I am an asexual 20 something female, with an anthropology degree dealing with a ton of mental bullshit while trying to exist as an adult. In case you couldn't guess this is my escape. This is my personal blog and I have three side blogs. The links are to the left.
2009 - GeoCities shuts down, taking old fannish websites
2010 - FFN forums deleted
2011 - Delicious destroyed by Yahoo’s incompetence
2012 - major FFN crackdown on porn
2014 - Quizilla shuts down
2015 - Journalfen’s servers become fully robust, deleting Fandom Wank
Didn’t quizilla have purges before finally shutting down? And I know basically every vidding home hot destroyed, repeatedly taking out the entire history of vidding online.
… they deleted Fandom Wank???
Well, not specifically. Journalfen failed completely and has never come back. FW was on Journalfen, so while you can see some entries on the Wayback machine, I think (?), the long comment threads aren’t archived.
2007 - Youtube starts using its “content ID” system to identify (and block) works that include copyrighted material in their database.
2009 - Greatestjournal shuts down, taking down fandom’s biggest collection of blog-style RPGs
2012 - Megaupload shut down by FBI; some (many?) fanvid archives lost
I thought there was also some kind of purge at Deviantart, but I don’t recall the details.
I’d like to remind folks that there was literally wank last month about why do we need the OTW.
Well, this would be why: we sincerely believed in the internet values of a decade or two ago, which involved owning our own servers if we wanted to see our projects remain stable, in the long term, online.
Worth mentioning: Yahoo purchased GeoCities, and was behind the decision to shut all those sites down.
Yahoo’s incompetence destroyed Delicious.
Yahoo owns Tumblr.
1356: 50% of monks.
People just… completely forget. I was there for all of the bans on fanfiction.net. You don’t know panic until you go to log in one morning and find out a bunch of your works have been deleted, gone forever, because some asshole arbitrarily decided that they wanted to ban something.
AO3 IS IMPORTANT. IT MATTERS.
2016 -y!gallery an archive of m/m art and stories, original and fanfiction was completely destroyed and all works were lost
Y!gallery itself was originally built in response to Sheezy art banning adult themes in 2005
Deviant Art in my experience says it doesn’t allow porn but will allow erotic art of women to reach the front page, straight male gaze gets a pass. Art focused on men is more likely to get deleted.
A lot of things destroyed by anti-porn rules are really anti-porn not made by and for straight men. It’s women’s and queer folks work that is demonized.
^^^^^ i actually tested this when i was on DA. I drew a bunch of s*xually e*plicit vag*nas and d*cks and the d*cks were removed within 24 hours. the vag*nas were never reported.
these bans are attacks on women and queer/LGBTQ people. the straight male gaze is apparently the only legitimate n sfw view
2010 ish (?) - deviantART purges adult fanfiction (I only very vaguely remember this one, because I’ve never been a dA user and it happened during my fannish hiatus, but there is some incomplete info on Fanlore. If you remember more about what happened, please help edit that page!)
Fandom purges are almost never just about one thing. Fannish content both relies on fair use exemption and is frequently sexually explicit, so it gets attacked on both copyright/legal grounds (thank you, OTW Legal Team, for protecting us!) and TOS/hoster rules about porn/specific fictional content (thank you, AO3, for being an open archive!). On top of that, there is a nontrivial history of fannish content being lumped in with content that criticizes authoritarian governments, and targeted by sweeps by those governments and their censorship agencies when they purchase or put pressure on the commercial entities that own the servers (thank you, OTW, for being a nonprofit and owning and defending our servers!).
If you care about fannish content, you have to fight for fanfic on all three fronts. And if we hop off of HTTP and onto one of the decentralized protocols like dat et cetera, like people are starting to talk about in response to Article 13 and the Tumblr purges, we will inevitably be targeted along with a) people pirating media, b) porn distributors, and c) anti-government protestors, because those groups are also going use those protocols, too. I’m not saying, don’t think about migrating. I’m saying: there is a systemic problem within fandom, regarding the fact that we routinely get hit on three fronts: legal rights to the material we transform, sexual content, and governmental disapproval. Protecting fandom means fighting for fandom on all three fronts and putting thought and effort into how to make an archive robust against all three prongs of the attack.
This is what’s made AO3/the OTW so special: we have lawyers protecting our right to make what we make, we have a TOS that protects our right to make things that are sexually explicit, and because the OTW is a nonprofit, it’s more robust to the pressure that can be brought to bear upon commercial entities by both corporate and governmental powers (though, I note, especially when it comes to governments, it’s not immune, and we have to keep actively protecting it, and we have to protect other fans). If you are in fandom but you think that copyright upload filters are fine, because, well, you don’t want to put fanvids on YouTube, you are part of the problem. Your community is under attack. The powers that be have always come for us by attacking us in pieces, and we have always only ever successfully fought back by banding together.
If you love a child and you’re worried
that something about them is going to make them a target for bullying or
other cruelty in the future, the best possible thing you can do is give
them as much validation and support as you possibly can, and do your
best to counteract the cultural messaging they’re going to receive about the ‘wrongness’ of being different. Show that child unwavering respect as a human being, and demand that others in that child’s life also treat them with respect.
The worst possible thing you can do for a
child who is fat, gender nonconforming, disabled, LGBT+, or otherwise
different from most of the other children they will grow up knowing, is
to tell them they have to hide or get rid of their differences so people won’t be mean to them.
You
need to refuse to become a child’s first bully. The world can be an awful,
cruel place to kids who aren’t like their peers – but you can counteract
some of that cruelty instead of being the first to show it. Accept kids for who they
are and teach them that they deserve respect and care as they are, that they don’t have to earn love or kindness by suppressing parts of themselves to fit someone else’s idea of who they should be.
Even
if you actually succeed in forcing a child to be ‘more normal’, the
lessons they take away from seeing themselves as unworthy without
changing major aspects of their appearance, personality, etc., will stay
with them forever. It’s traumatic to be told who you are as a person is
a bad thing.
Whether you succeed or not, the attempt will teach them
that it’s acceptable for others to demand they change major aspects of
who they are; that bullying is an acceptable way to show love; that they deserve any cruelty people show them for being different; and that if others around them are ‘weird’, they’re entitled to bully those others into compliance just as they themselves were bullied – by you.
Children with eating disorders are in a
worse position than happy fat kids with adults in their life who love
and support them exactly as they are. Children who are bullied until
they stop self-expressing in ways that defy gender roles are in a worse
position than happy gender nonconforming kids who have adults in their
life who stand up for them and love and support them exactly as they
are.
Autistic kids who grow up in an environment where their differences
aren’t treated as burdens are better off than autistic kids who are
traumatized by abusive therapies where they’re trained to deny any uniquely autistic needs, pain, or body language and taught implicitly that who they are is lesser.
Don’t
try to change a child to make the world safer for them. By teaching them
that who they are is the problem, rather than the bullying itself, you are being part of that danger.
Instead, do everything you can to honour and respect the children you
love for who they are.
Encourage them to think well of themselves and to
not believe any messaging they’re receiving from the world that tells
them they’ll never be good enough until they conform. Seek out and
create positive representation of people like them – and people who are
different in a multitude of other ways – who are good, interesting,
worthwhile people. Compliment them on the unique ways they express
themselves. Teach them not to be afraid of not being exactly like
everyone else.
A kid can grow up different and still be
okay. But they need the support and love of the people around them to
make it in a sometimes hostile world. And they need the adults in their
life to work to keep that hostile world at bay as much as possible, and
not be part of the hostility.
The most important thing in a child’s life is having their parent (or person in the role of a parent) On Their Side.
MONEY. WE WANT MONEY. MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY MONEY. WE CAN DO SO MUCH WITH IT. WE HAVE ACCESS TO DEALS YOU COULD NEVER. MONEY
That aside.
I’m only going to talk about food items but if your food bank takes personal items, a lot of times diapers, feminine hygiene products, etc, are very very welcome.
1) Canned chicken and beef
looooooove this stuff. It’s expensive, it lasts forever, it tastes good and it can be used a variety of ways. This stuff is fucking catnip to food banks, it’s so hard for us to provide proteins.
2) Fancy nut butters
Peanut butter is a standby for food banks as a shelf-stable inexpensive protein, but if we have a family with a kid with a peanut allergy that’s not going to work. Non-peanut butters are expensive and it’s something we hardly ever see donated. (we also like peanut butter, but that’s easier for us to buy ourselves than non-peanut butters)
3) Canned or packaged tuna
You may notice a trend here in shelf-stable proteins. And yeah. That’s basically it, so I’m not going to keep harping on it. But this stuff is a godsend.
4) Easy breakfast things for kids (Granola bars, instant oatmeal, and the like)
Whatever Donald Trump tells you, most people who get food from food banks are actually working their asses off and so they have to leave Obama to raise their baby or whatever, and they don’t have a lot of time in the morning. Things like this that kids can make for themselves are expensive. (Another trend you may be noticing–donate shit that costs a lot of money. That helps us more than all the shitty green bean cans in the world) But they are so helpful for busy working families where the parents may not have a set schedule and sometimes little Amanda is making her own breakfast before she runs off to school. Don’t let kids go to school hungry.
5) Shelf-stable juice
This is one people never think of! But if you show up with a bunch of (preferably reduced sugar stuff) bottles of juice at my door, oh man, you are gonna get so many check mark and okay hand emoticons. This stuff is great for kids, and it doesn’t require refrigeration until it’s opened, so it works great for food drives.
But seriously, give money
And it’s way better food, too, anything you get prepackaged has A TON of sugar and/or salt in it…collecting cans may be more exciting than writing a check, but if the point is to help people, the check is going to get a lot more done
Yoooooo heads up for those of you with kids, I know this time of year schools start holding canned food drives so keep this in mind if you’re able to give.
collecting cans may be more exciting than writing a check, but if the point is to help people, the check is going to get a lot more done .
museum curator, watching steve waltz into the smithsonian, the memory of having the stolen cap america authentic howling commando era uniform returned dirty and ridden with bullet holes still fresh in their mind: hide the VALUABLES
steve, reaching over the rope to poke at something on display: it’s my goddamn stuff???
I’M SAYIN’, every single level of management at the Smithsonian must have had an extensively well-documented migraine after dealing with the colossal shitshow raised by such thrilling items as “sock (woolen)” pulled from the pack of one “Rogers, Steve G., 1918 - 1945 lol whoops he’s back″
like i said in my initial reblog… all the people building stories out of this make me laugh with delight, but smithsonian & dc museum people adding their tags give me LIFE
… also steven grant rogers would be KIND and COURTEOUS to the front-line museum staff and not ask them stupid questions and you will pry that headcanon from my cold dead hands thankyouverymuch
oh steven grant rogers is KIND and POLITE and CONSIDERATE to front-line museum staff, he will politely move himself to the side so he doesn’t cause traffic issues if he gets recognized and a couple kids want pictures, he apologizes to security for causing a scene (he didn’t mean to! he thought his baseball cap disguise would work, bless him). he returns his maps (sweet and so unnecessary but then one of the volunteers can take a map captain america used and will probably sign for them back to their grandkids so that’s nice). the docents LOVE him; he’s both a Nice Young Man and also from Back in Their Day.
the collections and conservation staff however have sworn a blood oath of pure vengeance against him and nothing he ever does will change their minds. the textile conservator (we’ll call her lorraine) who had to restore the old captain america suit spent THREE YEARS OF HER LIFE on that stupid thing and it’s still too unstable to ever exhibit again. lorraine went through FIVE INTERNS, two of whom CRIED ON HER. she had to spend a fourth year making a replica because everyone was writing their representatives that the captain america suit wasn’t on display and they MADE HER DO IT.
like if steve thought any debrief in wwii he ever had sucked lol try lorraine, who has given up trying to catalogue what the fuck happened to that piece of shit suit and finally tracked down his cell phone number after six months of this hell project out of sheer bloody mindness and desperation and tricks him into her office through a series of absolute goddamn lies about idk public programming or some shit that steve might actually care about and then corners him and makes him give her a play by play of what, exactly, the fuck he did to that suit.
cuz, okay, listen. blah blah save the world blah blah, but steven grant rogers* stole a priceless museum artifact, bled on it, set it on fire, dropped it into the potomac, dragged it (WHILE WET) through river mud and god knows how many plants and bugs and microbes, got melting plastic and metal and shrapnel and other people’s body juices and skin and hair embedded in it–the only reason he lives is because he can give the full and accurate account of what the fuck he did to it and answer questions of how the fuck it can be slightly, slightly unfucked. not saved! not made to look like it was! certainly not able to be put on a mannequin and exhibited again! but like she can get some more of the mud and that chunk of charred plastic out maybe. otherwise, lorraine would have murdered that dumb bitch in a fit of justifiable rage, and no amount of charming “sorry ma’am”s would fucking save him.
God I really wish carrying stuffed animals around with you was socially acceptable
I don’t mean to take over a post, but I actually did a project on this for my sociology of deviance class in college!
I carried a large stuffed rabbit whenever I went in public for about a week to observe the reaction of others. The point of the project was to do something harmless yet unusual to see if the action would be considered deviant, in which case someone had to try to correct or shame the behavior.
Long story short, nobody tried to correct my behavior. I was asked about it casually, had a few lingering stares thrown my way and when I was with my boyfriend, shop employees would direct questions to him instead of me. However, nobody refused to assist me when I was alone in a store, nobody said anything about the rabbit besides “oh, thats a cute bunny!” and I attended college classes without even a teacher questioning it.
In conclusion, it is socially acceptable to carry a stuffed animal, its just not a societal norm. ^^
My friend gave me a stuffed monkey plushy when I was struggling with uni, and I took him everywhere for like four years, usually velcrod to my backpack. No one said a damn thing, except my renaissance professor who saw it one day in the hallway and cracked the fuck up because I had a literal monkey on my back and he just looked at me like, “oh god, me too”. I used to leave him on desks during classes and exams (the monkey, not my prof). It was my reminder that someone cared if I was coping. But more than that it was soothing to have something to fidget with that wasn’t a pen. I used to ping those fucking things across the room I was so agitated. Harder to hurt people with a projectile stuffed monkey.
I got what I thought was a normal screen cleaning kit for my computer while I was in college. Much to my delight, instead of a little washcloth or whatever, the kit came with a tiny stuffed pig.
So I carried this pig in my backpack all through college, periodically taking it out, spraying my screen, and using the pig to wipe it off.
Now, I kept the pig in the side pocket of my bag where he was completely visible.
Then one day in screenwriting class I pulled him out to wipe my screen.
One of the guys sitting next to me looked appalled. “You’re wiping it off with your little stuffed animal??”
I explained what the pig was.
Turns out, the guy had noticed it and just thought it was adorable I carried a stuffed animal with me every day. He’d never mentioned it before.
Honestly, people do not care, and will not say anything. No matter the reason for your little stuffed animal friend.
And if you’re still really nervous about it keep a stuffed animal keychain on your bag. I have a cute little frog that stays on my backpack so when work gets stressful I can squeeze it.
For my anxious followers.
I love this so much. It reminds me that people can just be accepting, and if they aren’t - it’s by their choice. It isn’t a default.
I’ve seen people in college wearing pjs and art students always carry weird atuff. I saw a person in a suit by the math building holding what looked like a keychain with three if those fuzzy ball things in different colours and no one said a word. Bring your plushies and friends with you! Heck, if you have an office job you can bring a friend with you and keep them on your desk and if you work retail you can find a friend on a keychain and keep them on your belt, no one will care and you’re little friend can help you feel better!
Don’t let society bully you into changing. Inagead, lets change society into being accepting.
Through my junior and senior years of high school I had a small, beanie baby sized squirrel named Bob who rode on my shoulder or head. I even pierced his ears. 95% of people smiled or laughed or asked about him kindly. Teachers and the administration had ZERO issue with him which was hilarious because we had a strict dress code where you couldn’t wear fucking hoodies because the hood could POTENTIALLY cover your head. Even gave some of the students in the special classes for autistic spectrum kids the courage to bring cute things for comfort because a ‘normal’ kid was doing it too and they seemed happier.
The 5% who didn’t react like this was okay were the assholes who already bullied me. They would steal him or knock him off my head or the like. Teachers were very aware of Bob and thiis quicker to react when I was being bullied. It was weird.
i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes
it wasn’t, like, ~~~we luv pedophilia, it was way more complicated than that!
although it’s true AO3 does allow all fannish content provided it’s properly warned for, there’s a long history there - of spaces being used by fans until the host decided whatever we were doing was too weird and distasteful and either kicking us off, banning certain content, or changing the nature of the site until it was no longer viable as a host.
you’re referring to the LJ Strikethrough of 2007, which, being an ancient crone, I lived through, and since I was hanging out in the last vestiges of SGA and in bandom, I saw some of the fallout. this was before LJ was sold to the Russians (which is a whole ‘nother story), when it was still owned by Six Apart; in an effort to clean up LJ’s act, Six Apart decided to delete all accounts using tags like underage, incest, rape, etc.
this was supposed to get rid of actual child porn on the site, and I hope it did, but it also targeted fan communities. this was a problem for a couple reasons; for one thing, not every story tagged with these words is in favor of them; for another, these things happen to real people and these personal posts were also potentially in danger of being attacked; for the last one, look, I ain’t into this kind of fic but people write about what people write about, and if it’s fictional and not explicitly banned in the TOS (correct me if I’m wrong; I don’t think written content about this stuff was banned?) then it’s not cool for a content host to just start deleting communities without warning.
but that’s what happened! these deletions were also primarily targeting slash communities, which smacked of some serious homophobia since things were deleted that had nothing to do with any of this kind of content.
eventually someone found out it was this super conservative religious group who’d sent a list of journal names to Six Apart, and who if I remember correctly targeted slash fic on purpose, even after it became clear that the fic was, well, totally fictional. after a while, Six Apart admitted they’d made a mistake and started to reinstate journals, but all of fandom was pretty shaken up.
THEN Boldthrough happened, which was essentially the same debacle several months later, at which point fandom began its long slow migration from LJ to GJ, IJ, and eventually AO3, Twitter, and tumblr.
AO3 was opened in 2008 in response to several incidents, of which Strikethrough was a really intense one. remember, also, that back in 2008 the stigma surrounding fandom was significantly greater and more shameful than it is today, so finding hosts willing to archive fic was difficult unless someone had the dough to pay for server space - often not an option. this was also back when fanfic.net’s HTML restrictions were so great that users couldn’t use any special characters or bold or italicize anything, and it didn’t allow R-rated content, so it was clearly not ideal. in addition, although cease & desist letters were much less common than they were in the early 2000s and before, DMCA takedowns were still a phantom on the horizon.
LONG STORY SHORT, even though pedophilia is reprehensible and I personally cannot stomach fanfic that involves that kind of content, AO3 was founded specially as a safe space for fandom communities that could not find homes elsewhere. it requires warnings precisely for that reason, and if you find a story that is not properly warned, you can alert the admins and get the story labeled appropriately.
IDK, maybe it’s just because I am, again, ancient, but I was in and around fandom before homosexuality was legal in all 50 states. so were most of the people who started AO3. for most of my formative life, being gay was associated with pedophilia, and so was writing about gay characters. just - it’s a lot more complicated than you might expect, and there’s a reason many older fans who have been involved in several generations of fandom were so grateful to have AO3 as an option.
I don’t read, for example, Hydra Trash Party fics. They squick me, and I generally feel they are pretty gross. But writing noncon body-horror is not the same as saying “yeah, I totally want to go out and rape and torture people for years while brainwashing them!” or even “yeah, I wouldn’t do it myself, but it would be totally okay if someone did!” Nobody is hurt by it, and nobody is going to be hurt by it. So should I have the right to go, that is gross, you don’t get to write or read that? No.
In the same way, writing about underage teens getting it on–sometimes with each other, sometimes with adults, sometimes consensually, sometimes not–is not the same as child pornography, nor does reading a fic about Hermione and Snape getting it on while she was his student mean someone thinks that would be a good and/or healthy thing in real life.
Fiction affects reality, but fiction is not reality. And writing about something does not mean you want to do it in real life, or believe that anyone should.
Let’s take a closer look at that “Ao3 supports pedophilia!” shall we?
1) The only fics I have ever come across that had actual pedophilia (i.e. someone having sex with a child), it was clearly and explicitly abuse. It was not meant to titillate or arouse. It was meant to horrify. It was seldom explicit.
2) There’s a lot more incest, but it is usually portrayed either as explicitly mutually consensual (i.e. Sam/Dean) or as abusive.
3) I’ve been in fandom for a decade and a half. When people start getting upset at “omg pedophilia, think of the children!” the fics they are usually objecting to aren’t actually pedophilia. Usually, it is teenagers having sex, especially queer sex. And people don’t like that, and use pedophilia as an excuse to shame people for writing/reading sex they don’t like.
Let’s look closer at Strikethrough, shall we? I hope that, if there were any communities of actual pedophiles on LJ, they got taken down, too. But here are some of the communities that got taken down that were not in any way supporting pedophilia and/or rape and/or incest that got taken down:
1) at least one support community for survivors of sexual abuse.
2) a literary book discussion group that was reading Lolita.
3) lots of slash fanfic communities, for things like Draco/Harry fic set in their fourth year (when both boys would have been 15).
Basically, this very conservative “family values” group hated porn, and they hated queer stuff even more, and used “but think of the children, it’s pedophilia!” to pressure LJ to get rid of huge swathes of things they didn’t like. And one time taking down the worst of it wasn’t good enough for them. No, this was step one on a moral crusade. If you acceded to their demands, all that did was whet their appetite, and soon they would be back with a new list of demands. This is why the 2007 strikethrough was not an isolated event, but rather one of a series of events, nor was LJ the only website thus targeted. It starts with anything that can get labelled “pedophilia” or “incest” because that’s low-hanging fruit. But they use that to go after anything relating to queer teen sexuality. Then anything with teen sexuality. Then once the community is already divided and diminished, they go after anything with non-con. Then whatever is next on their list. It doesn’t stop until they’ve won the point and nothing but suitably “family-friendly” fics that match their purity test are allowed.
Which is why AO3 has no morality content in their terms of service. You can’t break copyright beyond fair use (and AO3 has an expansive view of “fair use” and a team of lawyers on call). You can’t use AO3 for commercial advertising. And you can’t post ACTUAL child pornography, i.e. the things that are legally prohibited, i.e. actual photographs or videos of actual children (not teens) in sexually explicit positions–you know, the stuff that actually hurts kids. Other than that? It’s fair game. You can post anything you want, and the archive will not judge. There is no handle for the Moral Majority Family-Friendly Thought Police to latch onto, no cracks they can exploit to divide and conquer.
We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t lead anywhere good.
Reblogging this for the excellent explanation of what exactly the moral crusaders did last time. They had an explicit agenda of anti-queerness, and they specifically targeted slash and femslash communities in particular, such that many ship communities became (or started as) deliberately members-only. You had to apply, and your personal blog had to look like a real person and a fan. You were vetted, a la 1990s private servers.
During this period, Dreamwidth was also targeted by attacking its payment processor. They had to get a new one. These “Warriors” (literally called themselves that!) were totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom they didn’t like.
If you’re carrying out harassment of people right now because they’re posting works with sexual elements you don’t agree with? (And it’s always sex, never non-sexual violence, how strange….) If you’re doing that, you’re also totally on board with destroying fandom as a side effect of destroying the parts of fandom you don’t like. Because your tactics are fandom-destroying, and so is your agenda.
reblogging because this is important: strikethru and boldthru and all the various “purges” that fandom went thru about 10 years ago: this had to do with OUTSIDERS deciding that fandom in general and fanfiction in specific were evil and needed to be destroyed; unless we were writing and shipping good vanilla M/F married people. These were outsiders, going after fictional writing about fictional characters.
AO3 and OTW are HUGE, because now we have an organization, with very smart women and a lot of lawyers, that have our back. Fannish history is important, people! It has not always been this way.
This is so, so important: there’s that other post about AO3 and fanfiction floating around, about our history. People decry violent video games but no one is trying to force companies out of business. But people can and do attack fanfiction: an activity primarily written by women for women, about fictional characters. And often about sex. We have to constantly defend ourselves, protect ourselves, support each other against charges like “paeodophilia”.
^^^rebageling again for excellent commentary
Throwing this in because I was also present: This was during the American Government’s attempts to pass censorship laws on the internet. As MOST of those domains had their serves in America, they were beholden to those censorship laws. A great deal of fanfiction.net was removed because they happened to lose a goddamn courtcase. I’ve been on the site since 2002. They may not have ‘officially’ allowed NC-17 rated content (what it used to be listed as in the filters), it never did a damn thing to remove it. Ever. They had it listed as a rating option during ‘New Story’ uploading after all. It was i nthe search filters. After they lost the courtcase however, they legally had to start doing things about the mature content reports they got. The admins and mods were not actively looking for fic to remove, they were just responding to reports they had already received.
tl;dr - I know tumblr is all about black and white “you’re either all right or all wrong” thinking, but it’s important to understand what actually happened before going “ew ao3 was made to give pedophiles a safe place to post” because that is 110% not what happened.
This is why so, so many of the comparatively older fannish folks on tumblr like me are so vehemently against stuff like the anti movement and “all ships are valid UNLESS”. It smacks of censorship and content policing - and we’ve been there. We got our shit deleted and our accounts banned because someone else thought what we were reading or writing or talking about needed to just… not exist. No warning. Literally overnight. We just woke up and stuff was gone.
And yeah, the group was legit called Warriors for Innocence (or maybe of). I knew several people that were members of survivor/support groups that lost their groups - and their main support network - when Strikethrough happened (ten years ago holy shit).
You antis need to listen when us older fans tell you that the censorship you’re advocating for, when put into practice, is NOT a positive thing; it’s an extremely scary thing!
I can guarantee that you would be very, very upset if another event like LJ Strikethrough were to happen today because *you* are just as vulnerable as the rest of us! If you support the rights of marginalized groups of people, if you’re a slash or fem slash shipper, if you support gender identities that aren’t defined by biological sex, if you care about representation, if you support women, if you have any kind of kink, if you care about fandom in any capacity beyond its eradication, YOU DO NOT ACTUALLY WANT THE SORT OF CENSORSHIP YOU’RE ADVOCATING!!
People were terrified during Strikethrough. I was there. Communities were being shut down, individual users were being shut down. People were losing access to their own fics, their feedback, their comments – a LOT went on in comments on LJ. Think more coherent reblogs, much more personal, very widespread. Comments were also very important, and in terms of networking/communicating, were absolutely critical.
LJ was, for many people, central.
It was a fundamental part of the infrastructure of fandom at the time.
Having it attacked, having parts of your fandom’s territory just deleted like that, was very very scary. People didn’t know who was next. Every day, the list of stricken journals grew. And not all of them came back, not all of them recovered their content. Some people even voluntarily deleted their content as a form of protest. It was a bad time.
You do not have to interact with fic that grosses you out or makes you uncomfortable. Tagging is a thing. And even outside of tags, you are responsible for curating your own fandom experience. It is not right to expect it to be curated for you. And it is not right to lash out when someone refuses to do so and expects you to walk away from things that do not concern you.
I was gonna say “things that don’t harm anyone” but I realize you can argue that. If you get triggered, that’s upsetting. That could be considered harm. And I have sympathy for that. I do.
I have run across fic that triggered me. I have pretty specific triggers, and people don’t always think to warn for them because they aren’t that big a deal for a lot of people. Or it’s sort of bundled into kink and is presumed, that if you’re okay with certain kinds of kink, you’re okay with this. So I’ve been blindsided by it before. And it sucks for a couple of days while I get over it.
That was not the fault of the authors! You could argue that tagging should have been used, and maybe it should, but ultimately that’s not an ironclad obligation. It’s a tool people provide out of courtesy.
That was not the fault of the site! The site is there to give authors a way to make fiction available, not to judge each work and interrogate its validity and make sure everything is tagged so that nobody has to see anything bad, ever.
That was not even my fault! It was my responsibility to try to curate my experience, and I tried, but it wasn’t my fault because I didn’t deliberately set out to trigger myself.
When I get triggered, unless it is by a deliberate act, it is actually the fault of the people who hurt me in the first place! And I refuse to let them off the hook and blame perfectly innocent people who just wanna write their fanfiction! I may hate that fanfiction, but that is irrelevant to the question of whether or not people should be allowed to post whatever they want.
Also, some people cope by writing about fucked-up shit. My best friend in the whole wide world has shared her fic with me, and HOO BOY it is messed up. She wrote it during a time in her life when she was in and just coming out of a horrifically abusive relationship. I mean, it was exactly the kind of relationship all of us here on Tumblr love to hate. She was married to a shitty, abusive man who preyed on someone younger than he was and used his influence over her to treat her in a way that would be right at home in that Lundy Bancroft book Why Does He Do That? He was a real rapist, a verified grade-A bad fuckin’ guy. (She was lucky to escape. I have immense respect for her.) And she wrote some fucked up fic to deal with it, and she shared it, and people were invested in it. And because this was early 2000′s, she had to host it on a foreign server and cover her tracks, because at that time no-place was safe to post it.
“Yeah, but if she’s writing it for therapy, she doesn’t have to post it where other people might have to see it!” I hear you say.
But like … what the hell??? “Shut up, don’t talk about it, it’s bad to talk about these things, because these things are bad!” is something used against folks with trauma.
“This isn’t good for me, I can’t talk about this, I can’t be your audience for this,” that’s fine, those are boundaries that people with trauma use to defend themselves. You should learn to say those things! It will help you!
But expecting other people to never create and share art about trauma is just so thunderously oppressive I lack the ability to fully articulate it.
And nobody should have to disclose their history of trauma to prove their motives are pure or virtuous enough for their speech to be protected. I’ve only really been able to openly say “I was assaulted, it was traumatic, I am a little fucked up from it” for the past couple of years, tops. I couldn’t talk about it before that. Couldn’t! And it was over 20 years ago!
I also believe, very firmly, that you don’t need a history of abuse to find writing really messed-up shit satisfying, or to find reading it cathartic. I believe 100% in the freedom of creative expression, and the freedom to read whatever fucked up shit you want to read.
All y’all fandom youngsters can spit nails all you want over gross rape fic, incest fic, whatever.
Fine, I don’t like it either!
But that fucked up shit? That fucked up shit helped carve out the spaces we have today. You don’t have to like it, but campaigning to get it deleted, harassing content creators, calling people rapists and pedophiles who have never done and would never ever do such a thing, that is not the way to improve the world, it doesn’t keep actual kids or teens or assault/rape victims safe. It wouldn’t have made me feel safe when I was 16 and did’t want what was going on. It doesn’t make me feel safe now. I can say with the perspective of someone 24 years away from that event, it doesn’t make the world safer for people like I was. It actually makes it worse.
Learn to steer clear of the messed-up stuff you don’t like. It’s a skill, you get better with practice. Have someone else vet stuff for you if you need help doing it now.
Everything that is sketchy and gross is not criminal, and writing about a thing is not morally the same as doing it. Please stop acting like writing about an adult and a teenager having really questionable, gross sex is as bad as the actual registered sex offender they caught hanging around an actual elementary school two neighborhoods over from mine, just trying to talk to the kids. The former is, at most, in poor taste, and potentially triggering to abuse victims. The second makes me want to vomit because even though he was just talking, that guy was gearing up to try something and create another abuse victim. A g a i n.
The first can be avoided because it is imaginary and you, an adult, have power over your back button so that you don’t have to witness harm to imaginary people. The second, those very real kids had to rely on real adults and real law enforcement to keep them safe from very real assault.
(It worked! The neighborhood rallied! He was arrested for violating parole!)
Pretty sure Sleazebag McDongface didn’t read some gross NC-17 Draco/Lucius fic before deciding to harm an actual human being. Pretty sure not having read it didn’t keep him from doing it. ‘Cause he fuckin’ did it. And he would have done worse. But actual people stopped him.
I get wanting to protect victims when so many of us are victims ourselves, but man, going after fiction is not the way to do it.
An author is not a perpetrator. Stop trying to make those things synonymous in the minds of other fans, and in the minds of other recovering victims.
I’m a crone who also lived through strikethrough, and all y'all young fans need to read this and understand it if you don’t want history to repeat itself someday.
Here’s the thing, also: it doesn’t stop with fic about objectionable stuff.
If you have a website with TOS that includes any kind of “objectionable content” rules, there will be parties who will use those rules to try to silence other people whom they want silenced.
Let’s look at the alt-right and MRA movements today, or GamerGate a few years ago. What is one of their primary weapons? They report black or feminist or really any leftist YouTube channels (or Twitter accounts, or whatever) whose message they don’t like and claim those channels are are violating TOS by posting hate speech or incitations to violence or whatever bullshit they can come up with, in an attempt to silence those channels.
When Anita Sarkeesian of Feminist Frequence came under fire for starting a crowdfunding endeavor to fund the production of her Tropes vs. Women in Video Games series of videos, male gamers tried to get her KickStarter and various social media accounts shut down by reporting her for for hate speech and promoting terrorism.
Luckily, that became a big enough story that the dudes failed and their efforts backfired. But a lot of times, these tactics work.
How do I know this? Because it happened to me. Not over major shit like the examples above, but over something completely petty.
Back in the mid-to-late 90s, before LiveJournal really became the place for fandom, before FF.net was really a thing, you had to create your own personal website on whatever free webhost you could find (GeoCities was popular, but there were others) if you wanted to host your fic somewhere.
And back then, TV studios and book authors were still sending their lawyers after people who wrote fanfic, issuing cease and desist letters to not only the authors, but also to their webhosts.
At the time, I was writing perfectly het Mulder/Scully fanfic. No rape, no pedophilia, no slash. Maybe a little BDSM. But largely it was unobjectionable.
Then the 8th season of X-Files started, David Duchovny decided he only wanted to be involved part-time, and the show decided to bring in another male character. The fandom lost their shit–as fandoms do–over the idea of “replacing” Mulder blah blah blah.
One of the most popular fanfic mailing lists–one that had previously had no restrictions on what characters or pairings could be posted–decided that if you wrote fanfic involving this character, you were no longer welcome. Well, this was the mailing list with all the readers. Sure, authors could go to other mailing lists, but they wouldn’t have exposure to the sort of readership this other list boasted.
I spoke out, saying that this change was unfair to fic authors and that the moderator of this list was behaving in a pretty vile way. The moderator and her friends took aim at me and began a campaign of harassment, and a few days later, suddenly my website with my XF fanfic was TOSed because someone had reported it. So was the next site I tried to create to host my fic, and the one after that.
Thanks to the way AO3s TOS are constructed, that sort of shit doesn’t happen now. I can speak up if I need to, and while I may receive harassment on my various social media accounts, there’s no chance they can have my fic taken down just because they have an agenda and don’t like me for reasons not relating to my fic.
So yeah, AO3′s rules protect fic a lot of us might find objectionable. But they also protect fic that is in no way objectionable from being targeted by unrelated harassment campaigns. And since any of us could find ourselves in the sights of those sort of campaigns at any time, we need to thank our lucky stars for that.
I like this last addition.
When I helped write the ToS for AO3, I wasn’t primarily thinking about strikethrough. I was primarily thinking of FFN, where so many people post things that are technically against the ToS but that the community tolerates. Any time someone gets pissed off, they can go on a grudge-reporting spree and target their enemy’s work. Often, that means guys targeting slash or Twilight fic because it’s “for girls” and thus sucks. Sometimes, it’s one ship vs. another. I was also thinking of Miss Scribe and all of that other Harry Potter fandom drama. (And if you think fans are above destroying an entire archive just to strike at one enemy, think again!)
We can’t force people to like each other. We can’t force people to be nice to each other. But we could take away fandom bullies’ favorite tools.
So we did.
Watching young (ostensibly liberal) bloggers and fans take up the deeply conservative rhetoric and moral crusading of the right wing and evangelical groups from the 90s has been both fascinating from an anthropological perspective, and fucking horrifying for someone who lived through this time period and the death of LJ.
This thread keeps getting better.
It galls me to think that those of us who went through all this shit might have to go through it again because people who were still in primary school at the time don’t see anything wrong with harassing us over
Like, I hate to pull this argument, but we are your fandom elders, we did what we did to preserve fandom for y'all, so y'all would have space to safely explore the sane things we did and still do. And in doing so we rightly realized that if we wanted to protect the comfortable, cuddly parts, we also needed to protect the dark parts.
You can hate non-con fic all you want, and I will always advocate for adequate tagging/warning (especially with franchises that are aimed at younger audiences, e.g. MLP:FIM and SU) so that you don’t have to see it because I sympathize, but I will never support people who want to make sure that it isn’t even there to be seen. I’ve been through that once. It didn’t help anyone. It didn’t fix anything.
Please, learn to curate your own online experience. You are responsible for not clicking, or clicking away. Don’t try to force others to do it for you. That’s not cool. You aren’t protecting children. You are asking fandom to treat everyone like a child. There is a massive difference.
Also… maybe parents should do their job in monitoring kids’ content? When my parents found out I was looking at age inappropriate things when I was a minor, like they intervened.
Strikethrough 07 was such a well-conducted operation that communities dedicated to survivors of sexual abuse and fans of Lolita fashion were suspended, but the journal of the baby rapist, ohbutyouwillpet, stayed up. And it’s still up to this day, though it hasn’t been updated it over a decade as its owner is still in prison.
Whooo, I guess it’s my turn to take a shot at this.
I’m a nold. I’m in my 40s. When I came out as queer, in the early 90s, it was in the middle of what were called the “feminist sex wars”. If you want a really good book to read about that period, which has a LOT of resonance with Strikethrought and with the current Tumblr discourse, I cannot recommend this highly enough:
A preview is available on Google Books, or it should be readily available secondhand, or in academic libraries (though it’s not a very heavy academic read). I recommend Booko for finding cheap secondhand copies. Support independent bookstores!
I haven’t read “Defending Pornography” for a while – I actually last re-read it about a decade ago because of the impact that Warriors for Innocence were having on Dreamwidth’s payment providers at the time, subsequent to Strikethrough itself – but here’s a quick summary, as I remember it.
1. In the late 80s and early 90s there was a vocal group of radical feminists who believed that pornography inherently harms women, not just in its production but also in its consumption (i.e. watching/reading pornography caused people to develop attitudes that were harmful to women). All explicit content was considered to be harmful, from eg. girlie magazines to hardcore XXX videos to a book like “The Joy of Gay Sex”, no matter who made it, its purpose, its intended audience, or its context. (Yup, even m/m content was considered to be degrading to women for reasons that didn’t make a lot of sense tbh.)
2. These anti-pornography feminists teamed up with the religious right and managed to get anti-porn laws passed. In particular, a law was passed in Canada preventing the importation of “obscene” material. Canada, of course, imports a lot of material from the US. Stuff started getting seized at the border.
3. Guess what was seized first? “The Joy of Gay Sex” and the like. Guess what businesses started finding all their shipments seized or delayed – sexually explicit or not – to the point where they were being put out of business? Gay bookstores. Guess what wasn’t seized at all? Mainstream porn made for straight men.
Around this time, Little Sisters bookstore in Vancouver (a gay bookstore) found that huge amounts of merchandise was being seized at the border, regardless of the actual content. They were being discriminatorily targeted on the basis of their sexuality. The queerness of the material they were importing was seen as inherently obscene.
Remember that this is before there was much information available online for LGBTQ+ people, so if you were a young person maybe just coming out and trying to understand things, or wanting to learn about safe sex (and yes it was at the height of the AIDS crisis, too) you’d go to a bookstore like this. Which now had empty shelves. I remember endless fundraising and activism in the LGBTQ+ community to try and keep Little Sisters open. In the end they spent half a million dollars on court cases. Read more about their struggles.
(You know what businesses weren’t impacted and didn’t have to basically ask their friends and community for help to stay open or spend a decade in the courts to defend their right to run their businesses? The powerful companies making porn by and for straight men.)
The book goes into a large number of analogous situations. Time and time again, anti-pornography laws intended to protect women are disproportionately used against women themselves, against LGBTQ+ people, and against basically any marginalised or minority group, rather than against the mainstream male-oriented porn that would seem to be its primary target.
Here’s the key point: Strossen is a legal scholar who’s looked at a lot of attempts at censorship, and you know what she found happened every time? When you try to censor pornography, even in the interests of protecting vulnerable people, that censorship will be applied first, and hardest, against the people who are most vulnerable.They won’t come for actual abusers, they’ll come for the abused, and prevent them from accessing resources, education, talking to each other, creating art to express themselves, or organising against those who are actually causing harm.
Read the book. The stories it tells are from the early 90s but they perfectly mirror what happened a decade ago with Strikethrough and what’s happening now with all this Tumblr discourse.
This is old, old business, we’ve seen it more than once before, and it never goes the way the antis think it will. Censorship is a tool that gives power to abusers and lets them inflict more harm on those who are abused, vulnerable and discriminated against. Don’t fall for it.
History they should have known: The Comstock laws in New York were this one dude (Comstock) who managed to get a mail regulation re-written to categorize anything related to contraceptives as pornography, which was already illegal to mail.
(Which is one reason for the pornographic playing cards etc, because the 19th century was almost as big on mail-order goods as the 21st, because getting to shops in person was hard for a huge subsection of Americans.)
Comstock built a non-profit with the support of the YMCA and oh shoot, some millionaire whose brand is still going strong, to enforce this law because the postal system didn’t have the personnel. They were granted the right to do so.
He and his posse of honorary mail inspectors with police powers (I kid you not) spent years engaging in endless skullduggery to prosecute people for selling contraceptives by mail. Which was how everyone got them in the 19th century, you couldn’t walk into a shop for a pack of condoms but mail-order packages were nicely anonymous. They dragged Margaret Sanger into court repeatedly. There was a huge cottage industry of contraceptives in NYC at the time, most of the manufacturers being female, Jewish, immigrants, or some combination of the above.
There was one woman whose name escapes me they kept trying to prosecute for selling contraceptive devices and the juries kept nullifying it because the average New Yorker in the 1890s were like ‘yeah no condoms are not a crime,’ but not everybody had her stage presence and resources.
You know who they never even tried to touch? The big rubber companies were were getting into mass production of condoms. Their big funder owned the company that produced Vaseline, and was claiming in ads at the time that it worked as a spermicide.
Only the poor and vulnerable felt the impact of the Honorary Postal Inspectors of righteousness.
It’s been touched on a little before but really it’s hard to explain just how confusing and scary the crackdowns were. I was only a reader on FanFiction when the crackdown came but it felt like I was standing in a coal mine full of canaries. Canaries that were either silent or /screaming/.
Every where you looked, authors where posting warnings about how x stories were getting deleted. All of the warnings feeling rushing, panicked, most of them including notes about how they didn’t know how long they had before their warnings were taken down or they were deleted. It felt a bit like all the stars going out, everything just dying around you. Like a stampede of people had fled from some oncoming unnamed horror leaving silence in their wake. Finding AO3 later on was like finding a safe haven in a world gone mad.
Also FanFiction doesn’t really encourage socialisation aside from authors notes to readers on their chapters or homepage. Meanwhile all the warnings of the crackdown were really rushed and vague. So, as a not very sociable reader, I really didn’t have a clue what was going on at the time of the crack down and the confusion and uncertainty was almost the scariest part of the whole thing. (Not knowing if the authors should come back and if fanfics were gone for good was scarier.) It’s only years later, reading fanfic history posts that I’ve started to piece together what happened.
Also an interesting point was that during the crack down all I ever heard about was /gay/ stories being deleted. Perhaps this was just because I was reading gay stories but I didn’t even realise it was mature stories in general that was supposedly the aim of the crack down until much later.
Hot damn, this post just keeps going!
I very much second the rec about the feminist sex wars. Understand those, and you’ll understand why those of us over about 30 are so opposed to tumblr’s purity crusade.
If you haven’t been TOSsed you really don’t get it, imo.
If you haven’t spent your time wondering if the thing that will get your content deleted is the dark stuff or the nipples, you really don’t get it, imo.
Hell, way way back in the day, I had moderator types private message me going “I really like your writing, but you need to be less obvious about it, or I will have no choice but to tos you.”
A long reblog, but a worthy read. So much history and experience recounted here. If we don’t remember our past, remember why AO3 and many fandom spaces work the way they do now, we will be condemned to repeat it.
Please do not let us return to the dark ages of fear, censorship, and oppression in fandom.
If society collapses and we gotta start living back in tiny tribal societies everybody’s gotta make sure when you start making those stories that get passed down through the ages that you include some ghibli movies in there. I want future archeologists to find multiple societies around the world worshiping chihiro the dragon rider goddess and howl the trickster god. We got one chance if it happens so don’t fuck it up
I can’t tell if we’re handling the collapse of society well or not anymore
- asexuality and aromanticism are minority orientations
- there is no ace or aro privilege
- aces and aros as a group do not benefit from sex-shaming or from the sexualization of oppressed groups
- many ace and aros are in fact harmed by sex-shaming and the sexualization of oppressed groups
- aces and aros are not more likely to be bad people than others, there is literally no reason or excuse to assume that
- asexuality and aromanticism are not desexualizing identities
- society at large is not thrilled about ace and aro identities. To start with, a lot of people think it’s not “normal” to not experience sexual attraction and a lot of people think romantic love is an essential part of “the human experience”
- society has zero qualms about pathologizing ace and aro identities, denying their existence and painting them as something in need of “fixing”
- aces and aros often do not learn their orientations exist until way late, if ever. They’re generally not taught about in school or college or in any comparable contexts and a lot of people with power there have zero interest in this changing (for example, because they think our identities are “unhealthy” and/or because they refuse to acknowledge them as orientations)
- a lot of aces and aros have recounted a lot of really bad experiences connected to people learning/knowing they’re ace and/or aro
- aces and aros are not in any way better protected from harm than other people
- there is literally no reason to act as if all this isn’t true
Honestly,you can immediately tell that anyone here posting about “not wanting to see cishets at pride” or wanting to inflict some type of violence on any “cishets” if they attend pride has NEVER attended any big pride event or hasnt ever actively taken part in one bc like, noone in real life prides stays at the gate and checks the lgbtqa status of people before letting them enter lol.Noone in real life pride events goes around asking random strangers if they really are lgbtqa or not.
Also , MANY cis straight family members or friends of lgbtqa people attend prides to show support to them or in remembrance of any lgbtqa person they knew who passed away.Hell, many cis STRAIGHT allies attend pride just to show their support and educate themselves about lgbtqa people and their issues.In fact, pretending to be a “cis straight ally” is how many closted lgbtqa people attend prides in the first place.Also dont forget questioning people.
Theres no way to tell if a person at your local pride is a cis/straight person or not.The “straight couples” you see might actually be bi people who are attending with their partners who might be bi themselves or not OR straight trans people with their partners.And unless you want to go around asking random people to show/tell them about their genitals, theres NO WAY to determine if random people are cis or not.Hell, those ace/aro pride flag careers might be non straight or trans too but just choose to bring an ace flag bc they are allowed to be proud of their asexuality too.
So like, yall really need to realize that real life isnt like tumblr discourse bloggers make it seem and theres NO way to believe in gatekeeping rhetorics like those pushed by discourse bloggers without alienating a large part of people they claim to want to protect
It’s not just Tumblr, people. This shit is getting ridiculous.
Of course it’s not Tumblr!
They came for Craigslist personals first because that’s the oldest trick in the book: Sneakily taking down the ‘perverts’ under the guise of vague, high morality goals and working slowly up from the bottom, picking off larger and larger targets. Few people cared about CL because of the stereotype of scary unwashed creeps trawling for sex online. That wasn’t so familiar or cute so it was fair game.
Tumblr is biting at the ‘artists’ heels and suddenly there is a bit more noise, because artists aren’t supposed to be treated like shit, are they? However even now the hair-splitting over what’s porn and therefore garbage and not-art shows that attitudes are not so different. It’s still the same divisive, dangerous us v.s. themmentality that is so easily exploited.
This is why when people tell me I shouldn’t worry about this because ‘my art isn’t porn anyway’ it makes me angry. It means so much more than drawings or a silly blog. This is about people being slowly phased out of their freedoms, rights and agency. History has shown time and time again that whenever power wants to make a crushing move backwards, it comes for what it declares ‘obscene’ first. People are raised to be scared and ignorant of sex so it’s an easy gateway. When they come cracking down on sex is when we most need to pay very close attention. They are not protecting us.
Reminder that elementary and high school kids are not millennials. I keep seeing people and articles calling them millennials, as though people have forgotten that generations don’t go on forever, lol.
Millennials were born from ~1980 to ~1996, and are currently between 22 and 38 years old.
Photographer Mattias Klum from National Geographic gets close and personal with a lion.
“and all of a sudden you feel very small” damn right
IT JUST WANTS TO BE LOVED AND SAVED
please, if you are able, do what you can for the asiatic lion. donate, get involved, spread information. there are only about 300 left in the world, and they all live in Gir Forest National Park in India.
the african lion is also estimated to be extinct by 2050 due to habitat loss, sport hunting, and loss of their prey base to the bushmeat trade. these beautiful creatures could be extinct in our lifetime. the next generation may not ever have the chance to see these creatures, there will be no more cute lion vines, there will be no more documentaries, there will be no more zoos or sanctuaries containing lions. there will be no more lions.
if you have any love for nature, any love for animals, any love for life, and if you care at all about the permanent loss of a species, especially one so beautiful and iconic, if you care and if you are able, please donate to help save lions.
anyway while yall are logged off tumblr on dec 17 to protest tits how about you also go to a protest or vigil because dec 17 is the international day to end violence against sex workers
we’re about 160% as likely to be murdered as you are to get the clap, & about 4x as likely to be murdered as you are to go to the hospital for the flu. consider… giving a shit about those numbers, maybe. that’d be nice.
The plan for the 17th, when the adult content ban comes in, is to protest.
To do that, we are making as much noise either side of the 17th as possible, and using the site as normal.
On the 17th, dead silence.
People are saying log off but what they really mean is don’t open the site or the app.
But, on the 17th make as much noise as possible on every other platform. Tweet about it and post on facebook and instagram and everywhere else.
What this does is causes a massive dip in ad revenue for one single day. That does not make staff think ‘oh everyone’s gone let’s shut down.’ What it actually makes them think is ‘oh shit people aren’t happy and if people don’t keep using our site we’re out of money and out of jobs.’
A boycott reminds a company that the users (consumers) have the power to make their site (business) worthless with one single coordinated decision.
If you want to join in, here’s what to do:
Do:
Close all open instances of the app and site on all your devices before the 17th
Make posts before and after the 17th on tumblr and other platforms, talking about why this ban is bad
Make posts on other sites during the 17th. Flood the official tumblr staff twitter and facebook with your anger and your opinion
Come back on the 18th and check in
Don’t:
Delete the app from your phone (this doesn’t affect their revenue and since it’s off the store at the moment it’ll be hard to get back)
Delete your account. I mean you can if you want to, but if you keep your account and don’t use it you’re saying to staff that there’s still time to save it. If you delete it’s hard work to come back.
Open the app or website (including specific blogs)
Make any posts (turn down/off your queue and make sure nothing is scheduled)
Go quiet elsewhere. Make it clear that this is just about tumblr, not a mass move away from all social media.
Remember: the execs don’t care about anything but money. Shutting down the site means there’s $0 further income from it. That’s their last possible course of action. If we make it clear we’re not happy, they’ll have to do something or we can do more and more until it becomes too expensive.
Protests take commitment. They’re a defiant action against a business that is doing something wrong. They will try to scare you into not participating, because they’re scared. We hold all the power here, sometimes the execs just need to be reminded of that.
