Tag: tumblr

defilerwyrm:

Let people grow.

When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.

There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.

But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.

You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.

It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”

Purity culture tells you that once someone says or does something, they can never go back on it. That’s a goddamn lie. While it’s true that some remain unrepentant and never change their ways and continue to harm others, it’s important to allow everyone the chance to learn from their mistakes. Saying something ignorant isn’t murder. Please stop treating it that way. Let people grow.

The Discourse Got Better, But The Chilling Effect Is Getting Worse

argumate:

the-grey-tribe:

We are living in a post-discourse world. Almost everybody on Tumblr knows The Discourse, everybody on Facebook knows a slacktivist friend who changed their profile picture for one cause or another and an older relative who posts weird political stuff nobody else cares about. Twitter users and Newspaper readers know who Justine Sacco was. Github and Hacker News have seen Opalgate, Django pull request #2692, Donglegate, …

Shirtgate and Tim Hunt have even reached TV news.

People make inconsequential jokes, or take part in something unpolitical that is subsequently scrutinised and deemed not politically correct enough (by whatever side). The person at the center of this whole thing gets dragged back into it every time somebody on side A attacks somebody on side B and it all ends with both sides unfollowing/unfriending each other.

Tumblr had seen peak discourse in 2013. Tumblr has not been trendy with teenagers in five years. Even Snapchat and Instagram are no longer the cool new thing. Twitter has not been the cool new thing for seven years now.

Social media is no longer full of early adopters, or wide-eyed, curious MOPs making their first steps on the net, or concerned Soccer Moms trying to figure out what heir young (too young for this!) child has signed up for. People can deal with social media. It’s no longer a novelty. Society has even adapted to deal with the ways people deal with social media, somewhat.

We have all lost friends (not real friends, of course, but what counts for a friend on social media, like mutuals) in the flame wars. We know what to expect. We no longer cheer when somebody gets caught in the fangs of the anonymous Internet mob – we reach out in private and ask if they are okay, carefully avoiding any public support for fear of backlash.

After years of Usenet, web 1.0, pre-discourse, forum culture, LiveJournal, the Blogosphere, the Internet went mainstream, and the mainstream acknowledged that. The Internet was no longer a place for nerds and weirdos like John Carmack or Cory Doctorow, respectively. We have seen the Internet, and it is us!

We went from anonymity and caution to pseudonymous communities, to real-name oversharing, and finally to carefully constructed social media personae.

At some point during the oversharing phase, discourse and mob rule reached their peak, toxic activists unleashed shitstorms, and we gladly joined in. We thought the victim deserved it, because he had a problem with the Internet, which meant he had a problem with us. It started out as outrage against corporations, but it quickly learned to pick on random people.

Now we, as stated above, have learned to keep our heads down. We have learned that the hate mob is us. Some of us only stopped joining in because of outrage fatigue.
At some point you just run out of the neurotransmitters you need to feel
angry about things. We have learned to only tweet our lunch, not our opinion. We have learned to use a pseudonym. Remember your PR training, stay on message, don’t make jokes outside of the member-approved internal chatgroup!

People had to lock down their posts and profile. The Internet is not a nice place any more. When you mess up, we will privately support you, but come on, what were you thinking saying that in public?

The Post-Discourse Situation:

  • Most twitterati have stopped dogpiling.
  • There is a mall, dedicated core of people coordinating the shaming campaigns.
  • We know you are not a bad person just because you got into an Internet Shitstorm.
  • We might privately commiserate or publicly vagueblog in your support.
  • We will say we told you so when you get edgy and it blows up.
  • The epistemic level of The Discourse is still bad.

Big Internet Shitstorms have gotten rarer. They are no longer perpetrated by viral, spontaneously forming crowds, but by strongly connected groups of bloggers. Outrage has been eaten up by the division of labour.

From the inside, however, once a shitstorm does happen, it looks just the same. It looks like there is a broad, popular opposition to your viral Facebook post. Your friends will privately scold you for getting into a preventable situation.

As the chilling effect increases and the censorship becomes internalised as self-censorship, the few remaining culture warriors can concentrate on the few remaining non-self-censoring netizens.

IN A WORLD WHERE BIG INTERNET SHITSTORMS RUN WILD

ONE MAN THINKS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS HAS GONE TOO FAR

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.

smug thinkpiece writer: “the internet is about the sound bite, the tweet, tiny fragments of information that only take two or three seconds to consume”
me, thinking back to the 5000-word tumblr post i scrolled past yesterday where two classicists, three high schoolers, and a witch all got in a very pointless argument about hades and persephone or shakespeare or something: uh,

every tumblr post in 2017

a tumblr user: you know when you uh…. astral project… to walgreens…. to pick up some excedrin for your headache but get sidetracked in the “intimate care” aisle because your… soul projection just noticed that they actually stock tiny vibrators in-store at walgreens and it really catches you by surprise then you notice an employee staring at your shadowy, indistinct form which is awkwardly hunched over in front of the condom shelf and you have to struggle to explain what you’re doing there hahaha
someone with a junkrat icon and a 3 page long blocklist linked in their about: hey OP just wondering why did you kill wolfgang amadeus mozart with poison :/

decalexas:

some shit on tumblr: love isn’t always SOFT some times it’s HARSH and SHARP and ROUGH and will BEAT YOU TO DEATH WITH BRASS KNUCKLES IN A DARK ALLEYWAY BEHIND THE LOCAL CHILI’S

me, surrounding myself with only the Softest Most Tender Loving Content: no thanks

rnph:

tumblr is pretty cool because no matter what you choose to blog about (whether it be jokes, a fandom, fashion, or something else) someone out there will always explicitly hate you for it with mad intensity

jumpingjacktrash:

the-real-seebs:

lavanderjam:

hummingbird-hooligan:

urbancatfitters:

hummingbird-hooligan:

urbancatfitters:

slytherin-starkid-of-tardis:

urbancatfitters:

everyone is embarrassed of their fourteen year old self trust me if you’re fourteen right now you will regret whatever it is that you are doing at this moment

What, being a SuperWhoLockian, Tumblrian, and just being generally pretty good? I don’t think so.

screenshot this and look at it in 3 years

Wow holy shit guys, it’s been approximately 5 years and I’m drunk enough to not regret finally acknowledging this
Surprise surprise, I was that kid
I know the above is the most cringy 14 year old thing to say, but hot damn y’all I was a child and I had just found an online community of people where being a fucking nerd was “hella cool” and oh my god I was having a blast, and with my new fragile self confidence I decided to say “no I don’t regret what I’m doing/what I like right now at this moment because I don’t hate myself and that’s pretty neat!” And y’all remember 2012-2013 tumblr that shit was absolutely cringy, I was just repeating phrases I’d heard. But then, it got turned into a “laugh at the child” and then I got dozens upon dozens of hate messages and my confidence about literally everything got shattered
I had messages telling me to kill myself and messages calling me a snowflake and an idiot and a c*nt and all those other words that are meant to hurt you. Even years after I changed my URL, I’d get a sinking pit in my stomach whenever I’d see this post go around again because I knew I’d get those three or four snide anons asking “so do you regret it?”
And yes I absolutely do, fuck off
So yeah, I was a stupid tumblr kid and probably shouldn’t have commented
But I didn’t deserve the onslaught of hateful messages
So now y’all know, it’s me
Surprise, or whatever

hello! I’m sorry for dragging you through the mud in the first place. seventeen-year-old me was not as evolved as she thought, which I’m sure is a surprise to no one. there were absolutely tons of comments exactly like yours, but it got singled out just because I was going through a sarcastically-responds-to-comments phase and I happened to see it. I’ve heard people use this post as an example of how young teens are stupid & don’t know anything, and I’m sorry that you became the poster child of that patronizing and invalidating idea. 

sidenote, who the FUCK calls a 14 yr old a c*nt & tells them to kill themselves??

Thank you for commenting, op ❤ I really don’t blame you at all for what you said, I want to call out my 14 year old self just as badly lmao
But I really appreciate the overwhelming positive response to this
I’d hope we can sort of grow as a community from this, but I won’t get my hopes up lol

This was beautiful to read

This is a really good example of why being mean to kids for being kids is stupid, but also kids, please understand that really, you probably will look back on young you later and cringe. Baby Seebs was probably pretty cringey too.

i was absolutely a cringefest at 14, and so were all my friends, and THAT’S OKAY.

that’s an awkward age because you’re just starting to grow into yourself and find out who you are, and part of that is trying on identities and opinions. and you’re full of energy and hormones and angry, so whatever you do, you do it loud and hard!!! and fuck anyone who tries to stop you!!! rawr!!!!! which is a defensive measure to protect your tender peppermint heart, because your identity is soft and unformed. you are a baby snail pretending to be a king crab. you’re picking fights and starting drama as practice for later life when you’re the only one who can resolve your conflicts. you alternate between viciously chewing people’s ankles, and groveling for acceptance, because you don’t know yet how to enforce your boundaries and personhood without being a danger to yourself and others.

this does not make you bad or unworthy.

just as young birds go through a stage of looking like something fished out of a drain, and young dogs go through a stage of being all feet and ears and running into screen doors, young humans go through a stage of being a social tear gas grenade. and just like birds and dogs, it’s cute as hell, but it’s cuter when you’re not the one cleaning up after them.

my advice, then, is: don’t cringe. instead, be proud of yourself for having figured shit out and grown into your feet.