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The Rise and Fall of Internet Art Communities
- keyle 8y agoI thought Tumblr's 'adult content' ban was due to the Apple appstore refusing to host the app? If not why would Tumblr ever make that decision? There were so many other ways to approach it - shadow banning for example.
- sarcasmic 8y agoTumblr's adult content ban was likely a last-ditch effort by Tumblr, encouraged by owner Verizon, to salvage some business value out a hectic social (re-)blogging site that seemed like a questionable fit even for the previous buyer Yahoo. Verizon embarked on an ambitious effort to be a force in online content and display ads, so that they'd produce worthwhile content that would contribute to them running a bigger and more successful ad network. They bought AOL and its magazines to make it happen, and a few years later they acquired the content arm of Yahoo when Yahoo pivoted to an investment holding company. Porn blogs were a big and visible part of Tumblr, but Tumblr's unwillingness to use coarse filtering meant that they were poorly policed. Porn blogs were overwhelmingly run by bots and hosted stolen content, they'd spam-follow unrelated accounts to game search engines, and they'd generally be a nuisance in every way, despite attracting a fair amount of viewers. The Apple App Store fiasco gave a convenient pretext to roll out the coarse filter to whack porn blogs and make the site more palatable for advertisers, but the collateral damage also affected erotica, art, sex-positive communities, and various LGBTQ communities. Meanwhile, ads on Tumblr have gotten a slight bit more frequent since the Yahoo days, but hardly any more relevant or less low-rent.
- eveningcoffee 8y agoTumblr is dead anyway for me because of their faulty and illegal GDPR support.
- kleiba 8y agoCare to elaborate?
- dylz 8y agoTheir opt out of marketing tracking box has been a meme because you have to manually click hundreds of checkboxes in a very small window on every pageload to not be tracked, accidentally closing the box or hitting accept once will enable all of them, each one you untick increases your load time as it fakes a progress counter to "opt you out", if you choose to opt out they'll re-prompt you every time you load the page Additional bonus is that you'll need adblock disabled and third party cookies enabled and all tracking protection turned off to opt out.
- eveningcoffee 8y agoFoundational Partners Oath works with select partners that process your data to provide significant functionality for our products and services. For more information about these partners, and to understand and manage their use of your data, see: Google (Privacy Policy) Amazon (Privacy Policy) Facebook (Privacy Policy) Teads (Privacy Policy) Nielsen (Privacy Policy) You cannot turn off Facebook tracking for example. This is in violation of GDPR because it is not possible to access essential functionality without tracking. This illegal implementation is even worse than before because it now forces me to explicitly agree with the tracking. It essentially means that I could not access Tumblr anymore.
- kleiba 8y agoIt essentially means that I could not access Tumblr anymore. But that's actually okay, no? I mean, you can make a decision what's more important to you...
- eveningcoffee 8y agoYes, this is not my tragedy.
- zimpenfish 8y ago> I thought Tumblr's 'adult content' ban was due to the Apple appstore refusing to host the app? No - that ban was because of child pornography, not adult content. Tumblr were apparently working on the adult content ban well before that happened; consensus being that it's likely to avoid problems with SESTA-FOSTA[1]. [1] http://digg.com/2018/tumblr-explicit-adult-content-policy-ban-december http://digg.com/2018/tumblr-explicit-adult-content-policy-ba...
- mirimir 8y agoInteresting, but it doesn't mention hell.com and the many related sites. Lots of seizure-inducing flash. I see that https://medialounge.org/ https://medialounge.org/ is still there, but I don't have flashplayer installed. > <meta http-equiv="content-type" name="medialounge - metamash mediation" content="There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite. The possibilities of the art of combination are not infinite, but they tend to be frightful. It is a constant interplay of ideas, a collection of story synopses that work better than novels ever could. Ideas are thrown away as quickly as they arrive. An incomplete, but not false, image of the universe, I am a mistake, a ghost" >
- com2kid 8y agoI'm sad that Elfwood wasn't mentioned, many now very successful fantasy and science fiction artists were present on Elfwood back before professional artists homepages became the norm. It was a really fascinating community for it's time.
- teddyh 8y agoElfwood had its own problems: http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/elfwood-part-1 http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/elfwood-part-1 http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/elfwood-part-2 http://www.wastedtalent.ca/comic/elfwood-part-2
- larkeith 8y agoMan, I'd forgotten how much the artstyle of Wasted Talent changed from the first few comics. I hope stuff's been going well for Jam since she ended the comic.
- lobotryas 8y agoFirst time I heard of WT and was sad to see it ended in 2016. Was any info ever given as to why? Was unable to find an answer on the site or searching.
- teddyh 8y agoThe last few comics are about this, although they are somewhat vague. She seems to keep posting on Patreon, though, but only patron-only posts, so I couldn’t tell you what’s in them.
- silveroriole 8y agoIf people wanted the community feeling back, they’d go back to old-school forums. They have few content-discovery mechanisms (limited search, no post rankings, no reblog mechanism, chronological post ordering), so your experimental content has the same chance to be seen as the popular stuff, and they have easily-created subcommunities. I’ve seen long-running threads develop their own community feel. Forums were built for that exact purpose; they don’t facilitate content aggregation and sharing like modern platforms. There’s nothing stopping everyone going back to forums, except that when it comes down to it, people seem to value being able to share/see/rank content easily more than they value a sense of community.
- joepie91_ 8y agoThat's conveniently ignoring the various anti-competitive steps that companies like Facebook and Google have used to capture more and more traffic onto their own platforms, diverting it away from smaller independent communities by force, often via EEE-like tactics. Presenting this as some sort of rational merit-based decision by internet users, is disingenuous at best. Many of us have watched large 'tech companies' destroy our communities through monopolistic tactics.
- jaredklewis 8y agoJust my opinion here, but I don’t think our lizard brains are quite so highly evolved. I don’t compulsively check my phone because I “value” the content. I value what I read in books far more. But my attention span seems to be in free fall and I haven’t picked up a book in months. I think it is _very_ possible to want something (I.e. a return to old school forums), but not act in a corresponding way. Social media is digital drugs.
- baud147258 8y ago> Social media is digital drugs. Old-school forums are drugs too, I'm addicted to one myself ;). Mostly for the drama and back-and-forth.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- itronitron 8y agoIt's sort of weird that this article which focuses on community engagement around art production would be posted on artsy, a site targeted toward people addicted to the art world.
- skilled 8y agoAs soon as you introduce any kind of an algorithm that favors activity, it's no longer a community. It's a dopamine cash cow waiting for people to naturally fall off because they lose interest. There might be other factors, but this is definitely high on the list. The same goes for many other modern "communities". Everything is robotized. Configured to feed you with stuff rather than incentivize discovery and a sense of curiosity. Of course, it's sad that old school forums are literally non-existent. vBulletin, phpBB, IPB -- these are the real internet forums. These days, people want flashy colors, but most importantly, everything handed to them on a golden platter. Albeit, this is likely an issue with concentration and attention span. A vicious cycle.
- tareqak 8y agoWhat would be a better name (more broad than “dopamine cash cow”, but more specific than “a vicious cycle”)? Consumerity?
- lowdose 8y agoA dopalov cycle.
- dragonwriter 8y ago> As soon as you introduce any kind of an algorithm that favors activity, it's no longer a community. Humans interactions already feature those, so, no, they don't eliminate the possibility of community or the word would have no meaning in the real world.
- deanclatworthy 8y agoAgree, although there are still many incredibly active forums around, but I do feel the golden age of them has passed. I started my career on forums, modifying them, moving eventually on to more general web work. It makes me a little sad to think this is pretty much the only "forum" I post in, but even HN is algorithmically-biased :)
- xorand 8y ago
- prepSchool4U 8y agoSpare me your dopamine whining. That's a weak-willed crutch for pussies that lack impulse control. Much in the same way that social ineptitude gets reclassified as "autism" or what have you, so too is the biochemical overclinicalization of everything else under the sun. Get a fucking grip. You are to blame. No one hacked your circuits. That's how schizophrenics talk. Maybe you're just smoking too much legalized cannabis. Ever hear schizophrenics ranting crackpot nonsense about feeling their individual neurons misfire? That's what you fucking sound like. Come off it. No one talks about dopamine, when they look at a DVD menu. So a chimpanzee can figure out an iPad. So what. No one hacked the chimp's neuro circuitry. If the chimp saw its reflection in a mud puddle, it would splash it. Your brain isn't the gibson. And FAANG corporations aren't neuroscientists. They're just self-important morons, harping on about bullshit they dreamt up, talking out their ass during a TED talk. But hey, keeping parping along with your sixth-grade biology vocabulary quiz show. Seratonin. Oxytocin. Boy you've got it all figured out. No, I'm not a Russian bot. Yes, I'm heckling you on HN. HN needs to be heckled, you pretentious anuses. You know you sound like some sheltered boarding school preppies, right?
- nuclx 8y agoI expected ASCII and ANSI art to be mentioned. But well, that was at least partly the pre-internet era.
- bane 8y agoThe demoscene has its ups and downs but is active and vibrant as ever.
- krtkush 8y agoThere was something amazing about having your cracked key generator adored with art from the scene.
- trpc 8y agoMark Zuckerberg ruined the internet
- have_faith 8y agoInternet users ruined the internet. Mark is a facilitator, sure.
- ArtWomb 8y agoNot sure if anyone else remembers it as fondly, but one of my all time favorite online Art experiences was Ryder Ripps' Dump.fm. Just infinite scrolling chat. With endless streams of animated gifs. Artists would "riff" on each other's works in real time. It felt like a Global Party of the Mind. And perhaps a terrific group therapy session at the same time ;)
- granaldo 8y agoGosh those days. Tripod, angelfire, and geocities... young people wont understand it today
- pojntfx 8y agoCapitalism is inherently incompatible with how art (and culture in general) works. This is quite funny to me; the US "soft power" of the 20th century was based on the fundamental acceptance of differentiation (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiation_(sociology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differentiation_(sociology)) and thus won agains the authorititarian left; now by ignoring this we are just destroying ourselves. I hate this timeline. PS: A Discourse forum would make for a great platform IMHO.
- Raphmedia 8y agoOne community that always amaze me with its resilience is Newgrounds. It has been around since 1995 and even survived the death of flash.
- baud147258 8y agoIt's still active, in terms of new content being uploaded to it? I spent a lot of time there around 2006-08 (I think). There was a lot of good content, but finding it wasn't easy.
- Raphmedia 8y agoIt is. There's also more than games (for a little while now). They have an audio/music section and a visual art section.
- baud147258 8y agoI think I was there when the visual art section opened, but I never spent much time there.
- ihuman 8y agoIt got a new surge of popularity with Tumblr cracking down on adult content.
- artur_makly 8y agoAbout 6 years ago, I decided to take a crack at redefining how Art was generated, consumed, and shared : https://vimeo.com/73825583 https://vimeo.com/73825583 Thus JuicyCanvas.com was born : https://JuicyCanvas.com https://JuicyCanvas.com -- With a bold Manifesto: https://juicycanvas.com/manifesto/ https://juicycanvas.com/manifesto/ It was the first social marketplace where visual artists & designers could upload their work to be 'forked' aka 'remixed' by 'remixer' users [1], who then could curate, share, and sell to their friends, fans, and communities. We managed to attract +500 incredible artists from over 50 Countries who were bold enough to allow their works to have such freedom of re-interpretation. It was to be the end of 'zombie consumption'..and the beginning of `active consumers` who could finally break free of mass produced art & fashion. But like all new behaviors/habits, these things take a lot of time to catch on...and time was sadly not our side this time. Perhaps one day soon, such an idea will rise again...and stick around with more...juice. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMQYwnPaVg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPMQYwnPaVg
- ThJ 8y agoI used to run one named ArtGrounds.com between 2005 and 2012. It was one of those small and cozy Internet communities. Three things killed it: 1. I kept twisting knobs to make it grow faster until people got fed up and left. 2. Internet art communities were dying in general. 3. Sketcher, the Java applet I had developed for multi-user real-time collaborative digital painting using pressure sensitive Wacom digitisers — the main draw of the site — was rapidly getting outdated as the Web began to reject Java. HTML5 was still a few years away, making it impossible to implement high-performance graphics apps in the browser. By the time WebGL made the kind of rendering I needed viable in a browser, the site was long gone. That era of web development was a frustrating time for me. Java in the browser was abandoned without offering a full replacement for its number crunching, graphics and media capabilities. My strong suite was the kind of software you typically write in C/C++ and the web ecosystem just wasn't able to do that kind of thing at the time. I basically sat there and wanted WASM and WebGL and all these other rich web technologies to exist, but they just didn't.