Slightly Sketchy

DECEMBER IS TOMMORROW.

When you like or reblog a post, that counts as user engagement for the person you liked or reblogged from, and shows up in their notifications.  

If the person you liked or reblogged a post from wasn’t the original poster (i.e., you’re liking or reblogging a reblog), it also counts as user engagement for the original poster, and shows up in their notifications as well.  

This means that user engagement from your likes and reblogs can potential accrue to two different people, the original poster and the person you liked or reblogged from.  

Consequently, you cannot “steal” user engagement from someone by reblogging their post.  

This is one of the very few areas where Tumblr is actually functions more reasonably than other social media platforms.  

Note that this is only true if you use Tumblr’s built-in reblogging function. If you save someone else’s content to your local device and append it to a new post, you effectively become the original poster from that point on.  

This means that on Tumblr, “reblogging” and “reposting” are two different things; if you see someone complaining about “reposting”, this is not the same as reblogging.  

Commenting when reblogging does not affect any of this – unlike, say, Twitter, where quote-retweeting causes user engagement to accrue to the quote-retweet and not to the original tweet – and you can and should do so freely.  

However, every Tumblr user can see who exactly you reblogged a post from, which functions as a soft disincentive against making inane comments; if you make a dumb comment on a reblog, people who see your reblog may “back up” one step in the reblog chain to reblog a version of the post without your comment.  

Nobody understands tags, and there’s a fair amount of evidence that how tags work changes periodically and without warning.  

DON’T FORGET - *most* Tumblr users DO NOT MIND if you engage with their OLD posts!  (Apparently on Instagram they do? this baffles me.) 

Many also don’t mind if you “spam” their notifications with a bunch of likes or reblogs in a row.  

Tumblr has a rich culture of Very Old Posts continuing to make the reblog rounds, and people become fond of them.

Also, unlike Twitter, you can reblog the same post multiple times.  Heck, you can reblog the same post every hour on the hour for days. (Please don’t.)  But you do see a lot of “oh this came across my dash again, must reblog” with posts users are fond of.  This is fine.

Tags ARE a divine mystery.  People use the tags both for organization (inasmuch as this works, sometimes), and for added commentary.  Commentary added to the tags will generally be seen by those who follow that person and see their reblog on their dash; but the OP and whoever they reblogged it from can also see the tags in the notifications. 

Look. Look at me. Look at my face. This is the compounding and expanding creation you see in something like tiktok going ham over sea shanties (loved that, shanties are great) and the original one, that ended up with like, 9... mixes? add ons? idefk i don't use tiktok. But see. see. tiktok has fame and engagement baked into the mix. Its your face. you want followers for it. Your followers can gain you money or influence or whatever the hell. and this doesn't have that. in part because this is tumblr, we couldn't create a market friendly influencer if our lives depended on it

But this is ALSO a joint collaboration in the scope of something like fucking qanon. and yes, qanon is a full on fascist breeding ground so I hate to use it but thats how desperate i am to find a reference point. Bc it started as a single drop on a website that one person encourage and then it spiralled into full offshoots. BUT its also totally not the same bc it was made wiht an agenda and purpose and the intent to convert and persuade people

And sure, maybe some of the first posts were people going 'haha this'll be funny' and yeah, looking at the note counts, some people are drowning in the reactions for the elements they made, but this isn't done with an agenda. It's all Yes, And, never a disagreement except in the sense of people bickering over which of their meta analyses of a non existent movie is more accurate.

Maybe something like Cicada? or or. the way they dropped the joker image??? Or the album that dropped early by leaving random fucking USB drives in bathrooms at concerts???? But cicada was secretive and antagonistic to each other in a lot of ways. And Joker was built by a marketing team. and the USB drives weren't as effective as they wanted?

Geocaching?? but there's an element of accumlating clout and bragging rights there that excludes it from comparison.

But its such a pure creation that I keep reaching back to the kinds of myths that that we told before we left africa. the stories that pervade humanity so far back in time that we can't find the origin. They were made and told and retold solely because we are humans and we want to share this thing we made so others can see it and enjoy it and share it again.

LOOK. This. it's. Look at my face. This is a work of spontaneous public art. This is a thing that the greatest artists of the last hundred years would saw off their testicles to achieve. They would with a smile on their face. People literally HAVE spent millions and millions of dollars trying to force this stuff. they have tried to carve this out of people. This kind of genuine engagment. People hire teams to work for years to make a tiny fragment of this happen and they cant bc it always feel false???

*cackling*

AO3 was built by a bunch of us with our free donated labor for the purpose of being a space free from commercial spam.

It’s not a public service. It was built by us to house the type of fandom culture we liked.

AO3 forbids commercial links because they are making a very specific claim about the legality of fanworks, and that claim is about noncommercial fanworks.

They’re not saying that commercialized fanworks are against the law. They’re just not prepared to host them–nor defend them in court.

In case people missed it: The OTW will not honor DMCA takedown orders that are basically, “I own X work and that’s a fanfic of it, and that’s copyright infringement so make it go away.”

The OTW says, lolnope, we don’t think that’s copyright infringement. If you disagree, sue us.

The OTW says: Disney - we will not remove explicit Mandalorian fanfic. Rowling, Warner Bros - we will not remove trans Harry Potter fanfic. Gabaldon - we are not removing Outlander fanfic no matter how much you think it’s illegal or a personal violation. Yarbro, if someone puts “The Adventure of the Gentleman in Black” on AO3, you will need to actually take it to trial to (try to) get it removed; none of this C&D order followed by fans caving because they can’t afford a lawyer.

…So far, nobody has sued them. (This is, in my mind, the strongest proof we have that fanfic is not copyright infringement. In 13 years, not a single person or company has scrounged up a lawyer and filed a lawsuit against AO3/the OTW for hosting fanworks.)

But they’re not willing to put themselves on the line for commercial works. Those get considered differently in copyright law. They’re not always infringing - there’s a whole history of parody books & songs to prove that - but the OTW is not dealing with them.

The OTW does not care if fans are making money. The OTW cares if fans making money interfere with its legal defense of its archive.

Events like Strikethrough and Boldthrough happened in the early to mid-2000s. It felt like you’d wake up every day in 2007 and find another fandom group on LJ gone. (And not just fandom groups either, important community groups for education and trauma survival were also wiped out in those purges as well.)

And while not exactly the same, Yahoo Groups–and yes Yahoo Groups was a major online fandom hub at one point–were deleted as late as 2019 with very little warning, leaving a lot of older fandom groups scrambling to back up decades worth of content.

I might be projecting, but Fanfic.net seems to be wobbling too. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out they go under in the next few years despite performing similar purges of adult content in 2012 and allowing for obnoxious ads, which made the site unusable on mobile unless you wanted to see an ad what felt like every couple of paragraphs. (It might be better now, I haven’t checked in a while.)

It has only been in very recent memory that fandom has gained any sort of foothold that isn’t poised directly over a precarious faultline that could at any moment open up and swallow entire communities whole, and a huge part of that is the volunteers at Ao3 who decided to play chicken with the likes of Anne Rice and won.

Women (and many men) fought for decades with hospitals to even have men allowed in the delivery room during the early stages of labor, which can last for several hours, and hospitals only began to give in to their requests in the 1960s but even then they would be kicked out of the room by hospital staff before the actual birth took place. So many of the couples watching the show would have had to go through labor without having/being allowed to support their spouse regardless of their wishes. Having the child’s father present for the birth only began to happen in the 1970s and 1980s. Which means most people watching this show either went through birth without the support of their spouse, were not allowed to support their spouse during the birth of their child, or their own mother’s went through that during their birth.

Moreover, a lot of kids watched this show. MLK himself contacted Nichelle Nichols and asked her to stay on the show when she was considering leaving, because “you don’t have a Black role, you have an equal role,” and there wasnt many Black role models on tv. I can only imagine how Black kids, Asian kids, and mixed race or mixed culture kids felt seeing people like them on tv. Hell, seeing Uhura on screen is what inspired Whoopi Goldberg as a little girl.

Like, all the years of anti-Chinese racism in the US? Sulu. Anti-Japanese sentiments left over after WW2? Sulu. Korean War in 1950-52? Sulu. The Vietnam War, with Johnson in 1965 (a year before TOS started airing) choosing to start sending American troops into the conflict? Sulu.

Sulu was Roddenberry’s desperate attempt to show all Asian people as inherently worthy, inherently human, and yeah, he probably put kind of too much on Sulu’s shoulders, but it was the 1960s and Roddenberry fucking cared about representation, so he did what he could.

Scotty was third in line for the captain’s chair. The only non-Kirk who had the con more then him was Spock.

He was smart, he was a *ranked* crewmen, he was a gentleman, he wasn’t a skirt chaser, and he was capitol L loyal. The only time he got into a fight was when someone both went after his Captain, AND his Ship.

And he was Scottish. 

Also, it’s very worth noting that the “token minority character” label doesn’t apply in any way to these characters.

this isn’t unexpected at all

the rise of “I shouldn’t have to see anything problematic ever, and instead of using available tools to protect myself from these problematic things, I demand that all such content be removed because no one should see it” rhetoric has inevitably been leading to something like this

don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that “all content should be morally pure” crowd is directly responsible for apple’s (or tumblrs) current battshittery 

but if you don’t see how an algorithm designed to eliminate a mention of, let’s say, ‘erectlon’ has decided that ‘Alec Lightwood’ is also problematic, then you must’ve crawled out from under a rock yesterday 

people say shit like “stories involving minors should be banned” without realizing that implementing something of the sort will inevitably result in the word “minor” being banned, whether we’re talking about minors, something unimportant, a school degree, or a whole set of fckn music chords

last time, tumblr didn’t ban p*rn, they banned pictures of hills and loaves of bread and a thousand other things that were in no way related to anything they were actually trying to ban

and then people spent the next two years going “we should ban problematic things” as if chasing off one person with exposed tits didn’t also mean chasing off thirty people who just liked to bake bread and twenty people who like to take pictures of barren hills, because, idk, they thought that was a fair trade?

and now they wanna know why the word “wax” on the banned list?