iamdave

Not that I'm complaining about this, it just is what it is.

(Also because there's a sports radio show that isn't broadcast nationally from my hometown and I like to listen in as I'm waking up/getting ready for the day)

Matter of perspective, no, Dan? Would it have been less of a pejorative to borrow a phrase from the latest incantation of our discussions of race and culture in the US to say "check your privilege?"

Granted this isn't the place for a protracted discussion on dialogue here, I just find the strong reaction to what is a very important clarion call to evaluate ones own biases and experiences against a spectrum of biases and experiences shared by every other human being, however curt or brief, taking it the point of calling it a "pejorative" an interesting reaction-IMO.

What you (the global "you") experience in the world and the results of your interaction are not a template, and other people's experiences may sometimes preclude them from truly realizing, appreciating and unpacking why people in other social groups might see interactions with the constabulary (keeping in context with this comment thread) or other systems of society a bit differently.

As a matter of personal perspective, the suggestion to break one's bubble isn't a swipe, but a request to entertain the thought that one's preconceived notions about a given affair might change with the knowledge that their experiences are not universal and exposure to a different angle.

Maybe the curt nature of the suggestion doesn't meet some arbitrary ideal of discussion, but that doesn't invalidate the root point of the suggestion.

My position on this is, if we're talking about being frustrated with the police not generating the outcomes we want from petty theft, and if we're also experiencing gnashing of teeth and tearing of sackcloth aimed at tech companies for things ranging from data breaches to questionable ethics and corporate responsibility (and in some cases, but certainly not all-with seeming impunity), why on earth would we ever conjoin the two roles like this?

Post hoc ergo propter hoc make for valid public policy it does not.

What source do you point to that we as a society are OK with qualified law enforcement looking the other way?

Where did I give you the impression that I'm defending "inept killer cops"? I'm asking for an inquiry of our expectations in crowdsourcing duties that the general public are not trained to conduct.

And then what? Will the platform also have a portal that will let people en masse vex the local PD with messages containing links to the video until the precinct assigns an officer to the case?

What happens next? Is there going to be a timer or some kind of SLA on the platform that notifies people in the crowd "Sergeant Jones still hasn't found the bastard who stole from the Smith family down on the corner"?

Crowdsourcing criminal investigation, even a passive element of it like identifying mugs from home security footage seems like a rabbit hole I'm not sure we're prepared to go down (it also scares the bajeezus out of me because the general population, sorry to say this, aren't the rational actors I want involved in trying to identify perps so casually through 'platforms').

I'm not going to go on some kind of "all cops are bastards" bend here, cause that's not the case and this isn't the forum for it, but I've had more bad experiences with the police than good ones.

None of them resulted in an arrest or charges filed (this is excluding moving violations because death, taxes and speeding tickets; I was a 23 year old driving a Mustang lol) since none of the interactions involved me doing anything illegal. After a few experiences like that you learn to keep an eye on a police officer when you see one, but there's no urge to make your presence overtly known to them either.

My dad used to say "there's few things more dangerous in the suburbs than a bored cop".

Been involved in some of those interactions while walking home in my own neighborhood. They're not pleasant. One involved handcuffs and a 30 minute sit on the curb while my backpack was searched. Yes I'm referring to these past incidents in plural for a reason. No, the complaints to the city and precinct didn't do anything.

"regular-old gay"??? Would you care to articulate what this even means? What is 'regular' gay? Is there a 'regularity' of being gay or are you applying YOUR presumptions of sexual orientation to a group of people you've never met?

I feel like this probably says much more about how you're using the site than you (probably) intend to give off, and further belies what your associations with the LGBT and kink communities are even to begin with describing things so lackadaisically and I'm not sure I'm inclined or convinced by anything you're really countering with as to what the Fetlife community even is.

It seems limited, surface-level, and full of projections that reduce a spectrum of experiences, desires and wishes for the site down to some personal hangups that really aren't worth discussing here.

And if this comment seems inflammatory to you, then I'll point back to the very beginning of my apoplectic response to your "regular-old gay" comment as an example of exactly how it feels.

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Anyhow, that aside I'm leaving the discussion to rest with this: Fetlife isn't a 1:1 replacement for EVERY disaffected Tumblr user out there, but it is a good alternative for some, has good features for some, and can be a good and enjoyable community for others.

The gay leather community, which literally invented BDSM, is bearly represented at all.

This is patently false to the point of almost being humorous, but also and even so, the Kink world is several times larger than the "gay leather community". It's mdae up of more people with more varied interests than whatever outmoded idea of Kink you have from the 80's.

I probably did a poor job phrasing that from the start, here-admittedly, or getting the point across that it has features some may find attractive to use for the type of content they want to publish, but to be honest I find your particular characterization in response as a counterpoint to be missing a lot of nuance of the platform, and one that dismisses and completely erases entire social-groups who use the site successfully to create their own local communities, groups and networks based on a few cherrypicked features.

*

If you'd like, I would be MORE than willing to share with you some of the groups and events on the site that (1) aren't about "white heteronormative sex" or (2) full of stupid rants, because contrary to what you're putting out here: they are NOT that hard to find, they are NOT that hard to join, and they are ABSOLUTELY welcoming to all sorts of flavors, identities and orientations. I really suggest you take a much closer look at the site than someone who made an account ten minutes ago and decided their mind is made up

Sure, while Fetlife might not be a "blogging" platform like Tumblr or WordPress is, the functionality of the site as a community shouldn't be dismissed as a viable alternative for tumblr refugees just because it isn't dedicated to periodical columns the way WordPress is even while the platform has a versatile and quite heavily used blogging feature.

It also trends strongly towards kink

Yes. It does. That's the point. They advertise it as such or try to convince you of anything otherwise. . They don't sell you anything else. That's entirely who the community was built for, it's the entire purpose of the site.

The very first thing you see when you go to the website is:

FetLife is the Social Network for the BDSM, Fetish & Kinky Community.

So yes. That's exactly the point of the site. But I also made sure to add, that among other things, the site is a pretty good and welcoming community for artists of many types: painters, drawers, photographers, writers, it can be many things to many people who want to trade in, and interact with 'adult content' despite the headline viewers see before even logging in or creating an account of their own.

But again, as I said in another comment in this subthread: kink != sex and to be earnest in discussing the affair, it's probably helpful to divorce one from the idea that kinky material == sexy material. Some people find pleasure-and it doesn't have to be sexual pleasure, it could entirely be psychosomatic in controlling what another says and does as a dom or domme. Conflating the two only sets back the entire discussion IMO.

Further, this part has me raising an eyebrow and sorry if I've missed your point but:

and white heteronormative sex, which excludes a huge portion of the Tumblr lgbtq+ spectrum.

How?

Not to be a contrarian on the subject, but as a person of color, my own experiences with the site can be surmised the way a lot of people surmise their experiences with many sites like reddit, twitter, et al: pick the communities/subgroups you want to interact with, ignore those you don't.

So how does Fetlife as a platform "trend towards" white heteronormative sex? Just curious because the platform, best I can tell over the last five years as an active member allows the user to choose what groups they involve themselves with, and what people they involve themselves with and which groups they don't. If you're a person of color, looking to interact with polyamorous people who enjoy rope play, there's a good chance a group exists for it, and if not there is nothing stopping you from creating that.

If you're a white person who wants to interact with non-poly people and are looking for just plain-jane sex with other white people, there are groups for that too.

Best I can tell, Fetlife enables you as a user to find and interact with all sorts of individuals who fit your specific theme/motif of "pleasure" however you define it, and places no limitations on those who exist outside of however we decide to define "normative" on a given day.

Is it possible the experience you speak of has less to do with the platform and more the groups you've chosen to subscribe to and the people you've chosen to interact with?

Just because one is able to dissect and understand a position that exists and how it functions logically doesn't mean it has their support. After all, I hold the opinion that if you can't articulate a counterargument to your own and truly appreciate its structure, it's probably not the "hill you want to die on".

If this is your way of asking if people still visit Fark, the answer is "yes" :P

I think you'd be surprised at the amount of people who are on Fetlife and aren't looking for sex but rather enjoy the kink community, are photographers, or content creators of other types (the blogging feature for example gives you the option of treating/tagging posts as blogs or as "erotic fiction", catering towards that particular wing of the sexually creative types).

Hence my statement of (plus other features, granted) in the original comment.

Sure, it's oriented towards the Kink crowd but Kink != explicit sex.

Used to be if you wanted a presence on the web, you did it yourself. You got hosting, you learned what you needed to learn if there was something unfamiliar to you, some trial and error later, a website. You dot com.

The platforms came and soon it became you dot theirplatform dot com. Because they made it easier, faster and cheaper to get your stuff out there and get it seen by many people also posting on 'the platform'...the great tragedy is that it also made it easy for 'the platform' to get rid of 'your' stuff (read: stuff you leased to the platform) if at any point they decide, for whatever reason, they don't want it there.

I remember that being much harder to do that when it was you dot com. We were happy to do the work of putting up a you dot com. Some of us still are, because it's what we came up with, what we cut our teeth on so to speak.

Not sure if I'm really going anywhere with this...just sort of thinking idly at a bygone era I guess.

it already exists (plus other features, granted).

Definitely do not want to rule that out, you're right to bring this up, but agreed. Calling your personal phone a 'burner', seems novel? Not sure if there's a better word there.

Right, and as I said in another comment, my statement here isn't to suggest I don't know what a burner phone is. My statement above is because I'd think someone would either say "We use our personal phones" or something similar to describe how they talk about FB without FB knowing it.

Describing your personal phone as a "burner phone" seems odd and possibly telling that there's something else there.

There very well might NOT be, but as I mentioned before: the article doesn't really say much further so it's hard to know.

We don't know that as a fact, do we? In this specific case I mean, I know how burner phones are used, but we have from the piece an interesting nugget that isn't really fleshed out.

Maybe the employee just used 'burner phone' to get the point across quickly of the lengths employees were going through, maybe it's an allusion to something more but it's a nugget I found interesting nonetheless.

So a phone used to duck surveillance from a powerful entity to conduct discussions about things you don't want that entity knowing about, colloquially goes by what other name then?

I get it if the implicit association between a "real" burner phone and these devices might not be a complete and perfect parallel but I think here the term is apt (unless we're legitimately just talking about someone's every day personal phone, but that wasn't the impression I got-the article doesn't really talk more about what these devices are)

I would presume because they weren't sold the idea that what they were doing had any other express intent-purpose or plausible outcome for use even used by the people they worked for, which alone I think warrants a different group to compare this situation to.

You'll sometimes see someone tag a picture post, if they tag it at all, if it's something the blogger actually created themselves with #oc for "original content" or they'll just tell you as much in the caption. Not always, but sometimes.

I'm not on tumblr for the porn (I read it for the articles, I swear), but a lot of the mechanisms and meta-memes of how people use the platform are pretty consistent across subgroups.

It's sometimes really hard to appreciate how much a moment in time affects the long-tail of history when you're living in it.

I'm sure it's no different on any other platform, so I hope this comment isn't seen as some way to skewer tumblr for being unique in this regard: but the number of times I've stumbled across content spreading some nugget of content about a health-condition, mental state of being or current event that is OBJECTIVELY untrue getting eager reshares and comments applauding the original poster that would cause any trained professional to expire from the horror is staggering to behold sometimes.

Again, not unique to tumblr, not here to suggest it is, but since it's the focus of the conversation we're having, there it is.

Already I've seen people I follow talking about leaving the platform because of this decision, which is going to hurt my own blog as I rely on them to discover new and interesting content (not porn, but I'm a big fan of futurist artwork, giant robots, Ralph McQuarie style space paintings, stuff like that).

Many comments here are pointing out Fetlife as a refuge for some tumblr ex-pats. Speaking as a Fetlife user, it's not hard to see why the 'their' is in quotes. When you see a tumblr profile on someone's fetlife profile it's often described by the profile owner as "you can see the kind of stuff I'm into on my tumblr" with a small ratio of original content to reshared content. Either images from a movie, online porn, or just "reblog" of another tumblr user's content when not the blogger's own images that are being posted.

This isn't me taking a position on adult content on tumblr, denouncing it or condoning it either way-but I think that bit of context might help answer your question.

It doesn't define the entire experience for the entirety of the porographically inclined userbase, but it's relevant.

I'm being mildly sarcastic in tone when I say this: they're probably there, you just haven't found their profiles yet ;)

Which is kind of the interesting thing about Fetlife, one can't approach someone about being on "that" site without outing themselves for being on "that" site as well-since you're not able to see any profiles without logging in (assuming a friend doesn't login and show them around and they spot your face in a profile pic commenting in a group thread or on someone's photos) where others you can't see at all unless that person has added you to their friends list-you're directed to a generic 404 page.