“why are pillowfort/ao3 asking for money?? Tumblr and LJ are free!!!”
y’all really don’t get how this works, huh?
Look y’all. Bottom line is large websites/web apps are fucking expensive
It’s not like a personal or small business site where you pay $25/mo for a shared hosting package and knock yourself out
You need multiple, dedicated, high-performance servers to handle a service like Tumblr or AO3, or Facebook, or what have you, to keep up with the insane amount of bandwidth and unfathomable amount of data.
Shit cost thousands of dollars a month. And those costs only go up the more users you have. Into the tens of thousands of dollars a month. Someone has to foot the bill for it. And that doesn’t include the salaries of the developers who pour hours of their time into making things function the way they need to.
“but Tumblr used to not have ads!!” you say! “They just got greedy!”
No, they didn’t “just get greedy”. This is how free services work. They aren’t magically able to sustain themselves. At any point. Ever.
Investors see proof of concept during the infancy of a project, and they pour their money– hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars– to 1) help fund the project into maturity. (Maturity = stable performance and a large, growing userbase) and 2) have a seat at the table when big decisions are made
Until that point, you won’t see ads, or be nagged to donate, or forced to pay a fee to access your content. That’s no accident.
Investors eat the cost of running and developing the service, because they know that once that userbase has been established, they can– you guessed it– SELL YOUR DATA TO ADVERTISERS.
They can’t do that until after they have users for advertisers to sell their shit to!
That’s how the investors make their money back, that’s how the service becomes profitable instead of being a giant cash pit.
So for the love of God, can we PLEASE stop slandering sites like AO3, Wikipedia, and now Pillowfort for having the audacity to ask for donations, or for having tiered/paid membership options for additional, non-essential features??
If you’re not paying, you’re the product
If you’re not paying, you’re the product
Eyeballs, data, or money. I mean, it all boils down to money in the end; the other two are just accepted means of getting advertisers to pay for it, which they do with the expectation of getting the money out of the user pool less directly.
Direct payment options include donations (like AO3), direct pay (like Pillowfort’s current donation-for-invite model), and freemium (like Pillowfort’s planned long-term model). But us paying means we’re the people the service caters to, and us paying for all of it means we (users) are the only people the service caters to, which is a vast improvement in security and general user experience over any situation where advertisers and investors are competing with us for best-interest privileges. (As opposed to, say, all those shitty cloned “pay-to-win” games where the user experience is designed to annoy the player into spending money to make winning easier, which is what tends to happen when users and investors co-exist as the beneficiaries.)
Whether this recent fuckery is a means of “harvesting” Tumblr’s userbase as a moneymaking device after years spent cultivating a community of users with a cool free mostly-useful internet platform, or a means of assassinating Tumblr in order to drive its userbase to sites where it’s easier for them to extract value from us by buying and then killing an unprofitable social media model, this is what tends to happen when the investors get first say in a thing. It exists to make them money, and if it doesn’t do that well enough to satisfy them, it gets mutilated and fucked up until it does, or until it dies and drives us elsewhere.
We need a space that is “Of Our Own,” again, this time for social media purposes, and that costs money on this bitch of an Earth. We need something that won’t be beholden to investors who might decide someday that we’re more profitable as products than customers.
Remember when tumblr turned off replies for like a whole year because they worked on a new system but apparently couldn’t let the old one stay meanwhile for some reason
Remember when tumblr was actively asking ppl to stop using the third party extension “missing e”(forefather to xkit) because apparently they didn’t wanna admit its the only way that’d make it bearable to even use tumblr.
Remember when tumblr purged users who uploaded audio posts of copyrighted music. Not removing the posts but the accounts would risk being deactivated if they had even one audio post.
Remember when tumblr made a “pinned post” feature so other blogs pinned posts was always at the top of your dashboard and you couldn’t remove it.
Remember how you could risk deleting your whole account when you just wanted to delete a sideblog
“Lacron was also behind a Tumblr account, “CharlestonChurchMiracle,” according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. That account, which is still live, contains hundreds of images that glorify mass killings.“
No female presenting nipples though I guess.
White violence has to be named so it can be changed.
So I just read up more on what the actual fuck is going on and what this means for NSFW content creators and this twitter thread really explains everything and why no amount of petition signing is going to change the direction tumblr, and inevitably twitter, is going
While a lot of artists went the ways of newgrounds and HF and mastodon and whatever else, a lot artists (myself included) just moved to Twitter because we were all mostly there already. But I’m not just bringing this up because I care about twitter, twitter definitely sucks, but because NSFW creators are very quickly running out of options.
Seems to explain the things going on with Tumblr lately.
I don’t make a living on nsfw anything, but some of you guys might?
I’m not a huge fan of censorship, so this is just plain worrisome anyway. I’m not entirely sure what to do other than help spread the word. =/
Are you fucking kidding me
Hey remember this post from a few days ago?
Well if you too think that’s bullshit, I advise you to check out this site right here.
I’m leaving tumblr soon, but having learned about SESTA & FOSTA recently, it’s got me a bit worried about the safety of NSFW creators in particular on major social media outlets.
By conflicting with
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, this set of bills can make entire websites responsible for the content of it’s users, putting them at legal risk if a user posts something the law doesn’t like – so the safest course of action is to play it safe and prohibit users from posting ANY remotely risky stuff – like NSFW content (thanks tumblr). It’s a bit like the EU’s Article 13.
It’s a bill that, on the surface, looks like it’s supposed to do good, but I’m not under the impression that it’s doing much more than harm – and it’s a step closer to the censorship of sexual expression, which I’m not really cool with, especially right after what’s happened to tumblr – effectively disrupting the livelihood of creators and purveyors of anything NSFW. Like you and I.
Maybe it won’t be an issue, MAYBE it’s an overreaction… but it’s currently on my mind and it has me worried. So perhaps, if you were previously unaware of the circumstances, you should be made aware.
Because after Net-Neutrality’s Repeal, Article 13, and tumblr metaphorically shitting on us, I’m not particularly optimistic…
So perhaps you should get in contact with your representatives and, like… Set them straight.
I don’t like talking about these big, world-changey politic-analogous stuff on my tumblr, but since we’re going to be burying my tumblr soon, I guess there’s not much of a point.
“Our side concocted the ‘bathroom safety’ male predator argument as a way to avoid an uncomfortable battle over LGBT ideology, and still fire up people’s emotions.”
COLOUR ME FUCKING SURPRISED
I want people, in particular cis people, to read this and understand what it means.
It means that these groups, these organizations, are so Hellbent on getting trans people outlawed, hurt, and killed, that they will openly lie and admit to lying to stir up emotions. They have no qualms with actively lying and distorting reality.
They have no qualms about misleading people. Actively lying to people.
They don’t care how immoral their actions may be, how much their rhetoric flies in the face of reality, as long as it reaches their end goal of the destruction of “transgender ideology.”
MassResistance and all their ilk want us dead, and should never be trusted, not even for the most trivial of matters. They should be rejected, reviled, despised, because nothing they do is in service of anything but hatred and evil.
And in case anyone actually doubts this, and wants to cry “fake news,” here’s MR’s actual article. Should it get deleted, here’s an archived version. Some choice bits under the cut, if you want to see how vile these people really are.
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