#we still use both apps

[dreamstatess]

Octocon is pretty barebones right now

but

We find it easier to use then Simply Plural is, plus you can turn on permanent tips if you need them (like us)

The only downside for us is the lack of non-alter statuses

[bookinit02]

i really do think there’s a huge disconnect on here w/ people who have never used tiktok as to what it actually is and who actually uses it. the number of people i’ve seen call it a “teen dancing app” is actually insane. it has not been a teen dancing app since i was in high school, around 2016 - 2020. the main communities i saw on a daily basis were 1) black history/anti-racism educators, 2) high school & college teachers sharing in-classroom strategies and frustrations with the education system, 3) local/state political leaders giving real-time updates on behind-the-scenes government decisions, & 4) community activism & leadership. like tiktok is an adult platform. almost every person i interacted with was my age or older. and yes it completely depends on your fyp and how you interact with the app, yes there’s still teenagers and dance videos and literally anything else you can think of. but these communities of adults aren’t insubstantial at all, they have literally millions of interactions on a daily basis. there’s about a million other types of communities that i could name just off the top of my head, because the range of users was SO diverse and thriving. it’s a long-distance community tool, just like any other social media—and honestly much better than any other social media, because it relies primarily on the kindness of strangers. i saw at least 5-10 videos today of queer people in rural areas panicking because they don’t have any access to queer community on any other platform or in real life. and before i end this i do want to say i think tiktok is coming back, i think this is a highly orchestrated political move, etc., but i do know it won’t ever be exactly the same. people are panicking about free speech violations because tiktok was a place where people fucking SPEAK. i have never seen mass mobilization and communication in this same way for as long as i’ve been alive. it is the people’s app, not just a silly teenage thing. if you’re not on tiktok and never have been, please stop talking about it like you know anything at all😭

[moeblob]

Karen has four older brothers and this is Ross! He's the second oldest and he looks rather polite and smiles a lot and when he's at work he can behave most of the time... but he really has such a foul mouth it puts Right to shame.

And Karen when she was a kid couldn't pronounce S's and they sounded like Z's. So when her brothers would be leaving for school she would say "enjoy zool" and just. Could NEVER say Ross's name correctly so he told her to just call him Oz. And it stuck but only with Karen. She's the only one to use it and no one else is allowed.

[autisticlee]

trying my best to to act "normal" and "practice" social skills by doing small talk and trying to make people talk about themselves by "not making it all about myself" and asking them questions and putting spotlight on them all that stuffs. specifically on the bumble friends app but also some discord servers.

I know you're technically supposed to ask people questions when get to know them, let them answer and don't answer your own question, and not do the back and forth say related things about yourselves without being asked way like I prefer. but trying to think of questions, then how to respond to their answer without automatically "and here's related fact about me" is so hard and exhausting!!!!! is not that I want to make it about me. is that I can only talk about things I know or let conversation end completely. if I respond about me then "it's all about me" but can't think of enough responses and questions when other person doesnt give much response back and doesnt ask questions. especially when their answers are too plain and boring like less than 5 words. no extra info to learn anything about them or be able to continue conversation. no idea for more questions.

example: what kind of arts and crafts do you enjoy most? what do you like to make? tell me all about your arts! "I crochet clothes" oh cool i've crochets a few things....(right it's not supposed to be ~all about me~) uh favorite clothing to crochet? "shirts. sometimes hats" oh uh.....how's...the weather....???????????? I don't know 🥲

I can't do this small talk thing. it feels so forced and unnatural. genuinely don't know how, don't know what to do. how many questions need asked? what questions are allowed? how to respond to their answer? especially when answer is super short? when is appropriate to talk about things I know and like? does only one person ask question? do I lead everything? why is this interrogation about them? are they uncomfortable? am I asking roght questions? what questions they want me to ask? what thing do they want to talk about? why I not feel like i'm getting to know them at all? when does small talk end? don't know anything! everyone else knows the rules and expect me to know but no one teaches me! and trying to use internet to learn isn't helping because I still don't get it! and too many rules to follow it gets boring and exhausting and frustrating and confusing. especially if I follow the rules and they do not. like they're supposed to ask questions back but they don't. what do then? keep asking questions? talk about something I like? idk

I prefer get to know someone over time naturally through talking about shared interests and doing activities or sharing back and forth what we are comfortable sharing without needing think of questions and feel like we pry into each other's lives. seems easier but is not allowed in the rules. need to follow the rules, but not all things are listed in small talk tutorial posts/videos. like needing know right question to ask, what's appropriate and not too invasive, know what questions they want to answer and what thing talk about, how to respond correctly and how to keep going when you get barely any response back, how to know what is too much to say and what is good amount, etc. because small talk seems all about mind reading or guessing correctly and i always fail.

doesn't feel like I get to know anyone from it. examples I see have the people both responding with many words and questions. answers I get are plain and superficial amd short. I get bored because it feels like I do all the work. i'm expected to ask questions but they don't ask back. they barely give response. but if I add anecdote about myself then i risk it's "all about me" and they never open up enough to get to know them more. is easier to get to know people when doing shared activities to feel their natural vibe and energy or get them talking without needing prompted. but small talk doesn't do that and keeps a barrier and I can't figure out a way around it so it always ends there if i'm the one that is designated leader. I know i can't lead. dont want to. confused and bored. so give up on the conversation. therefore no new friends. only wasted energy and spoons and now too tired and burnt out to try again for a few weeks. sighs. how people do this naturally and it works?! don't understand!

[lady-valandra]

Realized I didn't get any head-on shots of Legend yesterday, so will do so tomorrow. My main goal yesterday was to recreate an art piece from @cherrypaii with Four. These are our two favorites! (Four's not on social media, but I got permission before posting)

We had fun, hope we did it justice 💜🖤

I think I'm doing this right, please let me know if not! The photo we referenced is:

https://www.tumblr.com/cherrypaii/623574180071342080/i-miss-my-gba?source=share

[gifti3]

so yea running servers isnt like a cheap thing is what ive been learning these past couple weeks

[handsmotif]

regarding that last post i reblogged though it’s so real bc i will bitch and moan abt how lonely i am and how i wish i was in a relationship and then when ppl show romantic interest in me i get scared ..

[tittyalchemy]

had to block the op of that "dating apps dont get it i wanna have a crush" post bc it made me so mad

[spawnfog]

can we please discourage kids from being the heros in internet drama..??? idk pitting kids against each other to try and fix situations involving incredibly serious topics when they themselves cant even fully grasp such concepts just doesnt sound very healthy. i dont think that type of peer pressure, stress, or responsibility is good for a kids development

[purplespacecats]

i will not hook up with the crush i'm trying to get over at the play party we're both going to, i will not hook up with the crush i'm trying to get over at the play party we're both going to, i will not hook up with the crush i'm trying to get over at the play party we're both going to....

[gxlden-angels]

Throughout all of this, I never thought about the potential for my family members to also deconstruct/leave fundamentalist christianity, even if they remained a more progressive christian in the end

[arttheclown]

twicord isn’t a bad ship people are just mean ):

[juniperhillpatient]

man what am I gonna do when I leave this place I seriously love my coworkers 😭

[ekingston]

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

PLEASE check my later versions of this post via my main page to make sure you have the latest version of this post before you reblog. All the information I’ve been able to gather is in my reblogs below, and it's frustrating to see the old version getting passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much!

[picklesthenonbeanary]

running low on tagged drafts, gonna need to make some more or actually finish the ones I’ve already got started, oop-

I feel like I’m making empty promises on my Au, it exists I just have been getting distracted and also life is getting in the way a bit. I’m gonna finish my rant eventually my brain just has to actually cooperate with me on it, agh!

[sepiasys]

Questioning why we got fanta when B got us a drink. The time before he let us get a cherry pepsi (we just wanted smth cherry flavored and it was the first one we saw). WHY DO WE HAVE FANTA (pretty sure it's related to 🌼 deciding)

So anyways thank god we also have water nearby