apparently we are doing Imzy round 2.0?

[sciatrix]

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!

Comments

[elf]

Pillowfort isn't going to be free? (I mean. Not surprised; the choices are basically "paid membership" or "ad-supported" or both, and both wouldn't surprise me.) I just got my beta invite yesterday; it's free so far.

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.

[sciatrix]

Apparently not. Too bad, so sad! I didn't even hear about it until this round, but this pretty well just means that I have no incentive to bother with it. I mean, I can't consume content there, and I can't contribute it in response for feedback, so as far as I'm concerned it doesn't exist. Something like Metafilter, I have a way to read and decide whether the $5 is worth ponying up to join, you know? This doesn't have any established community, as far as I can tell has no mod staff, no nothin'.

[elf]

I'll probably post occasional updates about it, and if it ever actually gets interesting, I may say something at Metafilter. Right now, it's like Imzy only with less fail, which doesn't mean "with more awesome."

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 scans_daily is what made Dreamwidth viable: several hundred users who grudgingly moved to the new platform and kept it active enough that other people drifted this direction and got comfortable. PF needs something like that - a community that people will join in order to see. (Of course, they can't get that during closed beta. But they could be developing it - pick an under-represented niche of any kind, seek out a few people to manage it, and push them to stay active, so that when the next wave hits, there's something visible to do.)

[sciatrix]

Agree on all counts. You need content to seed a community on a new platform, and that means you need to have some motivation for people to make it. You wouldn't want to hire journalism students, mind--if I was trying to do that, I'd approach some of the bigger content providers, maybe in a couple of mid-profile fandoms, to start posting platform-specific shit over there. They'd lose some audience, which is why you have to make an incentive otherwise--we're fandom, we pay in attention and love, you have to compensate--but they'd pull quite a bit over there, and that helps. Might help to link longerform stuff on something like Tumblr with a pull text, like I know a few Wordpress blogs that reach Tumblr-based audiences do in order to pull comments somewhere less nightmarish. But you can't do that unless people can see the content before committing to join or unless they can join with a very very low bar to doing so, like a free login. (And no, free trials of paid accounts are not going to snare people, particularly if you demand a credit card--your customers got wise to that one, thanks.)

[elf]

I agree that journalism students aren't necessarily the best; they'd just be fairly easily available. Seeking out big-name/popular fans is problematic; monetizing fandom, even indirectly, is controversial, and a new company may not have any way of figuring out who's skilled at making good discussions happen, rather than just posting things people like. That could backfire badly. (See also: FanLib, especially the "Invitation Letters" section.)

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.

[doomhamster]

Eugh, PF isn't going to be free? -sound of interest plummeting-

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?

[elf]

Guess what - you CAN read Pillowfort without an account! You just can't get there from the main page.

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.

[sebenikela]

hi! we started mutually-following each other on tumblr (i'm kawuli there) so I thought I'd try and connect over here where the signal-to-noise ratio is a little better :)

[sciatrix]

hi back! I actually did wind up eventually joining pillowfort, ironically enough, so I'm over there too as grison.

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.

You don't need gifs to make your point with this

[jesse_the_k]

VERY BEST PIC EVER.

[jesse_the_k]

Proving my motto, "it's never too late to interact on DW," I'm here to say HI! I love your contributions on Metafilter and I'm so glad you're here.

[exasperative]

Hi! I'm testing Dreamwidth out over Pillowfort right now because it seems to line up better with the direction I want to go. I'm subscribing to a lot of people right now (including you!) to get a feel for post frequency etc. I'll probably do a prune once I've figured out how I'm going to use this dang thing.

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.

[sciatrix]

Hello back! I'm a grad student right now, but I'm also doing a lot of following with the assumption that I will prune when I get a minute, too. Nice to meet you!

[exasperative]

Good to meet you too! I'm really pleased to have a push to be a bit more social.

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?

[sciatrix]

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.

[exasperative]

Ah okay cool! I was wondering if it was some type of organizational hack I would regret not implementing form the get-go. (If anyone has any of those, I'm all ears.)

What kind of manuscript is this?

[swingandswirl]

Hello! I'm here via a post on AskMefi that links to your journal; you sound like a very cool person, and at least three of your links make me go 'oooh!' so, hi!

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.

[caeciliusinhorto]

So pillowfort is: Tumblr, except on a .io domain so porn is banned from the get-go, and I have to pay to use it, and there's no existing community that I would want to pay to join, and there's a 1Mb limit for images/gifs? And it's still in beta so things may change at any time without warning. And it's spent a not insignificant amount of time since tumblr's latest bullshit down for maintenance.

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*]

[sciatrix]

Yeah, more or less. I actually have an account over there acquired right before they became pay-only, but I haven't used it since their most recent massive PR fuckup (involving banning someone for something that they decided was going to be against their TOS before actually changing the relevant TOS.) Woof.

[sciatrix]

Hello back! I hear you re: people who have the sense god gave grasshoppers. It's one reason I'm basically taking the initiative to pour energy into DW in the same way as I pour energy into the Blue and Grey--both where I hang out on MeFi; Fanfare is a little too scattered and frankly a little too non-fannish for me to want to hang out there, and I mostly poke into the green when someone summons me to find out whether mice eat jizz. Here, there, the AO3 and the OTW generally, the Pinboard guy--internet folks who seem genuinely trustworthy are few and far between, and therefore worth cultivating wherever and whenever they appear.

[eirias]

Hello! I recognize your username from metafilter! Someone else I know IRL pointed to your journal, so I thought I would say hello.