can connect the furthest reaches of the planet with just the press of a button or the swipe of a finger, all while allowing us to share our information and interests, likes and dislikes, whether we realize it or not. In an ever-changing world where a new age of technology is evolving right before out eyes, it’s more important than ever to understand just how these networked communities tie us all together in the grand scheme of life, especially since life may soon revolve around technology as a whole.

                                                  Works Cited

Brügger, Niels. “A brief history of Facebook as a media text: The development of an empty structure.” First Monday, Volume 20, Number 5 - 4 May 2015. https://journals.uic.edu/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/5423/4466

Debatin, Berhnard, Lovejoy, Jenette P., Horn, Ann-Kathrin, Hughes, Brittany N. “Facebook and Online Privacy: Attitudes, Behaviors, and Unintended Consequences”. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Volume 15, Issue 1, 1 October 2009, Pages 83–108

Vickery, Caleigh. “Post 1”. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1840692722621659/search/?query=Caleigh%20Vickery&epa=FILTERS&filters=eyJycF9jaHJvbm9fc29ydCI6IntcIm5hbWVcIjpcImNocm9ub3NvcnRcIixcImFyZ3NcIjpcIlwifSJ9. Saturday, October 12th, 11:40 AM. Facebook update.

Vickery, Caleigh. “Post 2”. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1840692722621659/search/?query=Caleigh%20Vickery&epa=FILTERS&filters=eyJycF9jaHJvbm9fc29ydCI6IntcIm5hbWVcIjpcImNocm9ub3NvcnRcIixcImFyZ3NcIjpcIlwifSJ9. Wednesday, October 16th, 2:52PM. Facebook update.

Vickery, Caleigh. “Post 3”. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1840692722621659/search/?query=Caleigh%20Vickery&epa=FILTERS&filters=eyJycF9jaHJvbm9fc29ydCI6IntcIm5hbWVcIjpcImNocm9ub3NvcnRcIixcImFyZ3NcIjpcIlwifSJ9. October 25th, 2019, 5:38PM. Facebook update.

#oregonstate #oregon state university #onlineclass #writing

[cryptid-crusader]

My Tumblr History (feat. a LOT of rambling, I apologize)

I’ve been on Tumblr 9 years. I came to Tumblr from Xanga (which IDK if that’s even still a thing or not) after being thoroughly obsessed with latter for about 4 or so years. Xanga was much more of a typical blog blog, and though I interacted with far less people on it, those few I did became honest to god friends that I still think about to this day. Though, as years past, my few friends began to drop off one by one from the site and I found myself enjoying it much less once they were gone. Eventually, I left too.

A few months later, I decided to join Tumblr. It was still a fairly new site in 2010 when I had joined, and I had only heard a few things here and there around the internet before I decided to check it out myself. When I first started, I used this site a lot like I used Xanga and basically had it exclusively as an internet journal to talk about life and nerdy shit and the like (I remember even thinking the reblog option was dumb because why not just make your own content? Why reblog other peoples stuff? loooool) and also did a lot of those writing daily challenges. Do you guys remember those? I loved them. Anyway...

Needless to say as time went on and I got older and followed more people and gained more followers (some of you have been here from very early on and for that I am incredibly thankful) as dweeby as this may sound, I really grew as a person. God, I remember 9 years ago I would sometimes post uncredited art or really insensitive, not funny at all, “jokes” because I honestly didn’t see a problem with them (and the only reason I really remember these awful things is occasionally once in a blue moon random people would find them in the bowels of my blog and like them and I would shudder and delete them). I kinda started Tumblr as this young social media doofus that, again as cheesy as it sounds, learned a lot and grew from my experience here. I would never dream of posting uncredited art now, and those “jokes” make me want to vomit. I learned a lot about social issues through this blog and it also helped me open up and learn about my sexuality. I got to see a broader world view from all different walks of life here (which was incredibly refreshing after growing up in a very close knit predominately white republican community) , and met some fantastic humans I’m blessed to have interacted with and become their friend. I never would have met them without this site!

Not to mention just like... all the cool shit. There are SO many talented people on Tumblr. So much beautiful art, fantastic writing, and just all round hilarious and interesting humans that I loved to get even a small peak into their lives and learn about them and what they like and do for fun. I’ve picked up hobbies through this site, joined fandoms through this site, made friends, laughed endlessly, become inspired, found some of my favorite anime/books/movies, and have had so much fun in these nine years on Tumblr.

... Not to say that it hasn’t been without it’s bad. I’ve been here long enough to remember when Tumblr users proudly boasted about how open and inviting to any and all people they were, how they would never point fingers, be mean, or turn others away. Boy, how that has changed looool. I’ve been through the annoying but innocent enough superwholocks and the scandals of older users who used to be Tumblr royalty that fucked up in some way and fell from grace, to the disgrace of people who are totally fine humans that didn’t completely cater to exactly what certain people wanted or made a few wrong steps that people felt like they had to attack them viciously for the littlest asinine shit. The good the bad and the ugly, all the way through to now.

Now. :(

To be frank, this entire site has been a disaster for a loooooooooong time with a staff that seems to be equal mix of not knowing at all how to run a functioning site and not giving a shit at all about it’s user base and their feelings (which reeeeeeeally sucks for all the fantastic content creators and people who have been here forever who have essentially made this site what it is). Little things like ‘oh we made an update that ‘everyone’ will love but is actually dumb as hell and just pisses people off’ to their have been porn bots, pedos, and nazis on this site for YEARS terrorizing people and being awful but guess that is just how it will be... Until they got banned from the app store and THEN it’s an issue (because they lost money ofc)!

Suddenly, Tumblr staff cares, but only for themselves. Instead of actually resolving the issue THAT HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR YEARS AND IS AN EXTREMELY WELL KNOW AND COMPLAINED ABOUT ISSUE they just decide fuck it, punish everyone. No “porn” at all, but I use that term lightly because they say some nudity is allowed (don’t get me started on female presenting nipples it also makes me laugh to hard and then I won’t be able to type) and for some reason apparently written erotica is allowed (which makes absolutely zero sense if you are truly trying to make this a ‘family friendly’ site, why is visual porn not allowed but written OK?) but... Is it really? Posts that are completely innocent are getting tagged left and right as not suitable content. Like, thousands of posts are getting tagged by whatever stupid algorithm they are using that are completely void of anything remotely sexual and you expect me to believe your incompetent asses are going to go through them and deem which are OK and which aren’t based on you shoddy stupid ass new rules? Fuck that. 

And all the sex workers and people and run side blogs and NSFW art blogs and the like are just completely screwed (no pun intended). It upsets me because like... Porn blogs have never been the issue. There are definitely some horrible ones, no denying that, but for the most part they just stayed in their lane and interacted with other porn blogs. They weren’t the issue (And, if Tumblr knew at all how to create a damn site, they wouldn’t have been an issue at all if the damn safe mode toggle actually worked like it was supposed to). The ungodly amount of bots is the fucking issue. I can tell you right now, I have over a thousand followers and I am in no way kidding when I say half of those are porn bots that I just gave up reporting because I get like, 3 of them following me a week on average. It’s ridiculous! Also, ACTUAL FUCKING CHILD PORN? THAT IS EASILY ACCESSIBLE EVEN WHEN NOT LOOKING UP ANYTHING NSFW (which I very unfortunately know through experience)? And to top it all off, fucking NAZIS who for some reason are still allowed to spew their bullshit on this site??? Is this a nightmare?

So with all this happening, I believe it’s pretty safe to say Tumblr’s days are numbered. It makes me laugh and cry, it’s something you could see coming a mile away and yet something that you didn’t think would actually happen. I don’t want to leave Tumblr. I love you guys (the users not the staff). You have all brought joy and enrichment to my life and I am so grateful I got to be here with you. I also just like a lot of nuances of tumblr, like the fact I can read an entry so powerful and moving it brings me to tears and then just one post underneath is an over baked nonsensical cat meme which has me wheezing for reasons I can’t quite explain. I can be anonymous and as weird as I want to here without having to really worry about family, coworkers, or older friends seeing it and being like WTF is wrong with you, what does all this mean??? I like how my blog looks and how I can bitch in the tags and chat with my friends and message people and talk about my oc’s and randoms interests and get pointers and learn new things and AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I love Tumblr. I don’t want to leave and don’t necessarily plan to. But then again, I said they same thing about Xanga, and if Tumblr keeps going in the way it is going... I’m not sure I really truly  want to be lumped in with that. :/

Now this has already been entirely too long (and honestly I’m kind of feeling how I did when I started this blog in 2010 lul) but lemme say this: Thanks guys, I had a whole lot of fun. And if I do end up leaving sometime in the maybe not to distant future know that I will always be lurking around somewhere on the internet, and I had the best time while I was here. I wish nothing but the best for all of you, and may we all be able to remain a happy and dysfunctional little group, if not here, somewhere much better.

#I want to reiterate that I don't want to leave #I just wanted to say my piece #just in case #I love you guys #and I love what Tumblr could be #if staff actually gave a shit #:( #rant #Tumblr #also I am not going to leave #unless I have to #I'll be here until the bitter end tbh #thank you for reading #bleh #flapping my wings