Platforms

Let me define some terms.

A platform is a site or service that hosts content on behalf of the user and allows other users to view said content. Some platforms are just simple webhosts like neocities. Others are fully featured sites with many features to users like twitter. All social media sites are platforms in this sense(and why they are social media platforms).

Ownership of content in this case does not refer to copyright or intellectual property rights. Instead I refer to the control one has over the hosted content. Can user’s other than the creator/uploader remove or modify the content on the platform? Can user’s other than the creator/uploader change who is allowed to view or interact with content on the platform? In either case the creator/uploader is not the owner of the hosted content, instead the platform(and its owners) are the ones who own that content.

Platforms are convenient for sure, but by forfeiting ownership you are beholden to the owners of the platform and their rules. The owners are, to put simply, not you. They do not necessarily share your values nor are they obligated to. Platforms are not feasible unless they can make a profit, that is the nature of the world we live in. To make a profit they have to offset the cost of hosting the content of so many people(which is not cheap). To do this, they offer advertising space, like any other website does. This means that platforms, in order to keep avertisers happy, need to remain clean and marketable.

This is not neccessarily a bad thing in all respects. People like having moderation to a degree. Not having to put up with deaththreats and leaked personal infromation. Not having to put up with racisim and fachist shit. But fundamentally, advertiser cleanliness is an aversion to any kind of contravercial, non-profit seeking behavor. That includes minorites, critiques, anyone vaguely radical, etc.

But then again, moderators don’t own the site either. They are employees doing work, and with a set of standards and policies set by the company they work for. They are human, subject to their own biases and errors. They are also subject to the biases and errors in company policy.

The owners of a platform are of two groups, shareholders and the CEO. The shareholders are the ones who provide the money, betting on the success of the platform. Like advertisers, they are risk averse and profit driven, and therefore choose to make decisions that make the platform more sanitized and generate more profit short-term even if profit is dimished long-term. Fundamentally they have no investment in the “values” or “community” of a platform, only the value of the company stocks. The CEO is a different matter, they are the one who has to figure out how to drive profit, but they cant leave. They either plan to enshitify the site or want to mold the site to their own values. The CEO is unique as they are not entirely driven by profit, they can be driven by ego, which has been seen time and time again(just going to refrence elon musk and twitter as whole, figure it out).

By not owning the content on the platform, users are at the mercy of many. They need to be advertiser friendly, un-provocative and safe. They need to be appealing to the moderation team, who they will never meet, and must trust to accurately decide what is good and what is appaling on a scale that is near impossible to actually manage. They need to generate profits for shareholders, to be trendy and marketable. Lastly, they need to meet the values of the CEO which can be arbitrary(though generally self-serving, ego-driven, and debasing). Expecting users to manage all these priorities much less appeal to their own audience and community is, frankly, impossible.

Let me be honest, this is why I’m writing this. This situation on Tumblr is why. Of every platform I’ve seen Tumblr is the one I’ve liked the most. It provides funny memes, art, and genuinely useful information. It isn’t just a microbloging site like twitter where nuance got thrown out the window but it has long posts that people can continually add on to. It is the most hostile(in a loving way) social media site ive seen a while. Mainly, it’s users did not try to be profitable and that was how the site always was. It was unmarketable and unabashedly queer, and that is what started all this.

Predstrogen is a transwoman on Tumblr. This started because they posted a transition progress photo, effectively a comparision between how they looked before and after transitoning. It’s two innocuous photos.

Tumblr’s trans exclusionary radical feminists(TERFs basically women that hate trans-people) decided to mass report the image, becuse it’s a trans person which they hate. More specifically they reported it as being sexually explicit, which it is not. Transphobes like TERFs believe that trans-people are inherently sexual and therefore a threat to children, largely because calling the people you don’t like pedophiles is an easy tactic to destroy credibility. Tumblr’s moderation team saw this, and as seems to be policy, deemed the image to be sexually explicit and therefore she was banned. This is bad enough, and not an uncommon story on multiple social media sites.

But then the CEO(Matt Mullenweg, username photomat) decided to elaborate, as people were asking what tumblr was going to do about situations like these. Matt doubled down, claiming users were misinfromed about the situation. He claimed that tumblr staff can’t be transphobic as they have trans people on staff(this means nothing, its like saying you cant be racist since you have a black friend). He claimed that the issue of transpohbia had been dealt with since it was an individual moderator(it wasn’t). Then he claimed that Tumblr staff had death threats made against them by predstrogen. Ill just link the image below.

This is not a credible threat against the CEO of Tumblr. Both because it’s not phrased as an action the user is going to take at a specific time and place to Matt, but also because it is so loonytoons-esque, off-the-walls, rediculous that it is clearly a joke, especially given the fact that jokes in this style are quite common on the site. But that doesn’t matter since the CEO owns the site, he can just ban a user because he feels like it. Further he threated to call the police and FBI over what I must reiterate is an obvious joke. The entire response Matt mis-genders predstrogen refrering to her as he, they or even it at times. This has since been edited replacing all instances to their or “the account”. After all of this, when users started to criticize the CEO, he went to directly message critics and defend. Lastly and on-top of all of this, the CEO has been trying to change the site to generate more revenue for shareholders, mostly by emulating features from twitter and tiktok.

Predstrogen was harmed in more or less everyway she could have been by Tumblr as a platform. Shareholders enshitifying the site, as well as trying to appeal to advertisers. Moderators banned her based on bad reports and bad policy. The CEO, driven to protect his overinflated image, had a public meltdown directed at multiple users instead of trying to make the site better. In essence, this is a case-study for why and how platforms fail.

Make your own website and have your content hosted on more than one platform at a time.

You want to use multiple platforms if you feel you have to use platforms instead of your own stuff. Every platform will die eventually, there is never a good platform just least bad platforms and which is “least bad” will constantly change. When you don’t own your content, assume it will be deleted from any platform and any time for any reason(because that is part of most TOS).

Making your own website is hard, I will admit. As of writing I’m not even hosting my pages myself but im using neocities as a platform. Though I plan to change this. It’s worth learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s worth learning how to set up Apache or Nginx. Because I can build whatever I want, a full sense of creativity. And because I own what I upload. I can put porn on my page right next cute dog pics right next to code. I do not have to be marketable, clean, appealing to a techbro dipshit, safe to an overworked and understaffed moderation team, and I don’t even need to be appealing to users, they can just leave.

It is a freedom that is not found on any other place other than your own. It takes time and effort to build, but there are so many people out there willing to help you build your own space. In my opinion it’s fun to set up and customize(though that isn’t shared by everyone I understand).

Please consider running your own thing or at least not putting all your eggs in one basket.