Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

Every time some other social media site does something to drive away a large segment of its users, there's often an influx to Dreamwidth. This varies based on the userbase which is ticked off, of course; it tends to be the more female and more fannish users who are driven to Dreamwidth, while white supremacists and MRAs driven from reddit or Twitter are more likely to end up on sites such as 8chan or Gab.

This has two side effects: Dreamwidth users being excited that our platform is getting love and activity on a level that's been more rare since the great Tumblr + Twitter exodus of several years back, and new Dreamwidth users (and returnees) asking for some of the features which they loved at their old social media site. I am absolutely a fan of new people coming to Dreamwidth, and I undoubtedly agree with everyone that the UI is showing its age. It was not built in a mobile-first, multimedia-above-all world.

But it also true that the Internet is a more toxic place than it was in the heady days of Brad's garage in 1999, or in Mark and Denise's inspired 2008. Which leads me to the two hot takes I've been mulling over for several years:

1. Some of the features people want are products of the Toxic Internet, which has trained people to expect them
2. Dreamwidth's relative unpopularity is what keeps it great

Addiction and Anti-patterns

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In defense of unpopularity

( Read more... )

Yet another pass through the cycle that periodically afflicts me.

• Follow professional colleagues on twitter.
• Be relatively quiet and well-behaved on twitter because it's a professional forum.
• Follow more social justice folks on twitter because that's where they are.
• Tweet more about politics because these issues are important.
• Get stressed about tweeting about politics because I'm inexplicably followed on twitter by my boss, my grandboss, my great-grandboss, and my CEO.
• Get equally stressed about tweeting during the workday because see above, even though I'm responsible about when I check it.
• Hope they have me muted.
• Follow lots of people using twitter as a long-form platform because the New Web is weird, y'all.
• Start to long-form tweet because I pick up the languages of cultures I'm immersed in far too quickly.

With a soupçon of "I have all these blog topics half-drafted; why do I never finish them or reply to comments?" and a dash of "I seem to be so destractable and irritable lately."

I did eventually figure out that one of the reasons I was doing long-form tweeting is my perception that more people will read a storify than a blog post (unless it's on medium, *snort*). Which, (a) aargh, whatever, this is not a productive of my focus, and (b) I'm not widely read anyhow. [footnote]

I also keep running into the situation where I'm capable of being ridiculously diplomatic in situations where I believe it's called for (basically, any situation which has already become fraught), but in pretty much any other situation I am my father's daughter. I call that "assuming that in any non-politicized situation everyone is an adult and is willing to speak frankly with each other and hear frank and open opinions", though I suppose my father probably would have called it "not having time for assholes". To be fair, he also would have said something to the effect of "you're your father's daughter, and we're both assholes."

(Sometimes I miss the hell out of my dad. ♥♥♥♥♥)

This has led to the odd situation where some people believe I am incredibly diplomatic and can be called on to moderate awkward conversations, and some people think I am a bull in a china shop and should not be allowed out in public. Both of which are actually situationally true! But twitter, in any case, is one of the situations where it will not occur to me to be incredibly diplomatic, even though almost by his very nature it is already fraught.

It was at this point that I recalled I could disable Echofon notifications on my phone.

I'm hoping this will stick.


Footnote:
Certainly I'm not widely read in the accessibility community, where I'd like to have some influence. On the one hand this is deeply frustrating, because I do have a lot to add to that conversation with respect to technology, usability, and standards. On the other hand, that arguably means I can burn bridges freely.

Which, as I watch (as I have over the last decade) women, people with disabilities, and people of color get shunted to the side in accessibility standards making, accessibility voices cited, and people in the field given credit for their work, is something I have been considering more and more lately. If I'm not going to be allowed to help improve the accessibility of the web as a whole, why not focus on improving the accessibility of individual websites? I am too practical to bang my head against this particular wall forever.

Also, today was my first real mansplain! (Since its coinage.) I mean a For Serious dude in my mentions Calmly Explaining Me Things, when it became clear via three separate threads that he had no idea what he was talking about, and I, who had assumed he knew more than I did because he was so confident about it, was the more more knowledgeable of the two of us.

I was grimly thinking last week about the great day in the future when I will be able to burn all of those aforementioned bridges and speak a truth or too about the way things happen in the accessibility community, when I remembered the also aforementioned "the accessibility community doesn't particularly value my voice." Which again, means I can be tactless enough to make a post such as, say, this one, without even worrying about ticking people off. I could even link to it from twitter, honestly, although that would arguably be counter-productive for my own mental health.