Oh Beauty! Oh Love! Farewell! Farewell!

He was... well. Clueless is an understatement. When I say he has no idea what was going on, I mean the second round he was in he SLAMMED the alarm button and said “my screen said imposter what does that mean”

“It means you’re the bad guy this time, dad,” We explained. “But next time try and keep it secret, okay?”

“Okay”

The next round, he killed another player right in front of me and immediately self-reported.

“I got my first kill,” he said.

“Good job, dad!” we all replied. “You’re getting it”

He was so proud, next round, when he helped us catch the killer. And we were proud for him. He was trying so hard.

His kids showed him the game, he said — “Look dad a meme” — so he was playing it for them.

“What’s sus” he had to ask. “Is it inappropriate?” “No dad. It’s short for suspicious, because suspicious is a lot to type.” “What’s gg?” “It means good game” “ok. Thank u. gg”

Two rounds later, he slammed the alarm again. “My map looks different,” he said. “There are buttons on it”

“That means you’re the bad guy again, dad. You push them to sabotage us. Try it out”

We spent that round watching Dad of 3 gleefully pop in and out of vents at random and press all the buttons just to see what they did

“Have you killed anyone yet dad?” “No. It feels strange.” “It’s okay. It’s just a game. You can kill us if you want to practice.”

He was trying so hard. I don’t know if he’d ever even played a video game before, but he was trying so hard to understand this thing his kids enjoyed, and my little group of strangers was doing our best to help him get there.

I’m so proud of that random father’s effort, and I’m proud of all the other players who were so willing to help him learn.

Then out of nowhere he was gone. Mid-round, Dad of 3 vanished to a bad connection, and I’m legitimately sad. I’d hoped we’d get the chance to play a round for real, and I’d have liked the chance to wish him luck and say goodbye.

But since I can’t do that, I’m throwing this into the void: I hope you have a nice time, Dad of 3, and I hope we were able to help you learn so you can have fun with your kids.

Good luck out there, buddy.

Tumblr turned fandom content into mindless consumption instead of community. I’m no expert on human behaviour, but I’d put money on this.

Even “Tumblr conversations”, where you reblog each other’s posts back and forth and it turns into a dialogue, extremely limited. You can generally only do this a few times.

But there’s another, insidious layer to this, which is how reblogs work: it’s easy to create new “realities” or versions of post…without people realizing that other versions exist. If two differnent people reblog from the same person to add a comment, then other people reblog from them adding further comments, you’ll get something like this:

That is 14 different versions of the same post someone could see. Fourteen separate realities right there!

You might be seeing this:

While someone else will see this:

Now repeat things over several years and hundreds, if not thousands, of posts, and you can see how this can quickly lead to separate realities.

Even if people know each other, or are in the same fandom!

Something to note about how and why this happens. See those gray lines connecting the various dots? Those are profitable to the social media companies. That nebulous gray blog encompassing the two stars/fans, or the invisible hypothetical line connecting those two stars? That is not profitable. So companies are not only disincentivized to facilitate that connection in the first place, but actively try to prevent it too!

Compare this to how journals, forums, listservs, and other older fandom platforms operated:

Now, this is a very vague visual representation of multiple different platforms, but there are three main things I was trying to indicate.

tl;dr

Social media removed reciprocation, communication, and agency in content consumption. Fans react to either passive consumption because that’s the only way to stay sane in such an overwhelming platform, or to extremism because that’s the only form of agency they can truly have in their fandom experience. Fandom isn’t something you participate in, it’s something that happens to you.

And if this sounds familiar to any social science majors out there, you might’ve taken a course about group dynamics, ideological persistence, and/or had to study about the proliferation of social and/or political movements. Nicky Case has a lovely interactive webapp that lets you play around with these concepts and experience this in just half an hour of playing around:

The Wisdom and/or Madness of Crowds

Those three things in detail (put under a cut due to length):

I think that what we’re experiencing now, as a reaction, is a resurgence of individual communities. More often than not these days, I see that individual fandoms or groups within fandoms have a Discord or other place to talk away from Tumblr.

I think that may also explain why some people tend to like more than they reblog. Reblogging means leaving yourself open to (often extremist/purity-motivated) criticism of your choices - or leaves the OP open to similar criticism from your followers, with you as the involuntary middleman whose reblog made that connection possible.

So I decided to start a fund raising to be able to help my fellow medtechs, nurses, doctors and all health workers. 

You can drop your donations here. https://www.paypal.me/PrincessShalada

pls add “for covid-19 in your message”

Thank you everyone! Together we fight covid-19! PLS STAY AT HOME FOR US!

BTW you can check my facebook if you are in doubt https://www.facebook.com/cessyouu

also, I will be posting the medical supplies that i’ll be able to purchase from your donations. And ill be updating this post with screenshots of your donations! 

If ever I gather enough donations, I will be helping other hospitals too, because almost all hospitals in MANILA are already lacking from med supplies. Thank you so much! <3

If you have any questions pls message me! STAY SAFE!

*edited got two donors already* tysm meredith!