Clara Bow and Esther Ralston in 𝑪𝒉𝒊𝒍𝒅𝒓𝒆𝒏 𝒐𝒇 𝑫𝒊𝒗𝒐𝒓𝒄𝒆, a 1927 American silent romantic drama film directed by Frank Lloyd.

Canonical enshittification

This is the Facebook playbook: you lure in publishers by promising them a traffic funnel ("post excerpts and links and we'll show them to people, including people who never asked to see them"), and then the rug-pull: "Post everything here, don't link to your own site. Become a commodity supplier to our platform. Abandon all your own ways of making money. Become entirely subject to the whims of our recommendation system."

Next will be: "We block links to other sites because they might be malicious."

Then some kind of "pivot to video."

Probably not video (though who knows?) but some other feature that a major rival has, which Twitter will attempt to defraud its captive, commodified suppliers into financing an entry into.

In case you were wondering, yes, this is canonical enshittification. Lure in business customers (publishers) by offering surpluses (algorithmic recommendation and an ensuing traffic funnel). Lock them in (by capturing their audience and blocking interop and logged-out reading).

Then rug the publishers, clawing back all the surpluses you gave them and more, draining them of all available capital and any margins they have, until they die or bite the bullet and leave.

I would also give good odds on this leading to a revivification of the "Pay us tens of thousands of dollars a month for a platinum checkmark and we'll actually show what you post to the people who asked to see it."

That will be pitched as the answer to publishers' complaints about not wanting to turn themselves into commodity Twitter inputs. It will be priced at the same (or more) as the revenues publishers expect to lose from being commodified, making it a wash.

All of this seems to me to be an "unfair and deceptive business practice" under Sec 5 of the FTC Act.

If I sign up to follow you because I want to see what you post, and Twitter shadowbans your posts unless they are formatted to maximize your dependence on Twitter, they have deceived me, and are being unfair to you.

This is *very* analogous to the Net Neutrality debate, where a platform blocks or deprioritizes the things its users ask to see, based on whether the suppliers of those things are its competitors.

I've written about how an end-to-end principle for social media could be enforced under Sec 5 of the FTCA, how it would address this kind of sleazy practice, how it would be easy to administer, and wouldn't form a barrier to entry for new market entrants:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

(via @neil-gaiman )

Good morning! I’m salty.

I think we, as a general community, need to start taking this little moment more seriously.

This, right here? This is asking for consent. It’s a legal necessity, yes, but it is also you, the reader, actively consenting to see adult content; and in doing so, saying that you are of an age to see it, and that you’re emotionally capable of handling it.

You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.

“Children are going to lie about their age” is probably true, but that’s the problem of them and the people who are responsible for them, not the people that they lie to.

If you’re not prepared to see adult content, created by and for adults, don’t fucking click through this. And if you do, for all that’s holy, don’t blame anyone else for it.

This needs to be reblogged today.

Consenting to see adult content doesn’t mean you should have to see a bunch of shit romanticizing incest and pedophilia you walnut

Except this is the last line of consent before the actual work. So if you’re at this button you have already done the following:

1) chosen to go onto AO3 in the first place

2) chosen the fandom you wish to read about

3) had the chance to filter for the things you do want to see like a specific pairing or a specific AU

4) had the chance to specifically filter out any tags you don’t want to see like, oh I don’t know, incest and non-con and dub-con and paedophilia

5) had the chance to set the rating level if you wish to remove any explicit content at all

6) have read the summary of the story, which aren’t always great but are the only indicator of what the story will be like writing wise so something about it was good enough for you to click on it.

7) have read the tags of the story which will tell you what is actually in the story. If you have used filters to remove stories with things you don’t want then there shouldn’t be anything in here that’s a shock to you but maybe there is. That’s why the tags are there for you to check for yourself.

8) Then you have to actually click on the story. You cannot see anything other than the summary or the tags without personally deciding that you are going to open and read this story.

9) Only here, at step number nine, do you get to the adult content warning pictured above. You have been through eight different steps, the last six of which have also been opportunities for you to see that this has adult content. And AO3 has *STILL* stopped you to ask one last time “are you sure you want to read this because it has things that only adults should see in it”.

If after this point you are reading incest and paedophilia then it’s probably because you specifically went looking for it.

You walnut.

This is the most beautiful thing that I have seen about ao3

“You find the content you find behind this warning disgusting, horrifying, upsetting, triggering? You consented. You said you could handle it, and you were able to back out at any time. You take responsibility for yourself when you click through this, and so long as the creator used warnings and tags correctly, you bear full responsibility for its impact on you.”

Stop complaining with writers when you dislike a story FGS

This also works when stories are tagged, oh say, infidelity. If you don’t want to read about someone in your OTP being unfaithful (I.E., HAVING SEX WITH A DIFFERENT PERSON), don’t read that freaking story. The tags are there for YOU. So stop complaining when the story contains exactly what the author says it contains. Freaking hell.

If I go to the supermarket, walk down the fish aisle, pick up a salmon fillet, pay for it, take it home, put it in the oven, wait for it, take it out, then take a bite…

I cannot complain to Tesco that I don’t like fish.

WandaVision: Filmed Before a Live Studio Audience (2021) dir. Matt Shakman

daphne and velma, noir style 💜🧡

patreon // check more of my work on instagram // buy prints here

1911 Halloween Postcard

@postcardtimemachine

1915 Ad for Best & Company coats for Fall. From America in the 1910's, FB.

MANNY JACINTO 📸 by The EMMA Experience (2021)

The Baby-Sitters Club, Season One (2020)

Autumnal

“An old god comes.”

“What? No. That’s just a cold front. It’s Autumn.”

“Yes, one of the oldest gods of all.”

perhaps some will disagree, but i think the world got worse when we changed the colour of the night

this is what i mean

Via @bulbaderp

To be clear, THIS is how nights of the future should be lit

This is bat friendly street lighting, which not only looks sick as fuck but allows bats to pass through without disturbance, as they cannot see red.

orange and especially white lights deter bats and prevent them from reaching feeding grounds at nighttime. Please if you can, write to your local council and encourage red street lights!!!!

you gotta be able to say "die"

you gotta be able to say "suicide"

you gotta be able to talk about "sex"

they're uncomfortable topics, YEAH for SURE

because LIFE is uncomfortable. Death and suicide and sex and pain are straight up going to happen. not having words for the way it discomforts you doesn't make it more comfortable, it just makes you less able to reach out about it.

even more vital, you gotta be able to say words like "rape", "abuse", "queer" or "racist". cause we fought fucking hard to name those experiences. to identify "rape" as distinct from "sex" and "racism" as distinct from "acceptable behaviour" and "queer" as distinct from "invert"

like the function of communication is not to minimise immediate discomfort. we gotta be able to talk about stuff that's hard or sucks or causes difficult conversations.

This is what's so goddamn terrifying about the Internet slowly collapsing into the same 3-5 websites--if Facebook deprioritizes you for saying "sex" and TikTok shadowbans you for saying "suicide" and Twitter X locks your account for saying "racism" we've lost a lot more than just the culture of the old weird internet

Panfandom Hanukkah Bingo

WHAT: A fanworks bingo celebrating Jewish (and Jew-ish) characters across any and all fandoms. Write fanfiction and/or create graphics (moodboards, edits, vids, whatever you like) to fill prompts on this overall bingo card. During the 8 nights of Hanukkah, submit your fills to the AO3 collection and/or post them on Tumblr to be reblogged and added to the Bingo Masterpost.

WHY: Jewish characters and Jewish fans are often overlooked or erased during the Winter Holiday Season in favor of “Secret Santa” exchanges, Christmas-themed fics, and the idea that ~Hanukkah is Jewish Christmas~ (which spoiler for all fics in this bingo: it’s not). This panfandom Bingo challenge is to celebrate Hanukkah on its own terms and give Jewish characters and fans a place to breathe. :)

MORE INFO!

The Evening News, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, October 10, 1945

public libraries in the usa offering free digital library cards to people not in their areas (as of october 2023):

these cards (part of the books unbanned initiative) get you access to each library's complete libby/overdrive collection (unless otherwise mentioned), no hoopla/kanopy/physical copies included.

ebook collections are expensive to maintain (many american libraries have annual fees for non-residents because of this) but because of an uptick in book banning (particularly brutal in mississippi last summer) larger libraries have opened their doors more, which is very kind of them!

i've used my seattle card for the last several months and their libby collection has about three times the books that my local library does, which is wonderful for accessing more niche titles or skipping a waiting list. would love to hear of similar ebook initiatives internationally!

i use library extension (firefox/safari/chrome compatible) to check all my collections (+ the internet archive) at once, works for several different countries highly recommend it.

spotify seems to be offering 15hrs/month of audiobook listening to premium subscribers and while that does seem useful if you're already paying and are after a new release with a long library waitlist, libraries are better for everything else.

the only reason i know about girl math and girl dinner is because of people on here complaining about those terms. and those people who first started complaining saw it on tiktok. so heres the thing. why dont we all just never look at tiktok again forever. then these things won't happen anymore.

Panfandom Hanukkah Bingo

WHAT: A fanworks bingo celebrating Jewish (and Jew-ish) characters across any and all fandoms. Write fanfiction and/or create graphics (moodboards, edits, vids, whatever you like) to fill prompts on this overall bingo card. During the 8 nights of Hanukkah, submit your fills to the AO3 collection and/or post them on Tumblr to be reblogged and added to the Bingo Masterpost.

WHY: Jewish characters and Jewish fans are often overlooked or erased during the Winter Holiday Season in favor of “Secret Santa” exchanges, Christmas-themed fics, and the idea that ~Hanukkah is Jewish Christmas~ (which spoiler for all fics in this bingo: it’s not). This panfandom Bingo challenge is to celebrate Hanukkah on its own terms and give Jewish characters and fans a place to breathe. :)

MORE INFO!