#and this is why algorithms suck

[terrainofheartfelt]

I like to curate my instagram experience by blocking every single account served to me that a) is still making h*rry p*tter content in this the year of our lord 2024 & b) does any gimmick whatsoever with chatgpt

[mangomybeloved]

me when i sprained an ankle/cut my finger/etc: this isn't so bad

me when i've got a bad cold and sore throat:

[wrongcaitlyn]

every time i feel like i spend too much time on a social media app i delete it from my phone to resist the urge and now i've limited myself to just insta and so all that time that used to be wasted on social media is now wasted playing sudoku

[utilitycaster]

The thing about the "official" CR Reddit is that it was founded by the same person who founded the Fandom Critical Role wiki. At the time of founding in late 2015 he was 18, and in my experiences with him through the Fandom wiki I found his management and personnel skills to be...shall we say, understandably lacking, given that he's a programmer in his early 20s. He also stopped keeping up with the show with the end of the Vox Machina campaign if not before; and I think was just generally entirely unprepared for Critical Role becoming more than what it was in late 2015 in terms of actually having large fandoms in need of serious moderation in spaces like Reddit. He also equated being a frequent contributor to the Fandom wiki (cannot personally speak to the Reddit) as being a worthy moderator to the point of asking someone whom a more competent admin had once admonished for outright plagiarism if they were interested in being an admin. This persisted, despite, at the time of his leaving, him and one of the other moderators of the Fandom wiki having held those positions while being almost entirely absent from editing for years.

So anyway I say all this because as result of those communities being created by someone young, inexperienced, and lacking in the awareness to realize these limitations, these issues have propagated. Moderators in a lot of fan-run Critical Role spaces have been selected not on the basis of any merit or community consensus but rather by sheer volume or by ingratiating themselves to the previous mods. From personal experience on the Fandom wiki and from reliable hearsay about the Reddit it seems that they tend to embrace their privileges as mods while eschewing their responsibilities. I also find that there's an ongoing hangover in both these spaces of not really knowing how to deal with the fact that Critical Role is still rolling nearly six years after the end of the Vox Machina campaign, because a lot of these people were ultimately fans only of Vox Machina and more generally Critical Role as it was during that era. They're still acting as though the cast is very directly involved with the fandom and are the final word on various decisions, as they were in the very early days, even though that's long since ended. This in turn is I think behind the knee-jerk resistance to change - moving away from the old chapter system on the Fandom wiki and even implementing basic infrastructural changes to accomodate the fact that there are now multiple campaigns, for example, was met with pretty significant pushback. They still really struggle to cover anything that's not Exandria canon because, well, in late 2015 no one could have predicted Candela Obscura. And on the Reddit side, I think that's why changes that are purely production-related and should not affect your enjoyment of the show as a work of fiction (pre-taping, merch, having other people GM one-shots sometimes, taking longer breaks) are similarly treated as harbingers of doom.

And, that in turn is why I suspect the other CR-related subreddits that have since sprung up have such a reputation for being all negativity - it's people who got understandably fed up with the ridiculous rules and culture of the first Reddit, so their roots are in venting, which is valid. But it can be very difficult for a community built on venting to stop being only that, especially under Reddit's structure, and they're also still largely influenced by that Reddit and share and propagate those biases towards what the show was in 2015-2017.

[mimzy6bunny]

i wanna post art but I don't wanna be like.. an influencer or anything,, i just wanna have artist friends and like. share my ocs and stuff

[cloudystrwbrry]

Does tumblr know what an algorithm is? I’ve been seeing a LOT of a fandom that I don’t even know what it is. I haven’t interacted or shown any interest in it at all. In fact I’ve said “not interested in this post” to every single one because there’s been SO many. I had hoped that it would catch on to why I’m not interested and stop showing it to me. Tumblr also decides that when it shows you something it shows you ALL of it and nothing else. You like landscapes? That’s all you’ll see until you refresh. You like dangonronpa? Yeah here you go I’ve got tons of that. Refresh. You like this super obscure fandom that you’ve shown 0 interest in whatsoever and in fact have told us you don’t want to see it on multiple occasions? HERE IT IS! WE HAVE SO MUCH OF IT TO SHOW YOU THAT EVEN IF YOU REFRESH YOU’LL ONLY SEE THIS UNTIL THE DAY YOU DIE!!!

[monty-glasses-roxy]

I'm gonna start playing a game where I get people to guess what the shitty For You page shows me today because it's different every single day

So who wants to take a wild guess what the majority of the For You dash of for me today?

[kil9]

how to tell spotify that i dont want "smart shuffle" to even be an option i have never wanted it and will never want it for the rest of my life

[xxxemilyg1996]

Spotify I'm listening to "metal mix" why are you playing Fall Out Boy?????

[victory-cookies]

I wish I could handle myself in an argument without fucking crying

[olberic]

a crucial and often overlooked part of the social media experience is the need to see posts from ppl about things you do not care about. do not misconstrue my words because im not talking about giving bigots a platform. im talking about following ppl who never shut up about a game i never want to play. people who post about their oc for a manga ive never read. fan artists who you have no idea what the hell theyre drawing but you like their style. vaguely horny artists who have kinks i dont understand. people who post about bands from the 70s as if theyre still together and on tour. people who are obsessed with poetry when youve never found a poem you really feel. like sometimes you gotta follow somebody totally at random just for the enrichment and see where it takes you.

[frankenjoly]

I'm pretty satisfied with my writing + I'm a bottomless pit of writing (& insp) so I had to be nerfed with fear of being too spammy cjfjjgjfkfdndk

[cloud-based-and-rainpilled]

Remember kiddos, people will put you on a blocklist and try to ✨slander ✨ you because they don't read your tags if you have a nuanced opinion about anything

Obligatory "I'm not a terfy-werfy, not a racist, I just like shitposting about gay angels and David Tennant's fabulous existence"

I got called a 'crypto terf' lmao does that mean I get free bitcoin now

[wewontbesleeping]

idk sometimes i get sucked into watching videos on fb and it's like there's 3 different types of videos they always show me. first is the most miserable straight couple you've ever seen in your life, and the man literally wants the woman dead, but like, in a way that's supposed to be funny. the second is reenactments of supposedly real customer service interactions that have clearly never happened. and ofc there's staged prank videos. and it's all so bad. but i keep watching it. and sometimes i get to see a video of a cat.

[tarraxahum]

god one of the things I hate the most about today's Internet is the whole. Rage farming thing? Cult of Your Very Important Critical Opinion? Negativity bringing in clicks?

Whatever the fuck is responsible for the fact that I just can't watch a positive video about something I like without being IMMEDIATELY recommended five more of some heads talking about how the thing in question is bad actually

Like uuuugh okay obviously in some way it's just a consequence of being stuck in a proverbial room with all other kinds of people, but like you know what I mean. It's not some guy hating something so much he makes a dedicated page on his website or puts it in his LJ icon or a userbar, it's not a Facebook group of "[BAND NAME] SUCKS" that sometimes floods fans' comments to be annoying, no, it's a fucking content now

People churn out these critical think pieces on any given piece of media endlessly, because it brings them clicks, it brings reactions, it makes them motivated to put that opinion out there even if normally they wouldn't be arsed to care about the subject enough to have an opinion in the first place

Why are all of you fuckers (it's an abstract 'you') so determined to be fucking miserable!!!

[pepprs]

gonna delete this later bc i know it’s unproductive to screenshot / namedrop and i actually am thinking the best approach would just be to privately share this thought w the dev who posted this in a possibly futile attempt to effectively advocate for the change i want to see (#worktag2 lol). but im workshopping it here w my beloved mutuals first as i always do which is kinda shooting myself in the foot given that the devs can probably see that but whatever. my thought is like… i get it. i really do. i get that this place needs to stay afloat and some of that is gonna involve sacrifice or something from everyone involved. but… why would you try to snuff out the things that make this place what it is and just make it like all the other places. why would you not even take into account how the changes are going to impact EXISTING users who are loyal even if they don’t pay. people aren’t going to come to tumblr for more tiktok and instagram. they’re going to come here for tumblr. for the anonymity and the customization and whatever. so like i just don’t get it. why is the solution to this problem to experiment with changes **that existing users won’t like** and not to listen to what existing users want and do more of it bc other ppl likely will want that too.