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type_wildAs the current stories go, although official word of course does not confirm it:
Tumblr is only the disc one villain in this story. The final boss is the ghost of Steve Jobs
The one thing I oddly have yet to mention in either of my lengthy missives about my ill-fated love of the Windows Phone OS, was the fact that like half the reason I'm here in the first place is becaues I'll be dead before I'll own a bloody Iphone. It's a long and very petty story, but suffice it to say that my bitter annoyance with Apple naturally grew into a keen interest in criticism of Apple. The criticism of Apple that existed a decade ago was mainly concerned with its Walled Garden politics.
Quickly summarised: A walled garden is platform where the content available is curated by the people running it - in the specific case of the Iphone, the fact that the only software you're allowed to install on your device is software that follows the guidelines of the IOS app store.
With the way the internet and the usage of computers has evolved the last decade and half, it's hardly surprising that walled gardens are par for the course of the everyman. Most people I know use the internet mainly for social media and media consumption, all of which happen either on apps or on proprietary websites. The generation before me learned to use computers in order to use spreadsheets and text editing at work; the generation after are the digital natives who cannot imagine a world without youtube. But nineties kids were young when the internet was young.
I entered fandom when the web was still the open sea that required some fundamental tech knowledge to be navigated, but which was gloriously anarchic and gloriously equal when you learned how to make and share your websites. Even the fandom hubs were non-profit and run by amateurs. My computer was a tool, and the idea that the people manufacturing the tool was going to tell me what I was allowed to use it for was ridiculous. Even if my childish boicott of Iproducts wasn't a thing, I'd still be uncomfortable, to say the least, about using a platform that effectively wanted to dictate how I was using it. (ironically, the Windows store too is a Walled Garden. Let's talk about my hypocricy later)
But fandom, for all that it was full of early adopters in 2001, found its home in the proto-social media on LJ, and when it migrated from LJ, it didn't go to the known fandom-friendly LJ clones, but to modern social media. Finding out why people went to tumblr instead of dreamdwidth is nigh impossible at this point; whichever came first, fact is that the migration from LJ coincided with the smartphones taking over the mobile market. The result: A considerable amount of fandom is happening on phones, not computers. Phones use apps, and the stats say that about half of those apps will be curated by the IOS app store.
And the Apple business model is to be accessible to all users, and to be accessible to all users there needs to be handholding and protecting of the children, so ix-nay on the porn.
There is a debate going on about the World Wide Web vs. the app-based internet usage that I sadly have not followed nearly close enough to say something insightful about, but the tumblr strikethrough is the point where it hits fandom. Because if tumblr is purging the smut becaues it lost half its mobile users, then there is a lot to be said about how Apple's policy makers are effectively no-platforming creators on third-party software, and policing the content consumption of their own customers. Ideally, you could say that this is of course the choice the IOS users make when they buy an Idevice, but if Apple is using their size to dictate the content on a third-party platform, then the internet just got a great bit worse than I used to think that it was.
I might never have been a particularly avid fan of tumblr, but dear god, if there ever was a reason for arguing that the move from the web to app-based internet was Bad News, it is if the policymakers of some multinational company is going to decide what kind of pictures I get to look at on a website which they do not even own.
ETA 15/12: The latest story going around is that tumblr was planning the porn bann already in August or September, though I can't find this confirmed anywhere. If it's true, it disproves the causality I speculate about here. Though not, I'm afraid, the theory behind it.
Tumblr is only the disc one villain in this story. The final boss is the ghost of Steve Jobs
The one thing I oddly have yet to mention in either of my lengthy missives about my ill-fated love of the Windows Phone OS, was the fact that like half the reason I'm here in the first place is becaues I'll be dead before I'll own a bloody Iphone. It's a long and very petty story, but suffice it to say that my bitter annoyance with Apple naturally grew into a keen interest in criticism of Apple. The criticism of Apple that existed a decade ago was mainly concerned with its Walled Garden politics.
Quickly summarised: A walled garden is platform where the content available is curated by the people running it - in the specific case of the Iphone, the fact that the only software you're allowed to install on your device is software that follows the guidelines of the IOS app store.
With the way the internet and the usage of computers has evolved the last decade and half, it's hardly surprising that walled gardens are par for the course of the everyman. Most people I know use the internet mainly for social media and media consumption, all of which happen either on apps or on proprietary websites. The generation before me learned to use computers in order to use spreadsheets and text editing at work; the generation after are the digital natives who cannot imagine a world without youtube. But nineties kids were young when the internet was young.
I entered fandom when the web was still the open sea that required some fundamental tech knowledge to be navigated, but which was gloriously anarchic and gloriously equal when you learned how to make and share your websites. Even the fandom hubs were non-profit and run by amateurs. My computer was a tool, and the idea that the people manufacturing the tool was going to tell me what I was allowed to use it for was ridiculous. Even if my childish boicott of Iproducts wasn't a thing, I'd still be uncomfortable, to say the least, about using a platform that effectively wanted to dictate how I was using it. (ironically, the Windows store too is a Walled Garden. Let's talk about my hypocricy later)
But fandom, for all that it was full of early adopters in 2001, found its home in the proto-social media on LJ, and when it migrated from LJ, it didn't go to the known fandom-friendly LJ clones, but to modern social media. Finding out why people went to tumblr instead of dreamdwidth is nigh impossible at this point; whichever came first, fact is that the migration from LJ coincided with the smartphones taking over the mobile market. The result: A considerable amount of fandom is happening on phones, not computers. Phones use apps, and the stats say that about half of those apps will be curated by the IOS app store.
And the Apple business model is to be accessible to all users, and to be accessible to all users there needs to be handholding and protecting of the children, so ix-nay on the porn.
There is a debate going on about the World Wide Web vs. the app-based internet usage that I sadly have not followed nearly close enough to say something insightful about, but the tumblr strikethrough is the point where it hits fandom. Because if tumblr is purging the smut becaues it lost half its mobile users, then there is a lot to be said about how Apple's policy makers are effectively no-platforming creators on third-party software, and policing the content consumption of their own customers. Ideally, you could say that this is of course the choice the IOS users make when they buy an Idevice, but if Apple is using their size to dictate the content on a third-party platform, then the internet just got a great bit worse than I used to think that it was.
I might never have been a particularly avid fan of tumblr, but dear god, if there ever was a reason for arguing that the move from the web to app-based internet was Bad News, it is if the policymakers of some multinational company is going to decide what kind of pictures I get to look at on a website which they do not even own.
ETA 15/12: The latest story going around is that tumblr was planning the porn bann already in August or September, though I can't find this confirmed anywhere. If it's true, it disproves the causality I speculate about here. Though not, I'm afraid, the theory behind it.
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no subject
Date: 2018-12-07 11:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-08 03:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-09 03:24 pm (UTC)I agree that fandom can't rely on mainstream platforms! Usually those platforms are driven by corporate interests after all, which eventually runs opposite that of fandom's interests. I think the start of some fandom-y websites (like pillowfort) that wants to rely on funding by users instead of raising VC or getting bought by private companies is a good sign, though people may not be as willing to pay for them at first.
iirc the no porn thing for apple appstore is across the board for all apps? Personally I'm waiting for some website to make a good and proper responsive website so there's no need for apps lol.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-09 10:15 pm (UTC)It's understandable that platforms aiming for some degree of "mainstream" want to be sanitised, and now it's being told that the owners were planning to purge the NWS material months ago anyway because they wanted to put up ads. Fandom is kind of inherently shady, too; if not for our boundless abilities to make new and interesting forms of porn, so for our interactions being based on copyrighted material, a lot of which is probably shared more than whatever random copyright laws open for. The tumblr porn ban will be nothing compared to the götterdämmerung happening if the EU meme ban goes through and somehow turns out to be functional.
From what I gather through google, Apple's porn bann might just be visual? Because Wattpad launched an app specifically for erotica a couple of years ago, and I'd imagine that they at least know what gets banhammered. I'm personally so way behind the times on smartphones anyway that I almost exclusively use browsers still; the only SoMe apps I'm using are instagram and pinterest, and I'm hardly ever on them anyway.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-10 03:27 am (UTC)I'm planning a write up about the m/m writer that was sentenced to ten year's jail actually! It's why I'm even trawling weibo in the first place lol.
On the surface, the heavy sentence is because there's a 1998 law that sentences some years for every 20k the author earns for publishing unauthorized books. This is obviously to stop people from spreading their own ideals or anti-government agenda, but in this case the maximum sentence is probably due to the prejudice against the content of the books.
Luckily after the whole thing blew up, her friends found her a lawyer and she's going through appeals now!
Oh I guess apple's porn ban should be just visual. I think it's the same for google play. I guess advertisers were complaining.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-15 08:45 am (UTC)(Also while I agree with all the ragging on Apple, I fuckin hate that Android is their only real competitor. I shouldn’t have to choose between trading away my privacy or my freedom)
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Date: 2018-12-15 04:17 pm (UTC)YES, exactly, and it's disenheartening to see the number of people who apparently think that
I'm perfectly disillusioned with all of Big Tech as it is. And yeah, a big part of my loyalty to Windows Phone was because they were probably the only ones with a legit chance of breaking into the market. They probably wouldn't have been much better, but for a little while, it let me believe that it was possible that it was possible to have a variety of smartphone OS's.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 03:01 am (UTC)Yeah I think a lot of people are, right now. Hopefully it’ll lead to progress instead of nihilism
no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 02:22 pm (UTC)Could you say more about this? Because the app I am using to read this on my iPod Touch is Safari, which, as far as anyone knows, has no restrictions on accessing the web. (I wish Dreamwidth were a little more mobile-friendly, but that's a different topic.)
I got my first iPod Touch for accessibility reasons: it was the lightest mobile device on the market, at a time when I could barely lift a paper plate without pain. Where content is concerned, I mainly use my iPod Touch to create content, access my cloud backup, or visit the web. If a particular app does something better than a website, I'll switch to it, but I don't consider "censor the content" to be a reason for switching to an app.
On the iPod Touch / iPhone / iPad, a website bookmark on the home screen looks identical to an app. If a website has a mobile version that works the same way as its app, there is no way to tell the difference between the website and the app when it's open, other than to see the url at the top of the page. And in alternative broswers, you can even go full-screen and get rid of the url bar.
I just went through my iPod Touch and couldn't find a single app that couldn't be replaced with a website, other than productivity tools that don't supply content, such as word processors.
I don't want to sound like an Apple apologist here; I think there are major problems with the Apple system, one of which you rightly call out in this post. But I do want to distinguish between actual problems with Apple, and people using apps because companies are too lazy - or, in my case, too ignorant - to create completely mobile-friendly versions of their websites.
Tumblr, incidentally, has a mobile-friendly website. I found the angst over it losing its iPhone app to be totally baffling.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 05:53 pm (UTC)What I meant - but in retrospect, badly conveyed - was the sentiment I run into a lot with IRL people whose internet usage is primarily mobile: it all happens on apps, not in the browser. There are reasons why I find this troublesome, the main of which are outlined in the replies in the reblogs there: apps lock you into a singular service and allows the owners of said service to monitor and control your entire experience of it. They don't do it for your convenience.
The problem, as you too point out, isn't the cencorship of the internet, because everyone with a smartphone will have access to some kind of web browser. The problem is that someone has successfully convinced large amounts of their users that the web is inconvenient, and that the best experience is through The App. If most IOS users stopped visiting tumblr when the app disappeared rather than log on through Safari, that's a pretty good indication of how far along that path we've come.
Of course, word on the grapewine is now that the pornban has been planned since August, in order to either make the site ad-friendly, or just shut it down. Neither of which can be blamed om Apple's policies.
(fwiw: yeah, my only problem with DW is the non-existent mobile version)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 06:13 pm (UTC)Thank you for your nice reply to my longwinded comment! I agree wholeheartedly with what you said.
"Of course, word on the grapewine is now that the pornban has been planned since August, in order to either make the site ad-friendly, or just shut it down."
And I'm not at all sure that SESTA/FOSTA didn't play a role, like it did at Facebook. Essentially, I think that the entire mainstream culture is shifting this way, and that big social media companies are simply going with what they consider to be a trend.
I could have died laughing, though, when I saw that news quote about how Tumblr decided that the best way to double the number of its members from fandom and social justice communities was to ban adult content. Talk about not knowing your base.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 09:56 pm (UTC)I started writing a reply to this comment that got so tangential that I'll save it for a separate post in the future. The short of it is that I think this in some ways might be a battle between Internet 1.0 (a lawless country in a different dimension than The Real World) and Internet 2.0 (the internet is an extension of our everyday lives); the fact that this kind of legislature and this kind of content policing is cropping up now is because our mums are getting comfortable here and they are not ready to meet the subcultures that have been blooming online since the nineties.
If tumblr wants to be more mainstream, then it can't risk any more mums complaining about the weird perverts, I guess. But the real question is of course what kind of hopes it has for competing against Instagram or whatever kids these days are on, or why they think people would go there rather than to whatever new thing comes along. As long as things stay within the law, the uproar over this debacle suggests that the subcultures lacking other social media platforms would be a pretty loyal userbase. The question, I guess, if it's one that can be monetised.
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Date: 2018-12-14 10:57 pm (UTC)I've been seeing this post reblogged a lot.
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Date: 2018-12-14 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 11:25 pm (UTC)"our mums are getting comfortable here and they are not ready to meet the subcultures that have been blooming online since the nineties"
Well, clearly those mums should have been here when they were young in the nineties!
I'm 55, by the way. I first came online in 1993, when I was 30. My father persuaded me; he'd been on the Internet since the 1980s. I'm pretty sure my parents didn't anticipate me joining a dialogue forum on LGBT topics within the first four years of my going online - much less starting a gay erotic fiction ezine at a later date - but they totally coped with it. No calls for censorship there. So I have zero sympathy for the "make the web friendly to me at the expense of everyone else" mum brigade.
(Providing tools by which individuals can curate their own web reading/viewing I am highly in favor of. AO3 does that quite well.)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-15 01:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-16 10:38 am (UTC)Heh, no, I would have been faint at heart too.
My mother was never comfortable with computers; it was a dexterity problem she had with using mouses. I sometimes wonder whether, if she'd lived that long, she eould have done better with a tablet and a stylus.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 11:27 pm (UTC)"I hope I didn't come across as fanatically anti-Apple here - these days, I hardly think any of the big tech companies are much better"
I don't think it's possible to be fanatically anti big business. Scream a little louder if you like. :)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 02:58 pm (UTC)I’ve been using personal computers on a daily basis since 1985 or so when I got a hand-me-down luggable computer running CP/M. I started a work-study job in the public computer lab at Brandeis in 1989. I’ve used early MacOS and MS-DOS and an Amiga and every iteration of Windows.
After doing tech support for Windows 95, though, I opted-in to the Mac universe when I spent a bonus check on an iMac (back in 2000?) so that I wouldn’t have to fix things. Macs still Just Work, provided you know the right commands. I’m locked into using Macs and iPhones now unless I want to spend six months learning Linux and then a month on a data migration project.
So, yeah, trapped in the megalith.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 08:29 pm (UTC)I think Microsoft and Google both tried to emulate the Apple environment where all things digital happen across devices all belonging to the ecosystemn. Micrososft clearly failed, and as for Google, I suppose time will tell. I've never met a person owing a Chromebook, but they're apparently big in the US education market.
I'm personally not interested in "easy" as much as in some Braveheart-esque idea of ~our freedom~, but I also belong to the very narrow generation that taught ourselves computer by being let loose on Windows 95. Digital democracy is important, but I definitely felt more in control of my life back when I decided for myself when and what kind of changes I wanted to make on my computer *g* If I weren't so lazy, I'd been serious about Linux a decade ago.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-15 12:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-14 10:27 pm (UTC)Here via
is that a metropolis icon i see
Date: 2018-12-14 11:10 pm (UTC)But yeah, my good phone runs Windows Phone, meaning that it's good for little more than playing media and taking pictures. And, you know, occasionally calling or texting *g* the internet being taken over by apps is something I've been reading about, but not witnessed until this happened.
it is indeed!
Date: 2018-12-14 11:25 pm (UTC)Understood. I feel what that changes is the timing of the trigger, though, not the underlying forces.
the internet being taken over by apps is something I've been reading about, but not witnessed until this happened.
It's an amazing crash course.
And makes me think Dreamwidth never is going to develop an app, gatekeeping being so much not their thing.
Re: it is indeed!
Date: 2018-12-15 12:27 am (UTC)It comes across as sadly plausible, doesn't it?
DW is probably too small and too non-business for an app to be likely - and yeah, that whole bit about the platforms effectively being gatekeepers of the content. I sure would appreciate a mobile version of their website, tho.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-16 01:12 am (UTC)(I was an 80s kid, learned my computing on an apple IIc, had an apple II GS in middle school and was embittered toward Apple when they orphaned the IIGS. The only Apple device I've owned since was an ipod.)
Chromes, BTW, are OK dummy devices for kids to use in school, but I wouldn't buy one for myself.
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Date: 2018-12-17 01:51 pm (UTC)Yeah, that's the impression I've got myself. They can do everything your browser can! ...which, if ever expanding, is still a pretty limited scope.
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Date: 2018-12-18 04:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-12-16 07:09 am (UTC)In other words Tumblr got banned from Apple because the people running Tumblr were too lazy to enforce the law on their site, and now they're overreacting. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater so to speak.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 02:52 pm (UTC)And, yeah, if they were more concerned about their users than about Apple, then they'd work around it to implement some sort of filter a la Reddit. But they chose the other option, probably in the hopes of attracting a different userbase (to appeal to advertisers, some speculate).
no subject
Date: 2018-12-17 07:06 pm (UTC)Honestly, given their complete and utter contempt for the wants and needs of their users, I am half convinced that the people running Tumblr are minions of some evil chaos deity, or they're like the demons of the Bad Place (from the TV show The Good Place) designing it with the deliberate intent to make the experience as awful as possible.