Glittering Kitten

Yahoo apparently bought tumblr?

Ok, so, as a birthday gift to me, Yahoo bought me tumblr. That was super nice, thank you Yahoo. I appreciate that you bought me that, if you’d like to deliver it by hand I’m down for that too.

Actually, the truth is, they bought it for themselves (so rude, it’s my birthday not theirs!) - but look, I hate to point this out, but uh, really at the moment this probably won’t affect us. The porn, the animé, the fandoms - my guess? The reason they’re buying tumblr is exactly that. They’ve apparently claimed they want to make it family friendly, but honestly, that’s not likely to be overnight. The changes - if any - will be gradually sneaked in a back door like a latecomer to a party. Because they are exactly that. This is the party. Tumblr is the party, and Yahoo want in.

Now, we all have one guest at a party that nobody invites - for whatever reason - and nobody wants there; but normally, that’s Microsoft. Wouldn’t you be more offended if we’d been sold to them? Yahoo is just the latecomer. We forget - back when fandoms were young, and the internet was first stepping out - all those fansites with ‘omg, fanfic of ZxY’ were probably on Geocities. Yeah. Remember that? They were the freedom zones back in the day. We didn’t get a choice - we wanted a free website to host our work, we all got Geocities. But look - fandoms are still going. Geocities might not be (bless it’s soul) - but Yahoo didn’t jump in and deny posting to them. Or the yahoo groups - it let you have as much stuff there as possible, because it was a freebie. Sometimes it might’ve tripped a few wires; but as far as I know, it never really pulled any major plugs.

So why are we suddenly worried that Yahoo wants to pull our porn? Because of one statement? Seriously? This lady, the CEO, Marissa Mayer, seems reasonably ok with porn from her tumblr. The fact she uses the pokemon theme tune as a descriptive aid to show how much she wants tumblr ‘to be the very best’ in one post just makes me kinda wanna smile and give her a hug. She’s taking all our battering pretty well. But she’s still a woman, doing her job. Her job is to make Yahoo money; make it modern, make them pull forwards into our current media environment. We’re not making her job easy, because we all seem to fear change - and yes, we’ve got good reason to. Livejournal, facebook - a lot of social sites do seem to hit a point when someone gets involved and suddenly it all goes tits up. We’ve been through it. We’ve been hurt. But why fight a battle against it when it’s already happened? What we need to do is work with her to go ‘ok, look, we love it because of this - please don’t take this away from us. Let us compromise’ - because at the moment, there is no alternative. We all love tumblr. Leaving is cutting our own noses off in spite of our faces. We have nowhere else to go at the moment anyway and we would lose our connectivity.

If Yahoo change things - add adverts hideously, make everything pay-ful and gaudy, try to limit our posts to ‘family friendly’ - and basically ruin the creative freedom of speech we appear to have here, then yes. We have a right to complain. But maybe they’re here to learn. Maybe they want to be the ones going “Ok. Currently, users are enjoying it working this way. We want to hear what THEY think, because they’re the ones who’ll be using it.” It would be a foolish company *coughlivejournalcough* that go “We’re gonna listen!” and then do whatever the fuck they like- because people will leave. It’s OUR power. But let’s not abuse it. Let’s give them a chance.

Remember. Everyone’s a Newbie at one point in their life; everyone’s new to a fandom, knows nothing, feels nervous about stepping in with their first fanart, fanfic, etc. I imagine this is no different when buying a company with billions of users. Let them get to know us, before we all just crunch our noses up and go “eww, n00b. Get lost”. Be polite. Be understanding. And be ready, because regardless of what happens next  - change is always inevitable.

the-oxford-english-fangirl asked: Pepperony without a doubt XD The looks, competence and 'taking-none-of-your shit' attitude from Pepper, the charm, snark and general personality of Tony xxx

Ahhh! I love that I would be a child of this couple! XD XD

miss-nerdgasmz:

What ship do you think I’m the child of?

#oH FUCKING YES #PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE I’M SO CURIOUS #CROSSOVERS COUNT BTW LIKE IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE A STANDARD SHIP OR ANYTHING#WHICHEVER PEOPLE YOU THINK MADE ME

you know you want to!

(via selfmadesuperhero)