I won't be promoting this to Twt so let's keep this our little secret for when you next reach the bottom of something I do post.
To be level-headed here I have no idea if Musky Husky really went and put that Cis is a slur in the ToS, but if this goes through, this is the biggest move of outright hostility that he's brought the platform along for.
Up to now, well, let's be honest- old Twt management wasn't good either. Not gonna pull a "no ethical consumption under capitalism" here but I could tolerate this as something that was going to get bad, I did not and do not see much issue with using Twitter from a "we must boycott it" angle. So when he had his little, let's see now, 556 F-35A's flyaway costs-worth of a tantrum (i love that measurement really kills two birds with one stone), I saw the site being managed by people who still happened to be bad but were now just additionally incompetent. Then a few unbans happened, and forgive me if I'm wrong here, but those were dramatically overhyped. Trump was the only one actually unbanned directly and he didn't come back- the pundits that did had outstanding "delete this tweet to be unbanned" orders that they decided to fulfill at the time to look like Musk was rallying the horde. Since then there's actually been a bit of a return to the previous status quo almost, with a lot of the psychos who up and went and wrote the N-word 500 times the day he bought the birdsite out actually getting banned for it, and even if I suspect that was someone else in the company managing to just barely knock some sense into him, he mostly became the new idiot running the place.
This, however, look, it feels different. If this goes into Twitter ToS, let's go through not even the sequence of events per se, but the direct logical extension of it.
-Cisgender is grouped as a bannable slur. -We have no other word that refers to Cis people that doesn't also include Trans/NB/GNC/etc people.
-"But wait," says the fuck, "we do! We're just normal!"
-But we're normal too?
-"Nope, you're not."
This is a guy that we all knew was a cock writing into his ToS that his non-cis users have to proselytize, concede an implied abnormality before them. And, yeah, that's the obvious intent shown in all the replies in the threads surrounding it. "Normal," "Just call us normal, freak," "wElL cIs tEcHniCalLy wAs oKay BuT tHose DAng DIrty aCtiVisTs jUsT uSe It fOr iNsUltS (and as we all know any insult immediately is a slur, assuming that was even fucking true and not a fucking psyop)," you get the picture.
Fake Scientist puts it in his ToS that minorities have to grovel.
Great.
Back when this was at risk of happening, I started looking into other sites. Dragged my feet, then it snuck up on me, and I went through and got them set up. I was not planning to jump ship but wanted the backup as it degraded, and to be fair, I think I succeeded in doing that. I have these other sites ready. They are set up, they are useable. It's just transitioning to them that takes time.
I have, unfortunately, been using Reddit a lot for doomscrolling- which I should stop, because Reddit is also having a thing on top of being Reddit and also, like, doomscrolling is also bad.
DA hasn't been touched for a while but, fuck, is it tempting to go back. You can opt pieces out of that AI shit, but I'm still livid about the way they irreversibly put everything on the site at the time of launch into that dataset without asking- if you had anything posted, opting out won't work retroactively, to say nothing of all the users that have passed away and can't opt out. I imagine it has, in the meantime, been flooded by AI content, as artists leave and AI users find active encouragement. I hate to fall to stereotypes because DA is good and the things people make fun of it for are things I am very much into, but, well, a lot of the people there aren't exactly practiced or even really dedicated artists themselves with thought-out concepts (and let's be honest a lot of them are probably much too young to be drawing what they're drawing, which is much more damning than "haha art not look good")- I can only imagine that anyone that was there to post crayon drawings of Sonic being inflated has turned to AI image generators to satisfy their needs and pump out a content stream, and there's always been lots of those types there. It remains as a backup, and if they keep their promises of being able to opt out from here out, maybe I'll be able to forgive the damage that's already done- the numbers I got on what I posted were... Tantalizing. Hundreds of views from a moderately high-effort meme that just played with tags a bit, dozens of favorites in my first day. For just a moment I felt like I'd finally found a place where I could be successful. Fuckin ouch.
I'm making more of an effort on Newgrounds, with my recent streak of (NSFW) highly-rendered pieces getting well and truly past their policy against WIPposting, although I'm still going to have to really improve my workflow if I want to get going there. Their scouting system is apparently going to be beating my ass for a while, and I'm still not sure if VRoid model showcases are allowed, or what to do with that one ref that has clothed and nude versions ratings-wise. Newgrounds' format as a whole is definitely something I can get used to, but the mechanically-focused way my artistic side was raised is not meshing all that well with a site that doesn't like dealing with WIPs and variants.
As for Tumblr, it's been a while since I've checked and I'll need to shake out the bot followers, but mostly I'm intimidated about having to essentially design my own freaking UI. I understand it's not like ground-up coding, there's tools, but with how easily my brain gets overwhelmed thinking of starting a big project and how easily it proceeds to drop it if it leaves my field of vision this will be quite an undertaking for me. Still using stock pictures and outdated model images on this site and I found Wix's editor pretty intuitive. What I've heard about Tumblr just gives me MATLAB flashbacks...
But, as for moving over, well, I think I have a plan. As much as I can, I'll post exclusively on these sites, and link Twitter to them. I won't be putting images in my Twitter gallery, just tweeting links to... Probably Newgrounds for images, probably Tumblr for long-but-not-very-edited, train-of-thought posts (Wix ofc will remain but most of the stuff I do here will probably focus back on my original vision of a more archive/wiki sort of format with lots of images embedded and frequent updates to existing articles). I might start doing Twitch streams and Youtube videos in what harshly limited capacity I am currently able to- very limited talking, so mostly random gameplay clips for Youtube and relatively low-energy slow-paced and short TTS streams for Twitch. I will try and get as many people from Twitter to my other sites. And, as for Discord, any media sharing I do through friend's servers will lead to these sites.
But, at the same time, is... Is that going to happen? I've known this for a while, the vast majority of people who follow me don't interact with me. At all. I'm kind of guilty of it to, I should really hit the bell for some of my friends, but said friends are my only regulars. People give VTTwt a lot of shit and I mostly just kinda scoff and say "oh yeah you're just mad cause people told you off for shouting slurs" but one thing that is brazenly obvious is that everyone follows everyone and then proceeds to just sit there. If you're reading this, that clearly isn't you, thank you. But I don't want to turn this into a "fake fans" rant. It's... Eating at me. Bad. I learned of this whole mess from a partner messaging me it, laughing about how stupid it was.
Whatever strange hormonal gland lets them laugh at this situation, I clearly did not grow it.
I saw a bigot leveraging his power to force me off of a platform that I had finally found a scrap of success with. I hated myself, and have for a while, that I let something that can be so easily bought and distorted, a single, generic commodity, have that control on me- that I had become something what the people mocking us for opposing the takeover thought I was- and that I was treating my 290-odd followers as some kind of empire. But this is the closest thing to what I want in life that I have ever felt. That number doesn't count for much, but for a while, it's... It's helped me feel better. Sitting at my desk job with an hour of commuting either way became a lot more difficult today, knowing what's seeming imminent for this scrounged-together dream of mine.
I described it to them as anxiety over potentially losing a hobby. Really, if I can't salvage this, I'm afraid I'm losing a pretty significant reason to live.
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