how web 2.0 (and especially tumblr) is ruining fandom

aaronstjames:

greenjudy:

shipping-isnt-morality:

freedom-of-fanfic:

mikkeneko:

freedom-of-fanfic:

there’s so much to tell about this subject that I might add more to some points on subsequent posts.

everything in the below post is from observation and reading about the experiences of others on web 2.0. please feel free to add anything you feel is necessary.

(socmed = social media in shorthand.)

What even is web 2.0?

Web 1.0: web model where dotcoms generated their own content and presented it to users for free, depending on advertisers for their income. ‘social media’ mostly made up of mailing lists and forums on these content-oriented sites. collapsed because ad revenue wasn’t sufficient to support site maintainance costs.

Web 2.0: web model where dotcoms create a free space for users to generate their own content, depending on advertisers for their income. these sites define social media today. likely to collapse because ad revenue still isn’t sufficient to support site maintainance costs (even after shucking the cost of paying content creators).

(if you want to read more about how ad revenue is the social media Achilles Heel, check this link out: Why Monetizing Social Media Through Advertising Is Doomed To Failure.)

What makes Web 2.0 social media so much worse than web 1.0?

mostly: web 2.0 socmed exacerbates the pre-existing conflict of interest between users and site owners: site owners need ads. Users want to avoid ads.

With web 1.0, users were attracted by site-created content that had to appeal to them: users were the clients and advertisers were the sponsors. (Forum interaction was a side offering. sites dedicated to user interaction were small, scattered, and supported by banner ads.)

Web 2.0 socmed strips users of client status entirely; the content we generate (for free!) and our eyes/eyes we attract to the site are products the site owner sells to the actual site client: advertisers.

early web 2.0 social media sites (livejournal, myspace) used hybridization to pay site costs – users could buy paid accounts or extra blog perks. they also had privacy/limited-spread sharing functions and closed communities, which still ‘exist’ but with limited capabilities on current socmed sites.  privacy, it seems, isn’t very profitable.

now web 2.0 is geared towards spreading content as far as possible – and further if you’ll choke up a little cash to grease the algorithms. 😉

–

Web 1.0 had its fair share of problems. Web 2.0 generated new ones:

• following people instead of joining communities based on interests has negative emotional and social implications
• social media sites benefit from knocking down privacy walls. Maximizing content spread and minimizing blocking/blacklisting capabilities benefits advertisers – the true clients of websites.
• social media sites benefit from eroding online anonymity. they track user site interaction, searches, and more to precisely target their ads at your interests (unless you deliberately turn it off). tracking data can endanger anonymity and make doxxing easier.
• social media sites benefit from conflict. Conflict generates user response much more effectively than harmony/peace. More user interaction means more eyes on ads, increasing ad space value.
• social media sites are therefore deincentivized to address abuse reports, increase moderation, improve blacklisting tools, or offer privacy options. and there’s nothing you can do about it because
• there’s nowhere different to go. it’s difficult to compete with existing social media sites as a startup. to draw social media users, a newcomer must offer something bigger, better, and equally free*, and offering any of this on startup capital is … unlikely, at best.

*‘I’d move if they just had privacy features!’ the joke is: any successful socmed site that starts with privacy features will have a hard time keeping them down the road under the present profit model. they will be forced to cater to their advertisers if they want to keep afloat.

–

how does the structure of web 2.0 socmed harm fandom?

in aggregate: it forces fandom[$], a diverse space where people go to indulge niche interests and specific tastes, into overexposure to outsiders and to one another, and exacerbates the situation by removing all semi-private interaction spaces, all moderation tools, all content-limiting tools, and all abuse protection.

The result is that fandom on web 2.0 – tumblr in particular – is overrun with widespread misinformation,

black & white reasoning obliterating nuanced debates, mob rule and shame culture as substitutes for moderation features, fear of dissent and oversensitivity to disagreement, hatedoms and anti- communities, and large/expanding pockets of extremist echo chambers that have no reality check to protect those trapped inside.

to be more specific:

• moderated communities were replaced by following unmoderated tags, directly leading to and encouraging the creation of hate spaces – ‘don’t tag your hate’ leads to negativity-specific tags that could themselves be followed, forming a foundation for anti- communities to develop from
• no privacy, minimal blacklisting options, poor blocking tools, lack of oversight, lack of meaningful consequences for TOS violations = ‘fandom police’/vigilanteism (attempts to assert authority over others without actually having that authority) – some people react to the inability to get away from content that they hate by trying to force that content to stop existing entirely. without actual moderating authority, they accomplish this by social pressure, intimidation, and shame tactics.
• the people-following structure of web 2.0 is fundamentally incompatible with web 2.0 reshare functions and search engines. content posted on a personal blog is rarely intended to stand alone because people who follow the blog presumably see all the blog’s content in an ongoing stream. but reshare functions and search results separate the content from the context in which is was presented, causing misunderstandings and strife. (for site owners, the strife is a feature, not a bug.)
• following people instead of joining communities based on a shared interest creates social stress – following/unfollowing an individual has more social & emotional implications than joining/leaving interest communities
• Unmoderated conflict is polarizing. Web 2.0 specializes in causing unmoderated conflict. – exacerbated by the depersonalizing effect of not being able to see or hear other users, conflict in the unmoderated spaces on web 2.0 social media quickly devolves into extremism and nastiness. web 2.0 socmed structure even eggs the conflict on: people are more likely to interact with content that makes them angry (’someone is wrong on the internet!’ effect), which shares the content with more users, which makes them angry, so they interact (and on, and on).
• The extreme antagonism generated by web 2.0 socmed creates echo chambers – the aggregate effect of unmoderated conflict is that the most extreme and polarizing content gets spread around the most. polarizing content doesn’t tend to convince people to change their minds, but rather entrenches them further in their ideas and undermines the credit of opposing points of view. it also increases sensitivity to dissent and drives people closer to those who share their opinions, creating echo chambers of agreement.
• reacting to content that enrages you increases the chances of encountering it again because algorithms – social media site algorithms are generally designed to bring users more of the content they interact with the most because they want more site interaction to happen. if you interact with posts that make you mad, you’ll get more recs related to content that makes you mad.
• everyone has an opinion to share and everyone’s opinion has to be reshared: reactionary blogging as a group solidarity exercise. when something notable happens and everybody has to share their reaction on social media, the reaction itself becomes an emotional and social experience, sometimes overwhelming and damaging.
• when the reaction is righteous anger that everyone can reaffirm in one another, it creates an addictive emotional high. one way to reproduce it? find more enraging content to be mad about (and web 2.0 is happy to bring it to you).
• It’s easy to spread misinformation (and hard to correct it) – no modern social media site offers ways to edit content and have that edit affect all reshares. Corrections can only reach fractions of the original audience of a misleading viral post.
• web 2.0 social media discourages leaving the site with new content notifications and by lacking tools that keep your ‘place’ on your dash, deincentivizing verification checks before resharing content.
• web 2.0’s viral qualities + misinformation machine + rage as a social bonding experience = shame culture and fear of being ‘next’ (tumblr bonus: no time stamps and everything you post is eternal) – when offending content is spread virally, each individual reaction may have proportion to the original offense, but the combined response is overwhelming and punishing. many people feel the right to have their anger heard and felt by the offender, resulting in a dogpile effect. fear of inciting this kind of widespread negative reaction depresses creativity and the willingness to take risks with shared content or fanworks.
• absolute democracy of information & misinformation plus too much available information leads to uncertainty of who/what is trustworthy and encourages equating feelings to facts – social media doesn’t give content increased spread and weight based on its truthfulness or the credibility of the OP. misinformation is as likely to spread as truth, and the sheer amount of available information – conflicting or not – on the web is overwhelming. when fact-checking, it’s hard to know who to trust, who is twisting the facts, or who is simply looking at the same fact from a different viewpoint. information moves so fast it’s hard to know what ‘fact’ will be debunked by new information tomorrow. People give up; they decide the truth is unknowable, or they go with what ‘feels’ right, out of sheer exhaustion.
• information fatigue caused by web 2.0 makes black & white thinking look attractive – conflict and polarization and partisanship erodes communication to the point that opposing points of view no longer even use language the same way, much less can reach a compromise. the wildly different reference points for looking at the same issue makes it difficult to even know what the middle ground is. from an outside point of view this makes everyone on both sides seem untrustworthy and distances the objective truth from everyone even more.
• it’s easy to radicalize people who are looking for someone or something to trust/are tired of being uncertain – information fatigue leads to people just wanting to be told what to think. who’s good and who’s bad? whose fault is this? and don’t worry – lots of people are ready to jump in and tell you what to think and who to blame.
• everyone is only 2 seconds away from being doxxed: our anonymity on the net is paper-thin thanks to web 2.0 – before facebook encouraged using our real names and the gradual aggregation of most people to a few major socmed sites, anonymity was easier to maintain. now we have long internet histories with consistent usernames and sites that track everything we do to improve ad targeting. anyone with minimal hacking knowledge could doxx the large majority of socmed users. 
• and all it takes is one poorly-worded, virally spread tweet to send the whole of twitter after you with pitchforks.

[$] using the vld discourse survey as a reference, fandom is (probably) largely neurodivergent, largely queer/lesbian/gay/bi/pan/not straight, has many non-cis and/or afab members, and around 20% are abuse survivors/victims. fandom is a space we made for ourselves to cater to the interests we have in common with each other but mainstream society doesn’t often acknowledge. 

I agree with this and I’d like to add another angle to consideration, and that is the conflation of private and public space.

I doubt Tumblr is the only one to do this but it’s the one I’m most familiar with. Here’s the thing: Tumblr is set up in such a way as to make it feel like your space. You can customize your blog style, make things feel nice and homey, fill your dash with the things you love. It feels like your room, your space, your place. 

But it’s also a broadcast platform. Broadcast  platform. Every post you make on Tumblr is being screamed out to the whole world, potentially, with no control or lockdown options available. Aside from a “post privately” option that is so broken as to be functionally nonexistent (things you post ‘privately’ aren’t even visible to you  unless you know which hoops to jump through) everything is public, all the time.

Your blog feels like your space, your room, but at the same time it is also a public space with the “if you don’t want it out there you shouldn’t post it public on the internet” caveat applied. It’s hard to remember that when you feel like you’re minding your own business. “I have a right to post what I want on my own blog,” I’ve often grumbled, and I stand by that. But then your post is on everybody else’s dash, and that’s a problem because – 

The dash/feed is even worse for the contradiction of a public and a private space. In one sense, it’s everybody else’s  private spaces, their own personal rant grounds, but it’s being streamed into your  space. When something disagreeable turns up in your dash it feels like an intrusion, a violation of your privacy. It’s not just a “see, disagree, move on,” it makes you mad. “Why is there untagged character hate on my feed?” I’ve fumed, in violation of all common sense.

Retags and reblogs exist in the same dual public/private space. If someone makes a post, that post is theirs, on their dash. But if someone else reblogs it, they can add tags and comments that, too, are on their own personal blogs. And yet at the same time the original poster can see the comments and retags. Once again the “I can post what I want on my own blog” comes into crossfire with “How dare you say that on my  post?” 

The moment you made it public it was no longer only your post. But it feels,  again, like a violation.

Reasonable debate is almost impossible on a broadcast-only platform. Even if the two initial parties are able to set aside their emotions to talk reasonably, with every reblog the argument is exposed to a whole new set of people who all then have their own reactions. Discussion on tumblr is like two people trying to have a philosophical debate on opposite sides of a crowded room by megaphone; the people in the middle will swiftly start to get angry just at the noise.

Back in the __Journal days there wasn’t this conflation. Personal blogs were private and communities were public. There was a clear distinction which was which when you were posting it, with some nuance available – setting to public on a personal journal set a tone of “This is my space and my opinion, but I invite discussion” while setting to protected on a community signals “I wish to share this with others, but only those of my choosing.”

Remembering habits from the Journal days I’m usually, generally, pretty good at keeping a clear sense of what’s appropriate to post in a public space and what’s not. What I don’t want broadcast, I largely just don’t post, and say only to my friends in private. But.  

But as shown by the examples above, even I’m not immune to the sense of outrage and intrusion when a public post is made in my private feed or a private reblog is make on my public post. And what of people who never had that past experience and have no mental schemas to keep the two apart at all? And as the march of web 2.0 socmed squeezes onwards, other forms of social communion get increasingly crowded out – that which I don’t say on my broadcast blog, I can be left feeling lonely and discontent as I find I have nowhere and no-one to express it to at all.

great addition that goes into a lot of nuanced depth about private/public conflation happens. Particularly want to draw attention to:

– reblogs with commentary added – particularly disagreeing commentary – feels invasive and painful: a prime example of how the reblog function – especially on tumblr – makes everything weird and terrible. content you post on tumblr is eternal: tumblr does not allow deleting the original post to delete all reblogs as well. 

if somebody reblogs your content, it’s now their content too, impossible to reclaim from them no matter what they add to it or if you want it removed. On the other hand, tumblr continues to bring you reblog notifications, replies, etc, and the only way to escape those is deleting the original post or by third party extensions. 

in short: every post we make on tumblr should be its own self-contained press release because that’s how it will be experienced: people will reblog it and react to it and may do so independent of any knowledge of you as a blogger. Every single post on any given subject should put our best face forward, clearly give the parameters of the content, disclaim what we disagree with, etc. But it doesn’t feel like this is the case because of how tumblr (and other socmed sites) are designed. 

– “Discussion on tumblr is like two people trying to have a philosophical debate on opposite sides of a crowded room by megaphone” – exactly this. and bystanders pressure – knowing that your responses are visible to everyone – adds so much pressure to the debaters to be decisive and firm (and time has only increased that pressure). it’s awful.

– the loss of semi-private spaces where we can be certain that our audience will share our contextual basis and we can be sure the content won’t spread beyond where we want it to makes us lonely. We always have to have our business faces on: every time we slip we risk destruction by shame culture. 😦

Social media has brought us the ability to talk to almost everyone in the world, and simultaneously made us realize we don’t want to talk to everyone in the world.

This set of posts articulates a bunch of things that bother me about social media, and Tumblr in particular. 

If the service is free, you are the commodity.