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freedom-of-fanfic · 7 years

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I have been reading and reblogging some of your posts and wanted to thank you for that detailed account. I have been out of fandom for a while, and antis really baffled me at first. But now I have a question: Could you talk some more about how current antis relate back to the LJ social justice scene and when the morph from debating fanworks to dissing people happened? Thank you!

I’m glad you’ve been enjoying this blog!

I think this reddit post does a nice job of summarizing the history of fandom and how it’s led to our current point. But I’m going to go more into how tumblr’s very structure led to a ‘race to the bottom’ sort of enacting of punishment via social justice.

Almost all of this is from personal observation, having been here since late 2010.

To get more into the actual history of it: Racefail ‘09 is the name given to the big, public 2009 debates about racism in genre fiction (published fantasy and sci-fi), which happened primarily on livejournal and private websites. (Racefail was itself the result of the rising awareness of social justice in the real world thanks to the democratization of information via the internet.) Racefail raised a couple of big questions: were non-white (and non-straight/non-cis/non-male) creators being silenced and erased in published genre fiction? And were the stories being told primarily racist/sexist/homophobic and lacking in representation for non-white/Western cultures (and LGBT+/queer/female stories)?

From everything I’ve read I feel like a lot of good came out of these talks; in particular, it greatly raised the awareness of social justice in genre fiction and fandom spaces - which had been there before, but not quite so prominent. But one major bad came out of it: it revealed, via the shitty behavior of one member of the genre fiction community, how social justice could easily be used as a silencing tactic by applying arguments meant to dismantle power structures to individuals who may (or may not!) benefit from those power structures.

Fast-forward to 2010-2012 tumblr. LJ has undergone multiple journal purges and partial restorations, been bought out by a Russian company, and - final straw - changed the way anonymous threaded posts were handled, ending its value as a space for anon memes like kinkmemes. Fandom dispersed. A not-insignificant number of us eventually end up on tumblr, and those of us coming from LJ have brought with us a greater awareness of social justice, particularly lgbt/queer culture and feminism.

At the same time, Facebook has opened its doors to everyone instead of only allowing college students to use it. Facebook has almost single-handedly popularized the notion of making your offline life publicly available online. Gone are the days of keeping your age, real name, and offline identity hidden; we share everything except maybe last names and exact locations.

Tumblr democratizes the fandom experience like never before. Livejournal and forums had moderators; tumblr has none. Communities are gone - instead we have tags where people gather to talk about shared interests. People who previously felt shut out, forced to be ‘lurkers’ because they had nothing to say, could now have a blog and share the work of others via reblogging. The main way to gain social capital is by having the most followers and therefore the most widespread content.

But tumblr is a weird experience compared to other blogging sites because at the time it was the only one with a ‘reblog’ function. any one post can go absolutely viral and the people who see it beyond your immediate circle will lack the context of the rest of your blog. This means that either every single post needs to be entirely self-contained … or get wildly misunderstood. (Guess which one happens.) It also means that that the posts that spread the fastest and furthest are the short, witty ones or - you guessed it - the controversial ones. Finally, people tend to not fact-check - if something is interesting and seems believable, people reblog it uncritically. Tumblr’s dashboard structure actively encourages people to not leave their dash to look at provided external links - you’ll lose your ‘place’ on your endless-scrolling dash, and the little ‘home’ button in the corner is reminding you how many new posts have been created since you last refreshed. You don’t have time to fact-check.

Controversy without context is polarizing - without the original context, people provide their own context and agree or disagree based on a bunch of assumptions. Tumblr is a breeding ground for this. Opinions don’t get more nuanced - they get more vitriolic, more sharp and quick-witted. And with people not bothering to fact-check or click linked information, misinformation spreads like wildfire.

The early experience of fandom on tumblr is one of widespread acceptance. Possibly because FB does this, people feel safe to share their age, sexuality, and gender on their tumblr profiles - and those identities get more and more specific as people learn more about gender identities and sexual orientations that are off the gender binary. People spread educational posts about queer/LGBT+ culture, feminist theory, and racism alongside fandom posts. The importance of minority representation in the media is a hot topic and posts that criticize media for their lack of (or bad) representation get thousands of notes. Social justice theory - fighting the appropriation of colonized cultures by imperialists, promoting the voices of the oppressed over those of the privileged, the right to be angry because of the oppression and trauma you’ve experienced, not tone-policing people who have been hurt, and not erasing the experiences of others - are widely discussed.

A lot of good came out of this, too, but I believe a natural backlash resulted. Earnestly working to promote the voices of the least privileged and trying to avoid silencing or erasure, what started as an effort to even out the social strata gradually became a kind of reversed social strata. People who were oppressed on any axis could not be corrected by anybody of lesser oppression - it was considered to be silencing. People could not say their feelings had been hurt by a marginalized person’s word choice - that was tone policing.

And this led to a secondary, and probably lesser conclusion: people who identified as ‘privileged’ - that is, white, cis, straight, mentally well, able-bodied, (and male) - felt guilty for all the privilege they had. and the promotion of marginalized voices over their own - the tendency to tell people, regardless of the validity of their points, that if they were privileged their voice did not matter - to escape their privilege, at least on tumblr.

I think we hit Peak Tumblr in 2012-2013-ish. Non-human and nonbinary identities proliferated. Asexuality awareness exploded, as did other lesser-known sexualities and paraphilias. People wondered what it meant to be trans in a world with no gender binary. People self-diagnosed severe mental illnesses. And this unto itself wasn’t a bad thing! Probably many people learned a lot about themselves from the openness and acceptance.

However: there’s no way to know how much of this was from people self-discovering and how much was from people who realized that unless they had some axis of oppression they could point to they could be silenced. And people were extremely open about these identities as well: despite all of the talk about social awareness, interactions on tumblr suggested that most people still assumed that everyone else was white, cis, straight, able-bodied and mentally well (and therefore completely unaware of social issues and in need of education). And due to how tumblr’s reblogging system could separate posts entirely from the context of the original poster’s blog and personal details, this assumption happened a lot!

Whatever the actual numbers of people who were self-discovering versus self-deluding, this extreme acceptance got its own natural backlash. It wasn’t possible for everyone on tumblr to be oppressed, but everyone on tumblr seemed to be finding some way to be marginalized - they weren’t cis, they were ‘a demigirl’. They weren’t straight, they were ‘gray asexual’. There had to be some way to distinguish the real marginalized people from the fakers.*

Enter gatekeeping - which seems reasonable enough at first, given the sheer number of people who are claiming to be part of the marginalized club. People start making fun of ‘transtrenders’ and ‘starselves’ and say ‘heteroromantic demisexuals’ are ‘just normal’. People call one another ‘cishet’ specifically to erase their gender identity/sexual orientation.

This environment makes tumblr ripe for radfems, who greatly benefit from people putting limits on what identities other people can have. And radfems feed the gatekeeping mentality, leading to more and more policing of one another on tumblr instead of acceptance. Instead of trusting others to be honest about their gender identity, sexual orientation, race or mental health, people increasingly decide the identity and experiences of others based on whether or not they say and do the right things. Conversely, if you say or do the wrong things you are ostracized and your identity is erased using the reverse social strata of tumblr: ’cishet’ becomes shorthand for ‘ignorant asshole’ - and ignorant assholes are not to be listened to.

One no longer has to identify wrongly to have the wrong identity to be worth listening to. One only has to do the wrong thing.

So how does this tie back to debating fanworks vs dissing people? Well: tumblr isn’t just the home of social justice. It’s also the home of fandom, and these two spaces heavily overlap.

Like our genre fiction friend that I mentioned back at the beginning of this long-ass post, tumblr had already begun - with the best of intentions - to silence people for having the wrong level of marginalization. And when radfems and gatekeepers entered the scene, one’s level of marginalization became a function of how you behaved. Now you had to behave right to have the right to be listened to - and fanworks, far from being the exception, are the rule for determining if people behave ‘right’ in fandom spaces.

In other words: debating fanworks/fan opinions and dissing people have become the same thing. If a fanwork is for the wrong pairing, that makes a person a bad person. And bad people are only able to create bad fanworks.

This attitude is how you get things like ‘if you ship [x] you’re straight’ and ‘oh, you ship [x], your opinion on this unrelated social justice issue is invalid’ or ‘i’m not surprised to find that this person is [x]-phobic, they created problematic fanworks.’

And that’s where we’re at today.

Man this is much. I’m sorry for your eyes.

*And in case it isn’t obvious, I think policing sexual orientations and gender identities is nonsense - demigirls and gray-ace people count as much as everyone else.

#makamu-a-tumbling #gatekeeping #a history of tumblr

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topicprinter · 5 years

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Recognizing my own long-windedness, I’ve added a TLDR after every paragraph and lesson learned for those not wanting the deeper details.Yesterday, I finally decided to give up on a business idea I've been working on for years. I say "business idea" instead of "business" because businesses generally have customers, and that's not something I ever got a lot of *insert Price is Right loser music*, and I don't want to give anyone the impression I consider myself an experienced business owner by posting this: I would very much put myself in the "wantrepreneur" stage of my entrepreneurial experience. That being said, having listened to quite a lot of “How I Built This”, listening to successful entrepreneur friends talk about how they got to where they are, and even being part of this subreddit, I’ve formed the opinion tenacity is the attribute that most contributes to the majority of entrepreneurs’ success. Because of this, I know by giving up on my project I’m defining its failure, but I feel that, due to my inexperience as a business owner, cutting this idea loose before investing further is a smarter idea as long as I take away lessons that will improve my next venture. For that reason, I decided to write this formal lessons learned and post it for those who are interested. I get a fair amount of phone notifications for success stories in this sub, but I think it’s important, especially for other lurkers/newbies like me that the failures also be heard from (in a constructive manner at least).TLDR: Shutting down my business due to lack of customers, making a formal lessons learned so I don’t feel I’m walking away from the experience empty handed, posting it here for any interested/other beginner business owners.BACKGROUNDProbably 6-7 years ago I was shooting the shit with my co-workers at lunch (all of us software developers) and talked about how the dumbest ideas are the ones that really take off, specifically, due to their virality. I’m sure you know the kind: things like MillionDollarHomePage.com, where a guy charged a dollar for each of a million pixels and made more money than would be thought for a website so ugly (not to offend, I’ve been told my website is ugly as hell and it didn’t make me a million dollars). Going further back, we can see this isn’t just a byproduct of the internet as the pet rock made its creator a millionaire in the 70s. Wanting to take advantage of what I hoped was an easily exploitable behavior, I came up with an idea, and this was my pitch: “Who do you hate more than anyone in the world? Who’s your favorite historical figure? What if, for 25 cents, I could show you what it would look like if that historical figure teabagged that person you hate?” And so was born, [NSFW] GhostTeabag.com (site is still up, but with no GIF generating/purchasing functionality, so please don’t consider this self-promotion. You can, however, see examples of what was produced on the homepage). For those who don’t want to risk visiting the site due to the NSFW or don’t know what teabagging is, I’ll give a brief explanation of what the site did: you upload an image (say of a friend, or person you hate, doesn’t really matter), you pick from an assortment of historical figures (e.g. Cleopatra, Napoleon, etc.), and the site generates a GIF image of that historical figure (caricatured), making a teabagging motion on the picture (a teabag being the act of placing one’s scrotum on another person). I’m sure many of you are wincing at this point due to the nature of the website, but it’s important you understand what it is as it was a key factor of my lessons learned.TLDR: People pay for all sorts of stupid things, and I wanted a piece of that market by making a website that generated GIFs of caricatured historical figures putting their scrotums on images you uploaded.LESSONS LEARNED1: Never start a business you aren’t willing to promote and have no idea how to market. As obvious as this seems when stated blatantly, it was by far my most crucial mistake.I live in what’s referred to as the “Bible belt” of America: people are very uptight about their scruples. Additionally, I have a very conservative, religious family. And while I generally consider myself good at living a life independent of people’s judgements, once I had a product I was able to promote, I nearly froze completely in doing so. I know the stereotypical entrepreneur answer to this is, “You just can’t care what people think,” but when you have loving, caring parents who have tried so hard to raise you to make ethically wise choices, there are very few excuses that pair well enough with, “I made a website where Abraham Lincoln puts his balls on people,” to avoid the shame they will stare into you for the remainder of your life working on said website, and for that reason, I never told them about it.My family aside, living in such a conservative area made it difficult to do the little promoting I was willing to do. I made stickers advertising the site and planned to go from bar to bar in our downtown district asking bartenders if they could place one on their freezer or wall (as bars often do). I received quite a few “No”s, a thimble full of “Yes”s, and a “I can’t put it in the main area, but I can probably put it in the bathroom,” which I was more than grateful for but have yet to see in said bathroom. There were public posting spaces and a few lamp posts I was able to tag, but my primary focus and hope had been the bars as that's where I expected my clientele would be, and that had been a nearly complete failure. A friend of mine suggested trying colleges, but if the bars had been a failure, my assumption was the local colleges would not take kindly to having my stickers posted around and figured I was more likely to end up with a fine than customers. I know the classic entrepreneurial response to this is, “You have to take risks: it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission,” but because of the nagging parental guilt in the back of my head, they were risks I wasn’t willing to take.Digital marketing was a little easier to attempt as I could remain anonymous. That being said, one of the first things I thought of was to join the Reddit community and make a post, but as I’m sure everyone here is aware, that’s not looked upon kindly and the last thing most people in the Reddit community want to do for self-promoting individuals is give their site a kindly visit, so I posted in the Thank You Thursday sticky with a coupon code for a free image, but did little else, as the fact it was NSFW content made it even harder to find a way to constructively post about it.I considered paid advertising, and did so with Google, which I was shocked I was able to do because so many heavily used websites (Facebook, Reddit, etc.) restrict advertisements leading to mature content. I think if I'd been more willing to self promote I could have been more creative about how to market digitally, but the anxiety of questioning my own product was continually a blocking point.TLDR: If you're ashamed or embarrassed of letting ANY particular individual/group of people know about your idea, give it up or alter it so you don't have those anxieties: they're self destructive to your business.2: When you have an idea you think is fresh, produce it while it’s still fresh. As I wrote in my background, this idea came to me 6-7 years ago. For another year or so, I talked to people about it. The next years to come I worked on it, off and on, with as large as an entire year gap in between. Likely unnoticeable to most individuals, the time period I was slowly putting the site together was also a time of peak GIF popularity and image alteration: Facebook added the GIF option to messenger, Tinder following (though much later), and Snapchat became popular, due in part to its filter abilities. By the time I finally finished my website, I felt like GIFs/animations were everywhere, but in the worst possible way: they had trended to the point of oversaturation. My site lost out on what should’ve been a key period of growth due to my lack of get-shit-done-ness. That being said, this is a much lesser lesson learned as the opposite is also possible: get shit done too early and you can be, “ahead of your time” (RIP Sega Dreamcast), but having something done early and releasing it when the time feels right is infinitely easier than have the product done late and trying to release it in a time passed.On a more technical note, aside from your idea getting old, so will how you build it. My site is built in C# and originally began, I believe, in MVC 3, and at a certain point of return from one of my longer breaks away, I found it no longer worked. If I recall correctly, the component I was using to delete images after 24 hours was deemed obsolete to the point it was no longer in the .NET library, so the code wouldn’t even run locally on my computer.TLDR: The old adage, “Strike while the iron is hot,” applies well to unique and/or technical business ideas. Get shit done while it’s fresh or you risk your idea and/or the technology it’s built on aging out.3: This whole, “Minimum Viable Product” thing...it’s a good idea. I’m sure if you’ve been around this sub enough, you’ve heard people talk about producing MVPs. I made the classic mistake of requiring a lot of things be perfect that didn’t need to be before releasing. For a long time, my delay was coupon codes. I made the decision to not save images for longer than 24 hours of inactivity because I didn’t want people to have to make an account as I believed my users would mostly be drunk in bars and therefore not want to take the time or effort to make one. Instead, their images would be tied to a 24 hour session token and be deleted once it expired. Because I wasn’t saving images though, I worried people would claim they never got them and request a refund and I’d have little to no proof if they were lying. My solution was to instead give them a coupon code as repayment. Coupons, however, tend to require a particular unit of measurement on the buying and receiving end (e.g. buy 1 image get 1 image free trades an item for an item, but buy 5$ of images get 50% off your total purchase trades money for a percentage). This required I add coupon codes and units as new tables in my database, add a datascript to populate them, and add UI and backend code to take in and process it. So how many purchases were made vs how many people requested a refund? During the lifetime of my site I received 4 purchases. 1 from my wife’s friend, 1 from my friend, 1 from my brother, and 1 lone stranger who felt his time and money was worth a generated image of a historical figure teabagging someone. None of them asked for refunds. Even the coupon code I mentioned earlier for promotional uses never got used. At least 2 weeks of effort went into planning, designing, and implementing coupon codes, and it never got used by anyone but me, but I was so sure at the time it was something I needed to have. The saving grace of this particular example is coupon codes are something I’d like to implement on future sites as well, so it wasn’t a complete waste, but this is one of several items I spent time trying to implement that never needed to be done for me to start sharing my site so I’d realize ahead of time people’s lack of interest and my lack of willingness to market.TLDR: Regardless of your aspirations, odds are against your product becoming a craze over night, so don’t treat it like it is. Be realistic about your Minimum Viable Product: you can always add more features, but you can’t get back wasted time.4: If you can, always initially offer your product for free. My original intent was to offer images to people for 25 cents. Because of the costs involved with online transactions, I changed it to 69 (seemed fitting for the site), but my next step if I continued to work on it was to make them free. Offering something for free is, on its own, a type of marketing. As I mentioned earlier, I only ever got 1 stranger to buy from the site, and that person purchased 1 image. But if my product was free, how many more images would that person have made? How many more friends would they have sent those images to? And how many of those friends would be interested in visiting the site because, hey, it’s free, what is there to lose? While my site offered a watermarked version of your final image for free, it’s just not the same thing. And if you did want to purchase an image, you had to enter credit card information, and even I, a small business owner, find myself hesitant to do such a thing on an unfamiliar website: take away that fear and you increase users, increase users and you become trusted, become trusted and people will enter their credit card information on your website. If you want people to talk about your business, give them a small piece of your service for free, no strings attached, and once people are hooked, then you charge them for it (as unethical as it's framed, think of the cliche TV drug dealer who gives out a free sample first). And this doesn’t just apply to virtual businesses: nowadays, everyone knows about Sam’s Club and Costco because they’re everyday stores, but how many people, when those businesses first came out, only heard about and paid attention to them because of the free samples? I would count myself as one.TLDR: Make your product as free as can be until people want it enough you can lose the customers that aren’t willing to pay and still grow your user base.OTHER NOTEWORTHY ITEMSWhile the above lessons learned are what I set out to do for myself as a post-business learning experience, there are a few things I learned WHILE creating GTB that might be interesting to other people starting out:-Paypal basically comes in two flavors: plug and play, and full control API. The plug and play seems easy enough to use, but the API, which I had to use (I forget for what reason at the moment), absolutely sucks. I mean, everything about it sucks: how to use it, the documentation, and the fact my business account and personal account are somehow merged now, so when I make online purchases using Paypal it’s not uncommon for my package to be labeled to “Ghost Teabag”, a happening I’m lucky my children haven’t picked up on yet. Go with Stripe. It’s easier and has better documentation. It’s not as popular yet, but I would highly suggest using it if you need a payment API for ease of programming (it may also have a plug and play version, but never looked into that).-Commenting my code was never more important than when I was building my own website. I expected the opposite starting out: it’s my program, I know everything I’m doing, so I can cowboy code the whole thing. But, and I’m sure this is in large part due to my inability to consistently work on the project, there was a surprising amount of refactoring done to my own code wondering WTF old me was thinking as well as a great deal of decrypting my logic to understand why particular methods even existed. In a normal work setting, if you don’t understand uncommented logic, you can try to track down the person who made it or ask a coworker to have a look. When you’re the only developer though, all the burden falls on you.TLDR: Paypal sucks, go with Stripe, and comment your freaking code, especially when you’re the sole developer.Hopefully this write up actually helps some people out, it certainly helps me have some closure for the situation. Feel free to ask any questions, whether it be about the technical or business side of my experience. Additionally, I’m open to all comments regarding others similar or contrasting experiences. Thanks for reading!

#/r/entrepreneur #reddit

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