I FUCKING KNEW IT.
SO. IF YOU KNOW YOUR FANDOM HISTORY, YOU CAN SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL RIGHT NOW.
AND IN CASE YOU DON’T, I will tell you a story.
I don’t know if Yahoo as a corporate entity hates fandom, or if it LOVES fandom in the way a flame longs to wrap its embrace around a forest. Or maybe it’s just that fandom is an enticingly big and active userbase; but just by the nature of our enterprise, we are extremely difficult to monetize.
It doesn’t matter.
Once upon a time – in the era before anyone had heard of google – if you wanted to post fandom (or really, ANY) content, you made your own webpage out of nested frames and midi files. And you hosted it on GeoCities.
GeoCities was free and… there. If the internet of today is facebook and tumblr and twitter, the internet of the late 90s WAS GeoCities.
And then Yahoo bought GeoCities for way too much money and immediately made some, let’s say, User Outreach Errors. And anyway, the internet was getting more varied all the time, fandom mostly moved on – it wasn’t painful. GeoCities was free hosting, not a community space – but the 90s/early 00s internet was still there, preserved as if in amber, at GeoCities.com.
Until 2009, when Yahoo killed it. 15 years of early-internet history – a monument to humanity’s masses first testing the potential of the internet, and realizing they could build anything they wanted… And what they wanted to build was shines to Angel from BtVS with 20 pages of pictures that were too big to wait for on a 56k modem, interspersed with MS Word clipart and paragraphs of REALLY BIG flashing fushia letters that scrolled L to R across the page. And also your cursor would become a different MS Word clipart, with sparkles.
(So basically nothing has changed, except you don’t have to personally hardcode every entry in your tumblr anymore. Progress!)
And it was all wiped out, just like that. Gone. (except on the wayback machine, an important project, but they didn’t get everything) The weight of that loss still hurts. The sheer magnitude…
Imagine a library stocked with hundreds of thousands of personal journals, letters, family photographs, eulogies, novels, etc. dated from a revolutionary period in history, and each one its only copy. And then one day, its librarians become tired of maintaining it, so they set the library and all its contents on fire.
And watch as the flames take everything.
Brush the ash from their hands.
Walk away.
Once upon a time – in the era after everyone had heard of google, but still mostly believed them about “Don’t be evil” – fandom had a pretty great collective memory. If someone posted a good fic, or meta, or art, or conversation relevant to your interests? Anywhere? (This was before the AO3, after all.) You could know p much as soon – or as many years late – as you wanted to.
Because there was a tagging site – del.icio.us – that fandom-as-a-whole used; it was simple, functional, free, and there. Yahoo bought it in 2005. Yahoo announced they were closing it in 2010.
They ended up selling it instead, but not all the data went with it – many users didn’t opt to the migration. And even then, the new version was busted. Basically unusable for fannish searching or tagging purposes. This is the lure and the danger of centralization, I guess.
It is like fandom suffered – collectively – a brain injury. Memories are irrevocably lost, or else they are not retrievable without struggle. New ones aren’t getting formed. There is no consensus replacement.
We have never yet recovered.
Once upon a time… Yahoo bought tumblr.
I don’t know how you celebrated the event, but I spent it backing up as much as I could, because Yahoo’s hobby is collecting the platforms that fandom relies on and destroying them.
I do not think Yahoo is “bad” – I am criticizing them on their own site, after all, and I don’t expect any retribution. I genuinely hope they sort out their difficulties.
But they are, historically, bad for US.
And right now is a good time to look at what you’ve accumulated during your career on this platform, and start deciding what you want to pack and what can be left behind to become ruins. And ash.
…On a cheerier note, wherever we settle next will probably be much better! This was never a good place to build a city.
In case you want an easy way to back up all your shit, here is a good post about how
If you’re a fic writer and you do prompts and drabbles on tumblr and only put ‘full fics’ on AO3, please consider porting all your writing over to there. I promise, as long as you tag that stuff is just an idea, or unfinished and never will be finished, or just a drabble/ficlet/w’evr, people won’t be angry at you for it.
I really hate to think of all the beautiful little fics I’ve read on here just *poof* disappearing one day.
If you’re a visual artist, AO3 lets you put art and vids and things other than fic on there too. Essays and meta go on AO3.
We as fandom are now accustomed to looking to AO3 as a place to find our fannish fixes. So putting all your stuff over there is a good thing. People will be able to find it.
Thing is, if everyone does this, it’s gonna stress the resources of AO3. So if you’re able, please consider donating to them to cover the additional cost.
So I live in in New York City, where a lot of tech companies are–including tumblr, actually. I made a friend online 11 years ago who I actually see on occasion to this day. She doesn’t work for tumblr, but she is involved deeply in NYC tech.
She essentially has told me that tumblr is done and it’s just a matter of time. The tumblr offices are awful to work for and people who want decent jobs quickly migrate from there. It’s nigh impossible to make tumblr profitable or able to be advertised on so, essentially, it is a matter of time.
Honestly so I am fairly ready to move back to Dreamwidth or on to whatever the next blogging thing is because, quite frankly, it’s over soon.
I feel like we need to make a family fire escape plan. Where are we going when the house goes up in flames?
Tag: tumblr
Ok, seriously- is my tumblr name like one letter away from a porn blog or something?
I’ve got about 15 porn blogs following me, and I’ve NO FRIGGING IDEA WHY. I’ve never ventured to that side of tumblr, haven’t liked any posts, don’t follow any of them.
I just got two more in the time I’ve been logged on. Any ideas?
List 5 things you like about yourself, then tag 10 of your favourite followers.
Tagged by @that-anglophile
whelp, this is gonna be hard.
1) I like my eyes. I’m also highly self-conscious about them and wear colored contacts most of the time to avoid questions and ‘liar’ accusations, but due to my skin coloring they’re highly unusual- at least in my area. But I do like my eyes.
2) I like my cursive hand-writing. Not much chance to use it nowadays, since it seems hardly anyone but those over 40 can even *read* cursive, but I love it. I practiced hard for it when I a little girl, and I’m proud of it. Not so proud of my non-cursive writing that’s like a drunk trying to write smh
3) I like my imagination. It’s highly developed and very, *very* active. I don’t think I ever really “grew up” like most kids do when they hit junior high or high school and stop their more out-there daydreams. I still do, very often, very detailed.
4) I like my ability to see things from the other POV and be non-judemental almost always.
5) I like, erm, my wildly erratic reading interests?
Tagging: @janecshannon @irrelevantbl0g @seraphazrael @vanetti @distantstarlight @weweretoldandwelistened @an-abundance-of-hannahs @ramblings-from-yours-truly @221bsweetheart @not-a-bit-good
Quick question to tumblr taggers:
I just read this discussion that spawned the idea of an official TJLC Library, and a mention in there near the bottom of tagged searches not working reminded me of something from about two years ago when I was in another fandom:
Only the first five tags are considered in tagged searches.
So any and all tags after #5 are just for personal organization, not searches, no matter how carefully and thought-out they are. That’s why when I tag, if I’m tagging something that I might expect to perhaps come up in searches, I leave any and all personal tags such as #so cute or #my stupid boys for AFTER the #TJLC or #HLV or other tags.
So, my question is: since then, has tumblr changed? I’ll admit I was out of the game for about seven to eight months, perhaps closer to 10, so I don’t know if tumblr ever did an update to that and added more or not.
Anyone know?
@janecshannon @inevitably-johnlocked @that-anglophile @irrelevantbl0g @vanetti @seraphazrael @cupidford @distantstarlight
And anyone else who might know. Either tumblr has fixed this already and I’m just late to the party, or it’s knowledge that has somehow become lost and apparently hurting a lot of people.
Nope, it’s still the first five tags. I do the same thing as you for the exact same reason. 🙂
Huh. Thank you then! @inevitably-johnlocked and @vanetti 🙂
Quick question to tumblr taggers:
I just read this discussion that spawned the idea of an official TJLC Library, and a mention in there near the bottom of tagged searches not working reminded me of something from about two years ago when I was in another fandom:
Only the first five tags are considered in tagged searches.
So any and all tags after #5 are just for personal organization, not searches, no matter how carefully and thought-out they are. That’s why when I tag, if I’m tagging something that I might expect to perhaps come up in searches, I leave any and all personal tags such as #so cute or #my stupid boys for AFTER the #TJLC or #HLV or other tags.
So, my question is: since then, has tumblr changed? I’ll admit I was out of the game for about seven to eight months, perhaps closer to 10, so I don’t know if tumblr ever did an update to that and added more or not.
Anyone know?
@janecshannon @inevitably-johnlocked @that-anglophile @irrelevantbl0g @vanetti @seraphazrael @cupidford @distantstarlight
And anyone else who might know. Either tumblr has fixed this already and I’m just late to the party, or it’s knowledge that has somehow become lost and apparently hurting a lot of people.
When you see a post you have the perfect response to but you must open another tab to get an image/gif and when you come back tumblr goes mad and the reblog button won’t work so you refresh the page and now, after going through over 50 pages/miles of tumblr, you STILL CAN’T FIND THE BLOODY POST.
Concept: Maybe “neurotypicals” who consistently reblog post about autism and other mental disorders and illnesses because they relate to them actually aren’t neurotypical, and just don’t know it.
Even the ones who say, “But everyone does this!” might only be saying it because they do it, and therefore think everyone does, when that’s not the reality.
Like, I remember someone who very obviously had OCD saying, “Everyone gets constant, upsetting intrusive thoughts, and does things to make them go away! It’s normal!” and everyone who responded to them were like, “Uh… No, it’s really not. You have a mental illness.”
I hate how everyone is so quick to assume anyone who relates to their posts without having every aspect of their mental state listed on their blog is obviously an evil, appropriating neurotypical. Maybe they are technically neurotypical, but have one or two traits associated with whatever form of neurodivergence. Maybe they’re neurodivergent and just don’t feel like listing it. Maybe they think they’re neurotypical, and are in the process of realising that they actually aren’t.
Please don’t be so quick to judge. This gatekeeping helps no one.
This is an extremely important point.
I know at least one trans person who didn’t realize they were trans until they were talking about how much they relate to trans things. Only, it was in the context of being dismissive of trans people. “Oh, sure, of course you prefer those pronouns. Everyone does.” But that wasn’t a cis person being dismissive of trans experiences; it was a trans person not understanding that they were trans.
Same thing with a lot of mental illness stuff.
Honestly, if you relate to an experience, you have the experience. Doesn’t matter whether you have it for the same reason someone else does.
On a similar note that I was thinking about recently: perhaps some neurodivergent people who are dismissed by their parents have neurodivergent parents who don’t know it. Like, if your mom says “everyone has that” when you tell her about your depression, there’s a decent chance that she’s not minimizing you, she just has depression herself and doesn’t realize it.
Bless you all
Also important to note that not everyone lists these things on their blog.
Ive had someone angrily come at me in messages because I was reblogging BPD posts when I “didn’t have BPD” but when I explained that I do, in fact, have Borderline Personality Disorder, they were apologetic but that doesn’t take back the distress their ask caused. Same thing with gender issues.
Please don’t assume that everyone on tumblr is willing to list their mental illnesses on their sidebar like a badge.
Please don’t assume that everyone on tumblr is willing to list their mental illnesses on their sidebar like a badge.
special snowflake mental illness gatekeepers are the reason i choose not to be so public about my illness. it has taken years of fucking terrifying self searching and personal struggle to build a normal and functional identity and I don’t want your velvet ropes around how I handle my brain
There’s also…sometimes we reblog things for a friend. Because not everyone follows the same blogs, they might not see what we see. And we think maybe they’d want to see that post. And no, we’re not always gonna tag or ‘at’ a person who we hope sees a particular post, because they might not be out about whatever topic is in the post. Or we think they’d be interested, but not necessarily comfortable having their username attached.
do u have those mutuals who are like WAY COOLER THAN U and when they reblog/like ur stuff ur just like 👀💯✔️👀
I think I would literally die if my fam found my tumblr like who do u explain why I have so much gayness and sh** and can u imagine dinner
*cringes for eternity *Dude i casually mentioned my blog once to my professor at uni and he asked my url so he could check it out. my friend laughed out loud and said “pls dont”
whimsysmayhem 