The Search For Inspirado

1.5M ratings
277k ratings

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
theprettieststarrr
odditycollector

I FUCKING KNEW IT.

SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.

AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.

I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.

It doesn’t matter.

Once upon a time - in the era before anyone had heard of google - if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.

GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.

And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on - it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space - but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.

Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history - a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.

(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)

And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…

Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.

And watch as the flames take everything.

Brush the ash from their hands.

Walk away.

Once upon a time - in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” - fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon - or as many years late - as you wanted to.

Because there was a tagging site - del.icio.us - that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.

They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it - many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.

It is like fandom suffered - collectively - a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.

We have never yet recovered.

Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.

I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.

I do not think Yahoo is “bad” - I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.

But they are, historically, bad for US.

And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.

…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.

vantasticmess

i forgot that yahoo was the one that destroyed both de.li.cious and geocities too, dang. But yes - tumblr is a loss and the writing is on the wall. Yahoo won’t run this site purely for charity reasons, so unless something wildly changes, tumblr’s days are numbered.

(Maybe now is a good time to check out pillowfort.io …)

70thousandlightyearsfromhome

The current brouhaha reminded me of this post.

I have been involved in online fandom since AOL was new, and yes, I witnessed the destruction when Geocities went dark.  It was a real loss.  The Wayback Machine saved some pages, but not all.

But I think it’s wrong to blame Yahoo.  They weren’t the only ones.  And they won’t be the last.  It might seem like Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter are here to stay, but that once seemed true of AOL, Geocities, MySpace, etc.  If it stops being profitable, it goes away…or becomes a useless shadow of what it used to be.

AOL still exists as a company, but the fannish message boards, filled with discussion and fanfic, are gone forever.  So are all the personal webpages where fans used to archive their stories.  Free mailing lists at Yahoogroups, Onelist, and Egroups were once the heart of fandom - where people posted discussion and fanfic, and expected them to be archived forever.  Yahoogroups ended up absorbing the rest, then put Draconian limits on posting and archiving that basically made the mailing lists useless for fannish purposes.

Usenet is still around, but the archiving services (Remarq, DejaNews, etc.) mostly went away.  Because of the nature of Usenet, it was pretty useless without multiple archives (posts tended to get lost, they were only available for a couple of weeks, and you couldn’t depend on one ISP or one archive to get them all - a pain if you were trying to read a 30-part story).  

So, I am wondering how long Tumblr will be a viable platform for fandom.  Yahoo recently sold off Flickr, and the new owner is making huge changes.  You used to get 1 terabyte of space for photos; now you only get 1,000 photos, no matter what size they are.  If you don’t buy a membership for $50/year, they will start deleting your photos until you are under the limit, oldest first.  If they decide to sell Tumblr as well, who knows what the new rules will be.

Many Flickr users are upset at the changes.  They expected their photos to be archived there forever.  Now that won’t be the case, even if they pay - since once you die and stop paying the fee, your photos will be deleted.

I fear that applies to fannish works as well.  Switching to Pillowfort.io or Dreamwidth isn’t really a solution.  They are likely to face the same pressures Yahoo, etc. faced.  Any commercial service can’t be relied on.

I’m reminded of something a biographer of Steve Jobs said.  He writes a lot of biographies, and said Jobs was difficult, because his early journals were on magnetic tape and other obsolete media, written with software that is no longer readily available.  Leonardo da Vinci was easier, because his handwritten notebooks can still be read.  I guess there’s something to be said for dead-tree fanzines.  :-/

olderthannetfic

A good post to revive!

I don’t think it’s the commercial nature of a site by itself that’s the issue. DW never really took off like a lot of us hoped and never created that second era of LJ-style fandom, but it has been chugging happily along ever since. Its ambitions were modest and its business plan sound.

The problem is that most commercial sites are venture capital startup nonsense that does not have a clear business plan that will be sustainable in the long run. The aim is to drive users to the site in such numbers that they feel unable to abandon it, then inflict advertising or new fees on them after they’re stuck. “We’ll figure it out later” is a key feature of all of these, but the assumption that lots of users mean lots of ways to monetize isn’t always valid.

Squidge-style sites also don’t usually have good long-term plans. (IDK about Squidge in particular though.) The ones that last are the ones run by fans with deep pockets and good offline fannish support networks. Many others die when the owner forgets to renew the domain name or gets tired of paying or can’t pay any longer.

Look at the Smallville Slash Archive: it was one of many fannish sites that Minotaur hosted. When he died unexpectedly, his many fannish friends stepped in to save his work. SSA ultimately got imported to AO3 to preserve it. This worked because he had plenty of actual friends in fandom–people he saw offline at cons too–and not just casual acquaintances who followed him on social media. It’s true that donation drives can be signal boosted on social media, but all of the liking and goodwill in the world won’t do jack if nobody has access to the hosting/business side of a site to use those donations to keep it open.

This is one reason a lot of older fans I know have started talking about fannish estate planning. All those paper zines are a better archival format than any computer drive, but they also often get thrown in the trash by clueless relatives. Out of an original print run of a couple hundred, how many are extant?

AO3 is distinctive in that it has an entire organization in place to make sure it continues. (So while nothing is forever, AO3 is about as solid as it gets.) But I’d probably trust DW second most, and I’d trust it over many single-owner not-for-profit fannish spaces.

drst

One of the reasons why I’m pro-Pillowfort. They don’t want to make a thing that they can sell off to a corporation. They want to make a home for fandom.

I’m not deleting my DW account though.

frozengayavocado

I QUEUED THIS A WEEK AGO

tumblr fandom just reblogging for the history here this is interesting
theprettieststarrr
sodomymcscurvylegs

Real talk, though, because it needs to be said: as much as we all joke that porn was the only good thing this place had left, the reality is that it being the only place where one could regularly engage with and promote sexual content being gone is really not understanding at all what makes this place special. I mean we all joke about “horny on main” and all that, but the reality is that for a lot of the LGTBQ+ community, particularly younger members still discovering themselves and members in extremely homophobic environments where most media sites were banned (but Tumblr wasn’t even considered important enough to be), this was a bastion of information and self-expression. For a lot of artists too, this was a great place to come and post NSFW work and get traction that became Patreon pages that became honest jobs.

The problem with “family friendly” social media is that more often than not, the ones hit  the most by the whole family friendly nonsense are marginalized groups that have no vehicles to express themselves. Stuff like YouTube consistently bans or flags simple content featuring something as innocuous as two men kissing as “adult” content and makes it hard for LGBTQ+ content creators to compete with their non-queer peers for a lot of those reasons.

The ultimate problem isn’t even that banning of NSFW content, it’s the general mess surrounding it and unintended consequences to these groups. For MONTHS Tumblr has had a huge problem with porn spam bots and outright child pornography, and for MONTHS the majority of the userbase has been in general consensus that both of these things needed to stop. Tumblr did NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. When Apple finally removed their app from the store, SPECIFICALLY because of the child pornography, Tumblr decided to do what any rich corporation owning a social media site with zero understanding of what makes it popular would do, and decided that the best course of action was to eat itself like an Ouroboros. Rather than admit that they have done an absolutely shit job at keeping pedophiles off this website and rather than hiring the necessary staff to carefully moderate content, they decided to loose a poorly programmed bot that literally deleted perfectly SFW blogs with thousands of followers, and rather than properly handling moderation, they decided that it was best to simply go the lazy route and block anything even remotely NSFW.

They run this site in the worst way possible, and I don’t understand how @support or @staff or their completely oblivious “CEO” plans to keep this sinking ship alive.

tumblr did I already reblog this whatever I'll reblog it again
wilwheaton
sodomymcscurvylegs

Real talk, though, because it needs to be said: as much as we all joke that porn was the only good thing this place had left, the reality is that it being the only place where one could regularly engage with and promote sexual content being gone is really not understanding at all what makes this place special. I mean we all joke about “horny on main” and all that, but the reality is that for a lot of the LGTBQ+ community, particularly younger members still discovering themselves and members in extremely homophobic environments where most media sites were banned (but Tumblr wasn’t even considered important enough to be), this was a bastion of information and self-expression. For a lot of artists too, this was a great place to come and post NSFW work and get traction that became Patreon pages that became honest jobs.

The problem with “family friendly” social media is that more often than not, the ones hit  the most by the whole family friendly nonsense are marginalized groups that have no vehicles to express themselves. Stuff like YouTube consistently bans or flags simple content featuring something as innocuous as two men kissing as “adult” content and makes it hard for LGBTQ+ content creators to compete with their non-queer peers for a lot of those reasons.

The ultimate problem isn’t even that banning of NSFW content, it’s the general mess surrounding it and unintended consequences to these groups. For MONTHS Tumblr has had a huge problem with porn spam bots and outright child pornography, and for MONTHS the majority of the userbase has been in general consensus that both of these things needed to stop. Tumblr did NOTHING. Absolutely nothing. When Apple finally removed their app from the store, SPECIFICALLY because of the child pornography, Tumblr decided to do what any rich corporation owning a social media site with zero understanding of what makes it popular would do, and decided that the best course of action was to eat itself like an Ouroboros. Rather than admit that they have done an absolutely shit job at keeping pedophiles off this website and rather than hiring the necessary staff to carefully moderate content, they decided to loose a poorly programmed bot that literally deleted perfectly SFW blogs with thousands of followers, and rather than properly handling moderation, they decided that it was best to simply go the lazy route and block anything even remotely NSFW.

They run this site in the worst way possible, and I don’t understand how @support or @staff or their completely oblivious “CEO” plans to keep this sinking ship alive.

wilwheaton

the reality is that for a lot of the LGTBQ+ community, particularly younger members still discovering themselves and members in extremely homophobic environments where most media sites were banned (but Tumblr wasn’t even considered important enough to be), this was a bastion of information and self-expression.

tumblr
writing-prompt-s

A better, more positive Tumblr

staff

Since its founding in 2007, Tumblr has always been a place for wide open, creative self-expression at the heart of community and culture. To borrow from our founder David Karp, we’re proud to have inspired a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders to redefine our culture and to help empower individuality.

Over the past several months, and inspired by our storied past, we’ve given serious thought to who we want to be to our community moving forward and have been hard at work laying the foundation for a better Tumblr. We’ve realized that in order to continue to fulfill our promise and place in culture, especially as it evolves, we must change. Some of that change began with fostering more constructive dialogue among our community members. Today, we’re taking another step by no longer allowing adult content, including explicit sexual content and nudity (with some exceptions).  

Let’s first be unequivocal about something that should not be confused with today’s policy change: posting anything that is harmful to minors, including child pornography, is abhorrent and has no place in our community. We’ve always had and always will have a zero tolerance policy for this type of content. To this end, we continuously invest in the enforcement of this policy, including industry-standard machine monitoring, a growing team of human moderators, and user tools that make it easy to report abuse. We also closely partner with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children and the Internet Watch Foundation, two invaluable organizations at the forefront of protecting our children from abuse, and through these partnerships we report violations of this policy to law enforcement authorities. We can never prevent all bad actors from attempting to abuse our platform, but we make it our highest priority to keep the community as safe as possible.

So what is changing?

Posts that contain adult content will no longer be allowed on Tumblr, and we’ve updated our Community Guidelines to reflect this policy change. We recognize Tumblr is also a place to speak freely about topics like art, sex positivity, your relationships, your sexuality, and your personal journey. We want to make sure that we continue to foster this type of diversity of expression in the community, so our new policy strives to strike a balance.

Why are we doing this?

It is our continued, humble aspiration that Tumblr be a safe place for creative expression, self-discovery, and a deep sense of community. As Tumblr continues to grow and evolve, and our understanding of our impact on our world becomes clearer, we have a responsibility to consider that impact across different age groups, demographics, cultures, and mindsets. We spent considerable time weighing the pros and cons of expression in the community that includes adult content. In doing so, it became clear that without this content we have the opportunity to create a place where more people feel comfortable expressing themselves.

Bottom line: There are no shortage of sites on the internet that feature adult content. We will leave it to them and focus our efforts on creating the most welcoming environment possible for our community.

So what’s next?

Starting December 17, 2018, we will begin enforcing this new policy. Community members with content that is no longer permitted on Tumblr will get a heads up from us in advance and steps they can take to appeal or preserve their content outside the community if they so choose. All changes won’t happen overnight as something of this complexity takes time.

Another thing, filtering this type of content versus say, a political protest with nudity or the statue of David, is not simple at scale. We’re relying on automated tools to identify adult content and humans to help train and keep our systems in check. We know there will be mistakes, but we’ve done our best to create and enforce a policy that acknowledges the breadth of expression we see in the community.

Most importantly, we’re going to be as transparent as possible with you about the decisions we’re making and resources available to you, including more detailed information, product enhancements, and more content moderators to interface directly with the community and content.

Like you, we love Tumblr and what it’s come to mean for millions of people around the world. Our actions are out of love and hope for our community. We won’t always get this right, especially in the beginning, but we are determined to make your experience a positive one.

Jeff D’Onofrio
CEO

kam13chomo

Constructive Critisim: You’ve failed. Not only yourselves @staff but the whole community of tumblr. You say “freedom of expression” and yet take away that freedom from fanartists, positivity blogs, and others all in the name of making it a “safe place” for those who’re underage. You have done the complete opposite, you aren’t making it safer, you’ve made a war zone by your own hand on your own doorstep. Sadly, I will probably delete my blog, there’s no point to be in a place where “freedom” has chains.


I would have maybe gotten it if you had did an all round sweep of every tag there was. However only nuking one and completely ignoring the others (aggressive hate groups hiding behind “freedom of expression”) is not equitable in any way.


Unless you do something - You will not see me after December.

girlgirloveandreams

Tumblr should not ban fanart or even pictures simply because there are 2 women kissing! That’s what’s appening in my tumblr

therealgoldenzebra

Everyone, if you are a creator go to this website and sign up for their email course on how to grow & keep your fanbase and monetize your content. Currently lots of traffic so the website is a bit slow to load. Seriously, do it.

drawing-prompt-s

#SIGNAL BOOST!!!

yellow-sandwich

It’s a 7-day email course. Sandra (blog owner) recommend having your own website and to be self-hosted so that when things like this happen it doesn’t affect you, and to start working on an email list rather than only focussing on the # of followers on social media. With email there is no algorithm that hides your content. So if you have 300 subscribers, all 300 subscribers receive your email instead of having 300 followers and only 10 people seeing your content. 

So basically you gonna need things like Wordpress self-hosted using, for example, BlueHost that costs around $4 a month and Mailchimp (free). 

If you don’t have any money, I still highly recommend Sandra’s course because the information she gives out is amazing and also work without a website 80% of the time. Definitely worth checking out. 

signal boost tumblr