#I think the mass exodus of tumblr people is getting to me

[cinnamontoastensketches]

It's almost Volo time~ I'm so pumped~~~

[smileposting]

one of the Big Hurdles for me when it comes to thinking about the drain is trying to strike that balance between "engages meaningfully with GGG's Overarching Themes" and "could plausibly exist in a saturday morning cartoon setting, goofs and all." with that said here's some of my favorite ideas i've gathered from both me own brain and mutuals on discord/bluesky. unless stated otherwise none of these are Necessarily meant to overlap with one another. But They Can.

though the environment is harsh and resources are scarce, drain society itself is rather mundane. the twist is that both the grove and the drain are convinced that the other island is the worst possible fate that could befall anyone ("i hear nobody ever gets to leave the drain" vs "those who leave for the grove never come back...") and the bonkers fucking yonkers geography going on between them does not help. should they ever make proper contact postcanon there will be a lot of initial confusion. this one came about from spitballing with my lovely mutual momo who is Not on tumblr but has made some beautiful art/exploration of drain environments.

my other mutual cici's brought up the idea of there being a Drain-Specific Branch of the bizzyboys meant to look after those still in the drain + the org As A Whole reforming into a sort of mutual aid/outreach program thing (or at least such a group being set up in their place) which i also think is cool. something something embracing one's roots/place of origin albeit in a kind of roundabout way rather than shunning them entirely. i also like the idea of like, the drain branch getting news of the disbandment of the surface branch and coming up to have, ah, some strong words with hector about how if he's really gonna turn himself around then he's gotta help them get their shit sorted, too. after all, every good grove citizen knows you don't maintain a paradise through being complacent!

i know i talk about the idea that the drain is the idea of oblivion/irrelevance made manifest to be like an inverse of the grove being all about preservation and archival and recordkeeping and history In General. but i'm about to do it again: i think there's something kinda beautiful n bittersweet about the idea of there being genuine communities that have formed among people deemed Forgotten. our environment may quite literally be out to fucking kill us and any progeny we may have in here but i want you alive and hey that's gotta count for somethin'. i think this also presents a cool lil moral conundrum that could be explored in postcanon fanwork. like from the perspective of someone who's like. ok well what if i don't want to be forgotten but i also don't want to uproot my whole goddamn house just to be remembered. what if i just want to fix my house. after all, isn't that just as metal as a mass exodus?

i don't really have an end goal here i just think fan speculation meeting worldbuilding is sick as fuck lol. what are y'alls favorite ideas for the drain?

[sreegs]

do you think the 2019 tumblr acquisition was made on a more optimistic note? In terms of how they thought the site could have been made profitable or at least self-sustaining.

yeah it felt good at the time because tumblr was owned by Verizon. switching hands to a company that was at least aligned with what tumblr does (blogging) and a private company made it feel like Tumblr had a chance to refocus and reprioritize, but Automattic was not a good fit for Tumblr culture

because tumblr was mostly nyc based and had things like, observed public holidays, and an office (this was pre-pandemic). there was this transitional period where tumblr was treated with some exceptions while they adjusted to the Automattic way of things. this strengthened the divide as seasoned Automattic employees saw us as getting special treatment like sub-competitive wages (as compared to absolutely not competitive wages) and a day off during national holidays.

this transitional policy was loosely documented and adhered to, and was unceremoniously ended by a decree from the top that Tumblr no longer has holidays off. i'm not going to say which national holiday triggered this change of heart but, lol, it's a doozy

additionally there were only a handful of automattic people who understood what tumblr was, and much less who understood the vibe of Tumblr's userbase. i know there were at least a few people who thought Tumblr was an analog of wordpress and didnt even know the dashboard existed

Tumblr employees started leaving en masse because their benefits and compensation were cut. Mullenwig's seagull style of management and the general disconnect between Automattic and Tumblr culture accelerated the exodus. I remember reading on Automattic's anonymous employee-only message board (yeah.) employees expressing their happiness that the "lazy overpaid Verizon acqui-hires" (the Tumblr staff, who had lower salaries than other tech companies and never identified as Verizon or Yahoo or anything except Tumblr) were being shed like dead weight and soon it will be Automattic in charge of everything

Also, side note: Automattic is weirdly anti-profanity as an unofficial workplace policy ordained from the CEO. How's that gonna fit with Tumblr?

So the initial feelings of freedom from Verizon and opportunity to work on things that might turn Tumblr around were dampened under the wet blanket of pay cuts, benefit cuts, cuts to time off (Automattic has "unlimited" vacation, lol), bad management, and an unwelcoming attitude from naysayers

The remaining old pre-2019 staff are very, very few in number. It's mostly Automattic's show now, and you can see how that's working out for them. i was once hopeful it would work out for Tumblr but that hope has long waned. it would not surprise me if the biggest advances toward profitability have been due to employees leaving Tumblr and not being replaced

[mikurulucky]

has tumblr always been crawling with proshippers and proship views like this? has it decreased recently after the mass exodus? or did it get worse?

Since 2013 before I even saw anyone criticize that shit on a regular basis, hell I think people who criticized ships of that nature (adult/minor, incest, abusive, etc etc) they were called sjws back then. 2014 was when I saw the criticism and got confused because those kind of ships were so normalized to me, and then I saw death threats get sent to proshippers which only pushed me further into that sphere. Took me some years to actually hear out the other side and get out of the proship side of tumblr for good.

As far as whether it got worse or not, I think it's mostly the same as it always was for the most part, but it did get bad on twitter prior to twitter going to shit.

Also still seeing the occasional antishipper wishing death on proshippers which makes me think "Bro... that ain't gonna help, stop that." Like, it's better to educate others about this stuff than to go the aggressive route like that, and sadly a lot of the aggressive threat hurling varieties tend to be quite young.

Also took me until a couple years ago to witness a proshipper sending death threats to an anti, that's when I realized that the aggressive harassing types are on both sides of the whole thing and that basically just prolongs the proship issue and it ruins others' mental health. Like, if you post death wishes towards proshippers, a young or even underage person groomed into the proship sphere is gonna look at that and that'll traumatize them, or worse. It harms more than it helps, same goes with proshippers sending that shit to antishippers, how do y'all think underage antishippers feel about that? That shit's gotta stop on both sides if we want this whole thing to improve.

Sorry for the ramble, but long story short:

[37q]

not even being resentful or engaging in bad faith here i genuinely think social justice voyeurs on tumblr got burnt out on reading critiques of stuff they didnt have the energy or drive to negotiate with in their personal lives.

this happened around 2017 ish, maybe before the twt exodus, when at some point the voiceless masses stopped reblogging those deeper critiques based on years of foundational build-up bcuz so many ppl were, until then, just suspending their disbelief for their "listen to marginalized voices" performance, and whatever that breaking point was made them shift from "nuanced interrogation" to "passive survival".

like during the pandemic for ex people got upset and were very smart sometimes, and then people got so mad at people getting upset, and then we all sucked back in to our most comfortable self-affirmations like how humor was one of the only things keeping intangible friend groups together. sure as hell cant bond forever over complex trauma.

my god the elevation of humor as like a social object over all critique and action... the virology of privately shared memes, the black and white publicity of thoughtfulness; if youre not fully entrenched in or committed to alternative lifestyles then the role humor plays in your group identity formation will be of status quo comfort.

humor pulls the ends of something we know and plucks it to make the sound of our laughter, with the distance and tension between the poles producing the frequency. and the thing about comfort is that... well actually i dont care to get into it like that. all i know is that nostalgia and comfort are crazy for anyone under, like, 45-50 at this point, and any kinda of meme can serve that purpose.

we dont see these objects of humor as any thing. they exist only in our appreciation, a prompt without cause. its so odd to me because i feel like it was only yday that ppl were unafraid to get long-winded about something seemingly innocuous, but now anything serious over a joke is just totally inappropriate.

i feel like so many ppl have jettisoned their critical compassion for the sake of small pleasures. sometimes i dont blame them because if i could find a cheap laugh somewhere id take it, but then i come back to my reality where cheap laughs are blatantly reactionary. it makes me wanna throw up a lil what my friends friends can detach from enough to laugh at.

see thats the thing about humor being elevated to its status as a social object -- we dont see anything for what it is or what it does, we detach it from social life but now our social life from it. we need to push back against "maybe the curtains are just blue", because its seriously meddling with ppls willingness to interrogate how we ourselves interpret seemingly neutral messaging!

its not intentional, because nobodys signing up to shill for their prison anymore, but we carry with us all the funny little stigmas that feel good to pluck, and it feels even better to pluck them in an orchestra! we "propagandize" ourselves and each other: the "cop in our head" seeks safety and order, and she conditions our social instincts to decay and stasis instead of growth. be skeptical of comfort!

we are given the tools to make meaning and play with it, but so many ppl are just too tired to consider who made those tools! the value we derive from humor and its conditions comes from somewhere, and its our responsibility to trace the ethical lineage of our actions imo!

[dreaming-colourful-skies]

Hello again 👋

I am... not sure if a mass exodus to Tumblr is happening? Or if any of my mutuals from years ago are still active? 😅

If anyone cares and/or if I ever, like, relaunch this acct, lil fandom update &... context statement I guess! 

It’s getting long so I’ll hide it behind a “Read More”. But if you’re hemming and hawing over a follow or have a weird “you shipped that??” moment then feel free to take a look!

(And welcome to my page 🎉)

Past: FMA & Brotherhood

I stand by my older writing, at least to the extent you can see your old stuff without cringing too hard ahaha.

That said, I wouldn’t say I currently ship this pairing. Their fanon interpretation is in my memories fondly, especially from certain authors, but I’ll be honest, the ship did not occur to me while I was watching the show itself. I think part of the beauty of fandom is that transformative aspect, and I did appreciate experiencing the anime and manga in a new way through fanfiction.

I never set out to ship somewhat “problematically”, stumbling into it as FMA’s most popular Ao3 ship at the time. For my own writing, I consistently made it clear that Ed was an adult (like, at least 20), maybe Roy younger if an AU, and adjusted things like employment context to minimize power imbalances, because that was important to me.

Can people ship them in different ways, incl. age gap, boss/employee, etc.? Sure! I’m not out here to judge and don’t really want to touch that, tbh. It’s important to me that we can all create fandom in the ways that are meaningful to us, tag, curate our own experiences, and mute or click away as preferred, but I’m also too sensitive to dive properly into Discourse around these things (I mean, I’m out here creating soft bantery fluff hahaha) so that mismatch was a bit of a deterrent. Nuance is difficult online, and often in short supply.

Leaving was a weird combo of fandom getting quieter, inspo leaving me, and I guess life stuff. Tl;dr I’m pretty “ship and let ship” and against harassing any creators, but my own take was gentle and if it makes anyone comfier, I did want to add that context!

Little did I know that I would later stumble into a whole different arena of “don’t call me short, bastard!” exchanges.

Past: Carry On

My time in this fandom was fun! Ngl, there was no issue or major reason for leaving; I simply read the second and third books, once the third was out, and lost inspiration. 😅 What can you do?

CQL/MDZS, HQ

These fandoms are still dear to me, but I didn’t end up creating content for them for a couple of reasons. Perhaps someday if it makes sense!

Bungou Stray Dogs

It’s been... idk, eight months of BSD obsession? Six months writing it on Ao3 (Colourful_skies), in any case! If I do move back to Tumblr, I’m sure you’ll hear more. As of now, I’ve published ~65k in that time, which is... hard to compare, I suppose, but a high rate for me personally! I don’t know if that will continue, but at this point, I hope so. More recently I’ve attempted a bit more engagement w others, which has been fun.

In short, Soukoku and especially Chuuya have my heart, and I also really appreciate Sigma. I tend to write soft skk, fluff, and introspective fics, but mentioning that simply for context; I prefer to follow wherever inspiration leads me. Analysis is also v fun, including drawing connections with BSD authors’ works and making non-BSD poems or songs about skk/Chuuya, but idk if I would post about these topics here.

Moving forward, I hope to continue to work on my craft and brainrot over BSD & fandom with other lovely people, until my inspiration or mental wellness (?) lead me elsewhere.

Thanks for visiting my page! 🌻

[duhragonball]

UAWC Update: 20,070

All right, I'm 40% of the way to my goal for the month. I don't have a lot to add to that, so I'll take this time to mention that I left Twitter last week.

I didn't have a very big Twitter footprint, so I don't think it matter much, but if anyone cares, I got more active on the thing in 2019, after Tumblr instituted the porn ban and everyone thought the site would go out of business or something. For years, my profile just read "I sure hope Tumblr doesn't self-destruct", because I really never understood what to do with Twitter and I was only using it in case people couldn't find me through Tumblr.

And I did tweet stuff over that five year period. Nothing particularly interesting, I think, but I guess I got something out of it. Then Elon Musk bought the thing, and I decided to stick around and watch it decay. I had to turn off DM's because I kept getting messages from spambots, likes became private, except sometimes they weren't? I'm not sure? The Trending tags section seemed to malfunction a lot. Gradually, everything you'd go to the site to do got a little shittier.

Eventually I got fed up with using it on mobile, so I deleted the app from my phone. On Firefox, I can actually block all the shitty ads, and that made the experience much easier to deal with, and also I couldn't use Twitter unless I was at home, which probably helped my mental health a lot.

Then the Brazil fiasco happened, when Elon tried to play hardball with the Brazillian government. I forget all the details, but the short version is that for a while it became illegal for Brazillian citizens to access Twitter, because Elon wouldn't implement the content moderation required by their laws. Using a VPN to get around this would incur a steep fine. So a lot of Brazillians made the jump to Bluesky.

I was on a trip when the Terms of Service thing changed, so when I got home I logged in for the first time in a while and there was this stupid message telling me I couldn't use the site until I agreed to the TOS. And the TOS said that anything I wrote or any images I posted would be used for training AI, and that was the last straw for me. I got a Bluesky account late last year, but I hadn't used it much because there was so little activity. But when the Brazil thing happened, there was a big influx of users, and I'm not sure it ever stopped. So by the end of October I was checking both sites, and a lot of the people I followed were making the jump, and it seemed like I might as well cut the cord on Twitter. The AI thing just gave me a good reason to go through with it.

From what I hear, there's another mass exodus going on now. I know Elon implemented some change to the block feature where the people you block can still read your tweets, and that really pissed people off, and the U.S. Election seems to have been a catalyst. I heard Taylor Swift fans are leaving the site in droves, but that could be for all sorts of reasons, really.

I'm a little curious what the current state of Twitter is right now, but that's exactly why I deleted my account. Even when I could log in, I couldn't really tell what was going on, so this way I save myself the hassle.

If you're still using Twitter, my advice is to just quit cold turkey. Delete your account, or if you're worried about people using your handle after you're gone, I guess you can delete all your tweets and go private. I don't know. Me, I'd rather make a clean break. Bluesky is shaping up nicely, and if you want to find me there, the handle is the same. But there's nothing left for you on Twitter, trust me.

[msfbgraves]

@staff I understand that some of the money people may want to capitalise on the influx of people who have come here. They smell money. But the reason these people came here was to get away from the complete unusability that came with... capitalisation.

The other platforms got so greedy they alienated their userbase and now they think people can do the exact same to Tumblr and not cause a mass exodus in two years? If Tumblr can simply not afford to exist without setting fire to itself like this, tell us the money you need, or the people that make this place attractive in the first place will leave, and with it, the advertisers you hope for.

We know this place cannot exist without the money to run it, we know the same about Ao3... but have you considered staying you? If being you in all your weirdness is demonstrably attractive... why would advertisers not want to pay for it? Actually cash money?

Or tell us what you need to stay out of the hands of the money people. Facebook and Insta are revolting. Tiktok radicalises people within a day. We have no choice but to build Tumblr as part of the Organisation For Transformative Works if you become like them. Please be open as to what you need, don't let them set you on fire like they did Twitter and Reddit. We want our little Hellsite. We will probably rebuild again, but please, pre-empt that. Please be wiser. Let all those advertisers simply use their multibillion dollar marketing shrinks to figure us out because you have a solid foundation here and the people forming it, making sure the more marketable people can play.

Streaming has already become so shit it may bring Hollywood to a standstill. Please @staff if anyone among you can get anyone at all to listen - and believe me I understand, maybe none of you can and I don't blame you. But if you can reach anyone at all... try!

An open letter to @staff

I already submitted this to Support under "Feedback," but I'm sharing it here too as I don't expect it to get a response, and I feel like putting in out in public may be more effective than sending it off into the void.

The recent post on the Staff blog about changing tumblr to an algorithmic feed features a large amount of misinformation that I feel staff needs to address, openly and honestly, with information on where this data was sourced at the very least.

Claim 1: Algorithms help small creators.

This is false, as algorithms are designed to push content that gets engagement in order to get it more engagement, thereby assuring that the popular remain popular and the small remain small except in instances of extreme luck.

This can already be seen on the tumblr radar, which is a combination of staff picks (usually the same half-dozen fandoms or niche special interests like Lego photography) which already have a ton of engagement, or posts that are getting enough engagement to hit the radar organically. Tumblr has an algorithm that runs like every other socmed algorithm on the planet, and it will decimate the reach of small creators just like every other platform before it.

Claim 2: Only a small portion of users utilize the chronological feed.

You can find a poll by user @darkwood-sleddog here that at the time of writing this, sits at over 40 THOUSAND responses showing that over 96 percent of them use the chronological feed. Claiming otherwise isn't just a misstatement, it's a lie. You are lying to your core userbase and expecting them to accept it as fact. It's not just unethical, it's insulting to people who have been supporting your platform for over a decade.

Claim 3: Tumblr is not easy to use.

This is also 100% false and you ABSOLUTELY know it. Tumblr is EXTREMELY easy to use, the issue is that the documentation, the explanations of features, and often even the stability of the service is subpar. All of this would be very easy for staff to fix, if they would invest in the creation of walkthroughs and clear explanations of how various site features work, as well as finally fixing the search function. Your inability to explain how your service works should not result in completely ignoring the needs and wants of your core long-term userbase. The fact that you're more willing to invest in the very systems that have made every other form of social media so horrifically toxic than in trying to make it easier for people to use the service AS IT WORKS NOW and fixing the parts that don't work as well speaks volumes toward what tumblr staff actually cares about.

You will not get a paycheck if your platform becomes defunct, and the thing that makes it special right now is that it is the ONLY large-scale socmed platform on THE ENTIRE INTERNET with a true chronological feed and no aggressive algorithmic content serving. The recent post from staff indicates that you are going to kill that, and are insisting that it's what we want. It is not. I'd hazard to guess that most of the dev team knows it isn't what we want, but I assume the money people don't care. The user base isn't relevant, just how much money they can bring in.

The CEO stated he wanted this to remain as sort of the last bastion of the Old Internet, and yet here we are, watching you declare you intend to burn it to the ground.

You can do so much better than this.

Response to the Update

Under the cut for readability, because everything said above still applies.

I already said this in a reblog on the post itself, but I'm adding it to this one for easy access: people read it that way because that's what you said.

Staff considers the main feed as it exists to be "outdated," to the point that you literally used that word to describe it, and the main goals expressed in this announcement is to figure out what makes "high-quality content" and serve that to users moving forward.

People read it that way because that is what you said.

[pupintransit]

The thing about social media is that it's a demon that steals your happiness. They say that comparison is thief of joy, and boy howdy does social media love encouraging people to do that. It's bad for the mind to obsess over it, and I do my best to avoid doing that. So you can imagine my dilemma now that I've picked online sex work as a second job for when I'm post-op, which nessecitates having an online presence.

Fuck.

Well, this is the path I've chosen so let's see if i can unpack this a touch. What causes me the most dread about my online presence is, predictably, when posts don't do as well as I would have hoped. Duh, right? Obviously you'd be bummed if the content you made doesn't resonate with folks. What are some reasons a post might not do well?

It was posted at an inopportune time of day. Statistically most of my audience is from the eastern United States, the UK, and northern Europe. If I'm posting my content at 630 in the morning PST, which is a couple hours after i wake up, most folks who follow me are either just ending or just starting their work day. That of course means they don't have the time to check Twitter or whatever their app of choice may be. I may wish to experiment with different submission times to see when folks most reliably view my content.

The content wasn't interesting. I stand by everything I post but obviously not everything is gonna be a winner. If a specific post doesn't resonate with folks in the way I was hoping I'll tailor my content around things that do. I can also muck around with captions to try and make engagement a little more enticing.

I'm bad at this. Not likely since the feedback I've been getting up to this point has been very positive. I have to imagine this means I'm at the very least competent at being slutty online.

My audience isn't all that big. Really there's nothing I can do about that other than put myself out there and do my best to engage folks. All that takes is time.

User bases changes on a given platform. As we know Twitter is facing a mass exodus due to it exploding all around us, and Tumblr never quite recovered from the porn ban back in 2018. Unexpected things can impact the appeal of a platform in the longterm. Poor engagement on posts may very well be because the audience for the kind of content isn't there, or that formerly active users have abandoned ship completely. Again, not much I can do about this one other than focus on platforms that have proven to be sustainable.

Seems doable now that i've laid it all out.

You may be thinking to yourself "Hey wow this guy is really overthinking posting his nudes online, I feel like it's not that big of a deal." To which I would say Hello And Welcome To My Tumblr, where talking about my various neuroses is cheaper than therapy.* If anything I write is relatable to even one person, it was worth writing and worth the risk of being teased about.

*i'm fine, i have an appointment with a new therapist next week

[exculis]

You know. I was watching a video that was discussing what the near future of desktop computing is gonna look like with the whole windows 10 situation. And i really don't think theres gonna be a mass exodus to linux OR windows 11. I think more tech savvy people that are fucking sick of windows already anyway might get into linux, the less tech savvy or the folks for some reason reliant on microsoft products will probably upgrade (or keep using windows 10 as long as they can, and then either upgrade OR:) the least tech savvy people and folks that don't have a reason NOT to will probably switch to an apple product. If they're going to need to buy a new machine to run windows 11 anyway, a lot of folks could go this route (again, assuming they don't have some hard dependency on a windows app or something) Win 11 is already off to a bad start reputation wise, and it honestly looks like its trying to be the apple os anyway.

Anyway. Im not turning off replies or rbs to this bc i don't think i have followers that care anyway, but if you find this post deep in a tumblr search or something, i dont mind discussion but don't get fucking pissed at me ok? This is just speculation from a random guy that barely knows what a computer is made out of 💛 there is better things to be angry at. i love you

[olderthannetfic]

Haah, funny thing... I was just seeing another post on Tumblr calling you out (struck-thru vowels and everything) for "propagating racism" on AO3. I think it was some years old, but it did drop something interesting. Apparently, the "real" mass-exodus to AO3 happened because too many writers on LJ were getting into fights over racism-in-writing?

--

Oh, I'm sure there are many. People often make me the posterchild, which I suppose is somewhat justified now that my tumblr is so much more popular than before but was pretty dumb in the past when I was no longer working for OTW and not yet popular with randos. (TBH, I sometimes wonder if people spreading my name around pointlessly and advertising me is what made me popular. If so, congratulations, I guess?)

I've been criticized by at the very least Rukmini Pande for not talking more about Racefail. She's an academic who talks about racism in fandom but who mega sucks on the topic of Asian media and who conflates a lot of things I don't, including ye olde SF book fandom and fanfic fandom.

It's true that Racefail was a huge deal on LJ, but it was "fandom" in the 1960s sense where the word sans modifier means WorldCon type SF book spaces. When I say "fandom", I don't mean that community because, like most fanfiction fans today, I was never in it.

I don't even come from K/S fandom, actually. I come from X-Files fandom (one of the first "digital native" fandoms that made up its own rules) and (US, English-speaking) anime fandom. Those are my actual cultural forebears, and I haven't wasted my time on the racist, sexist, homophobic oldschool SF book publishing world since I was like 13. I do consume sff canons, but they're TV or movies or manga or self-published m/m novels that are also sff.

Why would I waste my time on trying to fix that community that isn't even mine?

Anyway, when people try to tell you that fandom left LJ over something to do with race, they're talking about a massive wankfest called "Racefail" or "Racefail 2009", which enveloped all of SF fandom on LJ and inevitably spilled into lots of more fanficcy spaces because we were all adjacent and overlapping. It largely consisted of clueless white liberals going "But I'm one of the good ones!!!" and being shocked and appalled that anyone could find them racist. People spent a lot of time "defending" their friends in unproductive ways. There was a lot of self-righteous stupidity on all sides, but it was the culmination of years of completely justified anger at the SF establishment being hella fucking racist. (So the two sides were most certainly not equal. A lot of the racist stuff being pointed out was indeed extremely racist.)

Racefail was deeply unpleasant, like any wank that rips through supposed ~civil communities of friends~. In reality, of course, a lot of the people who were pissed had been pissed about micro and not-so-microaggressions for years. It was something like one of those plays or movies about suburban morality where all of the simmering tensions boil up towards the end, destroying the façade of middle class propriety. It's deeply traumatic for people who did not realize the tensions existed, but it's hard to have much sympathy for their feelings if you've been the one suffering all that time.

It is not, however, the reason people moved to AO3. AO3 had already been in the works for a couple of years by the time Racefail was everywhere in 2009 and 2010, and AO3 was not popular at that point and continued to not be popular.

What popularized AO3 was FFN fucking up in 2012.

You know why LJ fic writers moved to AO3 in 2009? Because that's the first time it opened to users.

Moreover, while Racefail certainly affected many individual fans who like fanfic, it was primarily about oldschool US SFF publishing, a thing that 99% of AO3 users could not care less about. A far higher percentage of old LJ users care, of course, but even there, it's a mistake to think fandom=fandom.

"Fandom" in the supposedly-unmarked "book SF" sense and "fandom" in the also supposedly-unmarked "fanfic fandom" sense have never been the same thing. In the early days of Star Trek fic zines, they largely overlapped, sure, but by the early 90s, they had heavily diverged, and by 2009, they were completely distinct.

The reason they keep being conflated is that some of the loudest meta writers are in both and care deeply about that SF-->K/S zines-->AO3 history.

It's fine that they do, but it is not my history, and I see no reason to pretend it is.

The people who spread this lie about AO3's origins have an agenda, and it is not to educate the current tumblr masses about Racefail.

[finallydelight]

Hello! I sent this ask a while ago so I'm pretty sure Tumblr decided to nom all the asks I sent that day since it seems like none of them went to any of the people I sent them to 😓😓

Anyways, I was just wondering if you'd ever do something based on The Tag and/or Mousebusters? Those were such fun episodes so I think it'd be cool to see your take on them and where Ming fits in!

Have an awesome day/night! <333

Hi!

Thank you so much for the request, I'm sorry that your asks didn't go through, tumblr is a bitch.

Thanks for showing interest in Ming, it warms my heart.

Have a great day/night yourself <333

lots of love from Jenny :)

EP. 31 MOUSEBUSTERS #1 | Ming Going Seventeen

a/n: what's in between [/] are captions :)

''Our last rat is Kim Ming.'' Seungkwan announces, pointing at the screen next to him.

Her profile:

MING (Cutie)

master at aegyo

very smart

The members make 'aw' noises upon seeing Ming's profile and picture of her in the mouse outfit.

Seungkwan interrupts them. ''She might look cute, but she is the most dangerous rat of them all!'' He tells the members, making a lot of hand gestures.

''How come?'' Joshua asks, going along with Seungkwan.

''She will lure you in with her charms and then BOOM!'' He yells, making some of the members flinch by the sudden loudness.

''She'll eat you.'' He finishes.

Dokyeom gets up from his chair. ''EAT US? We have to stop her!''

''No, how come someone so cute, can be so dangerous?'' Jeonghan says.

Seungkwan gets closer to Jeonghan. ''See! That's her trap! People don't believe someone like her can be a mean rat, but once they get closer to her, she takes them!'' He tells his older member, as dramatic as possible.

''Then we have to send someone after her who can resist her charms!'' Mingyu orders.

All the members look at each other and a silence falls.

[ERROR FOUND]

Dino breaks the silence. ''I can do it!''

[Brave Maknae]

''She'll kill you first.'' Seungkwan denies Dino. The members laugh at the quick reaction, while Dino just accepts it.

Vernon comes up with a strategy. ''We just have to get her to run, then we can catch her.'' The members agree.

''Yeah, she's not a very good runner.'' Mingyu says.

''But she's smart, so she'll have a good hiding spot.'' Coups argued him.

Seungkwan finishes up Ming's profile. ''She'll be the one to look out for.''

While the busters decided on nicknames and strategies to catch the rats, the rats went over their abilities.

''We need to set the rats' abilities.'' Wonwoo started.

Hoshi chimed in. ''We have to divide the skills and...'' He got interrupted by Jun imitating the sound that a rat makes.

''There's the mass exodus which you can take everyone out of the jail.'' Woozi reminded.

''And three long distance escapes.'' Wonwoo added.

''And summoning!'' ''Summoning!'' Ming and Jun said at the same time, they gave each other a high five.

Hoshi also explained that after an hour has passed, the rats will be able to use their special abilities.

''Let's all lie.'' Hoshi laughed.

The five members joked around with the secret abilities, making each other laugh.

''The 96s are really good at it, actually?'' Hoshi stated.

Ming stopped laughing and looked at Hoshi, with a very (jokingly) serious look on her face.

[Ming-noona]

Woozi chuckled. ''Come to think of it, the 96s didn't get to gather well.'' He continued.

''What is the year of mouse? Kyungja-yeon?'' Hoshi asked the staff in front of them.

''Hey! If you're gonna tease me, at least do it well.'' Ming countered.

The 96-liners laughed at her reaction. Hoshi clinged onto Ming, finding her facial expressions hilarious.

She turned to the staff. ''Why am I here actually? Or did my age change without my knowledge?'' She asked.

''We just needed a fifth rat.'' Their producer said, casually.

''And their first thought went to you.'' Jun added, although it came out funnier than he intended to.

Ming turned her body to look at Jun. ''Are you saying I look like a rat?''

He waved his hands in front of him and shook his head. ''I don't think you look like a rat, but the staff obviously do.'' He clarified, again much funnier than he intended.

After everyone calmed down a bit from the laughing, Hoshi suggested a team name.

''I know what suits for rat. How about 'No Kidding' for our name?'' He suggested.

The members agreed and they did a little greeting, saying the name in sync.

Then, they heard one of the staff members announce through the microphone that the rats should go find their hiding spots.

The other rats started running, while Ming just slowly walked. ''Why are they running already? We have enough time to hide.'' Ming complains.

''Where should I hide?'' Ming said to herself, while looking around the area, she had been walking for a few minutes already.

She looked at the big white veils that were used as covers, so the products of the place they used were protected.

She slowly looks at her camera man. She points at the white veil, as to say ''Should we get under here?''

He simply shrugged and Ming pulled the veil up for him to go in first. Ming quickly made herself comfortable and sat herself down, next to one of the pallets under the veil and she leaned her head against it.

''Now we just wait.'' She said to the camera.

A few minutes passed by and her camera man informed her that the game had officially started, meaning the mousebusters had started looking for them.

Suddenly, she heard people close by her hiding spot.

''Do you want to search here then? I will stay here, they may come out.'' She recognized Vernon's voice.

''I will find them quick. Stay here.'' The other voice was Chan.

She motioned for the camera man to be quiet, but after a while Vernon also went away.

She sighed. ''Wow, I can't believe they didn't look under here. They're idiots.'' She told the camera.

[Tough Maknae Love]

Ming honestly didn't have any plans to move, she realized the members weren't going to look under the veils and she wasn't in the mood to be chased by them.

Her thoughts were interrupted when she heard Jeonghan speaking. ''It seems hard to find them but we should try,'' She smirked at Jeonghan's words. ''I think they went this way earlier...'' Jeonghan stopped talking. He had stopped right in front of Ming's hiding place.

''THERE'S THE RAT!'' He yelled, loudly. Ming panicked thinking she got caught, but was confused as she heard Jeonghan running away.

She took a couple of big breaths, visibly relieved that it was another rat.

''Woah, oppa, I really thought they had found me already.'' She said to the camera man. He chuckled at the girl's words.

Ming and the camera man had a hard time holding in their laughter. They would hear the other members close to their hiding spot, running and yelling trying to catch one of the rats.

She had a proud look on her face when she heard the busters talk about how they failed to catch Jun. She held up a thumbs up to the camera.

[Proud Rat]

During the first 10 minutes of the game, she had heard a lot of commotion outside. When she heard more people running outside of their hiding spot, she smirked at her camera man.

''Oppa, you must be happy you're with me, right?'' She teased him, referring to the fact that they had just been chilling, instead of running.

He nodded. ''I'm very happy, Ming-ssi.''

-----

Back at the headquarters of the busters, they felt frustrated.

''I think Hoshi-hyung an Ming-ah are hiding somewhere where nobody knows about.'' Chan said.

Mingyu sighed. ''I really thought I would catch Ming, but I don't think that's going to happen.''

[Outsmarted by a rat]

-----

''I think the game has started again.'' Ming's camera man said to her. She nodded at his words, she thought about something.

''Can I take a nap?'' She asked him.

He shrugged his shoulder. ''Because I have a photoshoot later and I need some beauty sleep.'' She explained to him.

He nodded. ''If there's danger, you can just wake me up.'' She told him.

He nodded again, slightly laughing, finding the girl's antics funny.

Ming put her head on one of the pallets and closed her eyes.

While Ming was doing her beauty sleep, Woozi had used his summoning skill for the second time, sending the busters back to their headquarters.

''Hoshi and Ming are still not here.'' Minghao exclaimed in frustration.

''Where is Ming?'' Chan asked the members. ''Has anyone seen Ming?'' The camera cuts to Ming sleeping in her hiding spot.

[Sleeping Beauty Found]

''Ming and Hoshi must be hiding somewhere deep.'' Jeonghan noted.

The members agreed. ''I want to catch Ming and Hoshi.'' Chan said, full of determination.

Taglist: @lunarxsun @cosmicwintr @mythicalamphitrite

[general-radix]

Welp. There’s another mass exodus revving up on dA because they made it opt-in by default for your art to be used to train AI datasets; there’s a Google Docs form you can fill out to hopefully be excluded from this mess, but it’s not guaranteed. Nor is it guaranteed that going through and manually opting out every single image you’ve ever uploaded will keep your art from getting scraped.

While I do think AI art has its place (especially for people who literally cannot make art the traditional way due to disability), this was not the way to handle it at all. And now it’s possible that I’m gonna lose the only real audience I have over this.

I’d really appreciate it if more people could follow me over here and share/engage with my stuff, because tumblr is probably going to be my main “base of operations”, so to speak, and, well. I’m lucky if I get ten notes on any given art post.

[theliterarywolf]

I was completely deadpan and curt in my survey. Honestly I don’t think anyone but staff thought this would ever be a good idea.

It's like... the educator in me wants to say that maybe some people on tumblr's payroll briefly mentioned 'Hey, maybe this isn't the right course of action' But they were drowned out by the vocal majority.

Because, yeah, there are too many red signs and foghorns with this that say 'Caution! Alert! Do not proceed! What the fuck is wrong with you?'

Even if. Even fucking IF such a 'feature' as Post+ were to be universally praised and rolled out, @staff has forgotten one itsy-bitsy teeny microscopic little detail.

Ahem.

YOU CAN'T FUCKING MONETIZE FAN-CONTENT ON A PUBLIC, COMMERCIAL SCALE. You MONUMENTAL IDIOTS.

Despite how much Tumblr wants to pretend and lie to investors and advertisers that the core userbase of tumblr is composed of families and aesthetic hipster bloggers, it's not. It's primarily people who like the notion of having a fandom-hub enough to deal with this hellsite's bullshit on the regular.

You can't make money off of fanwork of copywritten material. Even for those people who do, it's a shaky bit of business that typically relies on creative renaming (how much Pokemon merch do you see on places like RedBubble and Etsy creatively retitled to 'Cute Pocket Creature'?) or flying straight into the face of the gods, spitting on their robe, and just getting really good at hiding and relocating?

So, if they REALLY want to do this, if they are SO desperate for revenue and so STUPID about it that they would gouge out their own heart rather than putting on a new coat, they're going to end up banning fandom content from here.

Because they will be SO stubborn and ignorant that they'll insist that implementing Post+ will fix everything and that 'if people want fandom stuff, there are tons of other places to get it~' that it will be the final blow for the few people who are still on here and another mass-exodus will occur: leaving staff alone with no one but their pornbots.

Which, at this point, might be what they want!

[baejax-the-great]

I should mention that this is a bet many, many failed businesses have made. Over time, they degrade the experience of the loyal users/customers in search of more money, and with each change that makes the product shittier that doesn't result in an exodus, the business thinks, "cool, we can keep going."

This is, of course, a fallacy. Eventually there is a tipping point where the majority of users/customers get fed the fuck up and leave, and even if that business tries to roll back the most recent change that sent everyone scattering, it's too late. Every other shitty change is still on people's minds, and they are done. They have moved on.

Will tumblr's upcoming changes cause a mass exodus? Maybe. I can tell you that my own experience talking to employees at tumblr have given me zero faith that this place will be a functioning business a year from today.

The reason that staff doesn't listen to user complaints is that they already got us. If you look at the polls, every one shows that the average user has been here like ten years, and we've tolerated every stupid fucking change that's happened in those ten years, including even the porn ban.

Tumblr wants to get NEW people coming in, and they are betting that turning this place into lame Twitter will accomplish this (it won't) and that the captive current users won't leave.

We might all harp on what we like about Tumblr (chronological timeline amongst other things), but they don't care. As far as they are concerned, they don't need to please us. Their eyes are on the mythical shiny new people

[griffinblogsgw2]

What Killed The GW2 Tumblr Fandom?

(And I do just mean the tumblr fandom. I’ve not really noticed the fandom as a whole having this problem.)

So full disclosure before I talk about what I’ve noticed personally and why I think this jazz is happening: I’ve never been the most active in this fandom. I’ve tried to be in the past but even at my peak I’ve always felt a lil outside of everything? I’ve been playing GW2 since launch and I’ve been making a Gw2 comic at @torasteals for the fandom for almost 5 years at this point. For most of that time I’ve felt like some weirdo tossing shit into the void and only vaguely being aware of what else was going on in the tumblr fandom beyond the few blogs I followed. I want y’all to keep this in mind cause it does paint my perception of what I’ve seen as different from someone who may have been far more involved in the fandom than me.

Okay with that in mind...

Here’s what I’ve noticed:

The death of engagement within the GW2 fandom as I’ve noticed it seems tied to at least three things: Tumblrpocalypse of 2018, the migration to FFXIV, and the Pandemic of 2020.

Tumblrpocalypse of 2018

Does anyone else remember this shit? Tumblr had that change of policy around nsfw art and changed how they treat links that basically murdered a bunch of creators on tumblr? Everyone remember the mass exodus of artists and creators leaving tumblr for twitter? Yeah tumblr has definitely chugged along alive since, somehow miraculously, but the effects of this can still be felt to this day. We lost a large chunk of creators for the fandom during this. I wouldn’t be surprised if a large chunk of fans, who don’t create fan works, left for this reason as well.

Personally, tumblr’s changes in policy and algorithm during this time nearly killed my comic. I lost a lot of readers and a lot of engagement with my work. I wouldn’t be surprised if other artists went through something similar here.

Even so, I do recall there still being a lot of creators that held on during this time and who persisted to create works on tumblr. But then...

The Migration to FFXIV

From what I’ve seen, a lot of people, creators and just fans alike, have simply moved on from GW2 to FFXIV. Like, a LOT of them. Nearly every artist that I used to follow for GW2 content just doesn’t do that anymore. Nearly all of them have moved onto FFXIV (and sometimes some other game entirely, but it’s usually FFXIV). I don’t know what this says about the state of the game itself right now, but I’m not sure we’re getting as many new fans as we’re losing right now. That might change when End of Dragons is released, since expansions have always historically brought in an influx of new blood, but I’m no fortune-teller.

As it currently stands, I legitimately don’t know how many of us are left in this fandom. Hell, I still regularly make content for this fandom weekly and I can tell you I’ve been burned out on the game and needing a break from it for awhile now. I wouldn’t be surprised if this isn’t a common feeling.

Pandemic of 2020

I would honestly argue that this is what put the nails in the coffin for the fandom at present. I couldn’t begin to tell you exact reasons why, but I can tell you that as soon as shit really hit the fan last year, engagement in this fandom basically died. My posts that used to get a handful of reblogs, have turned to nearly zero over the course of this crisis.

My dashboard used to be littered in GW2 posts. So much so that even if I didn’t directly follow them, I could tell you who the big names in the tumblr fandom were. I can’t do that anymore. I have no idea who is big and popular on here anymore. It’s not just that people have stopped engaging, it’s that people have stopped creating as well. I’ve seen honest to god radio silence from creators who used to dominate the GW2 tag.

Again I’ve got nothing but guesses as to why this is? COVID has done a number on all of us I think. It’s harder to create and it’s harder to engage. It’s incredibly depressing on a number of fronts.

So is this it then?

I’d like to hope it isn’t?

I don’t really want to end this on such a doom and gloom note, and I’m sorry for that. I don’t think the fandom will straight up die forever but I do think we’re havin’ it rough right now. And there’s no guarantee of when shit’ll pick back up again as far as I’m aware.

If anyone else has thoughts on this, I’d love to hear it. I’m sure my picture of what I’ve been seeing is incomplete, so if anyone has stuff to add or has noticed things I’ve straight up been blind to, I’d be very curious to know.