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Enshittification...
Jun. 11th, 2023 09:39 pmAs usual, here I am facing the gap between good intentions and zero energy to follow through with them, lol. (The rush of "hooray, I'm off of work and now have my whole weekend ahead of me!" is very quickly overwhelmed by "ugh, I am SO tired, I want to do NOTHING.")
I've been thinking about finding additional places (other than solely on AO3) to post fic... not because I think AO3 is imminently doomed or anything, and I have no plans to *stop* posting there, but I do feel like internet stuff as a whole winds up being too "all eggs in one basket", so having some alternatives seems reasonable.
So far, I'm figuring probably Squidgeworld (which seems pretty quiet and low on engagement, but is very longstanding and uses AO3's base code, so it seems fairly simple if you're used to AO3), and probably here on Dreamwidth. I was thinking about creating a separate journal... and then someone on my flist mentioned they were doing the same thing by creating a comm that only they have posting access to. That... seems a lot easier than having to manage a separate login, lol.
I also recall that I have a Pillowfort that I've literally never used, and maybe that would be worth dusting off the login for.
I've been thinking a lot recently about the "enshittification" of the internet, and how a LOT of spaces seem to be gearing up to do that right the fuck now.
-There's the dumpster fire that is Twitter of course, but...
-Tumblr has pushed some really crappy UI changes and some pretty shit content moderation choices very recently, in addition to the general crap post porn-ban, with increased ads and "tumblr live" and such.
-Reddit has plans to fuck with basically all the APIs that have long been relied on by a lot of users.
-Facebook ("Meta") has been firmly enshittified for a long time, but now is pushing their paid verification plans, including the ability to get actual support being basically paywalled.
-Discord is doing their forced rename thing, which is already screwing with useability for some people (since there's now allegedly a big namecamping and impersonation problem.)
-Imgur going through and deleting all old anonymous uploads as well as a broad adult content ban.
-Even niche websites, like evidently Furaffinity, are having fucking meltdowns.
So basically... there's very little space that doesn't feel actively hostile to its own userbase. Plenty of the above are sites I've never used or extremely rarely do... but others I use more, and it still just feels like a sort of omnipresent background stress that you can't escape from. It's not that any of that is new - it definitely isn't - but it's just a lot right now.
It makes me grateful for DW being here, as usual both because of and in spite of how quiet it is. Which isn't completely related to the fic posting thing (AO3 has problems, but they aren't the enshittification kind), but it's a tangent that doesn't feel unrelated, either.
All the places I'm thinking about, whether here, AO3, Squidgeworld, Pillowfort (if I ever do try to figure it out), etc. are places that are in opposition to the sort of pervasive hostility elsewhere. (AO3 and Squidgeworld are noteably NOT social media sites, so it's a bit apples to oranges, but still.)
I don't have the desire (yet) or the willingness to utterly abandon every popular site out there (I still get a lot of enjoyment out of tumblr, there are people I can't contact outside of facebook, the youtube algorithm infuriates me but there are creators I still want to see videos from, etc.) but there is a part of me that feels like I don't want to devote a lot of my time and energy to places that are actively trying to be worse for me in order to extract "value."
I've been thinking about finding additional places (other than solely on AO3) to post fic... not because I think AO3 is imminently doomed or anything, and I have no plans to *stop* posting there, but I do feel like internet stuff as a whole winds up being too "all eggs in one basket", so having some alternatives seems reasonable.
So far, I'm figuring probably Squidgeworld (which seems pretty quiet and low on engagement, but is very longstanding and uses AO3's base code, so it seems fairly simple if you're used to AO3), and probably here on Dreamwidth. I was thinking about creating a separate journal... and then someone on my flist mentioned they were doing the same thing by creating a comm that only they have posting access to. That... seems a lot easier than having to manage a separate login, lol.
I also recall that I have a Pillowfort that I've literally never used, and maybe that would be worth dusting off the login for.
I've been thinking a lot recently about the "enshittification" of the internet, and how a LOT of spaces seem to be gearing up to do that right the fuck now.
-There's the dumpster fire that is Twitter of course, but...
-Tumblr has pushed some really crappy UI changes and some pretty shit content moderation choices very recently, in addition to the general crap post porn-ban, with increased ads and "tumblr live" and such.
-Reddit has plans to fuck with basically all the APIs that have long been relied on by a lot of users.
-Facebook ("Meta") has been firmly enshittified for a long time, but now is pushing their paid verification plans, including the ability to get actual support being basically paywalled.
-Discord is doing their forced rename thing, which is already screwing with useability for some people (since there's now allegedly a big namecamping and impersonation problem.)
-Imgur going through and deleting all old anonymous uploads as well as a broad adult content ban.
-Even niche websites, like evidently Furaffinity, are having fucking meltdowns.
So basically... there's very little space that doesn't feel actively hostile to its own userbase. Plenty of the above are sites I've never used or extremely rarely do... but others I use more, and it still just feels like a sort of omnipresent background stress that you can't escape from. It's not that any of that is new - it definitely isn't - but it's just a lot right now.
It makes me grateful for DW being here, as usual both because of and in spite of how quiet it is. Which isn't completely related to the fic posting thing (AO3 has problems, but they aren't the enshittification kind), but it's a tangent that doesn't feel unrelated, either.
All the places I'm thinking about, whether here, AO3, Squidgeworld, Pillowfort (if I ever do try to figure it out), etc. are places that are in opposition to the sort of pervasive hostility elsewhere. (AO3 and Squidgeworld are noteably NOT social media sites, so it's a bit apples to oranges, but still.)
I don't have the desire (yet) or the willingness to utterly abandon every popular site out there (I still get a lot of enjoyment out of tumblr, there are people I can't contact outside of facebook, the youtube algorithm infuriates me but there are creators I still want to see videos from, etc.) but there is a part of me that feels like I don't want to devote a lot of my time and energy to places that are actively trying to be worse for me in order to extract "value."
