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caledfwlchthat · 6 months ago

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feedback and fic in fandom (3 f's of our own)

This conversation about feedback on fic says everything I’ve been wanting to say better than I could say it. But I’ll go ahead and try anyway.

Over the last five years or so there have been some great discussions around the rise of commodification of fanworks and decline of fandom community. This commodification looks a bit like enshittification of the internet: a cool site exists; its popularity makes someone realize they can get money from it; it has more and more ads; the site adds features to drive engagement, including The Algorithm; the things that made the site cool start to fall away. The site exists now as a vehicle purely to get clicks, and the people on it are on it solely to get clicks—to make money, to be successful, for some kind of social cachet.

AO3 doesn’t have advertisements. It’s not making money. But what is happening to fandom is proof of concept that enshittification changes the way we as humans engage. A cool website in 2004 was often a community space where you could meet people, have conversations, find cool things, and make cool things. A cool website in 2024 is either a content farm that will continually feed you enough content to hold your attention, or a social media site where your participation will come with stats to show you whether you are holding the attention of others.

AO3 wasn’t built to be a community space. It doesn’t have great functions for meeting people and having conversations. The idea was that, because fandom community spaces already existed, AO3 would serve the part of that community where you can find the cool things and store the cool things you made. It was meant to be a library in a city, not the whole city itself.

But it was also never meant to be a website in 2024, a content farm constantly generating content solely for your clicks and eyeballs and ad revenue, or a social media site where the content creators themselves vie for your clicks and eyeballs.

The most common talking point when people discuss the enshittification of fandom is the folks out there who are treating AO3 as that first kind of enshittified website: the content farm. This discussion is about how people treat fanfic as a product for consumption.

The post that kicked off the discussion on @sitp-recs’s blog was about someone who wasn’t getting very many kudos or comments on their fic, and was feeling pretty demoralized about it, then joined a discord server and found an entire channel dedicated to people loving their fic. But those on that server had never come to share that love with the author, which the author found really discouraging.

There are more and more stories like this. Someone on tiktok pulls a quote from a fic on AO3 and makes a 10-second video with them staring at a wall, the quote pasted at the bottom, music playing over it. It has 100,000 hearts, and 100 comments with people gushing over the fic, which has 80 kudos on AO3. Overall, people notice more and more hits on their fics, but fewer and fewer comments or even kudos. Fewer and fewer people seem to feel the need to interact with the author, instead treating the fic like a product to be used and discarded—which the enshittified internet (a stunning feature of late-stage capitalism!) encourages. The fandom community is dying, these stories conclude.

I agree. 100%. Both of the stories above have happened to me—viral tiktoks about my fic, secret discord channels to follow and discuss my fic—and let me tell you, it fucking sucks.

But from these observations about fandom enshittification, the discussion continues in a very odd direction. The solution to the death of fandom community is our favorite enshittification buzzword: engagement. We should engage the authors. They’re producing these products for free. We consume them at no cost. We must demonstrate our gratitude by paying them back.

It’s as though the capitalist consumption that the enshittified web encourages is so ingrained within us that we must think in terms of payment, in terms of exchange, transaction. Or as though, by forgoing payment, authors are some kind of martyrs defying capitalism, and the only way to honor their great sacrifice is comments and kudos.

Indeed, the discourse around this sometimes does veer away from capitalist rhetoric into something that smells almost religious in desperation. Authors are gods who bestow us mere mortals with the fruits of their labor benevolently, through love; the least we can do is worship them. Meanwhile the authors adopt the groveling sentiment of starving artists: I produce great art; I only humbly ask that you feed me in return.

These kinds of entreaties make my skin crawl for a number of reasons. I’m not a god. I’m not writing because I love you. I don’t expect your worship or even your praise.

I think the thing that disturbs me the most about it is that it suggests that authors (or, if the OP is feeling generous fan work creators) are the most important people in fandom. I’ve even seen posts stating that without creators, fandom wouldn’t exist—as though readers aren’t just as important. As though conversations where people discuss characterizations and plot points and randomly spin out interpretations and ideas and thoughts related to canon are meaningless. I’ve even seen people scramble to include folks having these discussions as “creators,” as though realizing that these people are necessary and integral to fandom communities but unable to drop the idea that the producers are the ones who are important. As though that person who just lurks can never count.

Is this what community is? When you join the queer community, are you expected to produce a product of your queerness? If not, must you actively participate and give back to the queer community in order to be considered a part of it? Or is it enough that you are queer, that you exist as a queer person and want to be around others who are queer, you want to be a part of something? What is community, anyway?

The problem with people raising the authors above everyone else in the community and demanding that tribute be paid is that they are decrying the “content farm” style of 2024 website out of one side of their mouth, but out of the other side are instead demanding that AO3 become a 2024-style social media website. Authors are influencers. “Engagement” and clicks are the things that really matter. They are in fact suggesting that the way to solve the commodification of fanfic is by “paying authors back” with stats.

Before anyone comes at me with the idea that comments aren’t just “stats,” I will clarify what I mean. There are literally hundreds of posts on tumblr alone claiming that any comment “helps” the author. Someone replies that they are shy to comment. Someone else replies that incoherent keyboard smashes, a single emoji, or the comment “kudos” are all that is required to satisfy the author, all that is required as tribute—all that is required as payment to keep this economy healthy.

I’m not condemning the comments that are keyboard smashes or emojis or a single kind word. I receive them. They make me happy. If anyone wants to leave such a comment on my fics, I’m really grateful for it. But this is not community-building. This is a transaction. In @yiiiiiiiikes25’s excellent response in the post linked at the beginning, they point out that “you have a cool hat” is something that is “perfectly nice” to hear from someone—and it is! We all want to be told we have a cool hat! But as they go on to say, what builds community is interactions that are deep and specific, interactions that are rich in quality, not in quantity. A kudos or a comment that says only ❤️are lovely things to receive, but they don’t build community.

My reaction, when I see people begging for kudos and comments as the only means by which to keep fandom community alive, is very close to @eleadore's. I want to say, “No. Readers do not need to comment or kudos. Believe not these hucksters who claim to know the appropriate method of fandom participation. Participate as you feel able, or not at all; nothing is required of you.”

I’ve been told before (several times) that I’m not qualified to participate in such discussions because I am an established author who has some fics with very high stats. It doesn’t matter that I have also been a new writer with almost no one reading my fics. It doesn’t matter that I still write in new fandoms where no one in that fandom knows me. It doesn’t matter that I, like any human being, still care about receiving recognition and attention and praise.

And maybe that’s correct. I personally don’t think that billionaires have a place in deciding the direction of the economy, and--if we're really going to consider fandom an economy--in fandom terms, if I’m not a billionaire, or even a millionaire, I’m definitely in the infamous “one percent.” So, just as no one wants to hear Elon Musk say “money isn’t everything,” maybe it’s not my place to say “kudos isn’t required, actually.”

That said, I’m not the only one who has a problem with the stats-based discourse around fandom community. However, the main counter-response to this discussion I see goes something like this: you shouldn’t be writing fic for validation. If you’re writing for attention, you’re doing it for the wrong reason. Authors should write fic because they love it without any expectation of return.

This is, in my opinion, missing the point of what is meant by fandom community.

I wrote fanfic before I knew that fanfic, as a concept, existed. I read books; I wanted them to be different; I wrote little stories for myself with new endings, with self-inserts, with cross-overs, with alternate universes. I did it for myself in the 90s. It never occurred to me that anyone else would do this, much less that people would share.

As @faiell points out—creating and sharing are two different things. I created fics for myself, but I decided to share them in the early 2000s because other people might like them, too. And of course, I wanted to hear whether other people liked them. How could I not? I might decorate my home just for me and not for anyone else’s preferences, but when people come over and say my house is nice, how can I not enjoy that? And if a lot of people think my house is nice, which encourages me to post pictures of it online, isn’t it understandable I might do so with the hope that more people will say my house is nice? And, honestly, if no one is appreciating my pictures, I probably won’t continue to go through the trouble of taking them and posting them. I’ll just enjoy my house that I decorated without sharing, the end.

When I found out there were whole fannish communities where people discussed canon and tossed ideas around about it, made theories and prompts and insights into the characters, fics they had written and recs for other fics and analyses of fics and art based on fics and fics based on art—I wanted to be a part of that, too. Now, sometimes, I write fic not out of an internal need to do so but out of a desire to participate in that community.

The idea that we write fic only for the love of it, then post it only because we possess it, is a process entirely centered on the self. It’s fandom in a vacuum. The idea that we share this thing, that we feel pleasure if someone likes it but feel nothing at all if no one says anything about it, that it’s completely okay to be ignored and unseen—that’s not what a community is either. That’s some weird sort of self-aggrandizement through self-effacement—because yes, there is often a weird kind of virtue-signaling in this kind of discourse.

I say this as someone who has virtue-signaled in that way: “some people write for stats, but I write for myself.” It’s bullshit. Sure, I write for myself, but why post it on the internet? Honestly, said virtue has a whiff of the capitalist machine, which would like you to produce for the sake of production, work for the sake of work. The noblest among us expect no recompense for that which they give!

The reason that I’m bringing this back around to capitalism is that capitalism actively works to dismantle community. The reason that folks are out here pleading for “engagement” in order to “pay back” authors for the products they give us “for free” is because people no longer even have the language to discuss how to participate in meaningful community. And frankly, how to build back fandom community, in the face of enshittification, is getting harder and harder to see.

But I do think that if we value fanfic and the fanfic community, it’s really, really not constructive to judge whether someone’s reasons for writing fanfic are valid. It’s also weird to me that it would be considered wrong that someone’s reason for sharing fanfic is because they would like to receive some recognition for it, when in fact that seems to be the most natural reason in the world for sharing something so private and vulnerable with the world.

Let’s go back to that idea of how hurtful it is to find out your fanfic is trending on tiktok without anyone from tiktok saying anything to you about your fic, or how it can be painful to find out there’s a secret discord channel dedicated to your fic. The people who respond to that with, “Ah, but you shouldn’t be writing to get attention!” are missing the point. The fic did get attention. It got lots. Attention obviously wasn't why the writer was writing--they were writing to participate, and they didn't get to. At all.

However, if your conclusion is that the author was upset because these particular stats were not accruing under this author’s profile, thereby preventing them from achieving the vaunted status of BNF and influencer—I don’t know, maybe you’re right. But I don’t think that’s why I, personally, have been hurt by these things, and I doubt it’s what hurt the people in these posts either. They’re hurt because they want to participate, and they have been systematically excluded by the very people they thought were part of the community they thought they could participate in.

Sure, if those folks from tiktok and the discord server all came and showered the author with kudos and comments that said “kudos,” the author might have felt satisfied enough with the quantity of this recognition that they would continue writing. But in the end, this still does nothing to address the problem of fandom community, in which the deep, meaningful recognition, interactions, and relationships in fandom are getting harder and harder to have and to build, as a result of how people now expect to engage in online spaces.

So, how to address the problem of fandom community? You probably read this long, long post hoping that I had an answer, and for that I must apologize. I don’t have solutions. My intent was to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. I wished to outline the problems that I’m seeing in what was hopefully a slightly new or at least thought-provoking way, rather than offer solutions.

But, now that I’m talking about being prescriptive, maybe I can offer one suggestion, which is—maybe the solution to this isn’t about prescribing behavior. I do understand the irony in writing a prescription saying we shouldn’t prescribe people, but I’m going to write it anyway:

Maybe we shouldn’t be telling anyone the appropriate reasons for writing fanfic or for sharing it. Maybe we shouldn’t be telling readers they need to kudos or need to comment. If we’re going to go pointing fingers, we should be pointing at the institutions of capitalism that have made the internet what it is today—but I don’t think that’s going to solve the problem either.

But I do think that describing this problem, understanding what it actually is, not blaming readers for it and not blaming authors for it—I do think that helps. The discussion I linked at the beginning of this post is what I think of as the fandom I miss, the fandom that's now harder and harder to access, the fandom that is dying. That fandom was a social space where people had opinions and disagreed and went back and forth and gazed at their navels and then talked about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In the words of @yiiiiiiiikes25, it was a fuckin’ discussion about hats. And we’re hungry for it.

#not homestuck #long reads #fandom sociology #enshittification #late stage capitalism #great review of stuff i have a limited view of from my cave #(you know. the cave where it's 2013 all the time)#this has a good whiff of david graeber to it as well #thinking about that discussion in debt: the first 5k years about “communism” vs exchange vs hierarchy relations #and how capitalism alienates us from each other as markets expand into every sphere of human activity #by turning communal interactions into exchange interactions #and how those are fundamentally not the same kind of thing #good questions asked though: how to resist when the very substrates your communities depend upon repel community

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caledfwlchthat · 6 months ago

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what’s the point anymore?

you're allowed to give up any time you like, but if you do you have to acknowledge to yourself that everyone else has continued to keep going, and wonder to yourself why.

either everyone else is wrong about the state of things and their continued efforts are fools errands, OR it's just you who might need to spend some time readjusting your world view. ask yourself, are things actually over for you, or is the world as you know it just changing in a way that makes it feel like it's over because what qualifies as "the norm" has been forced to reshape itself? it can certainly be exhausting to try and keep up, so i wouldnt blame you for not knowing the difference right away.

perhaps the reason you feel like the apocalypse is happening only now is because it's been brought to your door for the first time in your life. you're not wrong to be scared, nor are you wrong to be tired. but you are wrong in thinking there's no point in trying, like in the grand scheme of history it's never been more over than it is in this moment. that's a very self-centered perspective to have.

there's no "correct" way to live life, which might be your main thing to learn. we've been led to believe that there is, because in mankind's addiction to efficiency we've created a self-perpetuating myth of "a life well lived"; something that is impossible to quantify, and impossible to replicate flawlessly. it mostly looked like going through school, getting a trade skill, going into the work force, making or perpetuating your family, and retiring on your own property. and now, because the channels that were once available to most people to access those things have become a luxury that disappearingly few are able to actually utilize, it feels like there's no way to live life "correctly" anymore at all. it feels like everything we try to do takes the form of a hollow echo of the idea we were led to believe was our future.

but i can assure you of this:

as long as you have food in your belly

as long as you have something that makes you laugh when you can

as long as you have something that helps you cry when you need to

as long as you feel okay asking for help with those things

there is something to wake up for, and something to keep trying for. it doesnt matter if it feels fake to you. it only matters if it works for you, because that's the only person you really need to live for.

i phrase this all in a very matter-of-fact way, because i do not know you and i cannot know your situation, nor can i feign like i have a great emotional need to help you. all the same, i hope that you won't take it as a cold or apathetic answer. it's important that you know i typed it all out because i hope that it will encourage you to stay with us.

#not homestuck #cw depression #speaking as someone who has always planned to keep going #both the call and the response feel very relatable #particularly struggling with writing holiday letters today #as i note my milestones and aspirations feel quite different from those of many of the friends i've left on other continents #even though they are probably outwardly quite similar #let's all try together not to judge ourselves this festive season #hope this reaches whoever needs to hear it #this has been a psa #reblog to save a life

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caledfwlchthat · 6 months ago

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ok i just got this thought out of nowhere but blog divers (people who scroll through a blog and reblog things that were posted YEARS AGO) are actually a super important part of the tumblr ecosystem

With people going inactive and deactivating, a lot of classic tumblr posts and also missed gems get lost because those connections get broken. Even on my own blog I forget about posts I made until I see someone in my activity reblog one of them- which then inspires me to reblog it myself because it was a good post and I want my new followers to see

do not feel bad about diving through someone's blog and reblogging shit from years ago, it keeps dashboards alive

(and if anyone has a problem with that, they can just block you or they can delete the root post ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, two things that have absolutely no effect on the grand scheme of our lives)

#not homestuck #digital ecosystems #it's kind of funny to think of ecological niches here but like #why weirder for social media than any other complex system #also who doesn't love a world heritage post on their dash

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caledfwlchthat · 6 months ago

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youtube

It’s The Smuppet Show [teaser trailer]

coming soon - a new feature-length Homestuck fan film from Naked Bee and friends

#homestuck #homestuck short film #the smuppet show #let's make it KEEP HAPPENING #the rb pile won't stop from getting taller #in theatres TODAY and by “theatres” i mean your screen #bee & laura at the top of their filming/scripting game here #every time through you'll find new things #dooooo iiiiit

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caledfwlchthat · 6 months ago

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youtube

[S] Cascade - Reanimated

#homestuck #homestuck fan...IMATION #cascade #i wept at its majesty. 14/10 no notes #makes me want to go back and compare shot for shot #because it's not a straight transcription? it definitely feels like there's some extra stuff going on here in a good way

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caledfwlchthat · 6 months ago

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💖 🤲

WHY HELLO MUTUAL IN MY INBOX, it is actually nice to receive things, but only now do I seem to find enough executive function to pull together a response. (tomorrow I start writing my first holiday letter to friends in like a decade, I'm not even kidding)

💖 What made you start writing?

hmm. Do I rules-lawyer this? How far back do I go. Because I've been writing expressively in one way or another very nearly since I could hold a pen. Motivations probably ranged from exploring early interests (wildlife, aerial battles) to sci-fi/fantasy OCs to collaborative post-by-post silliness of the kind we see here on Tumblr all the time. Plays, poetry, fiction. Attempts at more serious blogs. I am all about the mad wordz. You could stop doors with printouts of my emails to friends.

What made me start writing fanfic was that when Homestuck -- maybe not the first media of which I could say I was a fan, but the first for which I considered myself belonging to a fandom -- ended in 2016, I saw immediately that the main source of material for my voice acting blog (entitled, as you can see, "One Man Homestuck") had reached its limits. I had at best lukewarm ambitions for a truly solo dub of the entirety of Homestuck, and I found it hard to gel with several VA collaborations to that point. These days, of course, I could always just offer to podfic my lovely mutuals' fics...

Anyway, so Homestuck had [S] ACT 7 go up in April 2016. While I was wondering what to do with myself after that, I saw a post go up about the Ladystuck Remix Challenge 2016 -- my first encounter with a fic exchange. I liked the premise of using someone else's fic as a prompt, as an amusing exercise in constrained form. So I got myself an AO3 account, threw up two short VA intro scripts I had written for Jade and Terezi as qualifying works, and then wrote How Your Other Quarter Double-Dies -- which I can't say was what I had been expecting to write, but which ended up being stacks of fun. For extra credit I did The Cafe Mocha Caper which was a stretch for my powers at the time but I can at least say it was ambitious!

And then the rest has been history. My still-in-progress longfic Rose: Remember has been going from around the same time, and while I enjoyed Ladystuck it's this fic that seems to be my big Homestuck legacy. <kermit-flail waves to @laurasauras, @katreal-fic, @hussianphilosopher>

🤲 Would you please share a snippet of a wip?

Sure, uh! Lessee. <rummages around in the back stockroom>

Oh man! I had forgotten about this one completely -- so maybe to say it's "in progress" is a bit much, but I like the concept. Premise is a peek into the kinder, gentler dreams of some of the Friendsim trolls which, unfortunately for them, are no more than that. A sampler:

"Now, you may remember that last week," Ardata intones for the grubcam's benefit, "Mashya and I brought this poor abandoned lopwing in from the sun's searing heat. We found him half-culled in the dumpster behind our hive, his ribs kicked in and a wing slashed. And it annoys me greatly to think someone, anyone, would have done this anywhere even near here." She crouches down to join her charge in the cam's frame. "How could they! This precious boy! Who knows whose lusus he could have been!" Throughout her patter, Ardata feels the palmhusk in her trouser pocket shudder with the stochastic rhythm of Chittr notifications. She'll have to take a few of those later, since they're streaming live and the chance for her viewers to interact with the rescue beasts is part of the maverick appeal of her channel. There are still a few haters who still preferred the old times when the den was a dungeon, when the floor was slick with blood, when you could smell the suffering hanging in the dank air even through the remote link. Most of them are ignored, while a few persistent hecklers are derided or quickly shouted down. She's not quite as popular as she once was, but her new brand has a persistent counterculture staying power she would never have guessed at before Mashya arrived. Ardata purses her lips to mimic the lopwing's squeaking call, and the wounded animal hops over to close the few feet of remaining distance. Her rustblood assistant silently zooms the grubcam's view in as she gently pulls one iridescent wing open. The lopwing flinches and its eyes widen, but it allows examination of its wing's torn surface -- a helpful touch from another waiting aide. She knows she couldn't do this without him, even if she can't formally acknowledge his contribution. The wing is still a mess, the ragged edges of the membrane still crudely stitched together with silk thread. But by turning it into the light, she can see that the nearby elements have begun to revascularize, which may in time knit up the great scarred slash. She points this progress out to her fans. In another three weeks, the lopwing might be able to take short flights again; a week after that, perhaps it will finally be able to outrun the predating barkbeasts and cholerbears, and can be safely released. Ardata's palmhusk buzzes again and she fishes it out, throwing her hair over her far shoulder with an artfully careless toss of her head. "Anything you'd like to tell our little guest? Let's see." She frowns, seeing no text immediately apparent in the comment box. A quick double-tap highlights what was written: What exquisite cruelty. How, exactly, will this once-wild animal last more than fifteen seconds out in nature again? Your ministrations, and those of your misguided partner in crime, have rendered it unable to survive outside; you have merely drawn out its demise. And finishing: You sick, sick monster. I approve.

#homestuck #homestuck fanfic #askbox meme #i mean why wouldn't i want to write about... writing?

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caledfwlchthat · 6 months ago

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*seeing mutual going through my blog* haha mutual you are scrolling through my blog :)

*me going through a mutuals blog* they're are going to kill me

#truer words were never

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caledfwlchthat · 6 months ago

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A circle for summoning pentagons

A few months ago I needed a pentagon so I used ruler-and-compass construction to make one. But then I kept walking past the cardboard where I'd drawn it going "wow, this is a really cool design, it looks like an arcane sigil, I should really make something based on it." Two weeks of obsession later, here we are!

A few in-progress photos. For once, all the design changes were for aesthetic reasons not functional ones! Made for a nice change of pace, really.

Initially I had planned to use thin wire to make little arcs representing the compass marks, but it felt too crowded so I eventually got rid of them entirely.

#not homestuck #“arcane sigils”#what a delightful way to rediscover the pentagon construction #ruler and compass things always seemed like magic to me

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caledfwlchthat · 6 months ago

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#homestuck #homestuck fanart #rose lalonde #kanaya maryam #rosemary #wives of all time

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caledfwlchthat · 7 months ago

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people who write fics. how do you feel about comments on super old ones you wrote like 2+ years ago

#we love the COMMENTES #this has been a psa

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caledfwlchthat · 7 months ago

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im just now finding out that youre not a homestuck and your icon ISNT harry anderson egbert

An old angel stands in hell.

Your name is PDF. You don't celebrate the concept of birthdays and even if you did, you wouldn't know when to celebrate yours as you've lost track of time.

>QUICKLY RETRIEVE ARMS

You go to check your arms but are suddenly hit with a deeply uneasy feeling. Somewhere, out there. You get a sense that you're being likened to a character you have no knowledge of or are even aware exists. It's as if countless voices are calling out to you yet none of them ever manage to reach your dark abode.

>GO BACK TO STANDING.

#homestuck #homestuck fanart #but like... to be fair... actually *not* homestuck #the nature of things is that every so often etc etc #excellent angel and one i must learn more about #also this post had 413 notes when i first saw it and i was conflicted about messing it up by being number 414 #now it has... 420 notes. oh well can't win

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caledfwlchthat · 7 months ago

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I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

#not homestuck #enshittification #it ain't macquarie dictionary word of the year for nothing

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