Serpent's Tale

@little-theatre-fairy

Pretty much the same way a parent should handle offline situations that may be upsetting or hurtful to a child - which largely boils down to a combination of situational awareness for prevention, teaching the kid to get an authority figure involved to help put a stop to whatever is happening, and helping your kid learn to process any big feelings about it afterwards. Heavy emphasis on the last part because we have a lot of adults these days who never learned that.

And call me crazy, but it's also a parent's job to evaluate outside environments and decide whether or not they are safe for their children to be in - and if the answer is 'no' then it is the parent's job to remove their child from that environment. When I was a kid, that looked like "no, you're not going to a sleepover at Susie's house because her older brother is a fucking creep or her mom likes to drink and drive or her dad doesn't understand why you can't show a seven year old a graphic R rated movie and none of those people are safe for you to be around, much less on your own." Now it might be "no, because Timmy's parents don't pay any attention to what's happening online in their house." You're actually allowed to tell your kid no. They'll live. If they're upset about it, that's okay. It's good for them to learn how to deal with emotions like that too.

Don't let ads hinder or outweigh the actual purpose people have for coming to your page/site (be that through extreme obtrusiveness or through slowing their browser to a crawl)

Vet your ads and don't bombard people with nsfw content

Vet your ads and don't give people fucking malware

Like, it made for a pleasant internet experience, but I think that a lot of major sites were/still are operating at a loss. The less aggressive ads helped offset that, but plenty of sites depended on cash injections from investors or else are part of a larger company with other branches that make enough profit to eat that operation cost, and who made the calculation that cornering part of the market at a loss benefits other facets of their operation enough to be worth said loss.

The reason there's been such an influx of intrusive, crappy ads and sites pressuring you to get paid subscriptions is that a lot of the investor money went away. That's also a big part of why there's been so many layoffs. A bunch of places couldn't afford to pay all the salaries they were or rent the nice offices they had without those repeated cash injections.

That's not to say that the glut of ads is working as an alternative. But like... there was a lot of non-sustainable businesses during the era of ads being less awful

Some Fucking Scam, it seems a little sketchy now, but its lent legitimacy by the number of people they're paying to talk about it. Five years from now there will be a four hour video essay about how its a fucking scam and stole millions of dollars and leaked literally all of your data, but right now? It seems mildly convenient.

There's a bit of a selection bias here. Ever single video the algorithm decided you could be interested in has scammers as sponsors.

like there's what i'm gonna call the lawful good view on what a good sponsor is, which is basically "i only accept sponsors if i would actually be willing to pay for and use their product myself after having reviewed it extensively." these people wouldn't be seen dead shilling raid shadow legends. they're probably sponsored by audible, maybe some meal delivery service, and incogni. there's a 50/50 chance that they had either a better help or honey sponsorship at some point tho.

then there's the "i would suck a guy's left toe to get a sponsor" kind of youtubers, whose stance is basically "i love sponsors who don't care what videos i stick them in, they're my best friends, never trust a single one of my sponsors." as i said, people who struggle to get sponsors, especially if it's due to the subject matter of their channel. Raid Shadow Legends. these people dutifully shilled kamikoto before it rightfully fell off the map. whatever that company was that let you buy a square foot of land in scotland to get a title. still some meal delivery service. if your name is tomska, also surf shark for some reason.

Fandom Problem #8697:

I fucking hate these "Fiction doesn't affect reality 🥺😡" bitches because they'll only use that argument to excuse serious topics being handled badly and act as if people on the internet hadn't spoken about their own experiences where fiction DID affect their reality

I've seen so many people confess how they thought that problematic dynamics were actually okay as children because of these fuckers who put them in a good light, so many black & queer people feeling frustrated at a piece of media for being racist and homophobic EVEN IF IT'S FICTION, etc. There are literally fictional stories being made with bad faith views with the purpose of affecting people's mindsets and you want to tell me that we shouldn't call these issues out just because they're fiction? Oh FUCK OFF

Fandom Problem #15,499:

"Here's a problem that's PLAGUING modern cinema!!!"

And this forces you to decide whether your autonomy matters to you more than the approval of the group - while they'll still act like you're on thin ice either way, if you give in at this point they know you're theirs forever, because now they've established a foothold, you've shown a moral weakness, which they will brand you with so it can be used against you in the future ("hey RICE-addict here doesn't want help break into the city records office") to force you to double-down and isolate you further.

Characters must make choices.

Characters should often make bad choices before they make good choices.

Character choices should drive the vast majority of the plot. Characters reacting to having random stuff thrown at them is far less interesting than characters reacting to the stuff they've thrown after it's ricocheted around and comes bouncing back toward them.

If a character refuses to make a choice, there better be consequences for that too, and you better have a damn clear way of showing those consequences to the reader and the character.