(no subject)
Mar. 3rd, 2020 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavidk 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.
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.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-02 07:22 pm (UTC)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.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-03 02:59 am (UTC)(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.