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mcmansionhell · 3 months

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the motel room, or: on datedness

Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven't disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.

As I get older, to stumble on something truly dated, once a drag, is now a gift. After over a decade of real estate aggregation and the havoc it's wreaked on how we as a society perceive and decorate houses, if you're going to Zillow to search for the dated (which used to be like shooting fish in a barrel), you'll be searching aimlessly, for hours, to increasingly no avail, even with all the filters engaged. (The only way to get around this is locational knowledge of datedness gleaned from the real world.) If you try to find images of the dated elsewhere on the internet, you will find that the search is not intuitive. In this day and age, you cannot simply Google "80s hotel room" anymore, what with the disintegration of the search engine ecosystem and the AI generated nonsense and the algorithmic preference for something popular (the same specific images collected over and over again on social media), recent, and usually a derivative of the original search query (in this case, finding material along the lines of r/nostalgia or the Backrooms.)

To find what one is looking for online, one must game the search engine with filters that only show content predating 2021, or, even better, use existing resources (or those previously discovered) both online and in print. In the physical world of interiors, to find what one is looking for one must also now lurk around obscure places, and often outside the realm of the domestic which is so beholden to and cursed by the churn of fashion and the logic of speculation. Our open world is rapidly closing, while, paradoxically, remaining ostensibly open. It's true, I can open Zillow. I can still search. In the curated, aggregated realm, it is becoming harder and harder to find, and ultimately, to look.

But what if, despite all these changes, datedness was never really searchable? This is a strange symmetry, one could say an obscurity, between interiors and online. It is perhaps unintentional, and it lurks in the places where searching doesn't work, one because no one is searching there, or two, because an aesthetic, for all our cataloguing, curation, aggregation, hoarding, is not inherently indexable and even if it was, there are vasts swaths of the internet and the world that are not categorized via certain - or any - parameters. The internet curator's job is to find them and aggregate them, but it becomes harder and harder to do. They can only be stumbled upon or known in an outside, offline, historical or situational way. If to index, to aggregate, is, or at least was for the last 30 years, to profit (whether monetarily or in likes), then to be dated, in many respects, is the aesthetic manifestation of barely breaking even. Of not starting, preserving, or reinventing but just doing a job.

We see this online as well. While the old-web Geocities look and later Blingee MySpace-era swag have become aestheticized and fetishized, a kind of naive art for a naive time, a great many old websites have not received the same treatment. These are no less naive but they are harder to repackage or commodify because they are simple and boring. They are not "core" enough.

As with interiors, web datedness can be found in part or as a whole. For example, sites like Imgur or Reddit are not in and of themselves dated but they are full of remnants, of 15-year old posts and their "you, sir, have won the internet" vernacular that certainly are. Other websites are dated because they were made a long time ago by and for a clientele that doesn't have a need or the skill to update (we see this often with Web 2.0 e-commerce sites that figured out how to do a basic mobile page and reckoned it was enough). The next language of datedness, like the all-white landlord-special interior, is the default, clean Squarespace restaurant page, a landing space that's the digital equivalent of a flyer, rarely gleaned unless someone needs a menu, has a food allergy or if information about the place is not available immediately from Google Maps. I say this only to maintain that there is a continuity in practices between the on- and off-line world beyond what we would immediately assume, and that we cannot blame everything on algorithms.

But now you may ask, what is, exactly, datedness? Having spent two days in a distinctly dated hotel room, I've decided to sit in utter boredom with the numinous past and try and pin it down.

II.

I am in an obscure place. I am in Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada, on assignment. I am staying at a specific motel, the Voyageur. By my estimation the hotel was originally built in the late seventies and I'd be shocked if it was older than 1989. The hotel exterior was remodeled sometime in the 2000s with EIFS cladding and beige paint. Above is a picture of my room, which, forgive me, is in the process of being inhabited. American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) hotel rooms are some of the most churned through, renovated spaces in the world, and it's pretty rare, unless you're staying in either very small towns or are forced by economic necessity to stay at real holes in the wall, to find ones from this era. The last real hitter for me was a 90s Day's Inn in the meme-famous Breezewood, PA during the pandemic.

At first my reaction to seeing the room was cautionary. It was the last room in town, and certainly compared to other options, probably not the world's first choice. However, after staying in real, genuine European shitholes covering professional cycling I've become a class-A connoisseur of bad rooms. This one was definitively three stars. A mutter of "okay time to do a quick look through." But upon further inspection (post-bedbug paranoia) I came to the realization that maybe the always-new brainrot I'd been so critical of had seeped a teeny bit into my own subconscious and here I was snubbing my nose at a blessing in disguise. The room is not a bad room, nor is it unclean. It's just old. It's dated. We are sentimental about interiors like this now because they are disappearing, but they are for my parents what 2005 beige-core is for me and what 2010s greige will become for the generation after. When I'm writing about datedness, I'm writing in general using a previous era's examples because datedness, by its very nature, is a transitional status. Its end state is the mixed emotion of seeing things for what they are yet still appreciating them, expressed here.

Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don't necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called "liminal" spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you're the adult and the child in you is disappointed. (The real child-you forgot a dull hotel room the moment something more interesting came along.) An image of my father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, "It'll do." We have an intolerance for datedness because it is the realization of what sufficed. Sufficiency in many ways implies lack.

However, for all its datedness, many, if not all, of the things in this room will never be seen again if the room is renovated. They will become unpurchaseable and extinct. Things like the bizarrely-patterned linoleum tile in the shower, the hose connecting to the specific faucet of the once-luxurious (or at least middling) jacuzzi tub whose jets haven't been exercised since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wide berth of the tank on the toilet. There is nothing, really, worth saving about these things. Even the most sentimental among us wouldn't dare argue that the items and finishes in this room are particularly important from a design or historical standpoint. Not everything old has a patina. They're too cheaply made to salvage. Plastic tile. Bowed plywood. The image-artifacts of these rooms, gussied up for Booking dot com, will also, inevitably disappear, relegated to the dustheap of web caches and comments that say "it was ok kinda expensive but close to twon (sic)." You wouldn't be able to find them anyway unless you were looking for a room.

One does, of course, recognize a little bit of design in what's here. Signifiers of an era. The wood-veneer of the late 70s giving way to the pastel overtones of the 80s. Perhaps even a slow 90s. The all-in-one vanity floating above the floor, a modernist basement bathroom hallmark. White walls as a sign of cleanliness. Gestures, in the curved lines of the nightstands, towards postmodernity. Metallic lamp bases with wide-brimmed shades, a whisper of glamor. A kind of scalloped aura to the club chairs. The color teal mediated through hundreds if not thousands of shoes. Yellowing plastic, including the strips of "molding" that visually tie floor to wall. These are remnants (or are they intuitions?) of so many movements and micromovements, none of them definite enough to point to the influence of a single designer, hell, even of a single decade, just strands of past-ness accumulated into one thread, which is cheapness. Continuity exists in the materials only because everything was purchased as a set from a wholesale catalog.

In some way a hotel is supposed to be placeless. Anonymous. Everything tries to be that way now, even houses. Perhaps because we don't like the way we spy on ourselves and lease our images out to the world so we crave the specificity of hotel anonymity, of someplace we move through on our way to bigger, better or at least different things. The hotel was designed to be frictionless but because it is in a little town, it sees little use and because it sees little use, there are elements that can last far longer than they were intended and which inadvertently cause friction. (The janky door unlocks with a key. The shower hose keeps coming out of the faucet. It's deeply annoying.)

Lack of wear and lack of funds only keep them that way. Not even the paper goods of the eighties have been exhausted yet. Datedness is not a choice but an inevitability. Because it is not a choice, it is not advertised except in a utilitarian sense. It is kept subtle on the hotel websites, out of shame. Because it does not subscribe to an advertiser's economy of the now, of the curated type rather than the "here is my service" type, it disappears into the folds of the earth and cannot be searched for in the way "design" can. It can only be discovered by accident.

When I look at all of these objects and things, I do so knowing I will never see them again, at least not all here together like this, as a cohesive whole assembled for a specific purpose. I don't think I'll ever have reason to come back to this town or this place, which has given me an unexpected experience of being peevish in my father's time. Whenever I end up in a place like this, where all is as it was, I get the sense that it will take a very long time for others to experience this sensation again with the things my generation has made. The machinations of fashion work rapaciously to make sure that nothing is ever old, not people, not rooms, not items, not furniture, not fabrics, not even design, that old matron who loves to wax poetic about futurity and timelessness. The plastic-veneered particleboard used here is now the bedrock of countless landfills. Eventually it will become the chemical-laced soil upon which we build our condos. It is possible that we are standing now at the very last frontier of our prior datedness. The next one has not yet elided. It's a special place. Spend a night. Take pictures.

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#architecture #design #1980s #datedness #essay #the backrooms #oddcore #dreamcore #weirdcore

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exeggcute · 1 year

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the great reddit API meltdown of '23, or: this was always bound to happen

there's a lot of press about what's going on with reddit right now (app shutdowns, subreddit blackouts, the CEO continually putting his foot in his mouth), but I haven't seen as much stuff talking about how reddit got into this situation to begin with. so as a certified non-expert and Context Enjoyer I thought it might be helpful to lay things out as I understand them—a high-level view, surveying the whole landscape—in the wonderful world of startups, IPOs, and extremely angry users.

disclaimer that I am not a founder or VC (lmao), have yet to work at a company with a successful IPO, and am not a reddit employee or third-party reddit developer or even a subreddit moderator. I do work at a startup, know my way around an API or two, and have spent twelve regrettable years on reddit itself. which is to say that I make no promises of infallibility, but I hope you'll at least find all this interesting.

profit now or profit later

before you can really get into reddit as reddit, it helps to know a bit about startups (of which reddit is one). and before I launch into that, let me share my Three Types Of Websites framework, which is basically just a mental model about financial incentives that's helped me contextualize some of this stuff.

(1) website/software that does not exist to make money: relatively rare, for a variety of reasons, among them that it costs money to build and maintain a website in the first place. wikipedia is the evergreen example, although even wikipedia's been subject to criticism for how the wikimedia foundation pays out its employees and all that fun nonprofit stuff. what's important here is that even when making money is not the goal, money itself is still a factor, whether it's solicited via donations or it's just one guy paying out of pocket to host a hobby site. but websites in this category do, generally, offer free, no-strings-attached experiences to their users.

(I do want push back against the retrospective nostalgia of "everything on the internet used to be this way" because I don't think that was ever really true—look at AOL, the dotcom boom, the rise of banner ads. I distinctly remember that neopets had multiple corporate sponsors, including a cookie crisp-themed flash game. yahoo bought geocities for $3.6 billion; money's always been trading hands, obvious or not. it's indisputable that the internet is simply different now than it was ten or twenty years ago, and that monetization models themselves have largely changed as well (I have thoughts about this as it relates to web 1.0 vs web 2.0 and their associated costs/scale/etc.), but I think the only time people weren't trying to squeeze the internet for all the dimes it can offer was when the internet was first conceived as a tool for national defense.)

(2) website/software that exists to make money now: the type that requires the least explanation. mostly non-startup apps and services, including any random ecommerce storefront, mobile apps that cost three bucks to download, an MMO with a recurring subscription, or even a news website that runs banner ads and/or offers paid subscriptions. in most (but not all) cases, the "make money now" part is obvious, so these things don't feel free to us as users, even to the extent that they might have watered-down free versions or limited access free trials. no one's shocked when WoW offers another paid expansion packs because WoW's been around for two decades and has explicitly been trying to make money that whole time.

(3) website/software that exists to make money later: this is the fun one, and more common than you'd think. "make money later" is more or less the entire startup business model—I'll get into that in the next section—and is deployed with the expectation that you will make money at some point, but not always by means as obvious as "selling WoW expansions for forty bucks a pop."

companies in this category tend to have two closely entwined characteristics: they prioritize growth above all else, regardless of whether this growth is profitable in any way (now, or sometimes, ever), and they do this by offering users really cool and awesome shit at little to no cost (or, if not for free, then at least at a significant loss to the company).

so from a user perspective, these things either seem free or far cheaper than their competitors. but of course websites and software and apps and [blank]-as-a-service tools cost money to build and maintain, and that money has to come from somewhere, and the people supplying that money, generally, expect to get it back...

just not immediately.

startups, VCs, IPOs, and you

here's the extremely condensed "did NOT go to harvard business school" version of how a startup works:

(1) you have a cool idea.

(2) you convince some venture capitalists (also known as VCs) that your idea is cool. if they see the potential in what you're pitching, they'll give you money in exchange for partial ownership of your company—which means that if/when the company starts trading its stock publicly, these investors will own X numbers of shares that they can sell at any time. in other words, you get free money now (and you'll likely seek multiple "rounds" of investors over the years to sustain your company), but with the explicit expectations that these investors will get their payoff later, assuming you don't crash and burn before that happens.

during this phase, you want to do anything in your power to make your company appealing to investors so you can attract more of them and raise funds as needed. because you are definitely not bringing in the necessary revenue to offset operating costs by yourself.

it's also worth nothing that this is less about projecting the long-term profitability of your company than it's about its perceived profitability—i.e., VCs want to put their money behind a company that other people will also have confidence in, because that's what makes stock valuable, and VCs are in it for stock prices.

(3) there are two non-exclusive win conditions for your startup: you can get acquired, and you can have an IPO (also referred to as "going public"). these are often called "exit scenarios" and they benefit VCs and founders, as well as some employees. it's also possible for a company to get acquired, possibly even more than once, and then later go public.

acquisition: sell the whole damn thing to someone else. there are a million ways this can happen, some better than others, but in many cases this means anyone with ownership of the company (which includes both investors and employees who hold stock options) get their stock bought out by the acquiring company and end up with cash in hand. in varying amounts, of course. sometimes the founders walk away, sometimes the employees get laid off, but not always.

IPO: short for "initial public offering," this is when the company starts trading its stocks publicly, which means anyone who wants to can start buying that company's stock, which really means that VCs (and employees with stock options) can turn that hypothetical money into real money by selling their company stock to interested buyers.

drawing from that, companies don't go for an IPO until they think their stock will actually be worth something (or else what's the point?)—specifically, worth more than the amount of money that investors poured into it. The Powers That Be will speculate about a company's IPO potential way ahead of time, which is where you'll hear stuff about companies who have an estimated IPO evaluation of (to pull a completely random example) $10B. actually I lied, that was not a random example, that was reddit's valuation back in 2021 lol. but a valuation is basically just "how much will people be interested in our stock?"

as such, in the time leading up to an IPO, it's really really important to do everything you can to make your company seem like a good investment (which is how you get stock prices up), usually by making the company's numbers look good. but! if you plan on cashing out, the long-term effects of your decisions aren't top of mind here. remember, the industry lingo is "exit scenario."

if all of this seems like a good short-term strategy for companies and their VCs, but an unsustainable model for anyone who's buying those stocks during the IPO, that's because it often is.

also worth noting that it's possible for a company to be technically unprofitable as a business (meaning their costs outstrip their revenue) and still trade enormously well on the stock market; uber is the perennial example of this. to the people who make money solely off of buying and selling stock, it literally does not matter that the actual rideshare model isn't netting any income—people think the stock is valuable, so it's valuable.

this is also why, for example, elon musk is richer than god: if he were only the CEO of tesla, the money he'd make from selling mediocre cars would be (comparatively, lol) minimal. but he's also one of tesla's angel investors, which means he holds a shitload of tesla stock, and tesla's stock has performed well since their IPO a decade ago (despite recent dips)—even if tesla itself has never been a huge moneymaker, public faith in the company's eventual success has kept them trading at high levels. granted, this also means most of musk's wealth is hypothetical and not liquid; if TSLA dropped to nothing, so would the value of all the stock he holds (and his net work with it).

what's an API, anyway?

to move in an entirely different direction: we can't get into reddit's API debacle without understanding what an API itself is.

an API (short for "application programming interface," not that it really matters) is a series of code instructions that independent developers can use to plug their shit into someone else's shit. like a series of tin cans on strings between two kids' treehouses, but for sending and receiving data.

APIs work by yoinking data directly from a company's servers instead of displaying anything visually to users. so I could use reddit's API to build my own app that takes the day's top r/AITA post and transcribes it into pig latin: my app is a bunch of lines of code, and some of those lines of code fetch data from reddit (and then transcribe that data into pig latin), and then my app displays the content to anyone who wants to see it, not reddit itself. as far as reddit is concerned, no additional human beings laid eyeballs on that r/AITA post, and reddit never had a chance to serve ads alongside the pig-latinized content in my app. (put a pin in this part—it'll be relevant later.)

but at its core, an API is really a type of protocol, which encompasses a broad category of formats and business models and so on. some APIs are completely free to use, like how anyone can build a discord bot (but you still have to host it yourself). some companies offer free APIs to third-party developers can build their own plugins, and then the company and the third-party dev split the profit on those plugins. some APIs have a free tier for hobbyists and a paid tier for big professional projects (like every weather API ever, lol). some APIs are strictly paid services because the API itself is the company's core offering.

reddit's financial foundations

okay thanks for sticking with me. I promise we're almost ready to be almost ready to talk about the current backlash.

reddit has always been a startup's startup from day one: its founders created the site after attending a startup incubator (which is basically a summer camp run by VCs) with the successful goal of creating a financially successful site. backed by that delicious y combinator money, reddit got acquired by conde nast only a year or two after its creation, which netted its founders a couple million each. this was back in like, 2006 by the way. in the time since that acquisition, reddit's gone through a bunch of additional funding rounds, including from big-name investors like a16z, peter thiel (yes, that guy), sam altman (yes, also that guy), sequoia, fidelity, and tencent. crunchbase says that they've raised a total of $1.3B in investor backing.

in all this time, reddit has never been a public company, or, strictly speaking, profitable.

APIs and third-party apps

reddit has offered free API access for basically as long as it's had a public API—remember, as a "make money later" company, their primary goal is growth, which means attracting as many users as possible to the platform. so letting anyone build an app or widget is (or really, was) in line with that goal.

as such, third-party reddit apps have been around forever. by third-party apps, I mean apps that use the reddit API to display actual reddit content in an unofficial wrapper. iirc reddit didn't even have an official mobile app until semi-recently, so many of these third-party mobile apps in particular just sprung up to meet an unmet need, and they've kept a small but dedicated userbase ever since. some people also prefer the user experience of the unofficial apps, especially since they offer extra settings to customize what you're seeing and few to no ads (and any ads these apps do display are to the benefit of the third-party developers, not reddit itself.)

(let me add this preemptively: one solution I've seen proposed to the paid API backlash is that reddit should have third-party developers display reddit's ads in those third-party apps, but this isn't really possible or advisable due to boring adtech reasons I won't inflict on you here. source: just trust me bro)

in addition to mobile apps, there are also third-party tools that don’t replace the Official Reddit Viewing Experience but do offer auxiliary features like being able to mass-delete your post history, tools that make the site more accessible to people who use screen readers, and tools that help moderators of subreddits moderate more easily. not to mention a small army of reddit bots like u/AutoWikibot or u/RemindMebot (and then the bots that tally the number of people who reply to bot comments with “good bot” or “bad bot).

the number of people who use third-party apps is relatively small, but they arguably comprise some of reddit’s most dedicated users, which means that third-party apps are important to the people who keep reddit running and the people who supply reddit with high-quality content.

unpaid moderators and user-generated content

so reddit is sort of two things: reddit is a platform, but it’s also a community.

the platform is all the unsexy (or, if you like python, sexy) stuff under the hood that actually makes the damn thing work. this is what the company spends money building and maintaining and "owns." the community is all the stuff that happens on the platform: posts, people, petty squabbles. so the platform is where the content lives, but ultimately the content is the reason people use reddit—no one’s like “yeah, I spend time on here because the backend framework really impressed me."

and all of this content is supplied by users, which is not unique among social media platforms, but the content is also managed by users, which is. paid employees do not govern subreddits; unpaid volunteers do. and moderation is the only thing that keeps reddit even remotely tolerable—without someone to remove spam, ban annoying users, and (god willing) enforce rules against abuse and hate speech, a subreddit loses its appeal and therefore its users. not dissimilar to the situation we’re seeing play out at twitter, except at twitter it was the loss of paid moderators; reddit is arguably in a more precarious position because they could lose this unpaid labor at any moment, and as an already-unprofitable company they absolutely cannot afford to implement paid labor as a substitute.

oh yeah? spell "IPO" backwards

so here we are, June 2023, and reddit is licking its lips in anticipation of a long-fabled IPO. which means it’s time to start fluffing themselves up for investors by cutting costs (yay, layoffs!) and seeking new avenues of profit, however small.

this brings us to the current controversy: reddit announced a new API pricing plan that more or less prevents anyone from using it for free.

from reddit's perspective, the ostensible benefits of charging for API access are twofold: first, there's direct profit to be made off of the developers who (may or may not) pay several thousand dollars a month to use it, and second, cutting off unsanctioned third-party mobile apps (possibly) funnels those apps' users back into the official reddit mobile app. and since users on third-party apps reap the benefit of reddit's site architecture (and hosting, and development, and all the other expenses the site itself incurs) without “earning” money for reddit by generating ad impressions, there’s a financial incentive at work here: even if only a small percentage of people use third-party apps, getting them to use the official app instead translates to increased ad revenue, however marginal.

(also worth mentioning that chatGPT and other LLMs were trained via tools that used reddit's API to scrape post and content data, and now that openAI is reaping the profits of that training without giving reddit any kickbacks, reddit probably wants to prevent repeats of this from happening in the future. if you want to train the next LLM, it's gonna cost you.)

of course, these changes only benefit reddit if they actually increase the company’s revenue and perceived value/growth—which is hard to do when your users (who are also the people who supply the content for other users to engage with, who are also the people who moderate your communities and make them fun to participate in) get really fucking pissed and threaten to walk.

pricing shenanigans

under the new API pricing plan, third-party developers are suddenly facing steep costs to maintain the apps and tools they’ve built.

most paid APIs are priced by volume: basically, the more data you send and receive, the more money it costs. so if your third-party app has a lot of users, you’ll have to make more API requests to fetch content for those users, and your app becomes more expensive to maintain. (this isn’t an issue if the tool you’re building also turns a profit, but most third-party reddit apps make little, if any, money.)

which is why, even though third-party apps capture a relatively small portion of reddit’s users, the developer of a popular third-party app called apollo recently learned that it would cost them about $20 million a year to keep the app running. and apollo actually offers some paid features (for extra in-app features independent of what reddit offers), but nowhere near enough to break even on those API costs.

so apollo, any many apps like it, were suddenly unable to keep their doors open under the new API pricing model and announced that they'd be forced to shut down.

backlash, blackout

plenty has been said already about the current subreddit blackouts—in like, official news outlets and everything—so this might be the least interesting section of my whole post lol. the short version is that enough redditors got pissed enough that they collectively decided to take subreddits “offline” in protest, either by making them read-only or making them completely inaccessible. their goal was to send a message, and that message was "if you piss us off and we bail, here's what reddit's gonna be like: a ghost town."

but, you may ask, if third-party apps only captured a small number of users in the first place, how was the backlash strong enough to result in a near-sitewide blackout? well, two reasons:

first and foremost, since moderators in particular are fond of third-party tools, and since moderators wield outsized power (as both the people who keep your site more or less civil, and as the people who can take a subreddit offline if they feel like it), it’s in your best interests to keep them happy. especially since they don’t get paid to do this job in the first place, won’t keep doing it if it gets too hard, and essentially have nothing to lose by stepping down.

then, to a lesser extent, the non-moderator users on third-party apps tend to be Power Users who’ve been on reddit since its inception, and as such likely supply a disproportionate amount of the high-quality content for other users to see (and for ads to be served alongside). if you drive away those users, you’re effectively kneecapping your overall site traffic (which is bad for Growth) and reducing the number/value of any ad impressions you can serve (which is bad for revenue).

also a secret third reason, which is that even people who use the official apps have no stake in a potential IPO, can smell the general unfairness of this whole situation, and would enjoy the schadenfreude of investors getting fucked over. not to mention that reddit’s current CEO has made a complete ass of himself and now everyone hates him and wants to see him suffer personally.

(granted, it seems like reddit may acquiesce slightly and grant free API access to a select set of moderation/accessibility tools, but at this point it comes across as an empty gesture.)

"later" is now "now"

TL;DR: this whole thing is a combination of many factors, specifically reddit being intensely user-driven and self-governed, but also a high-traffic site that costs a lot of money to run (why they willingly decided to start hosting video a few years back is beyond me...), while also being angled as a public stock market offering in the very near future. to some extent I understand why reddit’s CEO doubled down on the changes—he wants to look strong for investors—but he’s also made a fool of himself and cast a shadow of uncertainty onto reddit’s future, not to mention the PR nightmare surrounding all of this. and since arguably the most important thing in an IPO is how much faith people have in your company, I honestly think reddit would’ve fared better if they hadn’t gone nuclear with the API changes in the first place.

that said, I also think it’s a mistake to assume that reddit care (or needs to care) about its users in any meaningful way, or at least not as more than means to an end. if reddit shuts down in three years, but all of the people sitting on stock options right now cashed out at $120/share and escaped unscathed... that’s a success story! you got your money! VCs want to recoup their investment—they don’t care about longevity (at least not after they’re gone), user experience, or even sustained profit. those were never the forces driving them, because these were never the ultimate metrics of their success.

and to be clear: this isn’t unique to reddit. this is how pretty much all startups operate.

I talked about the difference between “make money now” companies and “make money later” companies, and what we’re experiencing is the painful transition from “later” to “now.” as users, this change is almost invisible until it’s already happened—it’s like a rug we didn’t even know existed gets pulled out from under us.

the pre-IPO honeymoon phase is awesome as a user, because companies have no expectation of profit, only growth. if you can rely on VC money to stay afloat, your only concern is building a user base, not squeezing a profit out of them. and to do that, you offer cool shit at a loss: everything’s chocolate and flowers and quarterly reports about the number of signups you’re getting!

...until you reach a critical mass of users, VCs want to cash in, and to prepare for that IPO leadership starts thinking of ways to make the website (appear) profitable and implements a bunch of shit that makes users go “wait, what?”

I also touched on this earlier, but I want to reiterate a bit here: I think the myth of the benign non-monetized internet of yore is exactly that—a myth. what has changed are the specific market factors behind these websites, and their scale, and the means by which they attempt to monetize their services and/or make their services look attractive to investors, and so from a user perspective things feel worse because the specific ways we’re getting squeezed have evolved. maybe they are even worse, at least in the ways that matter. but I’m also increasingly less surprised when this occurs, because making money is and has always been the goal for all of these ventures, regardless of how they try to do so.

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pwesident · 2 years

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im sorry but it’s sincerely so fucking funny to see the absolutely unwinnable situation elon has put himself in. he’s bought an already-unprofitable website, one of the most complex social medias to-date, and immediately laid off half the staff that knew how to keep it running.

and then to try to make it profitable he’s going to charge $8 a month for 50% less ads and the privilege of being filtered to the top of search results.

$8 for the ability to blast your message before anyone else in search results and you dont have to prove you’re actually a person to buy it. he’s building a misinformation machine.

and by unbanning all the absolute scum like trump and such, advertisers want no part of it, so there goes even more profit. and just today he’s said he’s going to “name and shame” all the advertisers that have left if they dont stop being mean to him. because that’ll make them want to work with him. but then if he cows and doesn’t go through with unbanning, his clowns are going to turn on him.

then the kicker is that due to how the lean against Tesla is set up, the worse tesla performs the more debt he’s in & the worse twitter performs, the worse tesla performs.

he’s so fucked

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orayart · 10 months

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THE GOOD OMENS REFERENCE LIBRARY

You may know that sometimes it can be a real pain to search for a specific reference from Good Omens, like a detail from Aziraphale's costume, Crowley's expression in one particular episode, a piece of furniture in the bookshop...

So for that, I decides to create a library with everything Good Omens artists may need in different folders.

That may be :

>> Their face profile, their body types, Crowley as an angel, every time period costumes, Soho street and floor map, the bookshop outside and inside, the bentley in different angles, their different hair style, hands details, alpha century nasa pics, Aziraphale's ring or Crowley's tattoo, Beelzebub from s1 or s2 ECT......

But also :

>> Face features and body studies with notes made by me

+ a free morpho and anatomy book in pdf from this Tumblr post :

So obviously this is going to be a big work and I need your help to build this library !

How ? You can join this discord server I've made.

Everything will be separated in different # channels

If you have a great screenshot of Aziraphale's hands for instance, you can send it in the appropriate channel.

I will be sorting them and put them all in the Google Drive I'm working on with different folders.

In time, when enough material will be gathered, I hope this could become a Website on which everyone can have access ! (I'm looking for someone that knows how to do that btw)

So if you have a lot of stuffs in your gallery and are willing to help, but also if you're an artist and looking for specific references right now, you may join the discord !

Please be sure to check the # informations and # rules when you arrive !

See you there 🫶🏻

#good omens #ineffable husbands #aziraphale #crowley #aziracrow #ineffable partners #good omens season 2 #good omens 2 #tips for artists #good omens reference #art references #The Good Omens Library #Aziraphale reference #crowley references

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astercontrol · 7 months

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If KOSA passes

Or if any other form of censorship (there are many in the works!) ever succeeds at stepping in to impede our ability to communicate online:

We have to make plans.

Now, I dunno who'll even see this post. The few followers I have are TRON fans (who despite the fantasy we live in, tend to have realistically dismal views IRL about Disney and the various corporate uses of software).

And this fandom, on average, is pretty tech-savvy. It's where I've encountered the most people under 20 years old who actually know how to use a desktop or laptop computer.

So, if there's any hope for what I'm thinking about, this is prolly a good place to start with it.

(As with all my posts, I encourage reblogging and containment-breaching.)

(Gifs are clips from TRON 1982, mainly the "deleted love scene," from the DVD extras.)

Anyway.

Current society has moved online communication much too far onto major social media sites for my comfort. Whoever you communicate with over the internet, chances are you do it through a service owned by a big company: Tumblr, Twitter, Discord, Telegram, Facebook, whatever. Even TikTok (shudder).

These sites, despite their many flaws, can provide experiences that are valuable and hard to get otherwise. And once all your friends are on one site, you can't just leave and stay in touch with them all, not unless they all go the same place. It's easy to see why it's hard to abandon any social media platform.

But a backup plan is important. Because, as we've seen over and over, social media sites can't be relied on. They change their policies suddenly, without good reason-- and are inconsistent, even discriminatory, about enforcing those policies.

If they're funded by ads, the advertisers are their main customers, and your posts are the product. Their goal is that the posts most valuable to the advertisers get seen by people the advertisers consider desirable customers.

Helping you communicate-- making your posts get seen by the people you want to communicate with-- is optional to them.

Not to mention that the whole business model of an ad-funded website is generally unsustainable. Many of these sites are operating at a loss, relying on shareholders in a fragile bubble, doomed to fail soon just from lack of real profit.

And the more restrictions --like KOSA-- that the law puts on freedom of online speech, the likelier they are to go down or just become unusable. Every rule a site is required to follow is another strain on its resources, and most of them are already failing badly at even enforcing their own self-imposed rules.

If we want any control over our continued ability to stay in touch with our online friends-- we need to have a backup plan. Maybe it'll be simple at first, a bare-bones system we cobble together-- but it's gotta be something that will work. For a while at least.

There are lots of really good posts about ways to build your own website, using a service like Neocities. I VERY MUCH recommend learning this skill-- learning to make websites of the very simplest, most stable, glitch-resistant type, made of html pages-- which you can upload to a host while you store backups on your home computer. If you value the writing and art that you put online, this is probably the safest you can keep it.

But that's for making your own creative work public.

As for communicating with others-- for example, receiving and answering other people's comments on your work-- that gets more complex. I personally haven't found it worthwhile to troubleshoot the problems that come with having a system that allows visitors to comment publicly on my website.

But what we do still have-- and likely will for a long time-- is email.

Those of us who came of age before social media's current hold... well, we might take this for granted. Email was the first form of online contact we ever encountered… and thus it can seem to us like the most ordinary, the most boring.

But in the current world, it is a rare and precious thing to find a method of communicating that doesn't require everyone in the chat to be signed on with the same corporation.

Email is, as of now, still perfectly legal-- as much as social media companies have been trying to herd the populace away from it. I'm sure there are other ways to share thoughts online that are not bound by laws. But I am not going to go into that here.

Email service is provided by law-abiding companies, which will comply with subpoenas if law enforcement thinks you are emailing about doing illegal things. So, email is not a surefire way to be safe, if laws become dystopian enough to threaten your freedom to talk about your own life and identity.

But it's safer than posting on a public social media page.

For now.

Email is beautifully decentralized. You can get an email address many different ways-- some reliant on a company like Gmail, others hosted on your own domain. And different people, with all different types of email addresses, hosted in all different ways-- can all communicate together by the same method.

Of course any of these people, individually, can lose their email address for some reason or other, and have to get a new one. But as long as they still know the email addresses of their contacts, they can reconnect and recover from that loss. The structure of a group linked by email is reliant not on a single company-- but on the group itself, the friends you can actually count on.

This is why I am trying to promote the idea of forming email lists, as a backup plan to give people a way to stay in touch as mainstream social media sites prove to be unsustainable.

I'm envisioning a simple system of sending emails to several addresses at once, and making each reply visible to everyone in the chat by using "reply all" (or, if desired, editing the To field to reply to only some).

If enough people get used to using email in this way, it could fill most of the needs met by any other group chat or forum …without depending on a centralized social media company that's taking dystopian measures to try and make the business profitable.

So here are some thoughts about how I personally imagine it could work.

(Feel free to comment and bring up any thoughts I haven't addressed, or suggestions to customize how specific groups could set it up. This is meant as more of a starting point for brainstorming than a catch-all solution.)

As I see it, here are the basics of what you and your friends would each need to start out:

An email address. Any kind, hosted anywhere. You should use a dedicated email account just for this group, one that you do NOT use for other communication. Being in this group will result in things you don't want happening to your main email address-- like getting a TON of email, one for every post and reply. Or someone could get your email address that you really don't want any contact with. Use a burner email account (one that you can easily replace) and change it if needed.

The knowledge of how to "REPLY ALL" in your email. This will be necessary in order to add a comment that everyone in the group can see.

The knowledge of how to EDIT THE "TO" FIELD in your email, and remove addresses from the list of all recipients. This will be necessary if you want to CHANGE WHICH PEOPLE in the group can see your comment.

The knowledge of how to FILTER WORDS in your email. This will be necessary if a topic comes up that you don't want to see any mentions of.

The knowledge of how to BLOCK PEOPLE in your email. This will be very important. If someone joins this email group who you do not want to interact with, it will be up to you to BLOCK them so that you do NOT see their messages. (If they are bad enough to evade the block with multiple burner accounts, that's what you have a burner account for. Change it, and share the new one only with those you trust not to give it to them.)

Every person in the group will be effectively a "moderator" of the group, able to remove people from it by cutting their email addresses out of the "To" field. Members will all have equal "moderator" privileges, each able to tailor the group to their own needs.

This means the group may naturally split, over time, into other groups, each one removing some people and adding others. Some will overlap, some won't. This is good! This is, in my opinion, what online interaction SHOULD be like! There should be MANY groups like this!

In this way, we can keep online discussion alive, no matter WHAT happens to any of the social media websites.

If the dystopia got bad enough to shut down email, we could even continue with postal mail and photocopies, like they did in the days of print-zine fanfiction.

If it looks like the dystopia is gonna come for postal mail too, we'll use the connection we have to preserve whatever contacts we can with people who live near us.

Not saying it's GONNA get that bad. But these steps of preparation are good no matter exactly what kind of bad stuff happens.

As long as some organized form of communication still exists, we'll have a place where it's at least a little safer to be your true self…

to plan events and meetups…

and maybe even activities a little too risque to make the final cut of a 1982 Disney movie.

They're trying to censor us. We want a Free System. So we're gonna fight back.

For the Users. Not the corporations.

Peace out, programs. <3

#tron #tronblr #tron 1982 #userworldproblems #diy punk #censorship #kosa #internet literacy #email #solutions

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sunshineandspencer · 1 month

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Cowboy hat rule, Part 3 (Tyler Owens, Twisters)

A/N: This was written as soon as I woke up the morning after seeing the movie, I woke up at 5am for some reason and this was spat out of me. I have no knowledge of it even after rereading it all, but the groupchat liked it so here you are. Also I’m working under the headcannon that you don’t get your hat back until you complete the rule.

Pairing: Tyler Owens x Fem!Reader.

Summary: In between butting heads with Javi’s team and running a successful YouTube channel based entirely around tornadoes, Tyler Owens is introduced to the most interesting woman he’s seen in a good while - and her sister.

Word Count: 946

Warnings: past emotional(?) infidelity (fuck anthony ramos for cheating on his fiancé), talk of beer, slightly suggestive (again, cowboy hat rule)

Parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 4

I have redone the form for the taglist now that I’m apparently expanding from Criminal Minds

So, apparently, Javi was working for a company that profited off the suffering of people that were most recently affected by the storms.

Of course, it makes sense. Old white guy, white hair, irritating face, makes sense he’s into real estate.

What doesn’t make it any better, is the fact that while both her and Kate found out, he only bothered to go and explain himself to Kate.

Nice to know he hasn’t changed. He’s always preferred Kate to her, even when they dated, he always called for Kate first on the radio.

If she tries hard enough, she can hear them through the wall.

But she’s not going to try.

Doom scrolling through that old guy’s website and pretending she’s not feeling sick about inadvertently helping this guy was cut short by a knock to her door.

Shutting the lid of her laptop, she shook her head and pressed the base of her palms to her eyes.

Getting up and walking to the door, she gave herself a few moments to try and decide what emotion to put on, not sure she’s ready to face her sister or - God forbid - Javi. Pulling it open and leaning against it.

Fighting the smile, and the genuine relief, when she was met with Tyler.

“Evenin’ wrangler, what you all the way up here for?”

It’s the second level of a motel, there are a lot of people up here. If he didn’t sleep in the RV with everyone else he’d be up here.

“Heard you hadn’t eaten, wondered if you wanted a pizza? It was the last one before the lady went home, should still be warm.”

Shrugging, he offers the pizza, margarita. Safe, lots of people like it - thankfully it’s also the only pizza she likes. And God she needs a pizza, and a beer, but she needs the pizza first.

“You actually- nevermind, come in, bring the pizza.”

As if he’d leave it outside, she holds the door open a little more and he steps in. Taking a good look around the room.

It’s not like this place has meaning to her, it’s a shitty motel room in tornado valley; they don’t build these with the expectation to last. The most you can do is collect stuff from home and wherever you’re staying and try to give it some personality.

But then his eyes fall on the white cowboy hat on her bedpost. Let’s correct that, his cowboy hat on her bedpost.

There’s the splash of meaning.

“You still have my hat.”

She lets out a soft snort, a pretty kind of laugh that she probably hates.

Sitting down on the bed with her pizza and opening it up. Resisting the urge to dive head first into the greasy shit she knows it’s going to be.

God- she’s never hated New York and her fucking fad diet more than she did right now.

Luckily, she’s not in New York, she’s in Oklahoma and a cowboy just bought her a pizza, she couldn’t turn it down now could she.

Offering him the first slice, she gives him a smug little grin, tilting her head. Acting all innocent as if she doesn’t know exactly what it means, his stupid cowboy hat has kept pride of place since she stole it.

“And you know how you have to get it back. Otherwise it’s staying on my wall. Add it to the collection.”

She’s not had a collection of guy’s cowboy hats since she was in college - it was a pretty decoration, and she loved watching the guys find their hats once they left.

But he doesn’t know that, and she liked the upset glint in his eyes at thinking there are still some hats waiting for their owners.

He took the slice and sat with her, and the itching silence caused her to sigh. Able to see his kicked-puppy look in the corner of her eye. Cursing her inability to say no to a pretty face, or even allow herself to hurt someone in the slightest.

“I’m joking, by the way. The only hat I have is my own, and that’s in Texas.”

Whether he knows it or not, Tyler Owens visibly relaxed at being told that. And that sends a concerning rush through her chest.

Something she really does not need right now, especially not with her sister and ex-boyfriend’s voice coming through the wall. A little louder now, probably an argument.

Her head turns, staring unseeing at the ugly painting above the bed. Not really paying attention, but knowing the words would come back to her later. When she really didn’t want them to.

Honestly, he’s barely said a word since he came in, still surprised he actually convinced himself to bring her the pizza. And now he’s sat on her bed.

Not wanting this odd little dream to disappear before he could grasp it fully.

This woman is a wisp of smoke, the angry clouds before a tornado forms, unpredictable and dangerous. Unpredictability and danger, the two things he’s dedicated his life to.. he wouldn’t mind making her a third.

Nudging her foot with his, he dipped his head down to finally meet her gaze. Habit from wearing the hat, the damn thing somewhere off in his periphery.

“I have something I want to show you, if you’ll let me. It’s a hell of a lot better than anything this place has given us yet.”

“Like what?”

He doesn’t appreciate her dull tone, but knows she didn’t really mean it. Not when her gaze slowly returned to his, the fractals of guilt swimming in her eyes.

“A home away from home for you Alpine, trust me.”

Want more?! Good!

#tyler owens #twisters #twisters movie #twisters 2024 #twisters fanfic #twisters x reader #twisters spoilers #tyler owens x reader #tyler owens fanfiction #twisters fic #tyler owens fic

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bob-artist · 3 months

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Just found you via your funny dream comic. Good stuff 😆. Definitely gonna read the rest, and I was surprised you had your own website. Looks good on mobile too. I’ve got a comic that some friends keep trying to build me a site for but I’ve been telling them no because it seems like between webtoon and social media nobody is interested in personal sites anymore.

Have you noticed an uptick in engagement from your site? Would you recommend going that route? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

I’m also interested in how you decided to build/host it, if that question isn’t too lame.

Anyway, glad I found your comics!

Ah thank you for checking out Into the Smoke's website!!

Oh, I have SO many thoughts about independent webcomic sites and why people should have them. I have so many thoughts, and I'm so so sorry.

Why did I decide to have my own webcomic site?

First of all, this is not a lame question and I wish we could all have this conversation more often, so I could maybe write just a paragraph instead of this whole dissertation!

1. Because I lived through webcomics history.

I launched my first webcomic in 2011. I watched the webcomics scene shift over the years from self-hosted sites to third party sites, and I saw what it meant for independent creators. We lost vital infrastructure, relationships, habits, and control over our own work. I think self-hosted sites are an important backbone for creators, even if/when their largest *numbers* come from a third party site.

We’re all supposed to be helping each other, not fighting each other to satisfy the algorithm. Our early tools (webrings, link trades, comic databases, sharing each other’s posts) were small but meaningful, and they also helped us maintain a community mindset in a long and sometimes lonely line of work. When we started leaning on hosting sites, we let a lot of those tools and relationships decay. And now a lot of people are locked into imbalanced relationships with hosting sites that leave them with very little agency and control over their work and how it’s shared (or isn’t shared).

Hosting sites are great for removing barriers to entry (cost/time to build a site). And a lot of them have large built-in audiences. But the big ones aren’t run by people who care about creators. They’re designed to extract the maximum value from your work while giving you the least they can get away with. Use them if you want (I do), but don't be dependent on them.

2. Comics are the main thing I do for a living, and a website gives me the tools to promote my work and build relationships with my readers.

Most apps and third party sites actively prevent or suppress these things. On your own site, you can share all the info you want about your upcoming Kickstarter, your tradpub book release, your merch, etc. You can collect email addresses for your newsletter. You can literally just talk about your weekend, and you’re not gonna have a 150-character limit.

Yeah, not everyone wants to read a wall of text (ha ha...), but acting like a person reminds readers to treat you like a person. This is one of my main gripes with the apps and social media - they suppress human connection and present you like a cog in their machine that only exists to churn out free content.

3. I have a consistent home base and full control over how my work is displayed.

I don’t have to fight against an app that’s trying to direct my readers toward whichever content is most profitable for them. On an app, the readers “belong” to them, not you. (Who has their email addresses?) So if I'm putting effort into promoting my comic, I'm promoting my own site. (oh look, I just did it.)

Hosting sites/apps aren't designed to showcase your work. They showcase the app’s collection, and they're designed to keep readers on the app, jumping from creator to creator. This can help readers find you, but it also devalues your work and dilutes its impact.

And the app might not show your work to anyone anyway. Tapas is a great example; they recently redesigned their site to prioritize their Originals, and independent creators are hidden away in a “community” tab with barely any discoverability anymore. This is always the struggle on a third party site.

4. I hate censorship.

Into the Smoke is Teen 16/17+ and Demon of the Underground is R/18+. My comics aren’t even explicit, but I still can’t post my true, uncensored vision for either story on third party apps governed by Apple’s App Store and Visa/Mastercard’s tight content restrictions.

If webcomics exist exclusively on apps with heavy censorship, we’ll never have the diversity of storytelling and freedom of expression that’s necessary for groundbreaking or subversive art to happen. And that’s bad for everyone.

Adult brains need to engage with adult concepts. Difficult and triggering topics need to be explored in creative spaces. Artists need freedom to stretch their creative muscles without falling into the damaging patterns of self-censorship that come from having to tiptoe around arbitrary platform rules.

We can’t let the rules of like 3 American companies dictate what every webcomic reader around the world is allowed to read.

5. An independent website can’t easily be taken away from you.

Just make regular backups! You can always move to a new web host and redirect URLs if needed, and you won't lose your readers. On the other hand, you can easily lose the bulk of your audience on a third party site based on circumstances outside your control.

Let’s talk about Smack Jeeves, a formerly popular webcomic hosting site that was bought out and then shut down, leaving lots of cartoonists homeless. Or we can talk about the Tumblr NSFW purge of 2018, where I lost a huge chunk of my first webcomic’s following and most of my webcomic mutuals, even though my own account stayed within the rules. Or Musk buying Twitter, the platform where I once found my literary agent through a publishing event but now get no traction at all.

Have I noticed an uptick in engagement from my site?

I don’t have analytics on my site yet. But, up until a few days ago, that's where people were reading, thanks to my own efforts and the support of my comics friends and all of y’all who shared my ITS posts. (THANK YOU ALL!) I didn't have any discoverability on Webtoon or Tapas yet.

I got 10-15 new patrons between May 25 and June 5. Up until a few days ago, I even had more ITS newsletter subscribers than Webtoon subscribers.

What happened a few days ago is my Webtoon mirror suddenly blew up with 100+ new subs a day. I don’t know where I’m being featured, but I know I’m only getting those readers because Webtoon suddenly chose to grant me visibility. That can end just as instantly with an algorithm tweak or them deciding not to show my comic anymore. (When my first webcomic was in one of their pay programs in 2018, I went from $300 or $400/month to $0 overnight due to a policy change.) So I’ll enjoy it while it lasts, but I won't de-prioritize my website.

The new Webtoon readers are awesome and supportive, and I’m 100% thrilled to have them. But the Webtoon influx isn't resulting in a Patreon influx like my website launch did. I wouldn't expect it to, this early in the story. But it's consistent with my past experience polling my patrons: even when 50% of my readers came from the apps, 90% of patrons read on my website. (Your audience may vary.) And since I depend on crowdfunding for my comic, that's important to me.

Would I recommend going the route of having your own site?

For anyone who’s just testing the waters with webcomics, it might be overkill.

But for anyone who’s committed to their webcomic, I recommend having your own site AND mirroring on every third party site you can, provided you’re cool with their terms of service. It's important to meet readers where they are. Let those hosting sites lend you their readers. Some readers will even want to visit your home site where they can read ahead, read the uncensored version of your comic, get more info, or sign up for your newsletter.

Just remember, no one will discover your independent website all on their own. They’ll only find it through the work you put into promotion. But the reader that cares enough to come to your home site is a special type of reader.

So how do you get readers to visit an independent webcomic site?

Find your allies

These are people who work in similar areas as you who want to help you succeed, and whom you want to help succeed. Chat with each other, help each other, promote each other, boost each other, link to each other (psst, my links page just went live!), be there for each other - behind the scenes and in public.

God, I am SO bad at approaching people, but this is important, and not just for comics.

Be part of a community

Really, this is an extension of the above point. It's easier to find your allies if you're part of a community.

I’m a member of the Cartoonist Cooperative, and they’re a GREAT group of talented people all across the comics industry. The mission of @cartoonistcoop is to help create better conditions for comic workers through cooperation and collective action, and I’ve found so much help from them with Into the Smoke and comics as a whole. (JOIN! They're great!!)

The goal of the co-op isn't to drive traffic to your website. But being part of it has helped me at every level of crafting my comic, including promoting it and making it good enough that I can take pride in promoting it. And it's helped me ground myself as part of a community after I lost so much of mine in past years of burnout and platform enshittification.

Another option: @spiderforestcomics is a great webcomic collective full of supportive creators, and I believe they’re open to submissions till the end of June! They also have an awesome collaborative community mindset, and I've known some of their members for years.

Direct readers to your RSS feed and newsletter

Getting readers to your website is great, but they need to keep coming back for future updates, and it’s hard to remind them without an app notification. You may need to teach younger readers what RSS feeds are. Inoreader is a great RSS reader for the 2024 era.

The dreaded SEO

That’s Search Engine Optimization - optimizing your website so that people can easily find your comic via search engines. That’s a topic for another day, but feel free to research it!

Paid promo

This can be tricky, and I really only recommend spending promo money if you’re making a comic on a professional basis, because then it’s an investment you'll make back.

That said, Comicad.net is a great independent site where you can buy banner slots on other creators’ sites. I just ran small campaign myself. (And no, I won’t ever be offended if you outbid me!)

I haven’t bought any Tumblr Blaze slots, but I got BOPPed (blaze other people’s posts; apparently that’s what it’s called, lol) once on this account and once on a side blog, and both were highly impactful. (Thanks, friend!!) So I consider it a solid option, and it looks really cheap compared to other social media sites. (Never trust Meta.)

And where can you learn more about building a webcomic site?

I know you didn't ask, but if I'm gonna share all this, I might as well give folks a starting place to actually do the thing.

Now, I’m *bad* at offering cheap and easy web solutions. My specialty is hard and expensive. But my one piece of advice: PLEASE make your webcomic site mobile friendly for the current generation of readers! When we talk about barriers to entry, remember that more people have phones than computers, and many can't afford computers.

Anyway, here's some webcomic website resources from OTHER people!

The Cartoonist Co-op has LOTS of great resources on building webcomic sites! Several of them! Check them all out!

@screentonescast has a podcast episode on webcomic web design and one on RSS feeds!

@jeypawlik also has a great comic about how RSS feeds work.

So, congrats if you made it this far. Go make a website, y'all! And if you read any indie comics, go visit the creator's website!

#replies #asks #webcomic #webcomics #webcomic websites #comic resources #webcomic resources #long post #web design

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theriverbeyond · 1 month

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THE ANTICAPITALIST MESSAGING IN HADESTOWN TOOK ME SO COMPLETELY BY SURPRISE IN SUCH A GOOD WAY AND I HAVEN'T SEEN ENOUGH PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT IT BECAUSE ITS SO GOOD AND IT WORKS WITH THEIR STORY SO WELL

YEAH EXACTLY Im like... is it all just so obvious everyone decided it's redundant to mention or??? HELLO???

And I was sitting in the audience as one does and Chant was actually the song that reframed the entire show for me -- up until then I was like "aw :') theyre falling in love and are doomed, I should google all these lyrics later" but that song just... I felt like I was being hit in the face w a fish, honestly!!

"In the coldest time of year/ Why is it so hot down here?/ Hotter than a crucible/ It ain't right and it ain't natural"

"In the darkest time of year/ Why is it so bright down here?/ Brighter than a carnival/ It ain't right and it ain't natural"

Persephone's lyrics here are so specific -> a "crucible" is an ancient tool that can be used to create art but also industrialized into mass production, a "carnival" something that is inherently about celebration and festivity and joy but it is also a thing that can be commercialized almost beyond recognition. Capitalism is ravenous and will never be satiafied or sated, it will steal & exploit every scrap of art and joy that it can, then corrupt it all into hollow immitations that it then sells back to you on websites like SHEIN and Disney+.

"It ain't right and it ain't natural" hits so hard in this song because nothing is as natural, or as "right", as death -- so obviously Persephone is NOT talking about the literal underworld to the literal god of the dead. She's talking about how we need to stay warm and safe and dry in the winter, but we don't need fresh summer fruits imported from thousands of miles away. We need to stay cool and safe and hydrated in the summer, but we don't need to steal water from another state to keep the golf courses green. The winter is natural, the cold is natural, seeking warmth and light is natural. What is unnatural is this overconsumption, this never ending, never satisfied hunger.

And then of course you have Hades' parts,

Here, I fashioned things of steel/ Oil drums and automobiles/ Then I kept that furnace fed/ With the fossils of the dead

And wasn't it electrifying/ When I made the neon shine!/ Silver screen, cathode ray/ Brighter than the light of day

And obviously "fossils of the dead" is a reference to Hades being the literal god of the dead, in the ground, in the underworld, and it is also a reference to the modern dependence on oil and fossil fuels, but TO ME it is also about how capitalism relies on the exploitation of workers. In this show, the "fossils of the dead" are literally Hades' subjects. They're the workers of his factory town, and he both exploits them and is fully dependent on them, just like how the furnance of industry/capitalism relies on YOUR body, YOUR labor, it eats you when you're alive and it often continues to eat you when you're dead.

And then like "wasn't it electrifying" -> it's EXCITING what technology and industry does, but the problem is the overconsumption and the overproduction ("Brighter than the light of day") beyond what anyone actually needs or even wants. It ain't right and it ain't natural!!!

Every year, it's getting worse/ Hadestown, hell on Earth!

And the wind is so strong/ That's why times are so hard/ It's because of the gods/ The gods have forgotten the song of their love

Lover, what have you become/ Coal cars and oil drums/ Warehouse walls and factory floors/ I don't know you anymore

And it all keeps building in this song, re-emphasizing that Hades is not who he once was, that he has changed. Which again is not only commentary about consumption vs overconsumption, and how so many things started as wonderful ideas that could save people and help people and help make the world better were corrupted and turned into profit machines, killing machines, etc. "The gods have forgotten the song of their love" UGH

I also think the Themes are magnified because this is presented extremely directly alongside Euridyce's growing desperation, especially with the context that Euridyce DOES, in fact, "sell out" to Hades' promises.

There is no food left to find/ It's hard enough to feed yourself/ Let alone somebody else

Desperation forces her hand, she turns to Hades because he offers salvation, and she ends up just another nameless worker turning the gears of his machine. And I feel this is so similar to how when rich people are like "Just do XYZ", or telling people to bootstrap, or selling quick fixes to desperate people, when the reality is they got where they did due to a combination of luck, pre-existing social/monetary capital, etc, and buying into their promises of wealth will only make them richer and you more dependent and vulnerable.

#hadestown #30fishermen #IM JUST ‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️‼️ THIS SHOW...#ask #also btw other hadestown asks i SEE U i just wanna give good responses

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copperbadge · 4 months

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Howdy! I am considering submitting manuscripts I've written to a publisher or possibly self publishing. The publisher states on their website that authors must maintain an active social media presence. I'm not normally a social media type, Tumblr is my only one. What would you reccommend for such? Is it worth it to pay someone to make a website for me? Thanks and many virtual kisses for Dot and Deebs!

Honestly, I haven't submitted to a publisher since before a lot of modern social media existed. :D

It is my understanding, but this is secondhand information, that publishers want you to have either a twitter or a tiktok, preferably both, where you're frequently active and have a high follower count, because they want you to be able to publicize your book on it. One of many reasons I don't even consider trad publishing anymore is that I don't want to spend a significant chunk of my time filming videos for the sole purpose of hawking my books.

Now, as I said, that's an inference I've drawn; you may want to speak to someone who has been trad published recently to get the inside scoop (readers if you work in publishing or have been published recently, feel free to add commentary; remember to comment or reblogs, as I don't repost asks sent in response to other asks). I do have an author website but I built my own; I don't know what the going rate is for paying someone to build one these days but most website platforms are pretty intuitive to use -- I built mine on Wordpress and I'm building a new one on Wix currently, and at this point both are very drag-and-drop oriented. I do think a website is a good thing for an author to have, but I wouldn't pay someone to build one for you until you've taken a swing at DIY and decided it's not where you want to spend your time and energy.

In terms of self-publishing, the good news is that none of the rules apply; this is also the bad news. :D Because the thing about selfpub is that you either pay or DIY for...everything. It can be very inexpensive; when I publish a book the only direct monetary cost is what I pay for an ISBN and a proof copy of the book, which I will make back in the first 10 sales or so. However, I am "paying" in man hours in terms of typesetting, cover design, uploading the PDFs to lulu.com, proofing the initial copy, correcting the proof and reuploading (which usually involves further typesetting), and of course all the publicity -- website design and redesign, copywriting, tumblr posting. And while my profit per copy sold is well above what most authors with traditional publishers will make, that's because the publisher is doing a lot of the work for you. And, because I don't have an active twitter or tiktok or a publisher, my books are not very widely publicized. Undoubtedly I sell fewer copies than I would if I had a robust twitter following, but catch me touching that rancid wasteland without inch-thick gloves on.

So -- I think it's probably pretty important to understand that I have deliberately rejected trad publishing for good but not lucrative reasons, and I'm considered at best an iconoclast and more commonly a crank for having done so. If you can go the tradpub route, I would, but I also wouldn't put any money you're not prepared to write off as a loss into that pursuit. Definitely I would see if there's anyone in the industry you can reach out to who can answer these questions with a more thorough understanding of what publishers look for in an author and how to go about achieving that than I possess.

In any case, good luck! It's a journey regardless and I hope you enjoy your time on the path wherever you end up. And I'll give the cryptids a special cuddle for ya.

#auntyproton #publishing

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ltleflrt · 2 years

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This whole backlash against printing fics irks the fuck out of me, and I got some shit to say about it. Mostly "Fuck You" but here's some nuance:

On the surface, I understand where the naysayers are coming from. It's a legitimate fear that making a profit from fanworks will bring down the C&D Hammer on fandom. I get that. Do not put on the One Ring, or you'll risk the Eye of Sauron.

But here's the thing. Fuck capitalism. Fuck digital only. We're living in the digital dark ages, and 100 years from now huge swathes of our history, fact and fiction, will be lost to our descendants because there will be no physical copies of our lives for them to find in old libraries and boxes in the attic, etc.

Creators deserve physical copies of their creations, and so do the other people in the world who love them.

I don't want to profit from letting people print my fics. That's why I use Lulu, since they have an option to set zero profit and make the links hidden so only fans in the know can get a copy. Other printing sites I've looked at in the past don't have those options. In fact, the first time I ever even thought about printing one of my stories was when I won NaNo for the first time and one of the prizes was a coupon for 3 free printings of your story. HELL YEAH, that's a copy for me, a copy for my beta, and a copy for the artist who made the cover for me. Perfect! But I ended up not using that coupon, because the site required I set a profit margin, and did not have an option to make it private. Ummm, no thanks. Not worth the risk. And even though the profit margin could be set as low as ten cents, I did not want to make ANY money from my fic, because I know that would be breaking Fair Use rules. I found Lulu instead, and decided to let other people get copies too, because I'm nice. And if I don't, it's not like I can stop them from doing it themselves, no matter how much I'd rather they not do that.

But that's not good enough for the Reporting Trolls. Their argument is that it's not possible for it to be completely profit free, since Lulu makes a profit on the printing costs and the shipping carriers make a profit off the shipping costs. Someone is making a profit, and that's unacceptable, even if that someone is not Me, The Person Who Made The Printing and Shipping Worth Paying For.

I would like anyone who thinks that to delete your accounts where you read fanfiction. AO3, Wattpad, FFNet, LJ, Dreamwidth, hell even Tumblr for the short ficlet stuff that only gets posted here. Because even if the website it self isn't profiting, (AO3 for example), the companies that sold them their server hardware made a profit. Since utilities are privatized, the electric company that runs those servers are making a profit. IF YOU PRINT IT ON YOUR PRINTER AND PUT IT IN A 3 RING BINDER, the paper, printer, and ink manufacturers made a profit from your dinky little print out. The companies that build all the parts for your computer or your smartphone made a profit on your portal to the internet, who profits from your monthly subscription, just like your electric company profits from the power it takes to run your pc or charge your phone battery. IT'S A SLIPPERY FUCKING SLOPE, AND YOU NEED TO LEARN WHEN TO BACK AWAY FROM THE LEDGE.

We live in a Capitalist Hellscape, and if a company could figure out how to charge you to breathe and for every single beat of your heart, they'd fucking do it. So get off your goddamn high horses with this "wELL SoMEonE iS makINg PrOFit" bullshit. Or if you truly believe that, shut off every account you own, turn off your utilities, and go live in the woods and make up your own goddamn stories, which you can only share orally to the local wildlife. They give kudos by biting you and giving you rabies.

(not to mention; these assholes don't go after fanartists who are ABSOLUTELY making a profit off their work. but noooo, Flirty can't format a fic for print and allow other people to pay for the printing service and shipping, while never seeing a penny of that herself, despite all of the GODDAMN WORK I HAVE PUT INTO IT, WRITING IT IN THE FIRST PLACE INCLUDED FUCK YOU VERY MUCH. fuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufucky--)

#ltleramblings #printed fic

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llama-named-pizza · 2 years

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Anyone talking yet about how Elon fired someone right after publicly mocking him, and for what? Asking Elon for some contact after being ignored for days?

Meet Haraldur Ingi Þorleifsson. Born in 1977 with a genetic congenital muscle disease that forced him to use a wheelchair since age 24. That didn't stop him, though. In 2014 he founded the company Ueno. Ueno was a company that designed digital brands for various companies. The company was pretty successful, since it won various awards and Haraldur was named Icelandic businessman of the year in 2019. You can see more things he's done on his website - http://haraldurthorleifsson.com/

In 2021, Haraldur sold his company to Twitter. Not just that! He sold it as a salary so that he could pay higher taxes. He ended up paying the second highest tax in Iceland for that year (for an individual).

Outside of his company, he also aided in a project called Ramp Up Reykjavík, the intention of which is to help in installing wheelchair ramps around the city for better wheelchair access everywhere. After the success of the first project, a second one called Ramp Up Iceland was launched, with the intentions of building 1000 ramps around the country. This seems to be the site for the project - https://www.rampur.is/ - it would be great if someone who knows Icelandic can help with explaining how to donate to it?

He also created Bueno, a project that, by his own words, "a non-profit that donates money to good people doing good things". He was given The Order of the Falcon by the president of Iceland, the Icelandic medal of chivalry for contributions to social issues. He was Person of the Year in Iceland in 2022. Honestly, there's probably even more.

And this is the person Elon Musk decided to take the mick out of.

Queue March 6th, 2023. Haraldur tweets out to Musk.

[id: Dear elonmusk,

9 days ago the access to my work computer was cut, along with about 200 other Twitter employees.

However your head of HR is not able to confirm if I am an employee or not. You've not answered my emails.

Maybe if enough people retweet you'll answer me here?]

[id: Elon Musk: What work have you been doing?

Haraldur: I would need to break confidentiality to answer this question here.

If you have your lawyers share in writing that I can do that then I'd be happy to discuss that openly!

Elon Musk: It's approved, you go ahead.]

[id: Two consecutive tweets by Haraldur: Among others:

- led the effort to save about $500k on one SaaS contract. Supported closing down many others

- led prioritization of design projects across the company to make sure we were able to deliver with a small team

- led design crits to help level up design across the company

- was hiring manager for all design roles

- worked on efforts to steer the company away from focusing on power users and on to younger users (because our user base is aging)]

[id: Elon Musk:

- Level up from what design to what? Pics or it didn’t happen.

- We haven’t hired design roles in 4 months

- What changes did you make to help with the youths?

Elon Musk: Would you say that you're a people person?

Attachment to the second tweet: A YouTube video named "What would you say...you do here?". The video depicts a conversation between two men, presumably higher ups, and a third man, presumably someone who works at the company. The conversation is condescending towards the third man, implying his job (a type of customer service) is useless. The video ends with the third man outbursting "What the hell is wrong with you people!" before he leaves the room - based on his body language (looking down when he almost bumps into a colleague), it is implied that he was fired.]

There are other threads with the two conversing, this one is the most notable though as this seems to be when Haraldur learns he is fired. Musk later attempts to imply that Haraldur didn't work, saying that Haraldur "claimed he had a disability that prevented him from typing". As I mentioned above, Haraldur has a disability that forced him into a wheelchair. This same disability is slowly forcing Haraldur to lose strength in his upper body and arms. Not to mention, you don't need to type to work, mister "Lines of code matters". Newsflash, people can do work without typing. Musk thinks he's the only one who can do work without typing, I believe.

It's unknown (to me) if Haraldur was fired during this exchange or before it. At any rate, don't forget that Haraldur was on a "Don't Fire" list, yet Musk still laid him off.

And definitely don't forget that Musk seems to be avoiding paying him.

[id: Tweet by Haraldur: But ok, fair enough, I've been laid off and I'm ok with that.

Next up though is finding out if Twitter will pay me what they owe me per my contract.

Or, will elonmusk, one of the richest people in the world, try to avoid paying?

Stay tuned!!]

#elon musk #twitter #fuck musk #halli #Haraldur Ingi Þorleifsson #Haraldur Ingi Thorleifsson

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