#yahoo answers fail

[insomniac-arrest]

If Reddit goes quiet, how're we going to find answers from real people anymore?? Most search engines are unusable due to SEO grifts. Quora is an annoying hellscape with a distracting layout. Yahoo Answers, Yahoo Answers . . . *starts weeping openly on her grave*

Humanity has been removed from our virtual human playground.

[republicansaredomesticterrorists]

In 1832 Andrew Jackson stomped out the “nullification theory” when South Carolina declared federal law “null and void” and threatened to secede.

Historical figures are multi-faceted and led complex public and private lives. While justly regarded as a monster for what he did to Native Americans he also prevented a potential civil war and kept the union together. However one action does not necessarily balance the scales. History and politics is not black and white and will always remain shades of grey.

Governor Abbott is a political showman keeping the redneck fantasy of Tex-ass secession alive. They tell the Tex-ass MAGAts that Texas-ass is the only state not connected to the power grid because someday they might secede again. Truth is they keep it separate because Tex-ass RepubliKKKlans and their top 1% masters are all major shareholders in the ERCOT grid and make millions from price gouging their own constituents.

The border is something the RepubliKKKlans revisit every election year. They stir up the uneducated and misinformed base with racist and xenophobic nativist talk of an invasion and then when the election is over they do little or nothing about it.

Two years ago Republican operatives were detained in Brazil and questioned about their role in organizing migrant convoys and sending them to the U.S. southern border to make the Dems look bad. We all know they do this but the tv news won’t cover it. The far-right always gets a free pass by tv news. If you want real news about politics you have to go to respected print media and their associated websites for the whole story.

Greg Abbott will continue to human traffick migrants across the country and kill them at the border. US law supersedes state laws and he has no business messing with immigration. He’s trying to provoke a showdown with Biden so he can claim Joe is a dictator and rally the deplorable base. Biden is commander-in-chief of the Texas National Guard and could have the Defense Department order them to stand down but that would be risky politically so instead he keeps beating Abbott in court. Even if Biden ordered the Texas National Guard to stand down, Texas has a large state militia called the Texas State Guard that only answers to the governor and is not connected to the federal government. Abbott could always order those yahoos to commit atrocities against migrants and block federal agents. It’s all about creating a certain false perception of Dems appearing to want open borders.

Tex-ass once had a thriving economy that contributed to the federal government. However in the past 20 years Republicans have held power there and driven the state into the ground. Economically and socially it is now bordering on being a failed 3rd world state where oligarchs and gunslinging nativist white supremacists run amok. Tex-ass like most other red states is now a welfare state taking more from the federal government than it turns in. A handful of blue economic powerhouse states in the northeast and on the west coast now support nearly the entire nation. We pay high taxes that go to support Confederate states and the oligarchs that get perpetual kickbacks there.

[the-s1lly-corner]

Could you write headcanons for what could possibly fluster Jax + how he flirts?

Fluster Jax + Flirting hcs!

Gonna answer this and then take a nap! Yahoo!!

When jax gets flustered hes the type to tell you to shut up, I think. In fact I think he would attempt to get you to shut up by making you equally as, if not more, flustered... alas, he may likely fail

Dont get me wrong, deep down he loves the attention youre giving him, but he hates that it makes him look...

Soft

Now what could possibly make him behave that way?

Now I'm not entirely convinced that this is jaxs thing, but if you were to like. Actually go on in detail about the things you love about him.. that might crack him

And I dont mean like "oh I think youre funny," or "you're handsome" I mean like REALLY explaining it, get poetic with it if you really wanna make him red

As for how jax flirts, I think he would try to take up all of your attention. You turn around and hes there

Bugging you is his live language/j

But also.. not /j because I think he enjoys the extra time he spends with you

Oh jax is definitely a flirt. If he manages to get you all flustered before you can get him, hes gonna have this shit eating grin on his face

Turns into an unspoken game to see who can make who red in the face first, I think

Asides from trying to constantly cothre your undivided attention by clinging to you or being a nuisance via his pranks, he tells bad pick up lines

Like I mean bad ones

The one that can make a man cringe

Only once in a blue moon does he actually unlock something in him that makes him real smooth, something that hits just right

But alas

That's rare and tends to be very situational

[tartrazeen]

I feel like some folks don't understand what'll happen if Tumblr runs out of money.

I think that's why so many are doing the whole "we have to donate right now or else they can't make the changes we've been asking for" thing.

As a business major...

... allow me to enlighten you on exactly what'll happen if Tumblr fails to generate "enough" revenue.

Here it is!

They sell the site.

That's it.

You may remember this as being "the thing that happened the last time." Which last time, since there have been many? Exactly. Pick any of those blips in the rear-view mirror.

The site doesn't disappear or get deleted. Per capitalism, it fundamentally can't be. Automatic put money into this site, and they will not be leaving without getting money out of it one way or another: by monetizing us through Tumblr Live and tracking and no icons and letting terfs and racists roam free, or by trying to recover their loss if that never works at a turning a profit and they give up 'cause we're too high-maintenance.

This is normal Business. We're fine. Staff is pushing this so hard because they aren't fine, but if they go (i.e. "run out of money"), we get a new stepdaddy.

⁽⁠⁽⁠◝⁠(⁠ ⁠•⁠௰⁠•⁠ ⁠)⁠◜⁠⁾⁠⁾

And they will sell us long before we ever get to a 'boo-hoo delete the site' point because we live in a society under capitalism. You don't delete money. You sell it off to the next greedy corp. as a last resort so you get anything back on your failed investment.

Here - have some more details about that if you want:

Along with selling the site, someone else buys the site. This is the more important and yet even funnier/easier/more empowering-to-users half of the equation.

When someone sells something, it's to recoup a loss or realize a gain on their side - but either way, it's because there's something that's still valuable within the asset. Part of the sales pitch to new buyers is to therefore say, "Hey, look how profitable this website could be if you were able to tap into it the right way! Uh, why couldn't we do that? Uhhhhhhhhhhh."

The answer to that question relies heavily on why the site's being sold. If it's - as it's currently heading - along the lines of "Users are so delighted to give us money that they'll basically buy whatever you throw at them, but we're not in the business of doing infinite growth, so we're selling this to someone else who can manage that part and we'll start again with a different website." That's the best-case scenario for sellers and buyers. It's their win/win. It's them saying "I would keep making money but I don't have the infrastructure to get it all, so we're selling it to someone who can."

The answer that Yahoo got when they first bought it was some hilarious bullshit like, "Oh, uh, yeah, they're gonna be the .pdf of the future. Don't wanna miss that." Which is hilarious because it was more or less tricking Yahoo into buying a bucket of goblins. That was a win/lose on Yahoo's side, 'cause they fell for it and the old sellers got to escape with their losses cut and some money in their pocket. Same for when Verizon got it, although Yahoo was probably more honest in saying, "We didn't know this site had bees in it." Enough of a win for Yahoo to sell it, a lose on Verizon's side because they didn't know wtf to do with those bees either.

Automatic came in like, "Omg. Bees in a website. With money. We can monetize this. We can get rid of the bees. We'll take that off your hands for you, Verizon!"

And Verizon was like, "oh thank god, give us any cash you can spare"

And Automatic paid that assuming they would figure out how to finally crack through Tumblr's lack of profitability to get our sweet sweet money honey. They're forcing through Tumblr Live, for example, because if it works, they'll eventually find the optimal equation between "lose the unprofitable users" and "make maximum money." It's the same reason EA is in the business of microtransactions and doesn't give a damn about people complain until enough people reject it to actually hurt their bottom line.

If Automatic fails to do that?

They're just another Yahoo and Verizon. They sell it to the next sucker they can trick into thinking the site's a money-maker "in the right hands lmaooooo". They give up, essentially, but there's more money to be had in passing it on while the site still actively has users than it is to destroy the site entirely - because then you can't sell it for as much.

So feel free to dig in your heels and resist every single change! Send all your feedback! One-star the app! Delight in staff saying, "You're just making it harder for us!"

Yeah, good! Making staff's life harder is actually the goal. The harder we are to monetize in XYZ way, the more they have to decide if it's worth a new approach or cutting their losses. The less money they get, the more they have to either revert back to less profitable but tolerated options, or the closer they get to selling the site that's been publicly documented to hate XYZ tactics.

The worse reception these changes get, the closer the users get to an outright revolt, the more other companies go, "Eeee. You can't trick us into thinking they can be monetized." And that pushes Automatic towards one of two options:

Unload their "bad asset" onto someone else ASAP, with as positive of a spin on Tumblr's profitability as they can create

Keep the asset but accept that XYZ feature or tactic isn't getting them the cash they want, so try something else.

It's that simple. They're difficult for users to corner Automatic, of course, because Automatic bought this site with "The users are gonna try to boycott lol" rainy day funds and a lot of optimism that they could 'break' the userbase. But that's a corporate spirit that erodes once they really aren't making the money they thought they would.

Who knows? With enough documented resistance, the next owners might go in ready to embrace the existing Tumblr culture, especially if they can be convinced of how unique it is. You have nothing to lose with Automatic because they aren't interested in that. Quit panicking, this is all normal, and it's quite literally just a waiting game.

Continue to panic publicly, though! That does help. :) No - seriously, that affects Tumblr's external marketability and monetization potential, which further pushes Automatic into one of those two "sell or submit" options lmaoooo

[you-hate-time-travel]

i see you in my tags. yell at me about wv NOW!!!

-crews

HELLO CREWS DEARLY BELOVED MUTUAL! thoughts below, not under a cut as i dont like those.

horribly traumatized old man, treated horribly again and again, as both cannon fodder and the saviour - the one to defeat jack noir once and for all. and he fails at both! he is neither a good pawn nor a suitable wastelandic vindicator. time and time again he fails. its. YAHOO! remember that dream he had? my favourite sequence in the whole comic probably. makes me go fucking WILD. he is fucking miserable and, sigh...

putting this here again. grips your shoulders. stares into your eyes. i need you to fucking understand me.

anyways thats all! also so sorry crews im probably never gonna answer that itchy ask. i never actually made that felt personality doc lol

[creachureboy]

Gk charas' google history headcanons

Shiraishi

He definitely has gambling websites open, and you know he knows what he's doing when you find "gambling.com/this-is-not-a-scam-website-xoxo/".

Which is then followed by dozens of searches along the lines of "scammed by gambling website", "how to get money back after scam", "how to report gambling website".

Also various paid corn sites, good for him

He uses Quora and Yahoo Answers as a reputable source of information.

So many goddamn 9GAG pages.

Vasily

Tons of links on social media of art by his favourite artists.

And Twitch, he probably watches vtubers while he draws.

There are also lots of vids in his history of first person shooters.

Random wikipedia articles of highly specific phenomena that piqued his interest.

And drawing references. His search history even seems suspicious out of context with the poses he searches.

Saichi

Travel and tourism vlogs, followed by google maps searches.

Also, recipe blogs and videos.

He has compilation vids all over his watch history, whether its compilations of "Funny Fails 🤣🤣😂 LOL LMAO #TRENDING" or just a compliation of moments from a show or a game, even if he doesnt play the game or watch the show.

Random trivia google searches, mainly because he mightve seen something he didn't know and ended up googling it.

And then he falls down a rabbit hole of random trivia, ending up excitedly telling Asirpa all about it.

Asirpa

Definitely watches animal fail videos.

Probably gets addicted to Wordle.

Does Not Use Keywords When Googling to point it's a miracle that google can even interpret what she's saying. Who tf searches like "I put my shirt in the dryer and now it shrunk and now I want to know if I can reverse it".

Watches educational youtube channels about literally anything. She'll fall dowm that rabbit hole.

Secretly loves those online flash games but would never admit to it.

Ogata

It's fucking wiped clean, almost nothing is there.

He mostly just does typical ogata stuff like searching up really specific facts that could get the average person arrested for knowing.

And also cat videos :)

Oh and he most certainly does not use google, he opts for browsers that keep you super secure.

He probably has reddit just to spread misinformation honestly.

Koito

Tons of beauty guru channels definitely.

He also has a channel of his own which is also in his search history a lot.

Search history completely unorganized. Youll see pictures and vids he finds funny, links to online shopping sites, wikipedia articles on military icons and tactics, etc.

He also loves reading travel blogs and watching vlogs.

Is really fucking good at Wordle, Asirpa hates him for always being able to get it right.

Tsukishima

also has koitos yt channel in his search history.

Lots of miscellaneous journals and artciles open for him to read.

He has perused a lot through online libraries too.

Does crossword puzzles online.

Reads the fucking. News. Every day.

Tanigaki

Ngl probably wouldnt google many things, and if anything his search history would be few and far in between.

But when he does search its things its so normal ?? Like "XXL clothing store near me" and "How to repair a broken air conditioning unit".

Gym websites and workout routine stuff. He maintains his build and I gotta respect that.

Also has facebook to check in on how his family and friends are doing.

And also baking and cooking videos.

[kitonmitons]

It really is incredible how quickly the world of freely-accessible social media is dwindling— either falling apart internally or squeezed under the weight of tech monopolies. Or both.

Tumblr’s decision to remove nsfw posts to avoid strikes from Apple’s app store was what tossed the snowball down the mountain. Its demise was connected to internal mismanagement and the need to compete with other huge social media sites at the time they banned nsfw, which are all now under new management and/or owned by massive tech corporations.

That in particular is a point I would like everyone to think about. Every major social media site that we use is part of a larger billion-dollar corporation. Many of them started humbly— Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Reddit were all created by average people. It goes without saying now that Facebook has become a monopoly itself, and we all know the shitstorm twitter is under, which has left us with two primary platforms for free social media: Tumblr and Reddit. We know what is happening to Tumblr, but what of Reddit?

Reddit is owned by Advanced Publications, who also own or have majority shares in companies like Charter Communications (the company behind Spectrum internet, as well as Vogue and The New Yorker) and Warner Bros. Discovery. With funding like that, obviously the intention is not to make Reddit a place of information and socialization— the real intent is to turn it into a money-making machine.

To ensure this, Reddit is in talks of making their company public, meaning they would have to answer to shareholders when making decisions for the website. Shareholders want to see continuous profit, and that cannot be done only through ad revenue, such that Reddit has primarily profited from for years. People can subscribe to Reddit to remove the ads, but subscription services alone don’t see the profits they want to make. The solution to this problem is to push Reddit competitors out.

Some of their biggest competitors, ironically, were their own userbase. Reddit has a slurry of third-party applications made by Reddit users themselves, using Reddit’s API which until recently has been free. Third-party apps such as Apollo gave users a way to use Reddit WITHOUT advertisements, which was lost revenue for Reddit all while using the site’s base code. As a result, this year (2023) Reddit began charging to use its API, resulting in all of these third-party apps shutting down. With no more internal competitors, it’s time to go public and see how much can be made by shareholders— they might even decide to use their new funds to buy out more social media sites, or further integrate failing ones into their system, just as they are with Snapchat.

All this talk about Reddit in a post that is supposed to be about Tumblr. But, the two are related. As Tumblr begins to fall into disrepair and demoderation, we will begin to witness the fall of free social media as we know it. Big tech has dug its fingers in what has quickly become an important piece to our social fabric. The platforms that give us news, connect us with friends and family, connects us to the world, and spreads information is in the hands of just a few tech companies. Tumblr is failing because Yahoo! is failing. Tumblr is failing because WordPress is failing.

It is incredibly easy to blame staff for their stupid decisions, and it should still be mentioned. However, my main concern is the accessibility to free social media itself. The fall of Tumblr is an example of a social media website whose poor decisions— namely the removal of nsfw posts, poor automated moderation and failures to adjust to an aging userbase— cost it everything, but what really resulted in its demise was competition. Tumblr could never compete with giants like Facebook or TikTok. Nowadays, the only site Tumblr could really compete with was Twitter, which will be under a subscription service come January. And as people flock to sites like BlueSky and Threads, the diversity of the online world will only continue to decline. It is exactly the lack of competition that will make it hard for any Tumblr-like to take off, especially since a site like this has always run on user participation, not profit.

My point is, look at the overarching bullshit that is taking away from online life and question whether it’s worth participating in. Find ways to protest online monopolies that are squeezing out competitor sites and making it harder for people to use social media, especially if they aren’t influencers. And take a step back from the staff drama to look at what hostile monopolies and an undemocratic internet is doing to communities like ours.

[themculibrary]

Bucky Barnes Time Traveling Masterlist

1946 (fanfiction.net) - WintersSunrise T, 36k

Summary: When a mercenary presumed dead threatens to unravel a timeline, Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson are thrust back to 1946 where the fates of Peggy Carter, Howard Stark, and S.H.I.E.L.D. hang in the balance. They navigate a painful past fraught with post-war shadows while deciding whether to preserve the timeline or remake it.

21st Century Brooklyn Boys (ao3) - khaosNotRefundable T, 121k

Summary: In which Steve & Bucky from the 1930s wind up time-traveling to the 21st century and finally run into each other...sort of. Brooklyn’s still Brooklyn. Only bustling, shiny, and very expensive. Bucky wants to know why this little yahoo of his is now Big and Sad. And Steve’s pretty certain the last time he saw him, Bucky wasn’t a very confused, quiet, long-haired, dangerous version with so many knives…and a metal arm…

OR:

Who’d’ve thunk procrastinating an arts assignment could save two pals in another century?

Cross the Same River Twice (ao3) - littlerrhymes steve/bucky T, 5k

Summary: In the fall of 1940, a stranger with Bucky's face saves Steve and Bucky's lives. The stranger claims he's from the future and that his only mission is to protect Steve Rogers.

Ghosts of War (ao3) - eden22 steve/bucky E, 112k

Summary: The Winter Soldier was never meant to survive that final mission. The Winter Soldier returns to HYDRA soaked in blood and water anyways, Captain America and Insight both dead at the bottom of the river.

HYDRA has failed. HYDRA cannot have failed. HYDRA decides to give the Winter Soldier one last chance to shape the century.

If killing Captain America didn't work, maybe killing Steve Rogers will.

It remembers you (ao3) - often_adamanta steve/bucky T, 13k

Summary: When the Asset fails to complete his mission and kill Captain America on the bridge, HYDRA decides to take a more drastic approach to changing to world. The Asset is sent back in time to kill Steve Rogers before he becomes Captain America in order to erase him from history. Soon he’s dealing with failing his mission a second time and coming face to (masked) face with his own past.

I've Heard That Song Before (ao3) - Pokimoko steve/peggy T, 95k

Summary: In the year since he broke free from HYDRA, Bucky Barnes has been trying to rediscover himself, searching for who he was in the words of history books and within the memories he is slowly recovering. While journeying through Hungary, he meets a mysterious old woman who promises to help him. He accepts, not realising that her idea of helping involves time travel.

He gets sent back to 1944, into the body of his younger self. Bucky, with no clear idea of how to return to the future, tries his best to rediscover the Bucky that Steve, Peggy, and the Howling Commandos know him to be, whilst also having to deal with a mission straight out of his worst nightmares.

Journey Home (ao3) - EiraLloyd steve/bucky T, 14k

Summary: One moment, Bucky was raiding a Hydra base alongside the Avengers. The next, he was stuck in November 1943, with no way back home and no one to trust. Not even a day later, Steve walked into his room at a London inn and kissed him.

What the hell was going on?

Leave Yourself Behind (ao3) - raendown sam/bucky T, 76k

Summary: “It’s a very long story,” he said.

Well, that wasn’t exactly true. The basic truth itself could be summed up real easy: that guy right there is me from the future and that’s his pal Sam, also from the future. All the details and the questions afterwards - only half of which got actual answers - that’s what really took so long.

When a version of himself from the future is brought back to the past right in front of him suddenly HYDRA isn't the most interesting thing in this war. But the more time Bucky spends with himself and the new companion who came with him, the more questions he finds himself with. How much time has really passed? How much can one man be changed from himself? Who is this Sam - and what will he grow to mean to Bucky?

Operation Hindsight (ao3) - DCAngst T, 111k

Summary: When Steve chases the assassin who shot Fury, he realizes the sniper is strong, fast, and has a metal arm...but he's not the only player in the game. Who is the other guy on the roof—the one who may have just saved Steve's life?

Synopsis: Bucky and Sam travel from 2024 to 2014 to thwart Hydra agents armed with knowledge of the future from changing the timeline. To do that, Bucky has to stop the Winter Soldier from assassinating Captain America.

Out Of Time (ao3) - ibroketuesday steve/bucky E, 38k

Summary: Bucky can't remember anything before Hydra. He doesn't want to know about his life. That's the way it has to be: Bucky Barnes was a monster, and the past is in the past.

Or: in which Steve and Bucky are thrown back to 1937, where they have to figure out how to get home, work together, and, as another time traveler hunts them down, simply stay alive.

Savage God (ao3) - LenneWithMilkAndHoney, PottersPink steve/bucky M, 36k

Summary: Past, present, future, Steve knows Bucky Barnes. It’s why he recognized him when he found him in that alley in April of 1942, even though Bucky was older, stronger, wearier; he called himself The Asset, and had a metal fucking arm. He flinched when Steve tried to touch him, and when Steve told him he loved him, his first response was to ask why.

The Asset was only with Steve in 1942 for a few days, but it’s enough to change the course of Steve’s life forever; the journey to becoming Captain America is coloured with urgency, with an undercurrent of fear and determination that in the end he just can’t manage to hide from everyone — But it was all for nothing. Steve saves Bucky from Zola, just to lose him on the train. Their second chance, wasted.

Seventy years later, Steve wakes up in the twenty-first century, and he doesn’t know whether to be heartbroken or hopeful when some of the things Bucky revealed to him in 1942 start falling into place.

The Future Looks Bleak Without You (ao3) - syriala bucky/tony G, 3k

Summary: Bucky had known that joining the Avengers after everything he went through would mean some really strange stuff would continue to happen to him. Seeing a future version of himself in the living-room still hadn't made his list.

“Jesus, I’m Bucky, I’m from the future, would you please put the gun down before you kill yourself.”

“Shut up!” the Soldier barked. “What’s your mission?” he asked because it was apparent that he would not get a satisfactory answer out of the intruder.

“I’m cupid.”

Thermotemporal Equations (ao3) - Blinky the Tree Frog (blinkytreefrog) T, 48k

Summary: Bucky Barnes is used to strange happenings; his time with the Howling Commandos has guaranteed that. He's therefore not totally thrown off balance when he wakes up in an extraordinary tower in a seemingly impossible year. He can’t help but be worried though, no matter how much reassurance he's getting from Steve and his new team.

to memory now I can't recall (ao3) - Etharei steve/bucky E, 102k

Summary: While on a mission storming a HYDRA facility, James Buchanan Barnes touches one of the many strange alien devices collected by the Red Skull. He does this, in fact, twice— in the past, and in the future.

Next thing he knows, Bucky Barnes is opening his eyes in the 21st century, which is full of great gadgets and coffee, and at least includes his old pal Steve. (And, inexplicably, a different Stark.) Meanwhile, the Winter Soldier finds himself in the middle of World War Two, helping Captain America hunt down HYDRA (which is at least familiar), pretending to be Bucky Barnes (which is not), and figuring out the very noisy group of soldiers who call themselves the Howling Commandos.

When In Brooklyn (ao3) - McBiteypants, Spintwin E, 191k

Summary: Bucky Barnes arrives at the Sokovian memorial to take Baron Zemo into custody only for the multiverse to crack open at exactly that moment and throw the two of them back to somewhere that’s very familiar to Bucky: 1940s Brooklyn.

Winter Solider: Resurrection (ao3) - DCAngst G, 38k

Summary: In 2024, Bucky Barnes follows a lead about more super soldier serum that takes him to Siberia. He encounters the unexpected and finds himself in 2014, shortly after the Winter Soldier vanished.

Winter Undone (ao3) - DCAngst steve/bucky T, 74k

Summary: What if, after the Endgame battle, Dr. Strange used the time stone to save Tony and undo 80 years of Hydra for Bucky? In other words, 1945 Bucky ends up in 2023 and has to come to terms with...a lot.

[holdoncallfailed]

The threat of annihilation remains imminent. GeoCities was once the cornerstone of digital community, the first inkling of what the internet was capable of and a glimpse into how future social media might function, and now it’s gone. Yahoo Answers was once synonymous with homework help and random advice, however badly misspelled—but no more. It’s not hard to imagine that Automattic’s new Post+ feature will fail spectacularly and that Tumblr will continue to evade profit and hemorrhage money, eventually getting the axe despite its devoted userbase. “The internet is forever” was a common refrain from authority figures during childhood lectures on cybersecurity. Parents and teachers warned my classmates and me as young digital denizens that whatever we posted online would never really disappear even after we hit the ‘delete’ button. But maybe it isn’t as permanent as we’ve been led to believe. As long as profit-driven corporations and their investors retain the final say in which platforms are useful or relevant, we have even less control over our own digital content than we could have ever imagined.

[contentment-of-cats]

Part II: Growing Pains

When we ended Part I of our overview of Fandom, we saw fic evolving from Zines and independent publishing to fic specific platforms such as Fanfic.net, LiveJournal, Ao3, and Dreamwidth. The hand-off from one platform to the next was not always a process of evolution, nor a smooth transition, rather often necessity demanding invention. With the transition from paper to online exposure came the opportunity to develop community and an opportunity for problems.

We’re back at the Asker’s Studio™️, so grab a cat, move a cat, kick the toys out of the way and get comfortable.

Today, I would like to discuss what I like to generally define as Growing Pains. These are the issues that arose on all fronts which ranged from the highly personal, to technical assaults that threatened the mere existence of fic, online.

I have chosen a few topics that reflect on the evolution, creation and demise of Fandom platforms/archives/host sites. Let’s begin with the big one: Censorship. Over the months, I have heard fragments about a wave of censorship that hit both FF.net & LiveJournal. I understand that the results caused rifts/fragmentation in the fandoms. Since those platforms existed before my time, could you briefly describe what they were, how they served your needs, and what ultimately led to their demise?

Out of the ashes grows a rose: AO3. I understand that Ao3 was borne as the answer to the failings of the aforementioned FF.net & LiveJournal. However, it is not without its own attacks/problems - as recent as the last two weeks, hackers with content issues successfully took down the site for a solid day. Could you add any insights to these purity attacks & whether they are a continuation of the long war on creativity? Even less spoken of are issues of internal strife, regarding fic content/underage content. Having participated in several Fandom platforms/host sites, was the creation of Ao3 the answer that Fandom participants were looking for, or do problems evolve along with solutions? (I invite @olderthannetfic to feel invited offer any historical perspectives on the creation of AO3 at this time)

Finally, I would like to throw out what I call The Next Frontier: the introduction of AI. Many of us have locked our accounts and designated them Registered Users Only, as the AI beast lands like a pack of Death Eaters. We see the entertainment industry walking the picket lines with AI being one of the contract issues. Can you offer some insight on this topic?

This is a hackneyed list of issues - both human & technological - that has confronted Fandom/fic over its long and short history. Please feel free to add, abridge, omit or expand on anything I have brought up. As always, thank you very much for your time..

*settles in*

I wanted to answer this sooner, but really needed to think about some of my answers. This has been through a few drafts, so hold steady.

Censorship:

In the beginning (Usenet), there was always censorship. The fandoms would start off with 'all are welcome' but that was never actually the truth. Popular ships always eclipsed rarepairs, and people got downright nasty about it and there was also a lot of anti-smut action. Then there was the slash vs. het vs. noromo (no romance - now called 'gen) disputes. The fragmentation came with e-groups and members only listservs where people could write their stories without the censorship of the majority or characterization cops. There was still more fragmentation over other subjects, the purity police existed to make more wedges. The first time I ever saw a fight over 'queer' being a slur was on a Skinner/Mulder e-group so that was around 1996ish. E-groups purged a lot of slash and smut lists before it was bought by Yahoo, and Yahoo did the same.

Archives were curated sites on accessible hosting sites like Geocities, Angelfire, and so on. either dedicated to a specific fandom, pairing, or genre. Posting power rested in the hands of an archivist or a board of archivists. There was a lot of favoritism, and some authors posted their own work on a private website and often joined a ring of likeminded sites.

Fanfiction came out of the woodwork of the internet in 1998 when fanfiction.net came to be. FF.net was the equivalent of a publisher's 'slush pile.' A knocked-over fire-hydrant geyser of fic and fandoms as opposed to the neatly bottled and displayed stuff. It took a while, but the tweaks started in the early 2000's (dammit I am so fucking old) with banning works from a specific source (Anne Rice, Archie, Terry Goodkind etc.), then moving on to banning reader insert, filk and songfic, RPF, NC-17 and sexually explicit material (purging existing content also). They banned CYOA, Self-Insert, Character/Reader (You) fic. A lot of this was for two reasons.

The leadership of ff.net wanted to make the site attractive to advertisers.

They wanted to play nice with publishers, studios, media, real people depicted in fic, and intellectual property attorneys.

The migration to LJ placed fic in the hands of the author. They could post whatever they wanted and screw the mods.

If fanfiction came out of the woodwork on ff.net, it came out of the closet on LJ.

LJ came along in 2000ish, it originally was a place for fans to interact with other fans - like a forum where you could also post fic. The ban and excision of NC-17 and explicit fic from FF.net made LJ into a fandom hub, and for a short while kept the fan-run archives from dying out. However, even the hosting services did not want smut, slash, or other possibly-prosecutable fic on their servers, and were shutting down those sites. It was haphazard, but not random, as fandom grudges and the purity police would rat archives out.

LJ also saw the rise of the BNF, and also the phenomenon of Dark Fandom and Fandom Wank (FW originated on LJ and was driven off several platforms). LJ was sold to 6 Apart in 2005, and the Russian company SUP in 2007, with the founders mostly bolting after Strikethrough and Boldthrough - instigated by Warriors for Innocence (actual identity unknown, speculation attributes to Ms.Scribe). However, 6 Apart and SUP also wanted to - you guessed it - make LJ profitable. WFI was arguably the first successful, large format purity troll. I was already moving away from LJ and FF.net at the time, that just hammered the nail in.

Archive of Our Own:

That leads us to Ao3 (called AoOO and cue the 'Werewolves of Fandom' jokes), began with a 2007 LJ post by @astolat. The genesis of Ao3 was widely mocked, but fifteen years later it is still standing. I remember hearing about it and wondering if it had any relation to the essay 'A Room of One's Own' by Virginia Woolf.

"But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what, has that got to do with a room of one's own? I will try to explain."

I view the attacks on Ao3 as an attack on marginalized groups using nontraditional media. There are still vast numbers of people who do not want women or other marginalized groups to have a room of one's own, much less an archive, much less an archive that can't be held by the balls via their wallet, or threatened with a squad of foot soldiers with Esquire and Juris Doctor next to their name. Ao3 is now a part of fandom culture - good, bad, and ugly - and is a target for purity trolls using straw man, gaslighting, and red herrings to pull Ao3 apart for their own purposes.

Ao3 does have the problems that any institution has - and those unique to those dependent on user-generated content. It has its own internal struggles with the content that users generate as it pertains to underage/noncon and other squicks. To censor or not to censor? Is it enough to ask grown ass people to tag their work or to ask other presumably grown ass people to use tags when to eliminate content they do not want to see? are they doing enough to attract a diverse staff? How is that staff being treated? It is non-profit, staffed with volunteers, and lives on funding drives like US public television and NPR. It has a big enough base that understands the mission and is active enough to parse board candidates. In much the same way as NPR/Public Television, the content is a draw for trolls. Legacy media was the means to control the message, but when you can shoot content on your phone, write and publish from your connected device, the media can't control the message. It scares the piss out of people who have every reason to want to control the message.

When people attack Ao3, their reasons are spurious troll food for the most part. There's another, deeper, more nefarious agenda at work.

AI and the War On Creativity:

AI art, music, and writing is the idea of someone who views media as something to be consumed. You buy a book, you watch a show, and that is monetized.

Nobody has ever successfully monetized fandom.

The war between creators and media controllers heated up when technology handed creators the tools to make their own content and the platforms to distribute it whether it's video, writing, art, or music. AI is an attempt to wrest that control back.

To the Powers That Be, fandom is a resource that needs to be squeezed for money. People consuming fanworks for free are people not giving their money to Disney, Sony, Warner Bros, and so on. The PTB have taken over the cons, despite the inclusion of artists alleys, so that they can once again control the media and control the message. The PTB like to deem themselves creators and disruptors. However, creative human beings are an unruly lot. The PTB want creatives and what they produce, but under their control. No unions, no contracts, no pesky IP issues.

An AI has no rights, no needs, no true consciousness and thus can only copy or derive when it 'creates' content. Their 'disruption' is for everyone but themselves. So when we bar them from scraping our content, they see it as our refusing to give them something that they are entitled to use.

AI scraping from Ao3 and venues like DeviantArt are attempts to make unpaid use of creators' content. Creators write and create art that is uncompensated, which is then shared. Some writers and artists have 'tip jars' or take commissions, but the vast majority get nothing but comments and likes. Since this work is uncompensated, the PTB deem it 'free' and therefore they can do what they want with it. When they scrape a work to train their AI, they are working to replace creatives. Full stop.

For that matter, a scraper doesn't need to be from Google or MicroSoft. You can download scrapers for Wattpad like this one:

There are also tools available on sites like GitHub that can be used to scrape Ao3 and FF.net. Moreover, there are a fuckton of AI specifically marketed for fanfiction writing to fanfiction writers - all of which have been trained on fan-generated content. There are AIs for art and for music. It could be argued that these AI will help people unleash their own creativity, improve stories, and unearth creative potential. The thing is that none of these tech companies does anything for free in the long term.

Finally, the US Copyright office has ruled that you can't copyright anything - image, writing, music, video - that you create with an AI. anyone can use it for any purpose, without you having any legal recourse. There must be a minimal 'human involvement' - in this particular case, the art generated by a human entering text prompts into an AI was deemed insufficient to meet the standard. The ruling is the first of its kind, and more will follow, but keep in mind that you are one ruling from the AI creators assuming a stake in your work.

[pigcatapult]

Having the uncomfortable realization that, once you look past the incongruity-based humor of pronouncing typos out loud, the famous video compilation of badly-spelled pregnancy questions on Yahoo! Answers just demonstrates that people who don’t know how getting pregnant works are also likely to have been failed by the education system in other subjects, such as language arts. Low education level is a major risk factor for unplanned pregnancies.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Céline Calame

Published: Mar 13, 2024

Last year, I made one of the biggest changes of my life when I decided to stop trying to disguise my sex. A few days after my 28th birthday would have marked ten years since I began injecting testosterone. I had always thought I would feel at peace with that milestone, so deep in my so-called “authentic life.”

Heading home from work one day in February 2023, I stopped to look at the newspaper stand, where a headline about Jamie Reed blowing the whistle on “gender medicine” at the St. Louis Children’s Hospital caught my eye. As I read the article, it shook me to my core how much I related to each and every line. I myself had used the phrase, “Would you rather have a dead daughter or a living son?” on my mother, a phrase I had heard online, a phrase apparently recited by medical professionals to distraught parents. I was horrified to realize I was not the only one who had gone down this path as a minor.

I had already stopped taking testosterone several months prior, fearing medical complications. Despite my facial hair, as my body fat began to redistribute I began to be correctly sexed by confused men in public restrooms. I debated my next step. My little niece had only ever known me as her “uncle,” since my husband and I lived outwardly as a happy “gay” couple. Having grown a beard and undergone a double mastectomy, I continued pretending to be a man… but did I want to?

* * *

As a child growing up in Alabama, I simply thought life would be better if I were a boy: I wouldn’t get stared at in the video game aisles or made fun of for liking sports. Never mind that if I were a boy, other boys would have judged me for my Care Bear collection and my affinity for Barbies. Each night I prayed and every year I made birthday wishes to one day wake up as a boy with not a soul having any recollection to the contrary. 

And yet in some ways I did not really mind being a girl. Our neighbor loved to tease my sister and me by yelling to us, “Hey, boys!” which was met without fail each time with: “WE’RE GIRLS, MARK!” In truth, I was less of a classic tomboy and more of a healthy young girl who did not let stereotypes dictate her life. I didn’t worry about my body until I learned about the ways others changed theirs. My issue was that everyone around me seemed obsessed with separating boys and girls by telling us what hobbies or friends we were allowed to have, something I did not understand. 

When I first went online, in 2006 or 2007, I was about 10 years old. At first I mostly played dress-up games. Eventually I learned that I could look up questions I had, which led me to Yahoo! Answers. I wound up on the LGBT section of the site, where I asked if I could be “a boy inside” even if I loved my long hair, liked my “girly” clothes and hobbies, and didn’t really mind being called a girl. The answer was, bizarrely, a resounding “yes.” Several of the responses even gave me resources: forums I had absolutely no business being on, full of adults trying to change their sex, as well as webcomics glamorizing medicalization.

I learned to hide things from my family and to judge them negatively for not being able to understand or accept the complexity of “gender identity.” How could they deny that I was a boy inside? How could they deny “gender” might exist in shades of gray? Adults online told me that males who said they did not “feel like guys” were only saying so because they “never had to think about gender” the way I did.

My mother, at her wit’s end with how much I had gone silent towards her, did the only thing she could think to do: She read my diary. The first page of this new journal was dedicated to the logistics of stuffing my underwear with rolled-up socks to create a phallic bulge while still needing to use the girls’ locker room at school… my mother confronted me angrily, asking me how long I had been doing all these things to look like a boy. I completely shut her out, my trust in her shattered. I decided never to tell her about things going on in my life, such as self-harm, sexual abuse from a neighbor that made me ashamed of my own body, and the isolation I felt as a result of my hereditary progressive hearing loss.

My mother took away my “boy clothes” and refused to let me cut my hair. She would threaten to send me to all-girls schools. Several times she followed me to the store to ensure I was not buying duct tape, which she learned I was using to flatten my chest, or shaving razors, because she knew I was no longer shaving but instead self-harming. All of these things pushed me further away. My story finally looked more like the desperate stories of other teenagers in my boat, with families who fought every step of the way against gender ideology.

One day, realizing that my mother sometimes used male pronouns in front of me but used female pronouns when talking to anyone else, I came to the horrifying conclusion that I would never be accepted by my family as the opposite sex. Everyone online told me that suicide rates for “transgender” teens were sky-high, that without “transition” death would be my only relief. I attempted to take my own life. The tides turned in my favor: I never heard my birth name again, and was exclusively referred to as male.

Years later, when I wanted to back out, I remembered how hard it was to convince her in the first place.

* * *

At age 14 I found a gender therapist in Montgomery and emailed her, explaining that I was uncertain if anyone would let me medicalize my body because I was “a little nonbinary.” She told me I would be surprised at how open-minded she was. I began saving up money to see her. Every single penny was pinched with the goal of one day using it all to “transition.” I did not do anything fun with my friends or create savings goals for adulthood.

At age 17, I finally had an appointment with her. She made sure to schedule it for the same day as a group meeting where I met another 17-year-old girl who was already on testosterone and a man pretending to be a woman who did most of the talking while we both sat there shyly, silently.

I spent all of twenty to thirty minutes telling my story, leaving out details regarding my nebulous sense of “identity” as tumblr had suggested and instead highlighting that I had “lived as male” for a few years at that point. The therapist asked why I had come to see her, since I “sounded so sure” of myself. I needed to see a therapist in order to be prescribed cross-sex hormones, I said. She turned to her computer, entering my name into a form pre-filled for just this purpose. She handed me a printed copy, saying she would also submit my referral to an endocrinologist who worked in the same building. I was floored. Was it really going to be this easy? 

When I saw the endocrinologist he was alarmed that I had listed lithium, a mood stabilizer, as a medication I took. I explained that I had mood swings but that I had full consent from everyone to begin hormones. He was uncomfortable and wanted letters from my parents and psychiatrist, but then ignored these letters after I submitted them.

Sometime during the following year, I dragged my mother to the probate judge to change my legal name. She sat there, looking desolate and defeated as I assured the judge that she fully consented. He told me he could not in good faith assist a minor attempting to lie about her sex.

A few days after turning 18, I returned to the endocrinologist, having never seen the gender therapist past that first appointment. On the basis of “informed consent,” he could not turn me down: as long as I said that I was aware of all the risks and side effects, and accepted them as par for course, I would be prescribed cross-sex hormones. Did I understand the medical risks of what I was doing? Sort of. All of the side effects meant nothing to me because I had been told online that the alternative was a life of misery and eventual inevitable suicide. It would be years before I saw myself in Jamie Reed’s words: “All it took for them to permanently transform themselves was one or two short conversations with a therapist.”

I left with a prescription which I filled that day. The taunting at school stopped as the bullies who mocked me heard my voice crack, then drop. Facial hair sprouted. I bound my chest, sometimes with very frilly, cutesy custom-made binders. (A cupcake print one comes to mind.)

I entered college very open about the fact that I was female but wanted to be a man. I frequently wore makeup and sometimes women’s clothes, saying I was “expressing femininity as a man.” I was on every “transgender student” panel and did my best to “educate” everyone on the intricacies of people like me. I got a large tattoo to mask my breasts, thinking I’d never be able to afford a mastectomy. 

At the appointment the tattoo artist asked me, her deaf client, “How do you sign MY BODY IS AMAZING?” I showed her and she turned it into a dance. It was the dance of another woman who struggled her whole life to love her body. I had begun to love mine but was still obsessed with not looking completely like either sex. This made romantic endeavors difficult because I insisted on trying to be with gay men despite not being male and no longer even making an attempt to look male.

I found out that my student health insurance covered “transition,” so I made a consultation for a “simple release” metoidioplasty because I wanted ambiguous genitalia. At the appointment, I had no sign language interpreter and did my best to understand the staff and communicate what I wanted. The surgeon asked if I wouldn’t prefer a more linear path involving a mastectomy first. The nurse shook her own breasts at me while looking at my chest, eagerly smiling to indicate that the doctor was right. Uncomfortable, I took off my shirt. The surgeon assured me that my tattoo would remain totally intact and that because I was so small-chested the mastectomy could be done with the keyhole method, leaving me without scarring. 

The day of the surgery, I kept wondering if something would go wrong. If my insurance would suddenly fall through. If my ride home would cancel, thus necessitating we reschedule the whole thing. Instead everything went very smoothly. Everyone assured me that when I woke up, I would be happy.

A few days later in my dorm room, seeing my new chest unbandaged for the first time, I could hardly remember having breasts. I thought this meant it was the right thing to do. In hindsight, it was trauma. I was 21 and had no idea that my breasts would not grow back if I stopped testosterone. Prior to the operation, I told my therapist I might one day have a child and want to breastfeed my baby, but we never followed up on that thread.

Post-mastectomy, I got a vaguely worded letter from the surgeon expressing that my sex had been “changed” and that I was now “physically male.” My birth certificate and driver’s license were amended to reflect this lie.

I was not unhappy, per se, but taking cross-sex hormones is like trying to install a Windows operating system onto an Apple computer. You can certainly do it, but the machine is not equipped to deal with that. I had already been through female puberty. My bone structure would never look male. I would never gain muscle the same way men do. I began struggling with my eating disorder much more severely following my mastectomy because I saw my stomach sticking out so much further than my now-flat chest. I developed vaginal atrophy and cervical problems which I am only just beginning to have treated because I avoided gynecologists for so long.

After meeting him on a gay dating website and falling in love, I married a man in 2019. We moved to the Midwest and I did something I always thought I wanted: I went totally “incognito” about being transgender, and let everyone believe me to be wholly male. Instead, I felt empty inside for years. I could never be wholly truthful about my childhood. My husband was privately uncertain how it was possible for me to “feel like a man” and later admitted to being terrified of the medical experimentation I was undergoing. He loved me dearly as his “husband,” and was willing to refer to me as such regardless of whether or not I medicalized myself. He expressed what my family was by then afraid to: How long would I live?

* * *

After reading an article about Jamie Reed in our local paper, I researched detransition. I had been taught to see people who stopped lying about their sex as self-hating, “transphobic,” or even rare cases of other issues being mistaken for “genuine gender dysphoria.”

What I found was so different from what I had been told: thousands of people who had been prescribed cross-sex hormones after a single appointment, many never seeing a therapist even once. Hundreds of women whose breasts had been removed without ever being asked why they wanted that. People whose healthy genitals had been mutilated to poorly approximate those of the opposite sex. So many who really did at some point–or even still–struggle with the desire to be the opposite sex, an impossible endeavor. 

The future was uncertain to me. I was nearly 30 and had lived half my life lying about my sex. There was no adult woman I could return to being.

Was there?

Hundreds of people told me that even if I had lived my whole life pretending to be male, detransition did not mean “going back” to anything. It meant stopping the medicalization and the lies. It meant starting over. It meant moving forward.

I planned to wait a year before publicly detransitioning as a way of “serving penance” (a coping strategy my husband suggested, knowing the guilt I felt about my medicalization) and to avoid being perceived as a man pretending to be a woman. I wore women’s clothing at home, along with breast forms, which took an insane amount of courage because I felt like I was crossdressing as a woman despite being female. 

One day, I snapped. I felt miserable going to work every day living a lie and absolutely could not continue to handle the frustration of dealing with a period in the men’s restrooms. I told my HR director about my situation, expecting shock. I expected a few slow weeks of telling managers, then coworkers, eventually changing my name tag and restroom habits. Instead, she was completely unsurprised. Expressing that she would support whatever timeline I wanted, she reassured me that absolutely no one would be uncomfortable with me in the women’s restroom. 

I changed my name tag that very day and told all of my coworkers through a handwritten note that I passed to them with shaking hands. Not one was fazed. Most reacted with great positivity and support. A few asked me privately why I had “transitioned” in the first place and I told them very honestly: I was groomed by adults online and felt trapped in my decisions. The last decade of my life had been the epitome of sunk-cost fallacy.

Gender ideology ruined my childhood. I wonder today what would have happened had I never been exposed to the rhetoric online or had therapists pressed me about where I was getting these ideas. Today I know that being a woman is just about being female. It has nothing to do with the way she dresses, the way she sits, or the way she walks, talks, and lives her life. My mother is relieved to have her daughter back. 

One day my in-laws came to visit while I was wearing breast prosthetics and feminine clothing. My husband and I expected bewilderment that never came. After a few hours of aimless conversation, I told them that if they weren’t going to ask why I suddenly looked like a woman, then I would just have to tell them. I was met with love and support, but wondered if I should say anything about the hole I saw their daughter falling down. 

My teenage sister-in-law had brought her sketchbook over to show me her drawings: large-breasted anime characters that she insisted were male. Later, I texted her about my detransition to which she responded with her desire to be a boy, her involvement in the same Internet circles I had fallen for, and her intentions to look more masculine. I see myself in her: She is ashamed of her body and the Internet has already told her this means she is “a boy inside.”

I wrote this for her but she is unwilling to read it. 

I’ll be there for her when she’s ready.

--

About the Author

Céline Calame is an aspiring literacy specialist for deaf children in the Midwest. She volunteers with Women’s Declaration International USA, having joined its Desisted & Detransitioned Women’s Caucus in 2024.

[8um8le]

hii bee🐝 !!

sorry its been an awful while since i last sent an ask ^^; life sure has been busy in more ways than one haha. i hope life has been treating you well!! hopefully you’re able to enjoy yourself and the joys daily life brings us :D lately ive been trying to think of things that really make me happy even if its a small thing like “im glad i brushed my hair it looks lovely!” hopefully you can do the same if possible. i think its good to have that little light of joy with is especially when days are dreadful. even something like im glad i had a little chat with that person..it was nice :> (i often find myself having that as my daily answer for things that bring me joy especially when i talk to my discord friends ^^). ive said this probably more times than i can count in my asks but since its winter earth is in the right spot to have a better view of the stars and so they appear so much brighter; especially the milky way 💫 i hope that despite whatever daily challenges you may have that you are able to not let that stop you from enjoying your life :> make sure to drink and eat something if you can - our bodies are alive too so lets take care of them 😤💪 hopefully this can help you too but i find when days are hard i like to remind myself that stars can die any-day despite the regret that maybe they didn’t make the most of what they wanted in life so i like to think “oh wow if that’s the case im going to live my life in a way that makes me happy instead of appeasing others.” that most likely doesn’t make sense but that’s okay haha maybe one day it will ^^ life can be a bitch sometimes but as long as we have our jar of stars that are joy with us we can overcome anything. whether it be artblock or mental health, anything that it is you can make it through it 💪 loads of ppl love you and care for you so hopefully you’ll always know that <3 *gives u a hug and some of those cosmic brownies with peppermint hot chocolate* i hope life treats you right because you deserve every ounce of love, happiness, and peace there is. love you!/p

-mochi 💜🍡🌸

Yahoo another letter from the beloved mochi!!!! Your words never fail to make me smile, I’m collecting all your letters and putting it in it’s very own fancy display!!! Wishing u all the best, you deserve the world! Also Love u too dawg /p 💕

[meams4u]

Ok it's becoming unavoidable.

The 2010s internet business model is failed, and it's very likely taking tumblr down with it. The good parts of this site are going to die.

There is an inherent disconnect between the best product/service and the most profitable product/service. However the assumption of correlation AND causation between these is at the core of capitalism.

I explain.

Booyah.

The business model which drives tumblr's decision making is the same as drove nearly all sites in the 2010s. There was so much reliable investor money, that sites could fully fund their costs and expand wildly without ever making a profit, or ever charging their users for a service. Their goal was the long game, offer something fun for free, get people hooked, become necessary for daily life; that if they could capture enough of a userbase, then that MUST be profitable at some point. How could a site with 50mil daily users not make money, right?

Well, there was enough money flowing in to prevent those questions from ever being seriously asked. Which is unfortunate, because the answer is no. YouTube, despite massive use, omnipresence, and so so many ads, doesn't make money. Gmail doesn't make money. They painted themselves into a corner by being free, and people are used to that. The status quo was always unsustainable. Employees cost money. Servers cost money. These bills were paid by willing investors in the past, but with little more userbase to conquer, what's bringing them in? Now websites are scrambling to maintain the cash flow necessary to stay alive, let alone improve.

Gmail, YouTube, Discord, Twitch all have mega profitable services bankrolling them for the sake of surveillance, but tumblr doesn't have that (neither do Reddit, Uber/Lyft, or Snapchat). Various buyers (Yahoo and others) have dumped cash on tumblr occasionally, but that's not going to keep happening. So what's the plan? Cutting costs will only guarantee a slow death and nonfunctioning website (Twitter). So tumblr must either increase revenue or fire everyone and shut down the site. I cannot stress enough that the status quo of a functioning website for free, cannot exist without someone dumping money on it.

Now finally I get to the main point 🎉

Have you ever spent hours mindlessly scrolling some app, bored the whole time, and at the end you feel like shit? According to our current system, this is your favorite app which you like using the most. Have you ever had a meaningful connection on a forum or witnessed perfect comedic timing in a reblog chain? Well unless you chose to spend hours experiencing these beautiful moments (oxymoron), then the system will interpret your enjoyment of those websites as far less. That is considered a bad website. The only metric currently used is eyeball time. This metric does not reflect user satisfaction.

This metric is used because it's a simple conversion from eyeballs to ad views to income. So eyeball time becomes the goal and social media sites become optimized towards quick-seratonin-hit addiction and features that trap rather than convincing user to choose to spend their time on a site. Why isn't the latter a good enough option? Because happy people don't choose to spend their days looking at ads.

And that's the heart of the issue. Humans are not happy when they're generating max profit. Capitalism is never satisfied with profit alone, it demands the greatest possible profit. And therefore capitalism demands systems which make us unhappy. This is tragically at the core of capitalism; the idea that consumer choice will direct companies to produce the best product. That the product which wins out must therefore be the best for consumers. But it's not true. It has never been true. It's why cigarette companies succeed while companies that make long-lasting cars fail.

Tumblr, with its features that encourage user interaction and discourage influencer culture, is more enjoyable and less profitable. Can they find a workforce of engineers who are just as talented and hard working as the Facebook engineers, but accept much lower salaries? Probably not. So what do they do? I expect they make things worse on purpose, and eek out some kind of survival. Remember the porn ban?

[traineecryptid]

Hello,

Thank you for all the great shows you link to!

I was watching Overworking Man and I have a kind of stupid question. Wang-ge seems to spend a lot of time drinking directly from small teapot. I thought he was being a weirdo. Is this unusual behavior? I though you pour the tea into a cup (or share pitcher then cup), but then I saw a hanfu post today where the model seemed to be drinking from a teapot. I think I've characters in drama's pouring wine from from spouted wine decanters directly into their mouths. Are we supposed to infer something about that character from his tea drinking? Is it tea?

Thanks again.

Glad to hear that you enjoyed it! I looked it up and well my findings are hmm strange? So in no particular order:

1. There are a specific type of teapot called 西施乳 (Beauty's Breast, beauty as in Xi Shi one of the top Pretty Lady of Ye Olde Days) and they are apparently? designed to be uh....cup-less so to speak...just teapot to mouth HOWEVER the only source i can find to this claim is a baidu zhidao (like yahoo answers) post

2. another person answering to the post mentioned another type of teapot called 紫砂壶 (Purple Sand Teapot) which confuses me,,,cuz as far as I know, this is a Material of teapot not a type? like glass vs ceramic vs metal kinda deal. but they did make a few points about the Behavior of drinking from the spout

3. FINALLY we're talking about The Behavior. So, I'm just paraphrasing here: 3.1 Depends on the person and the setting (the era? the time background?) of the story -from what i understand OP means that in like costume dramas it might look cool and show that a character is a rulebreaker/ not your typical nice guy BUT since we're in a modern society, the general impression people would get from this is "wow that weirdo/ thats so uncultured." 3.2 Depends on the teapot's appearance (and hygiene...stuff) (this argument is supported by quite a few other posts) -drinking from the spout might cause discolouration after using it for a long time due to the person's saliva and the porosity of certain types of teapots. so it's rather unsightly

SO, THE CONCLUSION

Is this unusual behavior? Answer: Nope. But it seems like this behavior is a rather Old Men Behavior...........so uh.......yeah Are we supposed to infer something about that character from his tea drinking? Answer: Given that the setting of Overworking Man is The Modern Times, I would infer that 1. Wang-ge is trying to look cool and cultured (by using a teapot instead of a regular mug) 2. failing at that (because...it's kinda weird in an office setting...like no one wants to see you uh sucking...on that...it's just Cringe Central Behavior) Also like combined with his general character design with the greasy hair and nosepicking...i don't think it's meant to invoke the same feeling as those people in the hanfu posts.

Is it tea? Answer: Probably? I don't know how common it is for people to put non-tea beverages into teapots (like how people put alchoholic stuff in non-alchoholic containers)...and since tea is already quite a common drink...i think it's unlikely that it's not-tea? But I dont think it's explicitly stated.

[mcdevinpants]

I'm Trying to Make Sense of Crab Day

There's a lot being said about Crab Day, and a lot of people getting very angry about it and saying a lot of different things, so I'm going to try to organize my thoughts a little bit. I have some unanswered questions and if you have some answers, please do share. But I'm not trying to push any side on this, so if you're mad about any of my thoughts, please just scroll on by.

First and I think most importantly, whether or not it'll do anything. Not a clue. It's 100% true (as I've seen pointed out, I do not claim to be the originator of this thought) that tumblr is operating on a deficit, they're not in debt. Giving them $30M via crabs won't fix the problem. Even if we reliably did it every year (which wouldn't be a viable plan anyway) I'm not sure it'd fix the problem. But I feel like it might be a step in the right direction. It certainly couldn't hurt on that front. And I've been kind of wondering how long this place was going to be financially viable ever since Yahoo took that huge loss. It's not looking good.

I've seen a bunch of folks say that the OP of the original is a terf (who I will be henceforth in this post referring to as feminist-appropriating radical transphobes, or farts, as I've seen wonderfully suggested before, because I don't think they deserve to be called feminists and also do deserve to be made fun of). But I don't know who that is. Every post I've seen about Crab Day has (i think) talked about how this is their version of it, or seems to be promoting an already-existing idea, and the folks who are just referring to them as "the OP" aren't giving a username. So I can't go see for myself (as some of them have rather confusingly suggested). And I like verifying stuff like that. If you've got a lead on that, please let me know. Searches have been inconclusive. (I have confirmed that at least one person promoting it is a fart, but that's about as far as I've gotten. Said person is ohifonlyx33. More investigation has confirmed greater-than-the-sword is also a fart, but they also say they weren't the originator, just an early promoter. Any further information will be placed here in edits.)

But also on that note, at this point I kind of fail to see how this idea promotes or furthers a fart agenda. Which is the important part, right? Maybe I'm just not seeing it, and if that's the case, please do weigh in. I hope it's not just idea guilt-by-association. I can't avoid doing literally everything a fart does just because they do it, because they also do things like eating things they like and (theoretically) having friends. (No this is not a serious line of argument, I know those aren't equivalent, I'm just skeptical of idea guilt-by-association, I'd need more than that.) I generally try to avoid promoting fart blogs just to not give them any additional reach, but given that I don't even know who came up with this in the first place that doesn't seem like much of an issue to me.

I've also seen a post circulating talking about how we shouldn't be giving them money like this unless they make accessibility improvements between now and then. All of the accessibility needs they list are absolutely necessary. I'm not entirely clear on how that relates to the proposed crab day though. To be clear, what I'm saying is that Not Participating In A Semi-Organized Effort To Give Money To Tumblr is not the same as a boycott, and an absence of participation seems to lack the clarity of intent that a boycott absolutely requires to even approach being effective, even if folks write in about why they're doing it. Boycotts are a tricky beast and most of them don't really do anything. I'm also kind of under the impression that if they're already not taking accessibility seriously, withholding money isn't going to incentivize them to start so much as it's going to put you in the category of User Who Is Not Assissting Tumblr's Continued Existence. And to be clear, I am already in that category. I haven't spent any money on tumblr, and continuing to do that will unfortunately not further the cause of accessibility. It also won't hinder it per se, and I'm not entirely convinced that I'd be hindering it if I did give them money.

To sum up: I'm not arguing in favor of Crab Day. I'm not arguing against Crab Day. I'm not entirely sure where I stand wrt Crab Day, and I'm not sure this helped at all, but maybe it will lead to something that helps. If you've got something to weigh in on that might help, please do. If you've got something to weigh in on that involves being unpleasant, please don't.