all the faces in all the palms

[orangerful]

Poor Pillowfort AGAIN. They apparently had an "incident" yesterday with someone spamming child porn/sexually explicit content so they have to quickly update their ToS to be a little clearer on what can and cannot be posted. And now the comments are full of people attempting to justify their child porn/eerily underage porn collection and it is just weird. Or people saying that they are going to be attacked for shipping certain people.

Is that what Tumblr had become? A bunch of people fighting over fandom rather than enjoying it?

And, it's like, do they even READ what they are posting? They are like "oh but there are plenty of teen protags in anime and so much porn about them everywhere else!" yeah, well then go everywhere else if you know you can post your creepy child anime porn artwork there. That is fine. Just not on Pillowfort.

I dunno, I consider myself a pretty liberal person, relatively progressive, but reading people's comments that the Harry Potter characters are 14 in a book and they just HAVE to make artwork of these 14 year olds making out and they MUST be allowed to share it online...then make your own website?

At this point, I'm just really annoyed with the Tumblr people and don't want them on PF if that is how they are going to behave. I know it isn't everyone that uses Tumblr, but wow, it does make it FEEL like everyone, doesn't it?

Comments

[thenewbuzwuzz]

Tumblr person here, would you like me to try and explain some of the reasons why people might be upset, or shall I leave your venting post in peace? :)

[orangerful]

I can't imagine any of them will make sense to me. I mean, they DO make sense when I read them in Digg articles and Wired Magazine articles, written by professionals. But then I go over to Pillowfort and read people's comments rambling about shipping wars and how they want to post their creepy pictures and all my logic goes out the window because I'm too grossed out.

Again, I know it is not everyone, I used Tumblr and it was mostly Star Wars gifs, my friend used Tumblr and she only looked at Twee bands. So it is just a corner of Tumblr, a niche of people interested in this stuff, and, as is with most things, they ruin it for everyone.

[thenewbuzwuzz]

Aight, that's a no, then. Works for me!

[yourlibrarian]

Ugh, yes. I had to stop looking at stuff a few days ago because everything buffers and often 500s.

I saw their post on Tumblr but the short answer is yes. It's not anything I tend to see on Tumblr myself because I purposely follow very few accounts (I only have so much time and Tumblr is a firehose). But I've seen some signs of it and I think PF and others have sprung up exactly because people are so fed up with the fandom experience there.

I don't think the tendency is at all new, but I do think that it's much easier for disputes to be amplified and for people to get in other people's faces because there are no siloed communities the way there are here. I mean, depending on who you follow it's possible for anything to be in your face, but there it's possible on a much bigger scale.

The irony to me is that PF's community infrastructure is clearly not their focus and it's currently barely functional. Right now you can't even identify community mods, you have no idea who else is in the community, the new account-search-by-tags has yet to be extended to communities, there is no way to do a sticky post or profile space with rules and explainers, and mods have no good way of communicating with one another. They can delete people or posts from the community, so that's something.

Yet the best way to get around fandom clashes is to have communities that give people what they want without things they don't want, and to create groups that can interact based on what they're excited about. Plus, strong moderation. On Tumblr it's hard to interact with anyone directly and it's well known that nothing gets people into action like anger. So the angriest people are the likeliest ones to take action in what dialogue there is, and there is no one with ability to step in and separate participants, or to leverage a community to create effective peer pressure in favor of civility.

It's sort of a "it's not a bug it's a feature" aspect of centering a site on individuals who have no obligations to others.

[orangerful]

I think you're right that Pillowfort is not really the best place for these people to migrate to and, actually, Tumblr probably wasn't either back in the day, it was just there! The LJ ship was sinking and you either jumped to Dreamwidth or you went to Tumblr depending on how you approached fandom I think.

I mean, really they should all just go back to forums! You don't stumble upon NC17 level images in forums because if you're not interested in that you don't go to that forum! That doesn't stop the trolls, of course...

I wonder if Tumblr people would even understand what a moderated group was? Did Tumblr have anything like that? I know PF wants to kind of combine Tumblr, Twitter, and LJ/DW but it might be too much for one little site to do. I just better not get a bunch of follows from penises!

[yourlibrarian]

I wonder if Tumblr people would even understand what a moderated group was? Did Tumblr have anything like that?

That's what I've also been wondering, although frankly DW suggests that it's not the platform that is the problem but people's general unwillingness to take the time to post in places other than their own accounts. Because the real problem here has not been a lack of people posting but a lack of community activity. Part of that is, of course, numbers since the more people there are on a site the more will use communities in at least a minimal way.

But expectations are also an issue. In a big fandom a post could have gotten 50+ comments on LJ back in the day. Coming here, 10 would be a well performing post. On Tumblr it might well be 500 or more, though these would rarely be comments as opposed to just likes. For the longest time people didn't want to post to AO3 or would only do so after the fact because they said there was no one interacting there. Eventually some large fandoms started using the site and that issue went away. But fandoms tend to follow popular content creators and those creators don't want to post places where they might get a handful of responses when they can stay where they are and get 100 times more.

And no, the closest thing Tumblr has is the equivalent of fandom newsletters here -- accounts that focus on a specific aspect of a fandom and reblog submissions or content they come across. Only one person (or a group who shares an account) posts, and there tends to be no follower to follower interaction.

[verdande_mi]

This might just be in my head, but I do think many people are just stuck in their own imagined entitlement. And it wouldn’t surprise me if some of these people just want to make a mess at pillowfort, just because they can and they find amusement in ruining things for other people.

Might be an age thing with some, I know when I was in my teens I was much more willing to accept shipping with characters my own age, but as I have grown older I get uneasy when characters are so young. For a 14 year old shipping other 14 years old makes sense, but for adults things are a different matter.

I haven’t seen Call me by your name because the age different makes me uneasy, and I like this pairing from The dark Artifices series, Ty/Kit, but I would not feel comfortable reading or watching anything explicit because they are young, around 15 or so I think. I have reblogged fan-art of them on tumblr, but I certainly know what I am not comfortable with and I do feel a bit weird about it.

[orangerful]

I don't mind people shipping characters, but just because you have two people that like each other doesn't mean that you have to create an explicit sexual depiction of those two people. Especially if they are children. That is what weirds me out, the way the people in the replies acted like it had to be done.

But I'm kind of over it now, that is not how I fandom and I probably won't cross paths with these people again online because they are interested in things that I am not.

[angrboda]

I just saw that post now. I'll echo someone else's comment there, "shocking how far one has to scroll down in order to find some sanity!"

I haven't used the blacklist or block user there at all yet, but I'm half tempted to wade through all those comments and just liberally block a large number of people.

[orangerful]

LOL pre-emptive blocking! I'm sure I won't "bump" into any of those people in my PF world anyway as I have a feeling the comms they will frequent will not be the same ones as me, so I'm just shrugging it off now. But damn it had me worked up this morning.

[author_by_night]

Meant to comment on this the other day, but it was at work, and... not something I really wanted to comment on on a work computer.

Anyway, I'm glad it's not just me. Back when LJ was still huge I expressed similar sentiments, and people were so pissed that I basically shut up about it and have still been hesitant. I also think fandom fails to keep in mind how IRL, fourteen year olds having sex with adult characters or explicit art of fourteen year olds would be seriously called into question. Especially the latter. (I mean, I HAVE read books where underage characters had sexual relations. I also read one where it was an adult and a kid, although she was intended to be a victim of abuse, rather than it being considered "hot" by the writer and her fans. That's what bothers me. Portraying abuse is one thing, portraying child abuse as "hot" is another. Saying that is what got me into trouble, and I still have no idea why that was so controversial.)

[orangerful]

I have realized that this is not an area of fandom that I have ever or will ever go into. Yeah, I've read YA books where teens have sex, but I don't think that is the same as what happens in a lot of these corners of fandom that I dare not look.

I'm a librarian, I'm very anti-censorship, but I think things need to be cataloged appropriately. If you're creating things like this, then you need to learn how to label it so only people that want to find it can find it versus someone stumbling upon it at work.

Then again, another part of me twitches because, while I don't have a problem with sexually explicit content with two adults, someone writing stories or creating pictures that focus on children (or creatures that look like children but are actually adults but they LOOK LIKE CHILDREN) having sex just sets of lots of red flags.