#Scrape Threads Data

[webscreen-scraping]

Scrape Threads Data for Insights

Scraping threads data offer insights for businesses and researchers looking to understand latest trends, user behavior and content performance. By extracting data from Threads, users can monitor conversations, user interactions, and sentiment, helping to identify popular topics and emerging trends.

This data can be used to enhance marketing strategies, optimizing content, and enhancing user engagement. Additionally, Threads data scraping enables competitive analysis, providing a clear analysis of industry benchmarks and competitor tactics.

Whether for social media analytics, market research, or customer sentiment analysis, scraping Threads data is a powerful tool for gaining actionable insights and staying ahead in the digital market.

Read More: Scraping threads data

[caffiend-queen]

Authors, you’re going to want to check this database…

Thank you, my dear @jtargaryen18 for sharing this info too. 💕 I’m sorry your books were stolen as well.

Meta, which is Facebook, Instagram and Threads, is now involved in a massive lawsuit. Internal memos have been released that prove Meta intentionally stole hundreds of thousands of books - including all of mine - to data scrape and train their AI. Here’s a link to see if they’ve stolen your work too: bit.ly/4iRK92t

There’s a class action suit just about to be launched, they’re waiting for the judge to determine if this is protected under the Fair Use laws, which it is absolutely not.

I am begging you to see that piracy is inexcusable, whether it’s a single person who doesn’t want to pay for the book to a despicable multi trillion dollar corporation who thinks they’re entitled to take your creative work for free. Authors write because we love it, because we love sharing these stories with you, because we love your reactions so much.

Because you are our community.

But we’re also supporting our families. Piracy, plagiarism and theft are inexcusable, no matter what the circumstances. Here’s another helpful link to the Author’s Guild info: bit.ly/41S55zz

[cheese-water]

The moment when their worlds collide, world peace will finally be restored.

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

FYI artists and writers: some info regarding tumblr's new "third-party sharing" (aka selling your content to OpenAI and Midjourney)

You may have already seen the post by @staff regarding third-party sharing and how to opt out. You may have also already seen various news articles discussing the matter.

But here's a little further clarity re some questions I had, and you may too. Caveat: Not all of this is on official tumblr pages, so it's possible things may change.

(1) "I heard they already have access to my data and it doesn't really matter if I opt out"

From the 404 article:

A new FAQ section we reviewed is titled “What happens when you opt out?” states “If you opt out from the start, we will block crawlers from accessing your content by adding your site on a disallowed list. If you change your mind later, we also plan to update any partners about people who newly opt-out and ask that their content be removed from past sources and future training.”

So please, go click that opt-out button.

(2) Some future user: "I've been away from tumblr for months, and I just heard about all this. I didn't opt out before, so does it make a difference anymore?"

Another internal document shows that, on February 23, an employee asked in a staff-only thread, “Do we have assurances that if a user opts out of their data being shared with third parties that our existing data partners will be notified of such a change and remove their data?” Andrew Spittle, Automattic’s head of AI replied: “We will notify existing partners on a regular basis about anyone who's opted out since the last time we provided a list. I want this to be an ongoing process where we regularly advocate for past content to be excluded based on current preferences. We will ask that content be deleted and removed from any future training runs. I believe partners will honor this based on our conversations with them to this point. I don't think they gain much overall by retaining it.”

It should make a difference! Go click that button.

(3) "I opted out, but my art posts have been reblogged by so many people, and I don't know if they all opted out. What does that mean for my stuff?"

This answer is actually on the support page for the toggle:

This option will prevent your blog's content, even when reblogged, from being shared with our licensed network of content and research partners, including those that train AI models.

And some further clarification by the COO and a product manager:

zingring: A couple people from work have reached out to let me know that yes, it applies to reblogs of "don't scrape" content. If you opt out, your content is opted out, even in reblog form. cyle: yep, for reblogs, we're taking it so far as "if anybody in the reblog trail has opted out, all of the content in that reblog will be opted out", when a reblog could be scraped/shared.

So not only your reblogged posts, but anyone who contributed in a reblog (such as posts where someone has been inspired to draw fanart of the OP) will presumably be protected by your opt-out. (A good reason to opt out even if you yourself are not a creator.)

Furthermore, if you the OP were offline and didn't know about the opt-out, if someone contributed to a reblog and they are opted out, then your original work is also protected. (Which makes it very tempting to contribute "scrapeable content" now whenever I reblog from an abandoned/disused blog...)

(4) "What about deleted blogs? They can't opt out!"

I was told by someone (not official) that he read "deleted blogs are all opted-out by default". However, he didn't recall the source, and I can't find it, so I can't guarantee that info. If I get more details - like if/when tumblr puts up that FAQ as reported in the 404 article - I will add it here as soon as I can.

Edit, tumblr has updated their help page for the option to opt-out of third-party sharing! It now states:

The content which will not be shared with our licensed network of content and research partners, including those that train AI models, includes: • Posts and reblogs of posts from blogs who have enabled the "Prevent third-party sharing" option. • Posts and reblogs of posts from deleted blogs. • Posts and reblogs of posts from password-protected blogs. • Posts and reblogs of posts from explicit blogs. • Posts and reblogs of posts from suspended/deactivated blogs. • Private posts. • Drafts. • Messages. • Asks and submissions which have not been publicly posted. • Post+ subscriber-only posts. • Explicit posts.

So no need to worry about your old deleted blogs that still have reblogs floating around. *\o/*

But for your existing blogs, please use the opt out option. And a reminder of how to opt out, under the cut:

The opt-out toggle is in Blog Settings, and please note you need to do it for each one of your blogs / sideblogs.

On dashboard, the toggle is at https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/blogname [replace "blogname" as applicable] down by Visibility:

For mobile, you need the most recent update of the app. (Android version 33.4.1.100, iOs version 33.4.) Then go to your blog tab (the little person icon), and then the gear icon for Settings, then click Visibility.

Again, if you have a sideblog, go back to the blog tab, switch to it, and go to settings again. Repeat as necessary.

If you do not have access to the newest version of the app for whatever reason, you can also log into tumblr in your mobile browser. Same URL as per desktop above, same location.

Note you do not need to change settings in both desktop and the app, just one is fine.

I hope this helps!

[destinationtoast]

Hello! I keep hearing that fandom culture has changed, and there are less comments now than there were years ago. Have you noticed this in your analysis? Is the percentage of comments being left today lower than before?

Hey! Thanks for the question -- it prompted me to start collecting data about comments (after procrastinating on it for a while, because I had to write new code to gather comment data). I've also seen other discussions from folks also thinking about how to do this kind of analysis (like in the fandom data projects community) -- hopefully we'll end up with multiple people attacking this from different angles and getting a variety of data about comments!

I'll give a sneak preview that partially addresses your question and contains some good news. If we look at the fraction of AO3 works that get at least one comment (focusing just on one-shots for now), I think things have gotten better over the past decade on AO3*:

In other words, it tentatively looks like more works were getting at least one comment in 2024 than in 2014 (for a variety of time periods). One caveat, though -- if a bunch of works with no comments got deleted in the interim, there will be survivor bias here. I'll try to look into that possibility later. Another caveat: this is based on only like ~100 randomly selected works from each year -- this may all change with more data!

Another interesting tidbit: I still see some of the 2014 works getting comments. In fact, ~30% of works have gotten new comments over 5 years after they were posted, and it looks like ~10% of one-shots posted back in Mar 2014 got a new comment in 10 years later, in 2024.

I'm still doing other analyses; there may be other factors that better match with the discourse around how comment culture has changed. It could be that comment activity peters out faster now than it did back then, for instance. Or the total number of comments left on the popular works is less now than it was back then (though my current methods may not be able to capture that). Edit thanks to quick eagle-eyed readers: it's likely that some of what people are thinking about is ratio of comments to hits -- that is hard to compare in 2014 to 2024, because we don't know which hits came from which years. But I am working on some analyses along those lines. :)

If you have other hypotheses about what's changed in commenting culture, feel free to share! I'll look into what I can.

Some methodology notes:

*I've been tackling this by comparing AO3 one-shots posted in early 2014 to one-shots posted in 2024, and comparing activity in the days/weeks/months immediately after the works were posted. (To start with, I'm only scraping the first page of comments for each work -- meaning the first 20 comment threads -- so there are lots of comments I'm potentially missing for the really popular works. But for many works, this captures all the comments, and I think it may be sufficient for a lot of the analyses I am interested in.)

I'm choosing to focus on 2014 vs. 2024 because 2024 is close to now (but it's been long enough for comments to have settled down a bit), and 2014 was well after AO3 was established (thus it was already a pretty lively time on AO3). I don't want to collect data about every single year because it's too time intensive/too hard on AO3's servers. But if people think that I should be looking at different years, I'm interested in feedback.

Because it's only been ~10 months since March 2024, I am limiting a lot of my analyses to only look at commenting activity the first ~10 months after works were posted in both cases.

[mariacallous]

A short note here on what I’m covering and why. The political changes we’re seeing across the world are underpinned by technological ones that are now accelerating. For more than a decade, I’ve been trying to investigate and expose these forces. Since 2016 that’s included following a thread that led from Brexit to Trump via a shady data company called Cambridge Analytica and the revelation of a profound threat exploit at the heart of our democracies. But what’s happening now in the US is a paradigm shift: this is Broligarchy, a concept I coined last summer when I warned that what we were seeing was the proposed merger of Silicon Valley with state power. That has now happened. Writing about this from the UK, it’s clear we have a choice: we help lead the fight back against it. Or it comes for us next. Please share this with family and friends if you feel it’s of value. Thank you, as ever, Carole

Let me say this more clearly: what is happening right now, in America, in real time, is a coup.

This is an information war and this is what a coup now looks like.

Musk didn’t need a tank, guns, soldiers. He had a small crack cyber unit that he sent into the Treasury department last weekend. He now has unknown quantities of the entire US nation’s most sensitive data and potential backdoors into the system going forward. Treasury officials denied that he had access but it then turned out that he did. If it ended there, it would be catastrophic. But that unit - whose personnel include a 19-year-old called “Big Balls” - is now raiding and scorching the federal government, department by department, scraping its digital assets, stealing its data, taking control of the code and blowing up its administrative apparatus as it goes.

This is what an unlawful attack on democracy in the digital age looks like. It didn’t take armed men, just Musk’s taskforce of boy-men who may be dweebs and nerds but all the better to plunder the country’s digital resources. This was an organised, systematic, jailbreak on one of the United States’ most precious and sensitive resources: the private data of its citizens.

In 2019, I appeared in a Netflix documentary, The Great Hack. That’s a good place to start to understand what is going on now, but it wasn’t the great hack. It was among the first wave of major tech exploits of global elections. It was an exemplar of what was possible: the theft and weaponization of 87 million people’s personal data. But this now is the Great Hack. This week is when the operating system of the US was wrenched open and is now controlled by a private citizen under the protection of the President.

If you think I’ve completely lost it, please be advised that I’m far from alone in saying this. The small pools of light in the darkness of this week has been stumbling across individual commentators saying this for the last week. Just because these words are not on the front page in banner headlines of any newspaper doesn’t mean this isn’t not happening. It is.

In fact, there has been relentless, assiduous, detailed reporting in all outlets across America. There are journalists who aren’t eating or sleeping and doing amazing work tracking what’s happening. There is fact after fact after fact about Musk’s illegal pillaging of the federal government. But news organisation leaders are either falling for the distraction story - the most obviously insane one this week being rebuilding Gaza as a luxury resort, a story that dominated headlines and political oxygen for days. Or…what? Being unable to actually believe that this is what an authoritarian takeover looks like? Being unsure of whether you put the headline about the illegal coup d’etat next to a spring season fashion report? Above or below the round-up of best rice cookers? The fact is the front pages look like it’s business as normal when it’s anything but.

This was Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Tuesday. She’s a historian of fascism and authoritarianism at New York University and she said this even before some of this week’s most extreme events had taken place. (A transcript of the rest of her words here.)

“It’s very unusual. In my study of authoritarian states, it's only really after a coup that you see such a speed, such obsessive haste to purge bureaucracy so quickly. Or when somebody is defending themselves, like Erdogan after the coup attempt against him, massive purge immediately. So that's unusual. I don't have another reference point for a private individual coming in, infiltrating, trying to turn government to the benefit of his businesses and locking out and federal employees. It is a coup. I'm a historian of coups, and I would also use that word. So we're in a real emergency situation for our democracy.”

A day later, this was Tim Snyder, Yale, a Yale professor and another great historian of authoritarianism, here: “Of course it’s a coup.”

History was made this week and while reporters are doing incredible work, to understand it our guides are historians, those who’ve lived in authoritarian states and Silicon Valley watchers. They are saying it. What I’ve learned from investigating and reporting on Silicon Valley’s system-level hack of our democracy for eight long years and seeing up close the breathtaking impunity and entitlement of the men who control these companies is that they break laws and they get away with it. And then lie about it afterwards. That’s the model here.

Everything that I’ve ever warned about is happening now. This is it. It’s just happening faster than anyone could have imagined.

It’s not that what’s happening is simply unlawful. This is what David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School told the Washington Post.

“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”

And he’s right. The system can’t and isn’t. Legal challenges are being made and even upheld but there’s no guarantee or even sign that Musk is going to honour them. That’s one of the most chilling points my friend, Mark Bergman, made to me over the weekend.

Last week, I included a voice note from my friend, tech investor turned tech campaigner, Roger McNamee, so you could hear direct from an expert about the latest developments in AI. This week I’ve asked Mark to do the honours.

He’s a lawyer, Washington political insider, and since last summer, he’s been participating in ‘War Game’ exercises with Defense Department officials, three-star generals, former Cabinet Secretaries and governors. In five exercises involving 175 people, they situation-tested possible scenarios of a Trump win. But they didn’t see this. It’s even worse than they feared.

“Those challenges have been in respect of shutting down agencies, firing federal employees and engaging in the most egregious hack of government. It all at the hand hands of DOGE, Musk and his band of tech engineers. DC right now is shell-shocked. It is a government town, USA, ID, the FBI, the Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, CIA, no federal agency will be spared the revenge and retribution tours in full swing, and huge numbers have been put on administrative leave, reassigned or fired, and the private sector is as much at risk, particularly NGOs and civil society organizations. The more high-profile violate the law, which is why the courts have been quick to enjoin actions. “So yes, we've experienced a coup, not the old fashioned kind, no tanks or mobs, but an undemocratic and hostile takeover of government. It is cruel, it is petty. It can be brutal. It is at once chaotic and surgical. We said the institutions held in 2020 but behind institutions or people, and the extent to which all manner of power structures have preemptively obeyed is hugely worrying. There are legions ready to carry out the Trump agenda. The question is, will the rule of law hold?”

Last Tuesday, Musk tried to lay off the entire CIA. That’s the government body with the slogan ‘We are the nation’s first line of defense’. Every single employee has been offered an unlawful ‘buyout’ - what we call redundancy in the UK - or what 200 former employees - spies - have said is blatant attempt to rebuild it as a political enforcement unit. Over the weekend, the Washington Post reports that new appointees are being presented with “loyalty tests”.

Musk’s troops - because that’s what they are, mercenaries - are acting in criminal, unlawful, unconstitutional ways. Organisations are acting quickly, taking lawsuits, and for now the courts are holding. But the key essential question is whether their rulings can be enforced with a political weaponized Department of Justice and FBI. What Mark Bergman told me (and is in the extended note below) is that they’ve known since the summer that there would be almost no way of pushing back against Trump. This politicisation of all branches of law enforcement creates a vacuum at the heart of the state. As he says in that note, the ramifications of this are little understood outside the people inside Washington who study this for a living.

And at least some of what DOGE is doing can never be undone. Musk, a private citizen, now has vast clouds of citizens’ data, their personal information and it seems likely, classified material. When data is out there, it’s out there. That genie can never be put back into the bottle.

Itt’s what it’s possible to do with that data, that the real nightmare begins. What machine learning algorithms and highly personalised targeting can do. It’s a digital coup. An information coup. And we have to understand what that means. Our fleshy bodies still inhabit earthly spaces but we are all, also, digital beings too. We live in a hybrid reality. And for more than a decade we have been targets of hybrid warfare, waged by hostile nation states whose methodology has been aped and used against us by political parties in a series of disrupted elections marked by illegal behaviour and a lack of any enforcement. But this now takes it to the next level.

It facilitates a concentration of wealth and power - because data is power - of a kind the world has never seen before.

Facebook’s actual corporate motto until 2014 taken from words Mark Zuckerberg spoke was “Move fast and break things”. That phrase has passed into commonplace: we know it, we quote it, we also fail to understand what that means. It means: act illegally and get away with it.

And that is the history of Silicon Valley. Its development and cancerous growth is marked by series of larcenous acts each more grotesque than the last. And Musk’s career is an exemplar of that, a career that has involved rampant criminality, gross invasions of privacy, stock market manipulation. And lies. The Securities and Exchange Commission is currently suing Musk for failing to disclose his ownership stock before he bought Twitter. The biggest mistake right now is to believe anything he says.

Every time, these companies have broken the law, they have simply gotten away with it. I know I’m repeating this, but it’s central to understanding both the mindset and what’s happening on the ground. And no-one exemplifies that more than Musk. The worst that has happened to him is a fine. A slap on the wrist. An insignificant line on a balance sheet. The “cost of doing business”.

On Friday, Robert Reich, the former United States Secretary of Labor, who’s been an essential voice this week, told the readers of his Substack to act now and call their representatives.

“Friends, we are in a national emergency. This is a coup d’etat. Elon Musk was never authorized by Congress to do anything that he’s doing, he was never even confirmed by Congress, his so-called Department of Government Efficiency was never authorized by Congress. Your representatives, your senators and Congressmen have never given him authority to do what he is doing, to take over government departments, to take over entire government agencies, to take over government payments system itself to determine for himself what is an appropriate payment. To arrogate to himself the authority to have your social security number, your private information? Please. Listen, call Congress now.”

It’s a coup

I found myself completely poleaxed on Wednesday. I read this piece on the New York Times website first thing in the morning, a thorough and alarming analysis of headlined “Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab”. It quoted Peter M. Shane, who is a legal scholar in residence at New York University, “programmatic sabotage and rampant lawlessness.” It was displayed prominently on the front page of the New York Times but it was also just one piece among many, a small weak signal amid the overpowering noise.

There’s another word for an “Executive Power Grab”, it’s a coup. And newspapers need to actually write that in big black letters on their front pages and tell their tired, busy, overwhelmed, distracted, scared readers what is happening. That none of this is “business as usual.”

Over on the Guardian’s UK website on Wednesday, there was not a single mention on the front page of what was happening. Trump’s Gaza spectacular diversion strategy drowned out its quotient of American news. We just weren’t seeing what’s happening in the seat of government of our closest ally. As a private citizen mounted a takeover of the cornerstone superpower of the international rules-based order, our crucial NATO ally, our biggest single trading partner, the UK government didn’t even apparently notice.

The downstream potential international consequences of what is happening in America are profound and terrifying. That our government and much of the media is asleep at the wheel is a reason to be more not less terrified. Musk has made his intentions towards our democracy and national security quite clear. What he hasn’t yet had is the backing of the US state. That is shortly going to change. One of the first major stand-offs will be UK and EU tech regulation. I hope I’m wrong but it seems pretty obvious that’s what Musk’s Starmer-aimed tweets are all about. There seems no world in which the EU and the UK aren’t headed for the mother of all trade wars.

And that’s before we even consider the national security ramifications. The prime minister should be convening Cobra now. The Five Eyes - the intelligence sharing network of the US, UK, New Zealand, Australia and Canada - is already likely breached. Trump is going to do individual deals with all major trading partners that’s going to involve preposterous but real threats, including likely dangling the US’s membership of NATO over our heads all while Russia watches, waits and knows that we’ve done almost nothing to prepare. Plans to increase our defence spending have been made but not yet implemented. Our intelligence agencies do understand the precipice we’re on but there’s no indication the government is paying any attention to them. The risks are profound. The international order as we know it is collapsing in real time.

It’s a coup

We all know that the the first thing that happens when a dictator seizes power is that he (it’s always a he) takes control of the radio station. Musk did that months ago. It wasn’t that Elon Musk buying Twitter pre-ordained what is now happening but it made it possible. And it was the moment, minutes after Trump was shot and he went full-in on his campaign that signalled the first shot fired in his digital takeover.

It’s both a mass propaganda machine and also the equivalent of an information drone with a deadly payload. It’s a weapon that’s already been turned on journalists and news organisations this week. There’s much more to come.

On Friday, Musk started following Wikileaks on Twitter. Hours later, twisted, weaponized leaks from USAID began.

This is going to get so much worse. Musk and MAGA will see this as the opening of the Stasi archive. It’s not. It’s rocketfuel for a witchhunt. It’s hybrid warfare against the enemies of the state. It’s going to be ugly and cruel and its targets are going to need help and support. Hands across the water to my friends at OCCRP, the Overseas Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an investigative journalism organisation that uncovers transnational crime, that’s been in Musk’s sights this weekend, one of hundreds of media organisations around the world whose funding has been slashed overnight.

It’s a coup

By now you may feel scared and helpless. It’s how I felt this week. I had the same sick feeling I had watching UK political coverage before the pandemic. The government was just going to ignore the wave of deaths rippling from China to Italy and pretend it wasn’t happening? Really? That’s the plan?

This is another pandemic. Or a Chernobyl. It’s a bomb at the heart of the international order whose toxic fallout is going to inevitably drift our way.

My internal alarm bell, a sense of urgency and anxiety goes even further back. To early 2017, when I uncovered information about Cambridge Analytica’s illegal hack of data from Facebook while the company’s VP, Steve Bannon, was then on the National Security Council. That concept of highly personalised data in the control of a ruthless and political operator was what tripped my emergency wires. That is a reality now.

The point is that the shock and awe is meant to make us feel helpless. So I’m telling a bit of my own personal story here. Because part of what temporarily paralyzed me last week was that this is all happening while my own small corner of the mainstream media is collapsing in on itself too. The event that I’ve spent the last eight years warning about has come to pass and in a month, 100+ of my colleagues at the Guardian will be out of the door and my employment will be terminated. I will no longer have the platform of the news organisation where I’ve done my entire body of work to date and was able to communicate to a global audience.

But then, it’s all connected. We are living through an information crisis. It’s what underpins everything. In some ways, this happening now is not surprising at all. Moreover, many of the people who I see as essential voices during this crisis (including those above) are doing that effectively and independently from Substack as I will try to continue to do.

And, the key thing that the last eight years has given me is information. The lawsuit I fought for four years as a result of doing this work very almost floored me. But it didn’t. And I’ve learned essential skills during those years. It was part of what powered me to fight for the rights of Guardian journalists during our strike this December.

The next fightback against Musk and the Broligarchy has to draw from the long, long fight for workers rights which in turn influenced the fight for civil rights that must now power us on as we face the great unknown. What comes next has to be a fight for our data rights, our human rights.

This was former Guardian journalist Gary Younge on our picket line and I’ve thought about these words a lot. You have to fight even if you won’t necessarily win. Power is almost never given up freely.

If you value any of this and want me to be able to continue, I’d be really grateful if you signed up, free, or even better, paid subscription. And I’d also urge you to sign up also for the Citizen Dispatch, that’s the newsletter from the non-profit I founded that campaigns around these issues. There is much more it can and needs to do.

[oceangirl24]

AI Scraping Response from r/AO3 mods

AO3’s Data Was Scraped For AI: What To Know

News/Updates

Hi all—as you may be aware, there’s been an incident regarding the Archive’s data being used to potentially train generative AI.

It seems that a user by the name of nyuuzyou conducted an unauthorized scrape of the Archive, both artwork and writing (as well as at least seven other websites) and uploaded the dataset to the machine-learning website Huggingface. This only scraped publicly available works—archive-locked works do not appear to be a part of that dataset. The works in the set are from as recent as March of this year, and comprise all publicly available works before then.

AO3 is aware of this, and they have filed a DCMA takedown to Huggingface, where the data has been made temporarily unavailable (aka nobody is currently able to use it for training). In response, the uploader filed a counterclaim to try to get it reinstated—though as Huggingface’s Terms of Service don’t allow uploads of any content the uploader doesn’t own the rights to, it’s unlikely that their counterclaim will succeed. However, the user also uploaded the dataset to two more websites after the Huggingface takedown: modelscope and datafish. These two sites are based in China and Russia respectively, places that do not always respond to DCMA takedowns—however, the upload to modelscope does appear to have been taken down/deleted as of writing this. (We also cannot link to these websites as Reddit has them shadowbanned).

The website Paperdemon has more information about the timelines, other websites affected, and how to request a DCMA takedown to Huggingface (which will hopefully not be necessary, but a good resource in case the counterclaim succeeds.)

As scraping like this is unfortunately hard to control, the best option we can recommend as a subreddit is to lock your works to only be available to registered archive users (as they are less likely to be scraped, though this is not foolproof). For readers, if you do not have an account, you will need to make one to be able to view archive-locked works. You can find a link to our most recent invite request thread here, or add your email to the signup waitlist on AO3 to get an invite directly in a few days.

~Cthulu (and the rest of the mod team)

Original post is here.

[calculatesguilt]

[LIE] I feel very normal things about Last Stand of the Wreckers and the aftermath.

This goes with a drabble I wrote. (Below the cut.)

Silver backed coffins lined the corridor, there would be no open funeral for any of them, there wasn't even a body to retrieve for... for.................. Gossamer filaments that lined delicate data slugs at the corner of his vision. A thumb rubbing incessantly over the white-stamped Autobot sigil, seared into his vision like a monitor ghost. Ironfist had known. He had known, and so did Perceptor. This was discussed with Prowl. Ironfist stared when they were on that terrible shuttle ride back from Garrus-9. No quips from Verity. No raucous laughter from Springer over a job well done. It was a brief moment that made him realize something harrowing. He figured him out. (A cruel twist in his spark was glad of that, the data seared into the scientist's module minutes away from expiration.) Ironfist handed the now-broken and shattered data slug into his hand, a hard look in his eyes. They did not need to exchange words. All that, all those deaths, all those sacrifices, and he stares at the remains of the data slug. What was the point? What was the point? WHAT WAS THE POINT. He had wanted to grab Prowl, then and there, pistol in hand. It would have been so easy to pull the trigger, he had gotten good at it. Instead he stood, limbs locked in place, not even a twitch on his face. Vision blurred, world spinning, audials ringing from the intensity of the anger that flared. It's not his job to get angry, not his job to put his feelings in place. Prowl had his reasons. "Are you listening to me, Perceptor?" Prowl's voice is like nails scraping against metal, pulling him harshly out of whatever stupor he was in. "There's still a loose thread I want you to follow up on," Prowl had finally deigned to say as though he hadn't just destroyed the only evidence of Aequitas' atrocities. And Perceptor had accepted the placement, had taken the trip to Kimia to investigate. One more job. (That's how it always ended up, wasn't it? One more job. It's not his place to moralize, it's his place to do the job.) "We're not winning this war, Perceptor," Prowl had once said. And it was true. It will always be true. They will never win. No one will.

[transmechanicus]

look this is really probably unnecessary, but I've seen tons of posts about how everyone is mad about the page that's going to post unmasked pics of the st guys and how outrageously disrespectful it is to them and well... I gotta say that it's just not that deep.

it's been pointed out that they've only ever said that 'their identities aren't important to the music or the story'. and that's it in terms of the "extreme lengths" they go to hide their identities.

i'm a regular follower of the reddit page where their identities are openly discussed and there is a decent amount of evidence that one of them or someone from their team lurks there and plays around a little with that community. ie, a few of the recent "the summoning solo shenanigans" were suggested in that thread and then seen on stage the next show. but who knows.

some of the guys are actually still participating in other media to a small extent. one of them still streams with a friend on twitch often. one of them just put out some older official music project on Spotify. one of them gets his new tattoos posted unmasked on his tattoo artist's page.

look, I'm not saying that this person who plans to bring this stuff to Tumblr shouldn't be warned about and of course everyone should have the opportunity to block and avoid it to keep their experience of the band how they prefer. that's no question how it should be.

but like... everyone is saying that this person who's starting the unmasked blog is like, evil and so disrespectful to the band. and I think that's just not right. it's their right to start whatever kind of page they want. it's everyone else's right to avoid it.

like I said, this is not really going anywhere, and it's not personal, I just have seen so many people bashing that person on a personal level and I just gotta tell someone, it's not that deep. thank you for reading

To me it is that deep, from what i’ve heard there was a major panic on Instagram in 2023 bc freaks were using info on there to harass II and his family. Hell he still alters his voice in videos, which you only do if you’re concerned someone is dedicated enough to scrape the internet with audio of your vocal patterns. I’ve seen video footage of Vessel cussing out a guy at a festival for yelling real names in the audience. There is direct evidence that the band members dislike off-stage info being known and shared, and that a portion of Sleep Token’s fanbase cannot be trusted to respect the secrecy that allows the band members to live comfortable lives relatively peacefully and out of the public eye.

In my personal opinion, your examples of how they’re still on other social media, and that you know that info abt them are reinforcement of my dislike for unmasked data aggregates. Unless the tattoo artist’s posts or the twitch stream is tagged #SleepToken there is probably a reasonable expectation that they don’t want band related attention for those things. Even if somebody does recognize them as the band members, it would be a minority population if it weren’t for subreddits and archives directly connecting dots between those things and Sleep Token, which is presumably why you have that info yourself in the first place.

By aggregating and collecting unmasked info, a resource is being provided that essentially says “Hey i know these guys have almost entirely retreated from the internet for their own safety and comfort…but here’s their names and faces and loved ones and colleagues and past projects and every little activity they do in their spare time. All gathered together and directly tagged and marked in relation to the band they’ve purposefully tried to anonymize and distance their real lives from”.

It’s stalker behavior, it’s unhealthy, it could be genuinely dangerous for the members if the wrong person made use of it, and i reserve the right to passionately condemn it.

[adeceasedtulip]

I've been seeing a lot about that AI company scraping ao3 for works and I know everyone has been filing DMCA take down claims for their work. The OTW has also filed on ao3 users behalf for the stolen works.

The good news is, that the data set has been temporarily taken down but the "creator" of it has filed a counter claim.

And after getting lost down a comment spital (which you can read here) its clear that the "creator" believes that they have a right to it since our works are based off of copyrighted content.

Their exact words in the thread linked were: "You do realise AO3 is a far more viable target for a DMCA than this dataset, right?"

As someone who knows a fair bit about copyright, this is so ignorant. If they bothered to do 5 minutes of googling then they'd see that when the materials are changed and non-profit then it is NOT a viable target.

To everyone who filed a claim and protected your works, keep it up!! People like this need to be shown that stealing from writers, artists and other creatives WILL NOT BE TAKEN LYING DOWN.

[webscreen-scraping]

How To Scrape Threads Data For Insights?

In today's digital world, the voices echoing online forums and discussions are more influential than ever. Platforms like Threads are woven with opinions, conversations, insights, and experiences for data enthusiasts, researchers and analysts. But how do we collect and make the best use of this data available before it disappears? That's when scraping helps. Scraping Threads can not only navigate you through the valuable user-generated content. Still, they can also be the treasure you might be looking for to bolster customer understanding and spark innovative ideas. In this blog, let's explore how to extract valuable insights from Threads and how to put the data to better use while considering ethical practices.

What is Threads and Scraping in the context of Threads?

Threads, created by Meta (formerly Facebook), is a social networking platform focused on fleeting photo and video sharing. Users close to each other on Instagram can create "threads" – temporary group chats where the content disappears after 24 hours or upon exiting the chat. This impermanent nature adds a layer of intrigue and authenticity to interactions.

Scraping, in the context of social media, refers to extracting data from a platform. Thread scraping involves collecting publicly available information from the app, such as Usernames, Captions, Comments, and Engagement Metrics.

Why Scrape Threads Data?

Threads is about sharing short-lived posts with close friends, giving us a unique look at trends and how users act. Let's explore why collecting data from Threads can be useful:

Capturing Fleeting Trends

Unlike public posts on platforms like Instagram, Thread's content disappears after 24 hours. This can be particularly valuable for:

Identifying Emerging Trends

Unearthing trending topics, hashtags, and visual styles before they explode into the mainstream.

Analyzing Real-Time Sentiment

Getting a clear view of what people think and feel about events or issues as they happen, providing important insights instantly.

Understanding Unfiltered Opinions

Threads foster a more candid environment with its disappearing content and close friend circles. You can understand the honest opinions and talks happening in tight-knit groups by collecting public information like captions and comments. This can be particularly useful for:

Market Research

Understanding how close friends talk about brands, products, or services can provide valuable insights into real-world user preferences and pain points.

Social Listening

Identifying emerging trends or concerns related to specific topics, events, or social issues can help organizations stay ahead of the curve and effectively address public sentiment.

Fueling Content Creation Strategies

Knowing what your audience likes is key to making interesting content. Collecting data from Threads lets you see what kinds of posts, pictures, and topics get the most attention in close friend groups. This information can guide you in making content your audience will enjoy, even beyond the Threads app.

How to Scrape Threads?

Before we dive into the how-to, we must understand the legal and ethical considerations of scraping. You must always comply with the Terms of Service (ToS) of the website you're scraping. Many sites explicitly prohibit scraping in their ToS, and scraping such sites without permission may subject you to legal action.

Also, consider the ethical implications – you should respect users' privacy and not misuse the data. Always aim for anonymized data that removes personal indicators whenever possible.

Identify Your Data Requirements

First, be clear on what information you need. Is it the thread text, user interactions, timestamps, or maybe the number of views and replies? The more specific you are, the more effective your scraping operation will be.

Choosing the Right Tools

Next, you need to equip yourself with the right tools. There are numerous web scraping tools and libraries available, such as:

BeautifulSoup and Requests for Python

Great for beginners and perfect for static content, but might stumble on JavaScript-heavy sites.

Scrapy

An open-source and collaborative framework for extracting the data you need from websites. It's built on Twisted, an asynchronous networking framework, which means it can handle larger amounts of data and more complex scraping tasks.

Selenium

Ideal for dynamic content that requires interacting with the web page, like clicking buttons to load more thread content.

Puppeteer or Playwright

Headless browsers that can control web pages with a JavaScript API, perfect for scraping single-page applications.

Learning the Structure of Threads

Threads are typically structured in a nested manner. There may be a main post followed by replies, each with its own sub-replies. Understanding this structure is essential to ensuring your scraper navigates the thread accurately.

Setting Up Your Scraper

Use the inspect tool in your browser to understand the page's HTML structure. Write the code and run the scraper to collect the data. Ensure you include error handling and respect the site's robots.txt and rate limiting to avoid blocking your IP.

Storing Your Scraped Data

It's good practice to store data in a structured format as you scrape it. For simpler needs, a JSON or CSV file might suffice.

Approaches to Scrape Threads data

There are multiple approaches to scraping Threads data, each with its own advantages and limitations

Manual Scraping

This is the simplest form, where you manually visit forums or Threads and copy-paste the needed information. While straightforward, it's time-consuming and not efficient for large-scale data collection.

Using APIs

Many platforms offer Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that allow you to access and collect data legally in a structured manner. Using an API facilitates gathering large amounts of data while respecting the platform's data use policies.

Web Scraping Tools

There are numerous web scraping tools and software available that can automate the data collection process. These tools navigate websites, extract specified data, and store it for further analysis. Some popular tools include Beautiful Soup (for Python users), Scrapy, and Octoparse.

Custom Web Scrapers

Developing custom web scrapers using programming languages like Python is a viable approach for more specific needs or for gathering data from platforms without an API. This involves writing scripts that send requests to the website, parse the HTML content, and extract the desired information.

Browser Extensions

Browser extensions designed for scraping data from web pages with minimal effort exist. These extensions can be particularly useful for quick, one-off scraping tasks or when dealing with a small volume of data.

Outsourcing to Scraping Services

If you lack the technical skills or resources, outsourcing data collection to a specialized scraping service is an option. Many companies offer tailored services to scrape and deliver data according to your specifications.

Considerations for Ethical Scraping

Respect robots.txt

This specifies the areas that should not be scraped. Respecting these rules is crucial for ethical scraping.

Rate Limiting

Implement delays between your scraping requests to avoid overwhelming the server.

User Privacy

Be mindful of personal data and comply with regulations like GDPR or CCPA to protect user privacy.

Terms of Service

Adhere to the website's terms of service, which often include clauses about data scraping.

Conclusion

Scraping Threads data can provide valuable insights into user behaviour, trends, and opinions. However, your chosen approach should balance your data needs, technical capabilities, and ethical considerations. Whether through APIs, web scraping tools, or custom scripts, data scraping, when done responsibly, can be a powerful tool for research, marketing, and strategic decision-making.

Scraping service providers like Web Screen Scraping transform the extracted data into actionable insights. We offer custom data analysis solutions and scraping services to businesses of all sizes. Using the latest technologies and the expertise of our team, we provide well-structured data from the source.

Article Source : https://www.webscreenscraping.com/how-to-scrape-threads-data-for-insights.php

[rivkae-winters]

Lore.Fm Sources for the company

For legal reasons this is all a statement of my opinion, if this phrasing confuses please see my previous post [here]

Another rapid fire post since in my opinion that is the best way to stop a company from an attempt they might make to step in and alter a narrative.

This company, of five people, are as far [this thread can figure] the group behind lore.fm.

They are on Forbes 30 under 30.

The Forbes article above also specifies that they are certified on the ethereum block chain. In my opinion and to my knowledge we in the fandom space aren't large fans of crypto currency, nfts, etc. In my opinion and based on my limited prior experience I don't trust this app, after learning this information, to not scrape data or use it to train a model. In my opinion any involvement with crypto currency or ai models makes someone untrustworthy when they enter into the fandom space as a company.

[honeyvettel]

hidden in plain sight | alex/franky, first time, smut, virgin!alex, [3.4k]

2017

“c’mon. stop looking at that.”

it’s late. alex can tell by the soft orange cast of the streetlamps outside, the paddock emptied out to a quiet lull, and franky’s voice pulling at the edge of his concentration like a loose thread. it hadn’t been dark when he sat down—just a little after dinner, telemetry sheets laid down in front of him, jaw tight with frustration.

friday’s data still doesn’t tell him anything, though. not about the way the rear had snapped out this afternoon, let him tumble in the gravel, bike smacking the barriers. “you won’t find anything in those sheets, anyway,” franky echoes, spooning another bite of mcflurry into his mouth. alex wants to tell him to shut up. easy for you to say , he thinks, since franky went on winning while alex had to spend his time apologising around the garage. but then franky nudges his foot under the table, presses the side of his sneaker against his calf, and alex deflates, like a popped balloon. “don’t you have someone else to bother?” he mutters. it comes out lacking a real bite and he knows it, and franky knows it too; especially when alex looks up and sees the spoonful of mcflurry suspended an inch from his mouth. franky’s grin is irritatingly smug, and alex can feel the heat creeping up his neck, settling under his skin. franky has always been like this—casual, offhanded, untouchable, and alex has never figured out how to handle him when it’s just them. almost two years of being teammates and it still catches him off-guard, the way franky toes the line between easy and intimate like he doesn’t know he’s doing it. or maybe he does. alex opens his mouth before it gets worse, before someone walks in and sees him like this—cheeks red, stomach fluttering.

“and who exactly should i bother at this hour of the night?” franky asks, a laugh stitched between the words. they pass the spoon between them like it’s nothing—routine, thoughtless. alex takes another mouthful without thinking, even though the sweetness clings to his tongue in a bad way. “i don’t know. shouldn’t you be out celebrating? i heard migno promised to get you drunk.” it lands wrong as soon as the words leave his mouth, bitter like biting down on something he didn’t mean to chew. he shouldn’t have brought up migno. he shouldn’t have said it like he’s—

“jealous or something?” franky raises an eyebrow, crunching around a smartie that leaves crumbs of chocolate all over his lips. alex huffs, trying not to react when franky’s foot deliberately curls around his calf— warm and unapologetic. he shoves the spoon back into the cup. “i don’t know how you can eat things like this. tastes like chemicals.” he’s not jealous. it’s just—migno is always there. always the first to throw his arms around franky in parc fermé. talking fast in the garage, laughing louder, saying things in rolling italian alex can’t quite keep up with. and there’s the video review coach thing. whatever that means. first time franky mentioned it, alex had blinked stupidly and assumed it was some kind of inside joke. like maybe boyfriend would’ve been easier to say. but no, it’s real; apparently it’s a job. go figure. 

franky finishes the last of the mcflurry, scraping the bottom of the cup with all the bits that got trapped into the paper seals. “i’ve got a movie queued up in the motorhome. do you want to come?” he asks, even though alex can sense the little tremor that runs through his words. “or we could just sit there and do nothing. i’m good at that too.” alex stares at the telemetry sheets as an excuse to keep his eyes down, all the red and green sectors blurring before his eyes. the crash still plays in loops to the back of his head—highside, gravel, the world turning upside down inside his helmet. he hadn’t watched the rest of the race; not until the broadcast in vds hospitality had flicked back to parc fermé—franky standing on the top step, golden trophy glitching under the sun. be amicable, marc had said once, not looking at him, busy taping up his gloves. you can joke around in the garage, maybe. but friends? you start thinking they’re on your side. then they’re not. alex was seventeen then, wide-eyed and still believing marc knew everything. he grips the sheets in his lap without meaning to, paper crumpling between his fingers. then he blinks and loosens his hold.

“yeah. okay.” 

franky leads him two rows down to his motorhome, the evening light sliding across the pavement and casting their long elongated shadows on the tarmac. he opens the door with a click and then steps aside, ushering alex in first with a quiet nod, all gentleman-like. he doesn’t know why, but alex had almost imagined the whole place would have been decked out in rossi’s piss-yellow, a blow-up of his face on the wall, along with some candles and a shrine. but no—it’s cream-white and dark wood when he looks around, just like his. more lived-in, though, like he’d expected franky’s space to be. “please, sit down,” franky signs toward the leather couch, before turning toward the fridge with an easy stride. “d’you want a beer or something?” “we just had ice cream,” alex rebutes, but acquiesces just for the sake of having something to do with his hands, needing the distraction. everything looks too sharp now, under the fluorescent lights—the edges of the table, the gleam off the kitchen sink, the clean lines of franky’s silhouette—and his head is starting to throb like it's working too hard to hold it all in. he sits down before his legs can give out, a strange sense of shakiness in his limbs he can't really make sense of. franky plops beside him a moment after, with two beers in hand. it’s march, but it feels like summer, close and stifling and thick. 

“thanks,” alex murmurs, barely above the hum of the room, and he takes a gulp of the estrella galicia. he can feel franky’s gaze on him when he swallows, sitting hot and heavy against the side of his face. franky hasn’t even opened his own beer yet. “so, what about that movie?” he offers, trying for casual. “i wanted to go for some classic, but maybe i can find something more chill on netflix.” alex shifts, suddenly hyper-aware of the narrow space they’re sharing— their bodies so close on the couch, knees brushing, the fabric of franky’s shorts grazing the denim on alex’s thigh. the condensation slides from his bottle and pools into his palms, but he doesn’t care to wipe it away. he can feel his pulse against the bottleneck, fast and thudding like it’s trying to get out. 

“ franky ,” alex says, throat tight. “what are we doing here?”

franky slides a little on the couch, taking an inch away from alex’s body, and the world seems to tilt.

“i just– wanted to do something nice with you.”

the tone—careful, bruised—makes something in alex almost recoil. it makes him want to get up and leave, put a continent between himself and this ache that’s blooming hot in his chest. because this—this isn’t what they do. they’re not strictly what you’d call friends; not the way franky is with mig, bagnaia, marini. that sort of friendship has structure. history. clarity. the kind of rhythm that makes sense when you look at it from the outside. him and franky— they’d bonded, sure, but only in the quiet, incremental ways that matter when you’ve spent years orbiting the same team, a mutual respect that had started small and steady, and then grown roots even if alex still had marquez etched as his last name.  and he hadn’t meant for this to happen—the way his feelings had slowly started to grow around his heart without warning. franky had just—folded himself into his days, seamlessly, until suddenly the sound of his laugh had carved out a place in alex’s brain, the sight of him in his race suit made something knock loose around his chest. (but friends? you start thinking they’re on your side. then they’re not) still. they don’t hang. not like that. not like this. this is—

“alex.”

it’s quiet, gentle, like franky is trying to keep him from spiraling further. he sets his bottle down on the table with a thud, and then his hand is there, curling around alex’s side, right where the bruises from the crash still ache under his shirt. “i don’t know what—” franky begins, then falters. his throat works as he swallows. “i just wanted to spend some time with you. that’s all.”   alex goes still, breath caught somewhere high in his chest. he can’t help but meet franky’s eyes, and when he looks up there’s no mockery there; no smug grin or teasing lilt. just– franky, open and calm; offering . alex settles his bottle down; he thinks how it would feel to carry this moment into the hollow of his chest for years. turn it over again and again with nothing to do about it. 

and so he leans in. slowly, like he’s moving through water. his shoulder brushes franky’s, then his cheek, and when their lips finally meet it’s hesitant, a little off-center. franky responds with caution, tilting his head, just before he deepens the kiss with the smallest sound in his throat, like relief. his hand on alex’s side slides around to his back, steadying, anchoring, and their knees bump again, skin against fabric. alex leans forward, suddenly bold, and licks into the taste left on franky’s palate; the faint, artificial sweetness of mcflurry still clings—vanilla and cheap chocolate—and his brain sparks with the thought of their spit mixing, indistinguishable now. they kiss, and kiss, until their lungs burn, mouths swollen and damp. “we should— i mean, we can—” franky pants, breath catching halfway through the thought. “yeah. yeah,” and alex is already standing up in the direction of the bed, with a kind of urgency he can’t disguise. soon his legs knock against the edge of a mattress, and then he’s sinking down, the world narrowing to franky’s body following his and covering him like a second layer. god . this could’ve happened sooner, alex thinks; that twists the knife a little. it could’ve happened weeks ago— months , even—when they had all the stillness of the winter break ahead of them. 

he hadn’t imagined it, though—he knows that now . that he was never alone in this want. it’s here, written in the way franky’s fingers tighten at the back of his neck, clinging, as he presses another bruising kiss along his mouth. “tell me you have lube,” franky mutters, voice low and a little frayed at the edges. he peels alex’s shirt off in one fluid motion, fingers skimming over the bruises blooming purple. alex wishes he’d just press down, hard—give him something to replace the disappointment. “yeah,” alex breathes; he feels his pulse thudding everywhere at once—neck, chest, cock. it’s already flushed, heavy against his stomach, and franky hasn’t even really touched him yet. “yeah, one—one second.” he nearly stumbles over himself on the way to the bathroom, rifling through his dopp kit with shaking fingers and dragging out a small, half-forgotten plastic bottle along with a strip of condoms shoved all the way to the back. when he’d packed them, it felt almost stupid; optimistic, in a way. not that he’d ever—well. he’d taken them out of hope more than reason, really. 

when alex returns, he finds franky waiting at the edge of the bed, stripped down to nothing but a pair of black boxers. his skin glows gold in the low light, all warm angles and smooth, sun-soaked lines of muscle. he looks—god, alex doesn’t even have a better word than stunning , like someone carved him out of sun and heat.  by contrast, he is like more of a sketch someone gave up on halfway through; his skin too pale, chest marked with uneven hair, ribs still bruised and mottled. he feels young in the worst possible way. “hey.” franky closes the space between them as soon as he notices the shift in the room, taking the lube and condoms from alex’s grasp without a word. “okay?” he murmurs, mouth brushing the side of alex’s neck. it looks like the urgency of before has dissipated to a simmer, and franky has understood everything, even if alex doesn’t know how to say any of it, throat thick with nerves and want. he just nods, slow, and slides his hand up into franky’s hair, threading his fingers through the thick curls.

“you haven’t done this before,” franky says—not a question.

“not like—” alex exhales, eyes darting somewhere near franky’s collarbone. “not like this.” he can feel his cheeks blooming with heat, his dick pulsating against franky’s thigh, demanding attention. 

“we don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” he says. “you can stop me anytime. you can tell me to slow down. you can tell me if something doesn’t feel good.”

“i know,” alex huffs, feeling too raw under franky’s gentleness. “i know, i just—” he swallows hard. “i want to. i want you. i’m just—” 

“okay. you’re okay.” franky moves down, pressing another kiss to the line of his throat, like he’s trying to soothe the words from his skin. he latches onto a spot behind his earlobe, and he bites, just barely, a drag of teeth followed by the sweep of his tongue. alex groans, and his hips buck upward without thinking, pushing against franky’s side. “gonna take care of you, now.”

they slowly make it to the bed again, with franky’s body pressing alex into the cushions, the heat of his thighs bracketing his hips. then a hand slips past the waistband of his briefs, and alex lets out a soft, broken sound. the strokes around his cock are unhurried—slow in that maddening, devastating way that feels both grounding and impossible to bear, his tip already wet with precum, fabric of his boxers clinging damp. under any other circumstance, he might've gone red with shame, but then he feels franky too, hard and hot against him, breath heavier now, his hips rolling slightly, and that alone unravels another string of molten heat from the bottom of his belly.

there’s a beat, and then alex is bare—his skin prickling with goosebumps the moment it meets the warm, sticky air of the night. he hears the soft clack of a cap being flicked open to his left, the wet, obscene sound of lube being poured. “tell me if it’s too much,” franky says. alex nods, mouth parted, but no sound comes out. his whole body feels wound tight, every nerve reaching toward where franky’s about to touch. there’s a pause—just long enough to let him breathe—and then a cold finger glides down, teasing lightly around the ring of his hole. alex clenches reflexively, and franky stills, shushing him softly, thumb rubbing soothing circles into his thigh. “you’re doing so good,” franky whispers. “just breathe.”

alex throws an arm over his eyes, breath catching in his throat as he tries to adjust to the pressure blooming inside him, franky’s words looping in his head and making his cock throb even more against his stomach. franky moves in slow, steady rhythms—up and down, up and down, easing him open, coaxing him gently, until the tension melt into something bearable. shortly after, another finger slides in beside the first, still measured, and alex can’t help but moan this time, loud and unguarded when franky seems to curl around a particular spot. he grinds down instinctively, needing friction, needing something. 

“ franky . c’mon—” it’s half a plea, half a sob, and franky just breathes out, low and shaky. when alex dares to peek from under his arm, he finds him there—hovering just above, eyes dark with heat, pupils blown wide. “yeah,” he murmurs, shifting closer, nosing along alex’s jaw. “yeah. you’re ready. okay.” he takes a moment to tear open the foil, roll the condom on with careful hands, before lining himself up with alex’s hips. the first press is slow, careful— so careful —hands anchoring at alex’s waist like he’s afraid he might fly apart. alex hiccups; the stretch is sharp—sharp and bright and dizzying—but franky is there, hand splayed across his chest, thumb brushing lazy circles over the center of his sternum. “it’s okay,” he murmurs, barely audible, mouth brushing over his cheekbone, his temple, the corner of his mouth. “i got you.” he moves again—deeper this time—and alex feel it all, all of franky’s cock reaching places he didn’t even know could hold sensation. franky is so big—just like he had let himself imagine in flickers- but he’s also so unbearably tender about all of it that it makes an ache rise behind alex's eyes. he turns his face into the crook of franky’s shoulder, tries to swallow it back before it all spills out— too much kindness, too much feeling. they find a rhythm that is deliberate, steady, building from the base of alex’s spine and spreading outward, washing over him in waves. franky’s mouth stays busy kissing over his throat, breathing into the hollow of his collarbone, and then his hand wraps again around alex’s cock, stroking him with an uptempo. alex’s back arches against the pillows, eyes turned toward the ceiling but seeing nothing at all. “god,” he breathes out. “franky— fuck.” he turns his head, finds franky’s mouth, and kisses him hard—teeth and lips and spit. he is so terribly drunk on the sound of their skin slapping together, how franky feels just right buried inches inside him, like they’ve folded into each other entirely. one, two strokes, from tip to base, and that’s it. the orgasm hits alex fast, world turning white-hot around the edges, a strangled sound ripped from his throat like the one of a dying animal. it’s a moment, and then franky follows, burying himself deeper one last time as he comes.

they both pant against each other’s skin, body collapsed on the bed. alex can only but hear a soft high ring at the back of his skull, just like after hitting the asphalt. sensations return in patches, as his body reels itself back in; there’s cum cooling on his stomach, the leftover slick already drying uncomfortably around his hole when franky slides out, slow. he misses the feeling of fullness almost immediately. “sorry.” alex turns his head just in time to see franky sitting back on his heels, wiping his right hand against the corner of the sheet. he then rolls the condom off, diligently wraps it in a tissue, walks it to the bin across the small room. alex smirks, equal parts affection and exhaustion; franky moves like he’s more embarrassed about being clumsy now than being inside him just minutes ago. “leave it,” he rasps, voice scratchy. alex shifts just enough to reach, fingers curling around franky’s wrist as he comes back to the bed. “c’mere.” franky hesitates for only a beat, then lets himself be pulled back down. alex tugs him close until he’s pressed along his side, skin damp and warm, chest still rising a little too fast. there’s a soft exhale against his collarbone as franky settles, one leg hooking over his thoughtlessly, hand gently resting at his waist. 

alex stares up at the ceiling; the shadows move slow and quiet, the twinkling light of the stars spilling through the blinds. there’s still this—this pressure lodged between his ribs, this stupid aching fondness. the way franky had looked at him. how his body had fit against his like he was meant to be there. he lets his fingers find the curve of franky’s back, tracing slow aimless pattern along the slope of his spine.

“you good?” franky tilts his face up a little, eyes catching the faint starlight filtering into the room. alex ignores how the sight is making his stomach roll with something unpleasant. like love .

“yeah,” he nods. “yeah. just… stay?”

franky hums, curling in closer until their legs tangle. tomorrow, they’ll board their flight, head back to their own corners of the world, and in seven days time they’ll line up on the grid again like nothing’s changed. alex breathes; he threads a hand between franky’s long curls and burn the feeling somewhere deep where he won’t lose it.

[honeyhotteoks]

Is this a safe space to vent about something? If it’s not, feel free to delete my message. Has anyone noticed the sheer amount of AI generated stories lately? I don’t find joy in reading anymore. I'm hunting for fics written by real humans like water in the desert. People don’t seem to understand that reading something created by AI just isn’t a beautiful experience. I don’t feel anything when I read those fics. And if you're going to post a fic written by AI, keep it to yourself, I don’t want to see it. Stop pretending it's your work. I really appreciate people who put real effort into their writing and don’t use AI at all. You are truly amazing, and I’d read a hundred of your stories over any of that AI junk. Oh, and one more thing, those of you who write stories without any help from AI, I truly appreciate the effort you put into your work. I’d much rather wait weeks or even months for the next chapter to be posted than read something written by AI and posted every single day. I hope this message didn’t bother you, but I really needed to say it to someone.

hey! definitely a safe space and definitely happy to have this conversation.

i honestly do have a lot of thoughts about this, and it's for me pretty complicated because outside of my smutty little fic i work in a field that demands a lot of conversations about AI / use of AI and I just feel very weird and torn about it.

obviously there's horrible environmental and economic implications and all of that, which i won't get into but think we can all acknowledge..... but the affect i'm seeing on art is pretty painful to me as someone who spends so much time writing and planning.

i think for me personally.... AI is one of those things where like..... if you want to hop into Chat GPT and be like "write me a drabble about xyz specific thing" because you want to kick your feet over it and just get the dopamine hit, i really don't care. you probably shouldn't do that considering it's going to destroy the planet, but i'm not going to call you a bad person or something, i get it. what you do in the privacy of your internet browser is between you and god.

i also personally don't mind if people use a writing software with AI to edit their works (such as grammarly etc.) i've never actually used them outside of a professional email setting at work where my company pays for a subscription, but i can understand how lengthy the process of editing is and how nice it could be to have something be just like.... a better spell check and grammar check tool. i post stuff with typos all the time and it makes me sooooooo annoyed at myself when i catch it, but i don't have a beta reader and it just is what it is.

the problem for me, which plays into what you pointed out, is actual generative ai and content creation. if you understand how ai works are created, how work online is being scraped for data, and what it means to be derivative.... then ai writing is not writing. you can certainly come to my inbox and explain nuances of using generative ai for content ideas, outlining, etc. and honestly.... whatever, you do you. i don't like it, but i also know writer's block sucks etc.... but the idea of having a tool write something for you in full and then posting that and claiming it's writing? it isn't.

people have scenario ideas all the time, think about every twitter thread or imagine, and those are forms of writing sure, but if i fed that into chat gpt and asked it to turn it into a 10K word fic and then i turned around and slam published that on AO3..... like i'm sorry but what the fuck are we doing? i don't understand who that's for. the only thing i can think is that the people doing that want the attention that writers in these spaces get or wish they could do it, but either they aren't a good writer naturally or they don't want to put the work in to learn. in my opinion.... if you post an AI generated fic and get positive comments, they're not praising you for anything, they're praising chat gpt for successfully plagiarizing actual art. i'm not sure what the comments or clout those people are getting is actually doing for them except for giving them momentary ego boots.

and truly like.... not to talk up my own writing, because i'm not trying to be cringe or pretend i'm some great writer (like i'm out here writing rpf kpop porn trust me i have a good grip on reality) BUT - i spend hours and hours and hours on this. i spend hours outlining, i spend hours researching, countless hours writing, editing, making edits for my headers, like..... truly it's the thing that consumes my brain because i love it. i have a drive in me to write that is unlike anything i've ever felt otherwise.

if you all knew the sheer number of half written fics on my google drive of just like.... i had a dream about xyz scenario or can't get a particularly thing out of my brain. it's insane. i literally have a 60k word fic for yunho that i will never publish because there are topics and experiences in it i don't know if i'm comfortable working through in writing publicly, but i write it in my spare time because it means something to me to do it, and to have that (literally like therapy)

i write because i have to. if you guys weren't here reading it, i'd still be doing it. i can't get my brain to calm down without it, but then being able to share it and have it embraced? that's extra for me.

i really appreciate your words. and i agree, if you're someone using AI to generatively write your fic.... i also really don't want to know. i also really don't think you deserve the comments and kudos at all, and i think deep down you also know this. i personally hope those people can find creative outlets that suit their talents if that's something they want to do, because as someone who's been writing for well over a decade, it's been the most fun and rewarding process of my life. i sucked when i started, like really REALLY sucked, but it's something i had to do, and i got better.

writing is a little bit of a gift, i'm sure, but it's also a learnable skill. ai is never going to help you hone that skill.

okay rant done.... i hope this makes sense. let me know if anyone has thoughts on this!! i'm super curious. i've been noticing other ai fic popping up and just feeling weird about it too.

[eriexplosion]

"The Emperor should be pleased we accomplished a successful transfer."

"Not when the M-count was severely diminished in the process. If we do not match or exceed the specimens' original count, it is a failure."

This is interesting to me and not something I've seen pointed out much - Project Necromancer did make some progress before Omega's candidacy was determined. They successfully performed a midichlorian transfer, but just one.

We know that the kids are the donors, but these experiments are being performed on clones with the expectation of being able to successfully transfer force sensitivity into a clone, so the recipient of this would have to also be a clone. It's not Crosshair, so who is it?

Well, we never find out. There's no mention past this of a successful transfer or force sensitivity among any of the rescued clones. But, I do think it's not a throwaway line - because Project Necromancer is still going past TBB. All of Hemlock's data is destroyed, but in The Mandalorian we find out Brendol Hux has been put in charge of it.

So what's the connecting thread? It might be this single successful transfer on an unknown clone. Even just a sample of blood from him might be enough for Palpatine to scrape Project Necromancer back together from nothing.

Which leads to the follow up question, who the hell is this? It doesn't seem to be any of our rescued clones from the finale.

For me, the most likely candidate is CX-2, both because of the focus he gets and his sheer durability beyond what should be normal for a clone. Man got crushed, blown up, AND drowned in the same two parter and kept coming.

Which leads into my theory that the impalement hindered him but didn't kill him, and that Palpatine collected him when no other data was recoverable. (Whether this means CX-2 is still a possibility for Tech or not is up to you, I know I enjoy the theory.)

But one way or another, I think whatever comes next has to tell us who the hell received the m-count transfer and where they are now, because this is the one possibility for any of Hemlock's research to carry forward with him and Nala Se both dead and his data gone.

[minimalsizeconspiracy]

Fics locked to archive users only

After some consideration following this Reddit thread about another person scraping AO3 fics for AI, I’ve taken the decision to archive-lock all of my fics for the time being.

I do not like doing this and the decision was not taken lightly, because I genuinely do not want to keep guests away. But I’m also sick of my countless hours of work being appropriated without even the courtesy of acknowledging my contribution. It’s one thing for me to – of my own volition – issue a blanket permission to others in fandom so they know it’s fine to play around with my ideas and words, translate, remix and so on. It’s something else entirely for someone who has no interest in what I’ve actually written to take my words and use them to train a model and then claim that they don’t have to acknowledge what my work contributed to that, because it’s just one out of millions of data points.

If someone is okay with that, fine with me, it’s an individual choice. Which is exactly the point – it has to be a choice and one that I can consciously make. When I put a blanket permission on my works, it’s an informed choice I can make because I know what a blanket permission entails, and I can request whoever makes a derivative work to link the original.

I cannot make the same choice where AI is concerned, because I don’t know what happens to my works, and thus, even knowing it will affect my guest readers and commenters, I at present do not want my works publicly accessible.