I Keep Seeing People Mention Neocities In Passing But I've Never Truly Understood What The Magic Of It

I keep seeing people mention neocities in passing but I've never truly understood what the magic of it was. Today I decided to take the plunge and wow. it's Different. it's really cool. it feels like I've walked into a whole new internet.

I liked tumblr because of how it still feels like there's real individuality. People are out there doing their own thing, building off of each other, making their own space where they can do whatever they want. But I've always been weird about posting. It still feels very much like I'm doing something for other people to see, which is a scary thing. Respect to anyone who's willing to put themselves out there like that, I'm just not sure I'm built like that.

But neocities feels like it really is just me on my site. And I can really just make a space for myself that nobody else is forced to see. No feed no posts just a little space to myself. My quiet little corner.

I'm think going to maybe try and also blog about how that exploration is going but no promises. I think it's going to be cool :]

neocities day 3: i am in love. i love blinkies. i love stamps. i love wacky gifs. i love cursor trails. i love mouse icons. i love music and sound effects. visiting a webpage feels like stepping into someones home. its their place that they are letting you visit and see. it just feels so wonderful.

I am slowly uncovering the whole of the boop conspiracy. Once I fully understand boop I will be unstoppable.

I HAVE THE BOOP SECRET

The trolley service will have to wait I fear

you EVIL BOOP??? you evil boop iso? oh! Oh! Jail for @word-heap for a thousand years

Just wanted to share that while I'm generally an optimist and I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the people who live on the moderation side of things, recent events have made me totally change my opinion on this site. One week ago I felt optimistic, I felt that this place was on a neutral / upwards trajectory, and I felt like the site was in good hands from a leadership perspective. Automattic made a lot of sense to me culturally as a custodian of tumblr, and seeing a number of staff members active on the site, participating, communicating, and engaging with users felt really really good, even with the "skeleton crew" announcement that circulated recently.

However, Matt's actions over the last week have completely turned me around. I respect the decision to see outrage over a ban as a CEO and want to investigate it and then provide some communication to your users -- while perhaps that shouldn't come directly from the CEO, I think it's a good instinct, particularly when (according to Matt's claims) the user was misrepresenting facts and causing larger moderation problems because of that misrepresentation. I would expect that public communication to be built on a backbone of facts that the company can confirm. Timelines and warnings build credibility, i.e. "the user posted mistagged adult content for the first time in November 2023 and despite receiving warnings on X, Y, and Z dates, they continued to post unlabeled adult content. Due to how rapidly these posts would spread before we could manually apply the label (as we are required to do in order to maintain compliance with iOS app store policies), we chose, as a last resort to terminate the blog." Unfortunately, that is not what Matt wrote.

Matt instead opened with a statement that there are queer people working at tumblr, which isn't particularly relevant and reads as a haphazard kind of shield a la "I have a black friend so I can't be racist!" and mentioning that they had issues with a transphobic external moderator in the past, which again, isn't terribly relevant unless you can connect that moderator to this specific user in question, and certainly doesn't boost your credibility here. If the user was banned by this external moderator (or even was negatively effected in the past by that external moderator) that would be an entirely different conversation, but that doesn't sound like it was the case. This is already a pretty terrible start -- all it does is bring up vagaries of how tumblr is "good" (which I'd like to believe is true!) but says nothing about the issue at hand and really only opens up further avenues of criticism.

He then gets to what should be the meat of the issue: the reasons for the ban. The right thing to do here would be to provide the context that the user is hiding behind because presumably, if the user is getting permanently banned off the site, they've done something relatively serious which they have neglected to mention in order to present themselves as a victim to the general public. This would be the place to share that i.e. "a member of staff had a SWAT team called on them and we could trace the origin back to this user," "this user sent a 1000+ word ask explicitly describing attacks they intended to perpetrate against X," "this user regularly posted mistagged explicit photos and did not respond to our repeated requests to use tags," or something of this nature. Keep it objective, state the specific reason for the ban (without revealing anything that would compromise the users privacy), and it should largely speak for itself. There is a balance between respecting the users privacy while also sharing your justification for the ban, but that's not a terribly hard balance to strike. Matt however did not add anything to the publicly available information and instead vaguely called out "explicit content" and "harassment" which only added to the confusion and, by not adding details or specificity, he led users to believe that there wasn't actually anything all that damning in the first place.

Which leads me to what I believe should have happened: I think after the CEOs attention was brought to this moderation issue, they absolutely should investigate and collect facts / context on the situation. It sounds to me like this was perhaps an overreaction of either a tired/inexperienced human or overzealous automation (or perhaps even a misclick on an internal tool!) It would also be perfectly appropriate to say that this was a mistake, or that it was an overreaction. Even if the blog is hard-deleted from the database and there's no way to restore it, saying "Oops! We made a mistake here! We'll be revising the processes that brought us here, and the user can have their URL back" would've been perfect.

But the way this initial post went, and the gross unprofessionalism that followed (I saw (potentially fake) screenshots circulating of Matt messaging random users, his subsequent post to twitter, the decision to continue editing the original post, and continuing to answer asks including one in which he threatened to shut down the site if the users didn't behave better) shook my faith in this site entirely. Unfortunately, as good as I felt about the direction of the site one week ago, it now feels like the foundations of those feelings have been entirely destroyed. I no longer feel that the site is in good hands, and, until I see some kind of action to address this (any kind of admission that mistakes were made here / there is a desire to avoid this happening again) I will no longer be paying for ad-free. Of course the $5 a month is a drop in the bucket to tumblr, but I simply no longer feel good supporting the people who run this place.

I'll still be here, and as usual I'd like to post more (real life as been busy as hell these last few months) -- I really want to talk about my second pass at learning stenography and my continued adventure on neocities, but I like writing long posts and long posts require me to have enough words to fill the posts. Anyways, just felt the need to get my thoughts out. I've got a post that approaches this from a different angle that I'm drafting out, about how I believe a solid approach to community management on this site could really turn things around, so hopefully I'll get that out soon B-)

But anyways, I'm not terribly happy with where things are going and I hope there's some kind of acknowledgement that this was really really terribly handled and some plan to improve things in the future. Godspeed to anyone working for tumblr right now, and that includes Matt who I'm sure isn't enjoying this mess either, even if I personally believe this is largely a mess of his own creation.