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apparently we are doing Imzy round 2.0?
Or at least, that's what Pillowfort sounds vaguely like to me. Well. Uh. I tried to join and got an error, so that's off to an excellent start.
ETA: And it looks like accounts will no longer be free, so I will not be joining--I'll sign up for something like metafilter since I'm paying for speaking access in a room of folks I already know and love and the work of the moderators that maintain that room, but I'm definitely not paying to join an unknown quantity with no known mod staff and no apparently ability to preview anything. Zzzzst, all interest dead. But I digress...
Honestly, I'm really using this discussion to find more interesting DW folks because I like it here, dammit, and I want to delurk more. So if you've recently had me following you, hi! I'm Sci, or I go by grison in a few places (notably AO3 and Tumblr). This is a general-purpose hi talk to me thread, if you're into things like that? If you've seen me following you, probably it's because I've seen you around for quite a while and am only just now delurking; hi! If you want to get a sense for who the hell I am, most of my longform stuff has been on Metafilter for the last few years; here are a few of the things I've written over there. I suppose I should think about porting some of those discussions over here, but.... meh. There's probably a limit to how much I can get away with pretending not to write my paper for the morning.
Anyway, here's a vague list of interesting conversations I've had, because that seems less awkward than just listing a bunch of identity terms into the void.
On allyship and men.
On the history of the asexual flag.
On my largest peeve about Ant Man. (Probably not for the reasons you think.)
On evangelicals actually putting their money with their mouths on morality.
On the meta I could find about good f/f porn.
On orchids blooming underground.
On parasitism in nature and science fiction, and whether or not we should talk about pregnancy. (Of course we should.)
On the loss of spikes in the (human) penis.
On the time I got very angry about an MRA who did not understand mammoths as well as he thought.
Anyway, hi!
ETA: And it looks like accounts will no longer be free, so I will not be joining--I'll sign up for something like metafilter since I'm paying for speaking access in a room of folks I already know and love and the work of the moderators that maintain that room, but I'm definitely not paying to join an unknown quantity with no known mod staff and no apparently ability to preview anything. Zzzzst, all interest dead. But I digress...
Honestly, I'm really using this discussion to find more interesting DW folks because I like it here, dammit, and I want to delurk more. So if you've recently had me following you, hi! I'm Sci, or I go by grison in a few places (notably AO3 and Tumblr). This is a general-purpose hi talk to me thread, if you're into things like that? If you've seen me following you, probably it's because I've seen you around for quite a while and am only just now delurking; hi! If you want to get a sense for who the hell I am, most of my longform stuff has been on Metafilter for the last few years; here are a few of the things I've written over there. I suppose I should think about porting some of those discussions over here, but.... meh. There's probably a limit to how much I can get away with pretending not to write my paper for the morning.
Anyway, here's a vague list of interesting conversations I've had, because that seems less awkward than just listing a bunch of identity terms into the void.
On allyship and men.
On the history of the asexual flag.
On my largest peeve about Ant Man. (Probably not for the reasons you think.)
On evangelicals actually putting their money with their mouths on morality.
On the meta I could find about good f/f porn.
On orchids blooming underground.
On parasitism in nature and science fiction, and whether or not we should talk about pregnancy. (Of course we should.)
On the loss of spikes in the (human) penis.
On the time I got very angry about an MRA who did not understand mammoths as well as he thought.
Anyway, hi!
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I have no reason to believe they'll turn out any better than Imzy, although the interface is better. Not that I'd call it "good," but they haven't made a swarm of design decisions based on "branding" that are awful for a substantial number of users.
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Someday I want to post a long screed on How To Make A New Social Media Platform, which starts with "just hire some damn shills; pay someone - even if it's journalism students receiving intern-job-credit instead of cash - to make a few posts a week for at least a couple of months," so that the new platform has *something* that's not crossposted onto four other sites, and it can start developing a community around original content.
Right now, it's got intros, gifsets, bug reports, and feature requests. I'm not seeing anyone say, "THIS is the UI I've been waiting for! Move over, tumblr; I've found home!"
LJ/DW users aren't likely to tolerate the narrow column - it's wider than Tumblr's dashboard but still very limited. Tumblr users have already complained about the image limits - it won't do gifs larger than 1mb. They also won't like the lack of asks, but that's probably less troublesome; people who love ask-based blogs just won't bother with Pillowfort. Nobody's going to like the lack of profile pages (you get a paragraph, roughly) nor the clunky interface, that's no doubt going to improve, but in the meantime, people are going to give up as soon as they hit a point of frustration.
Those aren't insurmountable problems, but I'm not seeing why someone would leave a platform where they're active, even if PF has one or two features they'd like.
They need a jumpstart. I still believe that
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But journalism students, or creative writing majors, who want to start making a name for themselves before they get out of school--they'd have no problem coming up with a dozen or more, with the pitch of "you keep the rights to your content; you post 4x a week and make at least 20 comments a week and you get to add "Intern at a Social Media Company" to your resume." And then have actual interviews and view writing samples to sort out the ones who fit the style of content the company wants to provide.
I expect they'll eventually be more visible, like Imzy was; for most of its early beta run, you couldn't see the content without a login. But I think that was open signup. I don't know what PF is thinking, to go months between rounds of users; it means there's a large swarm of moribund communities from people who joined during the last wave, posted for three days, and wandered off.
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Beta Users community - posts are normal blog posts; "discussions" can't be liked or reblogged, and stick around, with whatever's got the most recent comments jumping to the top.
Active Users - this is where pretty much everyone posts intro things. From those, you can follow usernames back to their blogs.
...Apparently the whole thing's public; it's just not obvious because the intro page is a login page.
You don't need gifs to make your point with this
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In fact I was starting to wonder if it had any real chance to take off anyway, because it seems, at least superficially, very like tumblr. I've been wondering lately if one of the reasons DW has never gotten the attention it deserves from fandom isn't that fandom as a whole was getting really sick of LJ, and DW (understandably, since it was BUILT to be LJ-but-better) was too... viscerally similar?
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I am sorry for being slow to get back to you! I think you managed to reach out to me during a low-communication day and it's taken me a bit to get back.
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I'm a legal assistant by day. It's been a long time since I've written anything for pleasure or even for consumption outside of the bar & bench, so I'm here to stretch a different muscle.
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If I may ask, what's with the date on this post? Did you post to the future instead of making a sticky? What's the benefit of doing it that way?
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I forgot that stickies were possible! Back in the day, they weren't: you just had to antedate posts way way in advance to keep them up top. Ha!
I need to change this to a different landing post that isn't so pillow fort centric, come to think of it; maybe after my latest round of revisions comes in for my manuscript.
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What kind of manuscript is this?
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And honestly, staying away from PF seems like a good idea - I got in one of of the beta waves, but everything I've been hearing since makes me SO glad for DW, which is at least run by people who have the sense God gave a grasshopper.
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Well, I guess I'll wait and see whether it takes off, but... I'm not holding my breath.
[*Opens half a dozen tabs on meta about f/f porn for future reading*]
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