Menagerie of Dickmonsters

I'm back from the writing convention. It was fun. I learned a lot. One of my friends brought homemade mead and shared it. (It tastes like beeswax candles turned into a drink--in a good way.) It was absolutely surreal to be treated with respect while still being a queer person and being open about writing erotica. Frankly, this has made me resolve to avoid tumblr. Sure, I'll turn on notifications for the people I actually care about seeing (more than I already have done), I'll queue some cats, I'll make hot takes on the SJ blog, and I'll check the activity pages, but at this point I'm actively avoiding the dashboard unless I have literally nothing else to do. I haven't gone in tags except from misclicks in months. It's not just the sexual harassment from bigots--it's also that the app loses your place on the dashboard at the slightest whim--using a browser, sometimes when loading a link inside the app, queuing a post instead of reblogging it--and the desktop site slows down horribly after a couple dozen posts when endless scrolling is turned on and takes forever to load each new page when it isn't. If I could set the posts per dashboard page to 100 instead of 20, I would mind less. Maybe there's an xkit extension I could make for that?

But, you know, it's also that I don't like being called a pedophile just for being a queer person who writes erotica and supports others' right to do so. (At least they've mostly stopped calling me an antisemite and a Nazi--to be fair, most of these people can't possibly have even guessed my heritage, without a last name--but only because calling me a child molester is more powerful, and more of a homophobic stereotype.) No matter how many people I block, I keep seeing it happen to my friends, too. I don't want to give these people up, simply because they use the same blogs for politics as for personal stuff. Fortunately, most of those are on a Discord server that I usually check frequently. (Not the last few days, because con.)

I mostly lost touch with a good friend a couple years ago, because they left tumblr, in much the same manner as I slowly am now. It was the ace discourse that did it. I don't blame them for not putting up with it. I just searched their username on Twitter, but all that's coming up is posts shared from tumblr. I'm trying to message them on Pidgin now (I figured an email or a public fic comment would be too awkward). And then I thought I got a ping, but then it turn out to be F-List, because I'd forgot to set my tentacle monster character's status as "do not disturb." (RPing as that character takes a lot of work, and I'm doing other things right now. Like this post.) I'm just also worried that I'll lose people if I leave tumblr. And then I worry I should take up WordPress again, but then I remember that I didn't interact with many people there and only lost one person I actually cared about when I stopped posting--there were a couple others, but they had tumblrs. I still follow one of them. And I could log back in and read my feed; I was mostly just a reader, not interacting in a "mutuals" sort of way. I wonder if I could somehow get that WP feed in my DW feed. I need to find more people to follow, here.

It's just...six years. I've had tumblr for going on six years. My current account is only 2 years old, but the other one was made in January 2013. I was there before the site had rebloggable asks and when it still auto-shortened links. And its interface was always trash, but after Yahoo bought it, after monetization became a thing, I watched it turn into a harassment hellfire. I got a reprieve of a year by being too burnt out for discourse for most of 2015, but it's just gone down the shitslide, and I know it won't come back. This always happens. It will happen to Amino, too, and that and the NBphobia in its queer spaces and the fact that everyone is in high school and its stupid all-or-nothing login incentives are why I haven't gotten into it. (Plus, it doesn't allow adult content. That puts a crimp in my usual style.) Sure, it's good now, but eventually they'll run out of startup funding and start adding banner ads. Collectivization of websites is the only way to prevent them from going to shit, and that's why I'm posting here and not on WordPress. Even though I liked WordPress. Maybe I can set it to autopost from DW to there? (And clean up my theme, while I'm at it. I made it sometime in the 12-13 school year and I'm pretty sure it's hideous.) I'm just mad at seeing the site die, at watching user experience be sidelined in the name of money, with execs never knowing when to stop before it kills the site, and of course having golden parachutes and myths of obsolescence ready for when it does crash. Oh, it'll carry on for a few years yet, but it will stop being central, especially to fandom and queerness. Twitter is clearly the politics platform, as ill-equipped as it is to be; the Orange Menace is not on tumblr. It is also usable as a shallow fandom platform, and with the rise of Discord and the existence of AO3, tumblr simply isn't necessary for fandom clusters. DeviantArt and Pixiv are for imagesharing and hosting, and DW is another place for fics and social interaction. I'll still miss tumblr, though, when it finally becomes irrelevant. It could have been good. The dashboard was genius. But privacy and interface always sucked, and the only reason it got so popular in the first place was the lack of similar alternatives--and Twitter's (then) 140 character limit and lack of image prioritization.

I've heard about these kind of site deaths before, and expected more of them, but I've never seen one. And now Tumblr and Facebook (which at least I rarely used) are on the verge of decline. Already the "mom platform," FB is not going to weather the privacy scandals now. Older users will hang on, but teens and young adults, at least in the US, will be reluctant to get on board. If you need a virtual phonebook to keep tabs on an acquaintance from college, there's LinkedIn, which nobody uses as an actual social platform anyway, just to apply for jobs. I'll miss some things, but I can't say that any of what I miss will be from after 2014, honestly. And tumblr was toxic then, I just didn't know it yet, and verbal abuse is a slow poison.

God, what was I originally going to talk about? The writing convention. I speed-wrote a piece for a workshop I hadn't realized I could attend, fleshed out a response to Innsmouth on the fly more than I'd ever done in the past (still don't know when I'll be ready to write it, but it'll probably be a novella), and then the next day I went to a workshop on how to break into traditional publishing markets. I don't actually remember much about most of the panels, except for the one where a white woman my mom's age was appallingly white and self-centered when the topic was supposed to be about the dehumanization of "killable bodies" as racial coding. No one cares if your ancestors are Nazis, Lisa--why are you so strongly identified with said Nazis, anyway? I can't dare ask my grandpa why he assimilated, but I suspect it's because of people like that, hmm? She got banned from the con, though. And there was also a workshop on silicone molding, with a focus on dildos, though it didn't involve any actual crafting. And I suggested that the con's methods of feeding large numbers of people involve an always-available pot of white rice next year, which the organizers thought was genius (and I thought was obvious, because damn, I've cooked and worked in catering for how long?). But yeah, mostly people were just nice and non-judgemental. I was safe, for a few days, if very far from home and dependent on a shitty bus company to get back. And I still don't have a job, except on paper, and I need to formally quit that one because I'm moving. But I think the con went well. Hopefully next year I'll be able to go again, and maybe I'll have learned to drive and obtained a vehicle and will be able to get there my own self. (Or like, to Iowa by myself, to bother my friends' cats, and carpool the rest of the way there. That is, if I don't make enough writer friends in Texas to split a hotel room with.) And I found out that cheese curds are good--they're like really salty cheesesticks but not individually wrapped, so they don't get all weird--and I wish I'd been able to bring some back. I hope I get to go next year. Money willing.

Maybe I'll try posting daily/regularly as some kind of belated New Year's resolution. Any days that I actually turn the computer on, anyway. That's not all days, because some days I'm tired and I just stick to reading things on my phone.

Earlier today I was reading an analysis of Web 1.0 vs Web 2.0 social media and why virality sucks as a universal social media structure (I'd recommend checking the notes on both), and it just makes me wonder what Web 3.0 is going to be like. What I'm seeing the last couple years is a move back towards community settings, moderation, and anti-virality--Discord and Amino, in particular. Amino looks a lot like LiveJournal for the smartphone age--I'm not even sure it has a browser equivalent. When I signed up, it asked for my phone number, not an email. Unfortunately, it's exclusively 13+ content, which limits what people like me can really do with it. I suppose you could post links to a link, but still dicey with the TOS. Most fancreators want to be able to display porn, to put it bluntly. Many adults want to be able to discuss sex in general. If Amino introduces an 18+ mode, it could be the social media app of the next decade. If it doesn't, it's going to hamstring itself as a fandom and creative network, which appears to be its primary market. It also needs to introduce a way to mute chat notifications without muting the entire amino they come from, because my god is getting every single notification from the Dragon Age Roleplay main chat annoying. I think it eats my phone's battery, too. The constant notifications, not the app. (Though apparently battery issues are a thing with this model of phone, and it's actually about the processor. Long story short, I'm not getting a Motorola again. Especially if the model's been out for less than 6 months.) It is currently ad-free, always a plus.

Discord, meanwhile, is an ad-free chat client. It's very good at hosting chatrooms; it has "servers" with multiple "channels" that allow, say, a fandom group to operate multiple channels for different subjects. It's ad-free and a far smaller application than Skype, both on Windows and Android, and usually less laggy. It's basically replaced Skype and Google Hangouts for me and a number of people I know (without us coordinating that), though I still have the apps on my phone just in case. I still use Pidgin, but only really for F-list and as a less laggy way to deal with Hangouts on my ancient laptop. (Being poor sucks. Student loans suck. I'd have an extra $4k for stuff over the last year and a little if I didn't have student loans.) However, it's not an independent social media app. There's no way to ask to join a server without already having an invite code; in fact, you can't see the server's existence unless you're given a code for it. Even on mobile, it doesn't support links within the app. There's no such thing as a personal page or "permanent" posts (there is a pinning feature, but it's not the same), just the chat, nor any kind of image repository (unless you overclock the custom emojis). There are direct messages and servers, but there's no way to show anything to the general public, and if there were, I suspect it would still have tumblr-scale ephemerality problems. Discord needs at least one accessory site to function socially. It's more of a nice add-on to an existing social media experience than an independent social medium. (For example, all the servers I'm in are drawn from tumblr and/or AO3, and basically exist because neither of those sites have any kind of group chat capability--or any realtime chat capability, until tumblr introduced chats around two years ago. For the AO3 one, an author wanted to host chat parties, and for the other ones that I'm actually active on, people wanted to discuss tumblr politics in a more moderated space with a less scattered structure than reblogs, and then it also spawned some more general social interaction.) Discord does allow 18+ with age-locking, as well as having voice-chat and videocall support. It bills itself as "for gamers," so I believe it was originally developed to faciliate MMORPG campaigns and it could certainly be used for tabletop RPGs via conference calls, much like Skype sometimes is.

However, I think that the true biggest social medium of the upcoming 2020s has yet to be developed. Amino could be it, but I'm not sure it will be, even if it does go 18+--and the reason is funding. Discord and Amino are run by private companies. So far, Amino has been funded by Series A and B funding, and from reading between the lines of Discord's Wikipedia page, it's something similar there. This means that, while things are sunny now, investors and owners will eventually try to monetize and datamine these apps, prioritizing revenue over user experience. Gradually, there will be ads and sponsored content and privacy erosion, paywalls for basic functionality, algorithms will replace user control, and harassment will be deliberately ignored because "someone is wrong on the internet" makes users spend a lot more time with the app open than generic, pleasant interactions. Sound familiar? It's because that's what's happened with tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Skype (and to a more invisible but equal extent, Google etc) over the last decade. In the next 5-10 years, and I'd put my money on the lower end of that, I foresee all those sites/apps except Google and maybe Facebook becoming socially irrelevant, as other things with more functionality step in to replace them. (And they'll be primarily smartphone-based. I really hope they'll have backwards compatibility with Windows or browsers, for the sake of people who can't afford new-model phones with tons of internal storage, or if an app temporarily goes down, or to enable non-members to see public posts [since account-walls just make people lose interest], but they'll be primarily aimed at mobile users.)

But any new social media will follow this cycle of monetization and decay unless the underlying structure is changed. It doesn't matter what promises are made in the beginning; as the site grows, and it's going to have to grow if it's good, operating costs and investor appeasement will eventually take priority. If we want user-friendly social media, we have to decorporatize social media. Web 3.0 has to be crowdfunded, user-owned, and not-for-profit, or nothing will really change.

We've already seen Dreamwidth, AO3/the OTW, and Wikipedia use this model. The occasional banner ads for pledge drives are far less annoying than standard ads on other sites. Users who have spare cash donate to keep the site running because they value its services and understand the peril of allowing a for-profit corporation to run our social lives or control our information access or host our transformative works, but at the same time, it's not required in order to use the service. Donation can be socially encouraged by little badges on usernames or similar, but it doesn't gate any significant service or any accessibility feature.This model gives the site administrators and moderators a sense of obligation to the users--one that can be made very real if displeased donors stop giving, tying revenue to user experience--and makes the site immune to pressure from outside forces that would try to restrict content. (I.E., Strikethrough of old, or, more recently, Patreon's Paypal-driven TOS update.) I can see allowing users to place ads on their own pages, even taking a small cut from it, but never making such a thing mandatory or introducing sponsored content or ads disguised as ordinary posts.

I admit I don't know how well this would work when translated to a tumblr-sized social media network. Dreamwidth and AO3 have relatively small userbases. But if Wikipedia can do it (and so far it doesn't appear to have been secretly bought out by anyone at an infrastructure level to skew information), then it should be possible for a social medium to do it. Onward to Web 3.0!