#its just so interesting to me with the influx of submitted stuff

[dan-whoell]

idk im just thinking about the phrase we know you know and the more... interactive they've been with us recently. like they keep giving us chances to say things on the channel even though they know exactly what we're going to do.

also the way some people think they don't like us (feeling pressure to come out bc of shipping etc) or the 'you cant say that it makes them uncomfortable' kind of thing- and yet they keep giving us the mic, telling us how funny we are, how much they love us. they know we know and they are quite literally giving us a platform to say it.

[trickstarbrave]

actually yknow what heres a list of complaints i have abt kink communities as someone who is kinky and heavily criticizes them but everyone keeps dumbing down everything i say as “you just dont like how they have sex”

overuse of slurs. just like everywhere. not in play where u carefully negotiate it just like in casual settings and meet ups. why. and especially slurs they cant complain i see non-romani ppl over use the g slur so much. why. 

oversharing. again in usually casual settings saying things their dom/sub would be cool w but Definitely Shouldn’t Be Shared With Strangers No Context. joking abt how u can hit ur sub as much as u want and its not abuse isnt funny to total strangers thats fucking horrifying 

not respecting boundaries. like all the time. even in kink spaces. i esp see this with male subs bombarding dommes w shit, demanding stuff from them, not listening when she isnt actually doing anything with them atm, or demanding free labor. it happens to multiple performers but dommes esp. 

not behaving OUTSIDE of kink spaces. yes kinky ppl have dif hobbies. yes other ppl are allowed to block u if a majority of ur social media is kink centered and they don’t like it. or they can block u if u think u can make sexual jokes w them they don’t like. you can be asked to remove kink gear in public if its not a kink friendly space. not everyone is okay w every kink 100% of the time. most ppl arent. why do you feel the need to constantly push this boundary w ppl who never asked? just bc ur not doing smth sexually explicit around them doesnt mean they have to deal with it. 

a large influx of young ppl into kink spaces online. like ur 18 years old w a set dom of 4 months???? thats a bit of a red flag for me personally. maybe on occasion there are ppl who have just gotten into it and met a partner they really connected with, or their romantic partner got into kink at the same time. but also this doesn’t happen all the time and i think newbies should rly explore the kink community, esp if they are younger, and not jump into making commitments before they really understand their community and what they like or dislike or what might be an issue. like either you havent explored it enough, or you were all in kink spaces well before you were 18. either way is a :/ from me

ppl genuinely thinking reading kinky writing/fanfiction makes them an active participant in kink. im.... there is a LARGE gap between liking something in fiction and liking it irl. fiction can be a great way to find new things to try out, but if you have never been tied up, how are you sure you like it? youve never been cut with a knife, how are you into knifeplay? do you even understand the safety precautious in full? you dont know what its like to stop a scene and worry if someone needs to go to the hospital. you’ve never been there. stop claiming you get it when you have simply never done it. you can say ur interested and participate in conversations to an extent but ive seen ppl acting like experts bc theyve read about it in a fanfic before. bro. 

dom men going after dominant women. “ill make you submit” sir that’s a domme her job is to not do that. if you want a difficult sub you can find a fucking brat or something. why are you acting like this. this i just dont get but i see it every time w/o fail at least once. who let you in here.

[rayschvantz]

Camming has become

Camming has become a huge part of the sex industry over the past decade, and it’s continuing to grow. There’s a lot of cam girls who now monetize and advertise through social media, so they're kind of the new "it girls" in a way—they’re rock stars, they’re influencers. Some of them have millions of followers on Instagram.I met Anna because she flatly offered to talk to me — clothed or unclothed — in exchange for money. She's Romanian, a model from a region with a reputation for sordid conditions and rapacious studio owners. If there were a dark side to the industry, she'd at least be nestled closest to it. But when her camera first flipped on for me, I didn't see the stained walls of a prostitute's den. Instead: a bright, modern apartment inhabited by a bright, modern girl. In her pink underwear. Anna embodies almost every delightful stereotype an American brain can hold over a young girl from Romania. At 24, she's clever — even cunning — sarcastically flirtatious in a way that makes you want to check your back pocket, and possesses stunning slavic beauty.While I was there, I went through one of the trainings they offer—a cam girl boot camp, so to speak. To be a cam girl, I learned, you have to be able to field sexual requests and be an expert on all kinds of fetishes so that you always know what clients are talking about. On top of that, you also have to be a pseudo therapist. The coach trained me on how to respond to different fetish requests, what to wear, how to do my makeup, how to pose, how to use the equipment, and just how to interact with clients in general. It turns out that, according to my coach, what people like is generally not the super over-the-top sexy woman. They want someone who looks hot but is pretty normal and chill, who they can just talk to.Heidi sells her underwear for $100 and has performed sex acts on other girls for her followers.

The first time I went private with a guy I freaked the fuck out. All he wrote was get naked. And so far all Id done in a chat room was flash my boobs for an influx of tokens. I froze up in stage ­fright and closed the room. In my group chat I wrote: Sorry, cam froze. And I logged off for the night.An anonymous webcam model did a Reddit AMA where users asked her every question you've ever wished you could ask a webcam girl (and others you probably wouldn't think to ask ever). Here are the most surprising answers. Three young women have revealed what it is like working as a 'camgirl', taking their clothes off in front of a camera and performing sex acts for strangers online.Theres so much free porn that I feel webcamming is more of a personal one-on-one. You can go online and find any ol stuff, but webcamming is more personal; its tailored exactly to what you want and what youre looking for. Youre not sharing it with 100 thousand other people. This is your show. Most of the time you build up a relationship, I talk to you as a friend and I respect you as a person. How has your day been, what did you get from the shops, what are you cooking for dinner… its like an online relationship.

Each network will ask you to fill out a brief bit of biographical information — list your interests, and try to sound fun — and then check a box or pull down a menu saying that you're 18 or above. You'll need to submit some sort of identification proving your age, but with standards low, laws international, and documents scanned, forging such a thing is a cinch, making underage cam girls a real problem."What can a member do to me? If he crosses a line or even if he is rude to me, I just click the mouse and stop it. And I can talk to the administrator on the website and they ban the IP address, so the guy can never enter again even if he changes his nickname. I mean, those people are thousands of miles away from me. They don't touch you - nobody touches you. You go online alone and you work online alone. This has nothing to do with prostitution.The young women who admit to leaving nothing to the imagination admit they are paid well for their trouble – and don't even have to leave their rooms to get paid. "There are girls who think they will just stay in front of the camera and make money. But all the things they do there will affect their minds. The next step is prostitution. I see that now.

CONTINUED BELOW...

[jinjojess]

As I was tagging the last reblog I was thinking of adding a playful "meet me in the pit workshop" joke but it occurred to me that… I have actually encountered someone similar to these folks in the wild during my MFA program. Not exactly the same, but a related phenomenon.

(Cut for length, don’t worry there’s a tl;dr at the end)

My degree was a 2 year fiction writing one, and every semester you had to take mandatory lit courses as well as a workshop course. For those of you who aren't familiar, a workshop is generally run like so:

person/people submit a piece to the class to be read and then critiqued the following lesson

during the crit phase, everyone in the room except the author discusses the work: what worked, what didn't, how they felt about it, etc.

the writer cannot say anything until the very end of the critique; it's usually encouraged that they only answer any direct questions and/or reply with "Thank you for your comments."

writer reworks the piece according to whatever input they deemed helpful and resubmit again later to repeat the process

As you can imagine, it's a VERY good way to thicken your skin and learn to tell helpful critique from stupid nonsense (i.e., the guy who insisted you always needed more talking animals). My first workshop in undergrad started off with a girl calling my opening paragraph "so pretentious [she] wanted to slit [her] wrists more than continue". I'm still grateful to her to this day, because hot damn was that what I needed to hear.

Anyway, by the time I got to grad school, all the people in my year were already workshop veterans, and so we were generally polite in our feedback, even if it was firmly critical.

Then, in my second year, we got an influx of new people, along with some…unique personalities, one of which was a girl clearly raised on YT film critics (and maybe fanfic sporking, but I suspect that might've been before her time).

When my friend TK submitted a story about a Latina sex worker conflicted over whether or not to marry her white boyfriend because of her complicated feelings regarding her work and heritage, this girl ripped into it. Nothing in this story was salvageable. It was misogynistic, it was tropey, it was racist, it was too idealistic, the characters were all horrible people. (In reality I wouldn't say it did any of those things, thanks in most part to the degree of nuance my friend gave the protagonist and the focus on her relatable human struggles regarding work vs love life vs public image vs personal community etc.) The story was stupid and Bad the writer should feel ashamed.

Understandably everyone was a bit ??? at this read, and even the eccentric professor known for tough love asked her to tone it back a bit, but we treated her critiques as valid like all the others. TK was kind of shell-shocked for a bit after, choosing instead to work on a different story of hers.

When the time came around for the hyper-critic girl to submit, we were pretty intrigued to see what she thought great work would look like. If TK's story was entry-level schlock, then this girl must have some serious avant-garde ideas about narrative. My buddy J, who exclusively wrote in meta-textual symbolism, was particularly excited.

Here's the synopsis of hyper-critic girl's story:

White Anglo-American girl is told she cannot date white Italian-American boy because he's new to the neighborhood. They sneak out and go on a date to a 50s-style candy shop, after which girl decides she's in love and will see the boy again no matter what.

Cue ??? from all of us Part II.

We were pretty gracious in our feedback, since no one wanted to be That Guy and sink to her level, but we did bring up the distinct lack of…oh, racial minorities, queer people, realistic tensions or conflicts, and anything new or unique.

What we discovered was that she had panicked when it was her time on the chopping block, and had resorted to writing the safest thing possible. Ironically, her story in all its blandness was more offensive to good writing than TK's could ever hope to be. (Not to mention pretty exclusionary to anyone but the most mainstream of audiences.)

In the end, her writing improved a lot after that (she had a weird dud about intra-family melodrama that had the depth of a soap opera, but following that one she started coming up with much better stuff) and she got way better at giving thoughtful critique.

Obviously this isn't a 1:1 comparison with the purity types, but it strikes me as similar because I see a lot of "writing advice" on Tumblr centering on this idea that you should only address the safest of topics or risk doing A Bad Thing. If you try to include anything but the most mainstream of ideas or subjects, then it must be 100% perfect or else it will be the sole downfall of society. It explains the viciousness aimed at works that do try to be more inclusive, while leaving other things that don't try alone. This paralyzing fear of feedback is where the Every Ending Must Be Happy people come from, since tragedy and pathos will often take a more delicate, deft touch and they’re terrified of being written off as edgy or cynical.

Basically the only rule of writing is that you can write whatever you want, just do it well. Not everyone will like it, and that's okay. You will write things that can be interpreted in a problematic way, and that's just an occupational hazard. Despite what purity types think, a writer cannot control what a reader will take away from their work. 

So here’s the point: treat all feedback like you're in a workshop. The stuff you can use, use, and don't be intimidated into sanding off everything that makes your writing unique and interesting. Sometimes the weirdo telling you that you need to eliminate children from your stories or include more talking snakes has no idea what they’re talking about either.

[news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog]

Remembering Advice Animals, one of the internet's first viral memes

It’s Viral Market Crash week on Mashable. Join us as we take stock of the viral economy and investigate how the internet morphed from a fun free-for-all to a bleak hellscape we just can’t quit.

Today's internet is an endless buffet of memes. Bountiful GIFs, viral videos, and an innumerable amount of tweets are bestowed upon us on a daily basis. But before that wide and glorious selection was available to us, there was really only one entree on the table: Advice Animals.

Remember Advice Animals? Those early internet memes like Scumbag Steve and the Overly Attached Girlfriend, that consisted of a picture and two lines of text delivering a rudimentary joke. In 2006, these guys started spreading snarky jokes, embarrassing stories, and musings. They positively dominated sites like Reddit, Tumblr, and 4Chan in the late aughts. 

SEE ALSO: The Origins of the Word 'Meme'

Now, however, Advice Animals have largely fallen out of favor. It's not really surprising, given the short shelf life of a meme in the wild world of the internet these days. What's more shocking is how long Advice Animals lasted — and how they met their demise. 

A brief history of Advice Animal memes

Advice Animals are a category of memes originally derived from the Advice Dog meme — hence the name, though they aren't just limited to animals.

The Advice Dog meme first appeared in 2006, according to Know Your Meme, an online database dedicated to cataloguing all internet phenomena. Advice Dog's construction is simple: a goofy dog's face was placed in the center of a bright rainbow pinwheel, and (typically) terrible advice was superimposed on the top and bottom of the image. The use of the image macro format  — a general term for a captioned image — made the meme fairly easy to replicate and expand on.

Soon after Advice Dog's popularity grew, so did its spin-offs, dubbed Advice Animals.

Some of the most popular Advice Animals: Business Cat, a cat sporting a tie and offering advice fit for feline co-workers; Socially Awkward Penguin, a penguin lacking in self esteem and social graces; Scumbag Steve, a youth known for his sideways cap and flair for getting into precarious situations; and Bad Luck Brian, a braces-clad teen wearing a vest who suffers from perpetual bad luck. 

(Know Your Meme has an extensive Periodic Table of Advice Animals if you want to dive deep). 

In 2009, Memegenerator.net became one of the first websites to allow users to create memes with their own desired text, according to Know Your Meme, with copycat sites like Memebase and Quickmeme following. 

By 2010, Reddit had become a hotspot for sharing Advice Animal memes with the addition of the r/AdviceAnimals subreddit. In 2014, the subreddit had 4.2 million subscribers and was featured prominently on Reddit’s front page, according to the Daily Dot. 

And then ... people slowly lost interest.

Did Reddit kill Advice Animals?

On May 7, 2014, the r/AdviceAnimals subreddit was removed from the front page. The platform issued a statement explaining that its old defaults were determined by popularity and that the company wanted to shake things up a bit with some new subs. 

Amanda Brennan, a Know Your Meme alumna and current Tumblr employee who has been dubbed the "librarian of the internet," told Mashable that Advice Animals' removal from Reddit's front page could have definitely contributed to a decline in the subreddit's reach and the memes' appeal.

"Having something removed from the Reddit front page, you lose that audience that you would get from someone who is logging into Reddit, or who may just come casually," Brennan explained. 

Instead, people would have to intentionally seek out the group in order to see it. 

The subreddit brought in 83.7 million page views and 8.3 million uniques one month prior to its removal from the front page. The following year those numbers went down to 29.8 million page views and 3.5 million uniques, according to a 2014 report from Kernel.

Google Trends also point to a decline in "advice animals" searches after May 2014, when r/AdviceAnimals was removed as a default subreddit.

There are a handful of things that could have encouraged Reddit to remove the Advice Animals sub from its front page.  

The Quickmeme Scandal

In 2013, Advice Animals faced one of its biggest scandals — the infiltration of Quickmeme.

Quickmeme, a popular meme-generating site, was launched by brothers Wayne and Stephen Miltz in 2010, generating about $1.6 million a month, according to the Daily Dot. Quickmeme links were frequently submitted to r/AdviceAnimals, though other generator sites like memegenerator.net were submitted somewhat regularly.

By June 2011 r/AdviceAnimals began looking for a new moderator to help run the growing subreddit, and Redditor gtw08 was voted into the position. Everything seemed to be going smoothly until 2012, when fellow r/AdviceAnimals moderator ManWithoutModem started to notice that gtw08 was deleting links from Livememe. 

Livememe, which debuted in 2012, was one of Quickmeme's largest competitors due to its ability to support GIFs. It struck ManWithoutModem as odd that only Quickmemes were getting upvoted while Livememe's were being deleted. 

ManWithoutModem's concerns were dismissed by the other mods, but after talking to suspicious members of the subreddit in a private chat they decided to go some digging. In 2013, it was discovered that gtw08 was actually Quickmeme owner Wayne Miltz, clearly gaming the Reddit system. The Miltz brothers and Quickmeme ended up being placed on a site-wide ban.

Brennan believes that the perceived manipulation of the Reddit subculture could have created a sense of distance.

"Seeing someone try to manipulate it [the subreddit community] and being called out for manipulating it gives that hive mind a, 'Oh, I don't want to get involved with someone that's trying to manipulate our culture for their own personal gain,'" Brennan said.

Advice Animals saw an influx of bigoted content

Like many internet communities, Advice Animals fell victim to racist and bigoted comments and memes.

According to a recent  r/TheoryOfReddit thread dissecting why Advice Animals have become less popular, racism was cited as a big contributing factor.

"Years ago around when the Racist Unpopular Opinion Puffin was starting to take over the sub and they were starting to build a certain reputation, Reddit expanded the default subs from 25 to 50 and dropped AA as a default," wrote u/diiejso. "It's possible that at this point new users weren't automatically seeing the sub and it started a gradual decline then."

Racist Advice Animal memes are still found on the subreddit, though the community now has strict rules against using Advice Animals (specifically the Unpopular Opinion Puffin) to make bigoted statements or remarks. The new rules were instated by its moderators July 14, 2015 and have been pinned to the top of r/AdviceAnimals for newcomers and old subscribers to see. 

"We're here to have a laugh; hate speech, bigotry, and personal attacks are not allowed," state r/AdviceAnimals' rules in bold. 

But with millions of subscribers it's not easy for unpaid mods to catch every crude meme or remark.

Reddit has had a longstanding struggle dealing with hate speech and controversial communities. So, it's not a surprise that a subreddit as popular as r/AdviceAnimals got tangled up with the bad side of Reddit.

Brennan explained that often times people will use use popular joke structures (like those of the Advice Animals) and language online to make racist statements to see if others agree with their ideology.

"As Advice Animals get more mainstream, more people are shown that structure of language and it's like, 'Oh people are joking about this stuff, maybe let me just test the waters and see if my ideology lands with people and then I can find my racist friends,'" Brennan said. 

This can create a kind of snowball effect, gathering more and more people through the use of mainstream language and mainstream attention, according to Brennan. 

We can't blame it all on Reddit 

Now in 2018, the still active Advice Animals subreddit has risen to 5 million subscribers, so it seems strange and a little bizarre to hold Reddit solely accountable for the decline of Advice Animal memes.   

Though, even with such a high number of subscribers the interest in Advice Animals just isn't there like it once was. Memes evolve on a daily basis, reaction GIFs became a form of communication, and Advice Animals became tired, and almost juvenile.

Now, memes tend to avoid the goofiness of their predecessors. Instead they're digestible bites of complex and surreal content, think Change My Mind meme, or the Gym Kardashian memes. They're in conversation with pop culture, current events, and nuanced human emotions in ways Advice Animals never were. The crude and sophomoric language of Advice Animals just can't compete with the offbeat and irreverent memes of today. 

"It is full of low effort content that just isn't enjoyable," said namer98, in a r/TheoryOfReddit thread, a year ago. 

Advice Animal memes are played out and unoriginal: the pumpkin spice latte of memes.

Brennan offers an explanation for the subreddit's continued userbase: "I think that it still has subscribers out of nostalgia, people who are maybe a little older, who really participated in the 'memey-ness' of it [the subreddit] in its heyday and don't want to unsubscribe because they still find them funny."

The likelihood of Advice Animals seeing a full resurgence is slim, according to Brennan, in large part because the technology we use to view and absorb memes has changed drastically.

"If you think back to 2012 or 2011 and the way that we spoke online and the power our phones had, it was easier to download a photo than it was to download a GIF," Brennan explained. "And now WiFi is everywhere. Our phones are faster, we can make more videos with our phones. Cameras are getting better."

Still, there's a little bit of Advice Animals to be found in all present day memes, says Brennan: "There's always iterations of Advice Animals that you can find. Like, you can find some evolved version of it [Advice Animals] no matter where you look in meme culture, because all the archetypes are there. It's all about fleshing out what you understand about these ideas of people through whatever the structure of the language is."

As far as the future of memes goes, it's unclear. But Brennan says that she knows one thing to be true: people will always use memes and their language to connect to others, in addition to connecting with themselves.

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