#internet meta

but all the people who led to me being alive today were just farmers and seamstresses. a few tailors, a gardener. the most notable positions ive found were a farm steward and a carriage driver. some of them just spent their days Digging Holes.

and i'll never know what went on inside their minds as they went about all that work. but. the standards for our existence today are really fucking high when you think about it. like why are so many 13 year olds trying to become famous online?

i doubt my great-great-great-grandmother was concerned about shit like Social Networking and Media Sponsorships. she just. sewed. helped on the farm. taught her children. repaired the farmhand's clothes when they came home from work. maybe made her child a beautiful dress outfit for a special event -like my great-grandfather, a tailor, did for my grandmother (even tho he was a Total Piece of Shit).

she just passed on her skills and what she learned from life. maybe she was discontent and yet kind like me, or maybe she was happy and carefree, maybe she was stern and strict. i don't know. but she didn't have to do anything grand in her lifetime for it to still matter now.

and those things i don't know, can't know - who they were as people, not just their roles in the community/family... those are the things that matter in our lives while we have them. whether we're kind. whether we're trustworthy. whether we're the defender, bystander, or aggressor. idk. am i making sense

not going to beat around the bush here, some people online (*cough* r/youtube *cough*) are fucking stupid. context tldr: youtube is now going to force users to send their legal ID + a photo in order to see 18+ content and using an AI bot to determine if you are "too childish" to guess your age. The AI bot will scrape data from your watch history to try and guess your age group depending on what you watch. This is a problem for me as someone who enjoys both child friendly content AND really dark morbid adult stuff.

and here is some of the gems i found online: "youtube already has all of your data anyways! who cares!" "lmao you don't have a problem giving amazon your credit card" Amazon can't give out my credit card info to anyone other than legal tender entities because thats bank fraud. even if they sell my credit card data, many entities can't do much of anything with my credit card number anyways. youtube meanwhile is going to sell my data to unsavory individuals to monitor my watch history and possibly even to entities trying to harm society. youtube might also use this to heavily control stuff such as adblockers or even more insane stuff. Youtube might use this to mark individuals for their political beliefs and sell that data to people trying to turn our society into a facist hell where you can get prosecuted for your ideals. Yes I know the government already has your ID, but i feel like you should all be pretty fucking worried that someone is trying to link your legal ID to the stuff you consume and watch.

"lmao imagine thinking protests do anything" "don't bother its hopeless anyways" how on earth do you expect the world to get better if you keep rolling over to let the people in power fuck your ass? maybe protests would be more successful if more people would stop being a bitch willingly doing nothing while the corporate overlords try to take over our lives and privacy. "but bars ask for our ID all the time! Bars don't photo-copy my ID to sell to unsavory people. this is a false equivalence.

insert any comment that calls you "bro" or "kid" dear internet people: you are not making yourself out to be smarter because you talk like that. you make yourself out to sound like a frat boy who can't tell the difference between a branding iron and a catheter. if you want people to take your argument seriously, don't be so condescending. (yes this is pretty funny coming from someone who talks like this)

moving on i am not using youtube anymore, at least not on the site. At the most its going to be with heavy adblockers and with me being signed out of the app. otherwise a good detox might be good for my brain. "but boycotting isn't going to work!" boycotting CAN work if there is less moron doomers going on about how pointless it all is. But i digress. This isn't a boycott on my end, this is me not wanting a website notorious for hacking and shady behavior having my personal information. if youtube is the type of site to stoop so low as to slow down my internet for having an adblocker and posting virus riddled ads. I don't want a site like that to have my data. "what do i do if i want to help?" complain! complain to youtube and contact your local government and complain too! youtube is a powerful entity and money talks in the US. if youtube thinks their profit is threatened they may try to pull strings here. Complain to their major advertisers! annoy the shit out of your local government encouraging them to pass mandatory safety and protection laws against forcing users to literally dox themselves! I have chronic depression and I have way more drive and hope than these pissy wimps; whining about how hopeless it all is. if your heart is still beating and you have the slightest bit of care for your own existence, stop letting shit happen and at least TRY to help a cause. Would you rather give up and just accept our big brother overlords, or at least try to go down fighting with a rare chance of this place NOT turning into a fascist cyberpunk hell? Rant over. please try to do something about youtube.

AND DO NOT GIVE YOUTUBE OR ANYONE ONLINE YOUR ID.

does anyone know of some sort of list of tumblr ettiquette anywhere?

alternatively just jot down what you can remember in a reblog/comment. include a rough date/time that you became aware this was a thing you had to/were expected to do!

This is not a drill, the most mysterious song on the internet has been FOUND.

Don't put your age on the internet!

Don't even mention that you're a minor! That's how you get targeted by people who WANT to hurt minors! In fact, don't put ANYTHING about yourself online that people could use to hurt you! This is internet safety 101.

Don't put your real name online. Not even just your first name. Just make up a fake name to go by.

Don't put your face online. People can use that to find you.

Don't put your triggers online. You are basically putting up a giant blinking "THIS IS HOW TO HARASS AND TRIGGER ME" sign.

Don't put your mental health conditions online. Ditto to above and also no one needs to know all that.

Don't put your location online, or photos of your surroundings. It is so easy for people to determine where you live by the type of trees or a building in the background.

Yes? Is this supposed to be a gotcha? I have literally said as much multiple times, and I plug AO3 donation reminders every year.

If you want sites to exist that do not rely on advertising and selling your data to remain alive, you have to pay them. AO3 survives solely on donations. It is an incredibly important archive of transformative works, and the only place on the internet where you don't have to wonder if the owners of the site are going to smite your works because they're queer - the "owners" of the site are the fans running it. It's the archive Of Our Own. It belongs to us. And that means we have to be responsible for keeping it alive.

I understand that there are a lot of people who are too childish and whiny to understand how these things work, but there are posts everywhere on this site explaining it. If you don't want to pay for these things, then don't! But there are a lot of us that have been around long enough to watch the destruction of places on the internet we thought were safe because they had to rely on advertisers to stay afloat. And advertisers will not let you host gay smut, and they will not protect you from a cease and desist from Warner Brothers about your Harry Potter fanfic you spent four years writing. We want to keep these places safe and functional, and we have the disposable income to do it. For the price of a pack of soda, I can buy a little entertainment and support the site I do my advocacy and community building work on at the same time.

You don't have to like it. And if people doing it pisses you off that badly, blacklist it and block people. But it's incredibly naive to think that people paying for entertainment is a moral failing, or that this site can just continue as it is with no threat of being shut down or changed drastically. When did you last read the privacy policy? Because I do every month. I have been waiting for them to change it and start selling our information to whoever wants it, but they haven't done it. And I am going to reward them for that, so they don't resort to it instead of letting us buy crabs and shoelaces and keep our anonymity.

I get two. TWO. Actual fully previewed, normal webpage result. And then pages and pages (scrolling) of images, generated “people also ask” nonsense, ads, videos, webpage preview images without any text summaries whatsoever, etc.