kradeelav | (no subject)

idk if I've seen this specific quibble voiced but one of the many things that makes me feel uneasy about current social media (especially twitter) is the ... constant low grade whiplash in newsfeed/accounts?

like you can have cute pokemon art, cute FE art, [horrific appeal for help against a warcrime], aesthetiq posts, [teeth-grindingly incorrect low-key radical political misinformation], more fanart...

and I don't know how to word it precisely but something makes me think that's partly where we went wrong - crossing too many streams too quickly without ... the wisdom to ask if there's any unforseen consequences? not that there's no place for important social discussions - but that it almost cheapens those deeply horrific, tragic tragedies when you place it right next to fanart? and almost blunts it? (and dare i say - almost vice versa?)

Like I constantly look at what went *right* with dA and no it was never perfect - but there was always an understanding that art took center stage and you could ramble about personal shit in the journals but it was always secondary and in a separate feed. (god, i would fucking /love/ separate dA-esque feeds for twitter, and the ability to mute all text posts - that'd almost fix all of my complaints about the site on the spot.)

but like - there's a deep low-level anxiety/ever-open psychic wound i feel whenever I used to see those posts mixed in, I've since curated my feed to avoid that mix and to focus on actual actions when possible - but ... ugh.

idek i feel like i've been complaining a lot lately about macro shit that can't be changed, apologies.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[listening & agreeing without having words to articulate anything meaningful]

I was nodding so hard while reading this post that I managed to give myself slight whiplash in the process.

Completely agreed on all counts. From what I recall, it was Tumblr that popularized this "cute fanart and horrific political reality right next to each other" approach. I remember a certain strain of 'slacktivism' entering fandom spaces as early as the LiveJournal years, but it didn't quite reach the levels of Tumblr and Twitter due to the structure specific to LiveJournal (separate, clearly demarcated communities meant that, for the most part, 'political reality dissemination' and 'fandom' tended to exist within separate spaces, minus incidents like Winterfox).

The irony right now is that, of the two large platforms we have, it's Tumblr that's actually better-suited to avoiding the above mix, due to the far more robust third-party extension support. As an example, I've blacklisted so many terms and muted so many posts on Tumblr that, for quite a while now, I've managed to turn it into solely a feed of fanart, fanfic, gifsets, fandom meta posts, etc. Doing the same is near-impossible on Twitter, due to a combination of the site not having a real tagging culture (hardly anyone tags 'US politics', for example) + much less in the way of third-party extensions, with Tumblr doing its best to kill off the few ones we do have.

This is one of the many reasons why I keep advocating for a return to segmented platforms, divided into clearly walled-off communities. Yes, it will lead to fandom fragmenting and splintering, but at this point, that's preferable to the damage done by throwing everything into a blender.

[ nodnod so much at what you said back too! ] absolutely.

(tho I would almost hazard to say that there's more blogs on tumblr that are specifically just for art and/or aesthetic posts, and no text posts? wheras it's much rarer to find 'em on twitter... that could totally just be my experience tending to stay close to design tumblr.)

turning off retweets on every follower on twitter only does so much, yeah. god, it's just broken - and to such a deep extent that semi-private places like this feel like one of the few answers, yeah.

The cross firing gives me some incredibly intense whiplash, honestly I can’t stand it. I’ll wake up, check Twitter, looking for messages from friends, cute art, fandom shit but no more than three posts down and you run into like speed bumps of politics, hatred, stress inducing discourse or reminders of just how truly awful people can be. It’s just... not great.

[ nodnod! ] yeah that's exactly it. it was never like that IRL and i think we've kind of inadvertently stumbled into the reason why it wasn't, as a human species....

I really think humans were never meant to be so... aware of one another. I have billions of people at the tips of my fingers, and inside this magic little rectangle that streams data directly into my brain. When I think about it too hard, it's kind of horrifying.

Like, yeah, TV and the internet at large were stepping stones to THIS - but christ. I hate it. It's a nightmare. At least I don't have to watch television for my fucking job!!

I watched the slow change in attitude in social media and internet interaction over the years and the very mechanics of the services used have a whole lot to do with that whiplash.

LJ may have not had the ability to make side journals, but the ability to make filtered accounts and LJ cuts, on top of the lack of reblog, I think mitigated a lot of the whiplash that could have occurred. It also taught people that they were allowed to pick and choose who they were comfortable with talking about certain subjects.

There seemed to be this sort of prevalent culture on LJ about keeping your feed tidy for your followers. Cutting long entries and sensitive subjects, providing warnings, even making filters for more sensitive subjects for those that didn't want to see it at all. Users didn't thrive on a call-to-action mentality, and there was no metrics other than comments to be concerned about and reblogs didn't splinter conversation or sully followers of followers. So much of that changed when tumblr became popular.

Tumblr was Always On and it's lack of selective privacy on top of the way it functions is mechanically what lead to what we deal with, now. The private blogs were terribly convoluted so very few people bothered with them and it lead to an era where everyone just dumped everything unfiltered and expected everyone to do the same. There were side blogs but they quickly became Fandom related, aesthetic and cute storage vessels. No one wanted to separate the bad from the good anymore, no one ever thought they had to and they were rewarded for endlessly venting to each other and getting reactionary likes and doing it all over again for the same thing. This slowly conditioned everyone into believing that it was good and 'honest' to dump everything in the same place and if you hid you were disingenuous.

I'm honestly so glad for DA setting the standard of having journals, posts, faves, and other interactions be something you can just opt out of. It's likely one of the single most reasons why other services after it followed in it's steps. (now if only we had more art gallery options for explicit porn)

(sorry, catching up on old replies!)

I really liked what you said about LJ's "culture" of feeds staying tidy - because I'm nodding a lot at what you're mentioning about the services changing ... but can also see how it's due to the various group dynamics of the cultures also responding to, and jumping from the base service.

Definitely explains how DW has mostly followed on that similar sense of tidiness, wheras as you said, tumblr is very much ... not that.

Old comments is fiiine, I know how it is to just not have the Brain to say something at the time.

And, yep yep. function of a service always becomes a vector to the flavor of the culture it produces.

tbh as someone who came into this climate and didn't know anything else, even I can relate, literally I've had to ask two separate people something along the lines of "can you please tag death threats?" bc they were putting extremely violent language on my dash without much second thought, I know I can be part of the problem bc I am terrible at organizing, but I've really tried to cut back on the amount of depressing stuff I reblog/retweet for my own mental health

On tumblr the way its blacklist works means sometimes you can rely on the op to have tagged the general topic you want blacklisted, the best solution I have on twitter is to temporarily mute ppl when they're too much to handle but that is hardly the most long-lasting solution. I guess a part of me just still waits for the ideal fan platform to come into existence one day, as unlikely as it is