buckyballbearing:

masswisteria:

bogleech:

An important thing to remember is that up until only a few years ago, the internet was like a sea of tiny, isolated islands. The biggest social outlets were forums, each with its own status quo, and the biggest, most visible ones were most often run by ambivalent moderators who encouraged “civil discussion” even if it meant letting grotesquely prejudiced shitheads have their “equal say.”

People who had any sensitivity to a lot of issues were often just run off and had to stick to smaller, more private outlets. Forums for trans people, abuse survivors, anyone different from the acceptable mainstream were treated as trolling targets and often crumbled under the onslaught.

What we’re NOW seeing, across all this social media like tumblr and twitter, are people coming out of hiding, showing their true feelings and identities as they discover they’re not as alone as they thought.

The people who chalk this up to some kind of SJW special snowflake bandwagon are people still living in the internet’s dark ages. They don’t get that this diversity and compassion was always there, but hidden under their mountains of fake edgy bullshit. That’s what pisses them off so much: they thought the internet was a free-for-all paradise to take nothing seriously and be as big an asshole as you want, but that was nothing but a facade all along. It was the result of people who thought they HAD to act that way in order to avoid becoming targets.

Now we’re finding out which ones were just legitimately terrible people to the core and they’re all in panic mode over it.

There is an interesting counterpoint to this, and that is while the open nature of tumblr and twitter have made it easier for us to find one another, it has also made it harder for us to set the boundaries and borders that are necessary to have truly safe spaces.

Forum software (or even LiveJournal) gave us the ability to create self-moderated spaces, where communities could define their own rules and enforce them by removing access from offenders.  The well-defined space of a community or forum helped contextualize content, and allowed for different groups to fulfill their legitimate but mutually exclusive needs without sparking endless flamewars.

Granted, these closed communities were a lot harder to discover, let alone become a part of.  Social media has done wonders for that, and I am grateful for it.  But I’ve seen so much conflict arise from the fact that people want to form safe spaces within these sites, and it is simply not possible to do so when the environment is completely open.  It would be nice if we could merge the discoverability of tumblr with the community controls of, say, LiveJournal.

Saaaaame. It’s not that wank never existed before (mod wanks were the stuff of legends), but at least it was possible to create a community where the members agreed on standards of behavior. 99% of the shit I see on Tumblr is the inherent tension of trying to pretend that millions of people are one cohesive community, when we’re not. We’re actually millions of intersecting, overlapping social networks, and my dash experience could be radically different to that of my followers. Also, my needs could be radically different to that of my followers. Tumblr, Twitter, any public social network are inherently unsafe spaces, and it is dangerous to forget that.