mistressofmuses (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mistressofmuses) wrote2021-04-11 07:18 pm
mistressofmuses) wrote2021-04-11 07:18 pm
Entry tags:
If it helps, you can pretend I'm drunkenly yelling all of this to you over the noise in a bar...
...because that's a little bit what it feels like even writing it.
But I'm kind of weirdly emotional about yahoo answers shutting down.
(Not like... tearing at my hair and rending my garments or anything. But I definitely have more feelings about it than I would have guessed.)
It's probably like... some weird "getting old and nostalgic" thing, but I'm gonna ramble about it for a bit.
I had internet starting in late elementary school (dial up, but eventually with a second phone line so that we didn't have to get off the internet if someone was expecting a call.) As time went on, I definitely remember sites disappearing, as people lost interest and stopped paying for the domain, or the hosts went under. (RIP geocities and tripod and mediaminer and all the others.) Some messageboards and forums only keep old messages for so long before inactive threads are purged.
Which means I'm not really a stranger to how a whole section of the internet can just metaphorically go dark, but it's still sad to me when it happens. That feeling of something being *right there* one day, and then just a broken link the next, is a specific type of internet-sad, I think.
A lot of times the internet feels semi-permanent, where things from years ago are just as (or nearly as) accessible as things from yesterday. Sometimes that's a good thing - you can find articles and art and media from years (and even decades, now) ago. Sometimes it's a shitty thing - that embarrassing thing you said or thought ten years ago is suddenly dragged up.
There's also been a sort of... unbound-by-time shared culture aspect to it. There are memes that I first saw in high school that I *still* see used as templates for new incarnations, 15+ years later. And yahoo answers was never something I used, but I was peripherally aware of it, as the source of so many dumb things that get referenced across the internet. ("How is babby formed?")
So with that "shared culture" feeling: the internet is full of inside jokes, ones that you can sometimes share with total strangers just by virtue of being around on the same sites. And it feels like we're losing the source of some of those inside jokes, and there's something weirdly sad about that to me. (Despite the fact that we're talking about something that, again, in many cases was objectively stupid.)
Losing Flash was definitely a much bigger *thing* for internet history, and tbh I realize I won't even notice that Yahoo Answers is no more. But it's just kind of a reminder that stuff that's been a background constant for years-to-decades-to-more can always disappear.
There's plenty also to be said about Web 2.0 and capitalism and corporate control... as fewer companies wind up owning more of the internet, and as profitability becomes the only real metric for a site's "success", bigger sections of the internet will ultimately be in danger of deletion.
Maybe this is kind of a *getting old* thing. When I was your age and we walked uphill both ways to get our internets...
Bless things like the internet archive and the wayback machine, which I unironically am extremely grateful for. This may be where it's crossing over with the whole anthropology degree thing, but I DO have very strong feelings about the importance of preserving history, even now (especially now?) that so much interaction/art/artifacts is digital. Even when a big site/service/host goes down, there's a chance that much of it will still be accessible.
It also makes me more grateful that sites like Dreamwidth and AO3 still exist. Sites that aren't ad-driven, that exist because the creators and users want them to, and think the service they provide is worthwhile, not because they want to make the most money possible (and therefore sell their users as their product.)
I don't really have anything to tie that together with, I'm afraid. But the reminders that stuff is temporary sometimes come at me by surprise.
But I'm kind of weirdly emotional about yahoo answers shutting down.
(Not like... tearing at my hair and rending my garments or anything. But I definitely have more feelings about it than I would have guessed.)
It's probably like... some weird "getting old and nostalgic" thing, but I'm gonna ramble about it for a bit.
I had internet starting in late elementary school (dial up, but eventually with a second phone line so that we didn't have to get off the internet if someone was expecting a call.) As time went on, I definitely remember sites disappearing, as people lost interest and stopped paying for the domain, or the hosts went under. (RIP geocities and tripod and mediaminer and all the others.) Some messageboards and forums only keep old messages for so long before inactive threads are purged.
Which means I'm not really a stranger to how a whole section of the internet can just metaphorically go dark, but it's still sad to me when it happens. That feeling of something being *right there* one day, and then just a broken link the next, is a specific type of internet-sad, I think.
A lot of times the internet feels semi-permanent, where things from years ago are just as (or nearly as) accessible as things from yesterday. Sometimes that's a good thing - you can find articles and art and media from years (and even decades, now) ago. Sometimes it's a shitty thing - that embarrassing thing you said or thought ten years ago is suddenly dragged up.
There's also been a sort of... unbound-by-time shared culture aspect to it. There are memes that I first saw in high school that I *still* see used as templates for new incarnations, 15+ years later. And yahoo answers was never something I used, but I was peripherally aware of it, as the source of so many dumb things that get referenced across the internet. ("How is babby formed?")
So with that "shared culture" feeling: the internet is full of inside jokes, ones that you can sometimes share with total strangers just by virtue of being around on the same sites. And it feels like we're losing the source of some of those inside jokes, and there's something weirdly sad about that to me. (Despite the fact that we're talking about something that, again, in many cases was objectively stupid.)
Losing Flash was definitely a much bigger *thing* for internet history, and tbh I realize I won't even notice that Yahoo Answers is no more. But it's just kind of a reminder that stuff that's been a background constant for years-to-decades-to-more can always disappear.
There's plenty also to be said about Web 2.0 and capitalism and corporate control... as fewer companies wind up owning more of the internet, and as profitability becomes the only real metric for a site's "success", bigger sections of the internet will ultimately be in danger of deletion.
Maybe this is kind of a *getting old* thing. When I was your age and we walked uphill both ways to get our internets...
Bless things like the internet archive and the wayback machine, which I unironically am extremely grateful for. This may be where it's crossing over with the whole anthropology degree thing, but I DO have very strong feelings about the importance of preserving history, even now (especially now?) that so much interaction/art/artifacts is digital. Even when a big site/service/host goes down, there's a chance that much of it will still be accessible.
It also makes me more grateful that sites like Dreamwidth and AO3 still exist. Sites that aren't ad-driven, that exist because the creators and users want them to, and think the service they provide is worthwhile, not because they want to make the most money possible (and therefore sell their users as their product.)
I don't really have anything to tie that together with, I'm afraid. But the reminders that stuff is temporary sometimes come at me by surprise.
no subject
And fannish history is so obscured because of all of it. I was looking at Misha's fanlore page and it was virtually nothing. Meanwhile I have a puzzle piece from the rhino hunt still tucked away somewhere. I maintain a few masterposts and am trying to keep myself from making a Leverage one. I may have the bones of one already. I direction J&W people to the 'fandom map' I maintain, it's not a true masterpost but it points people in all the right directions.
Hoo boy, this got tl;dr
I think a lot of people who have been around for larger chunks of fandom history (offline, in the era of zines for sure, but also through usenet and messageboards and individual fansites) see the value of preserving fannish history. And I am so glad for that! I love that you do maintain resources like that (and if you make a Leverage one, I know I'd wind up using it, haha.)
One of the things I love the most about fandom as a whole, particularly online, and which fits in with the upset about site deletion... is that you can always join. If I just now see a movie, or catch up on a TV show, or read a book that came out decades ago, maybe even before I was born, I can *still* join the fandom for it. Even if a fandom is "dead", I can still read all the fic and the meta that people have written. And some of those creators are still around, and would probably be happy to chat about this thing they know and I just discovered.
So having things like masterposts and fandom maps and things like that can help SO MUCH when new people discover something, or decide to wade into the fandom side for the first time, etc.
While Yahoo Answers in particular wasn't a hub of fandom activity (though RIP Yahoo Groups, which was), losing the ability to link to old fanworks and meta and such changes a lot of the mechanics of fandom, and makes it harder to join in at any time.
I don't think I have enough knowledge of any particular subsets of fandom to provide that kind of masterpost or resource gathering. Though I do plan to start contributing to fanlore, if I can find any topics I can help with. I very genuinely like the OTW, and I want fanlore to be a more comprehensive resource.
Tangent, but like... sometimes the dedication of one person maintaining a page is a big deal. My sibling and I replayed the first three of the Myst games a couple years ago (they held up well!) But while the files for the third game (Exile) are supposed to still be playable, and can be downloaded on Steam... they don't work. The game almost always crashes before loading. But there's one guy who made a patch for it, and just has it available on a really simple, barely-more-than-text website. If his host goes under, or he decides he doesn't want it up anymore... that game becomes unplayable for most people. (And yeah, maybe someday the company will patch their own 20 year old game, or someone else will save his patch file and rehost it, but... maybe not.)
Re: Hoo boy, this got tl;dr
Yeah, you can always join in but the rules and norms can be obtuse and random. And those who fail to learn from history yadda yadda. My armchair opinion on the Ms Scribe thing will always and forever be that Harry Potter fandom didn't see itself as part of fandom, it saw itself as this new and distinct thing with no relation to like fandoms for 90s CW shows. That's how they got sock puppeted so badly. It wasn't a new tactic, it's one of the many things you need to look out for in a large fandom.
I'd probably do more masterposts and guides if fandom didn't treat them like shareware. I've spent a lot of time putting things together and tracking down original sources only to get copy-pasted with no credit or link to my original. Most of the guides I abandoned, that was why. Maybe it's not plagerism per se, but it feels bad to see people go viral on tumblr with literally a copypasta of my posts.
I really, really should do some fanlore stuff about Misha, about Yaoi Press and some other things. I have a page about the Rhino Hunt on my Neocities site ... where no one sees it.
Yeah, maintaining resources can have a huge benefit. I've gone down weird rabbit holes after specific information. Finding just the right website or video is golden.
Re: Hoo boy, this got tl;dr
I think that's a *very* good perspective on the Ms Scribe drama. HP fandom may have been surprisingly large and mainstream for the time, skewing younger than a lot of similarly huge organized fandoms like Trek, but nothing about it was *new.* But maybe because it was so many younger people who hadn't ever been a part of organized fandom before... they did feel like/act like they were. And so they didn't learn from anyone's previous experience.
Also fair, and unfortunate. :/ A lot of really good resource posts absolutely get stolen and passed off without credit, which is really upsetting. Yeah, maybe it isn't exactly plagiarism, but it's kissing cousins with it.
Along the lines of the internet "shrinking" in its way, I feel like if something isn't hosted on one of the big social media sites, it's rare that people will find it. That may not be fair, but I just rarely see links to personal sites being shared anymore. (Though that could just be me, and that I'm not following people who do.)
But bless the people who DO maintain resources, even and especially niche ones!
Re: Hoo boy, this got tl;dr
And reddit still has a deep hatred of 'blogspam' and does not like people ever doing anything that gives them clicks, all clicks and content must go to reddit, all content must be hosted that way! Reddit has basically sealed off a lot of my potential audience. I need to sacrifice my content to Snoo to get it seen. I'm still banned/sitebanned on r/trains because an article I wrote was too popular there.
Sorry, ramble. Considering how well I know the ins and outs I should be better at self promo. But still, yeah having a personal site has been gold for me ... what I am not cursing out the latest WP updates :)
Re: Hoo boy, this got tl;dr
That's super ridiculous about reddit. I confess I never really use reddit, unless I follow a link there for some specific thread, but it doesn't surprise me that it's kind of a self-referential nightmare, lol.
If I ever do have cause to set up my own site, I might look into WordPress to host it. I went with blogger way back when, just because it seemed like a less dramatic learning curve, but everything I hear about WP says it's the better option in the long run.
Re: Hoo boy, this got tl;dr
WP definitely has an stability other services lack. It's what I use, though I am still not happy with the new editor.