tatterdemalionamberite:

souridealist:

I’ve seen a lot of nostalgia for the LJ days, in light of current fandom’s rabid rage, and I’ve also seen a lot of people rolling their eyes and pointing out that it’s not as if LJ was ever devoid of wank, oh my God. And certainly I can see both sides, and I’ve definitely been guilty of romanticizing the past, and I got into fandom just before the jump to Tumblr started anyway, but I think I remember three major differences in the tone of said wank, and I think I preferred the older poison.

1. Write-ups on wank (aka discourse, and really that difference in terminology sums up this bullet point) used to treat the whole matter as a bit less life-and-death. The attitude on things like sf_drama and fandom_wank was point-and-laugh-at-the-ass, which was plenty cruel, but I would definitely take it over the current shun-the-problematic-forever-and-a-day (and quietly demand that others do the same on pain of being next.) 
2. Even at their cruelest, sf_drama and fandom_wank and the like had links. Publicly available ones, which led to publicly available posts, with backup links to cached posts and screencaps of whole conversations in case a flurry of deletion occurred. Concrete evidence, not ‘please delete that post by ______, they’re transphobic and problematic and support pedophilia’ showing up in an inbox and demanding to be taken on faith. Not links to callout blogs who’ve since changed their urls or gone private. 
3. The people arguing that slash fic was identical to pedophilia didn’t insist that they were the real liberals and were tearing all the rest of us to shreds for our own good – or rather, the abstract good of groups of people that included us. 

I’m not saying it was a halcyon age. There were people active in certain LJ fandoms who got legitimate, diagnosed PTSD from it. There have always been ugly, horrible things. And call-out and anti culture evolved from these things; the seeds for at least some of it were there. But these three things are all changes for the drastically uglier, and I understand missing the old-school rules of engagement. 

In some ways, the rules of engagement are always based on the tech infrastructure.

Tumblr becomes a “who can yell the loudest” contest because of the way things happen so quickly. The life cycle of a post is shorter, but it gets farther when it’s louder. Due to tagging system changes and the reblog system, everyone is forced into proximity with people they don’t necessarily want to interact with. (Person A reblogs from person B, to their blog that is followed by group C. Person B and group C are accustomed to entirely different dialects of English. Where could this possibly go wrong?)

People could find ways to work around reblog stress, though. It’s the tagging system changes that really made things go over the brink. Mention a character or franchise name and Tumblr WILL FIND YOU.

All social media popular today foster environments of conflict. Facebook and Twitter do it differently than Tumblr (and have been written on at length elsewhere.) But they do it because conflict drives traffic and interest, AND they have gone ahead of the more functional platforms that have tried to gain a market share because it fucks with our heads – we can’t switch over now! Someone on the internet might be wrong, and they might keep being wrong while you go off and have a peaceful life somewhere.

And in the discourse of 2005 this wrongness wasn’t going to have too many casualties, but these days, again because of software infrastructure engineered to create conflict (*and* the focus on real names at Facebook, Google, etc), the people being wrong on the internet are doing more real offline harm by it than they used to, so “just stop and leave it alone” is not as useful a solution as it used to be.

We have met Skynet, and it wants to tell you five things about $rhetoricaltarget that will ENRAGE you.