There’s that, too - the regular churn as people can’t continue doing work that just wasn’t sustainable because of the time/energy/money involved. But there were a number of blogs I used to read that just suddenly stopped when the writers got Twitter. And they had active accounts that took up more time and energy than the blogs did (even if Twitter was easier), but which didn’t result in the same kind of content.
Personally, I gave up my blog but didn’t even bother to move over to social media, so I understand that decision.
the mary sue piece had a similar section in it, and it makes me wonder. i mean, i feel like any site that tries to center the voices of women is going to get push back in america
focusing on the men and their behavior, rather than the women and the writers … it just seems wrong.
it’s almost like the intellectual equivalent of “you’re showing too much ankle.”
( eta: and to be clear, that’s not on you or anything like that. it’s these publications framing jezebel’s legacy on the peanut gallery rather than the actual show. )
(This is maybe more in relation to Tumblr than Jezebel)
Working in infrastructure for a major tech company, I’m kind of shocked at how complex (and expensive) it is to keep a major site running these days. We’re way past the early days of ‘I threw a server in my coat closet and I’m running the fourth largest site on the net’, for better or worse.
It’s definitely the case that corporate greed makes the problem of ‘how do we run this website’ worse, but it’s definitely also true that hiring and retaining competent staff, along with just the basic infrastructure costs, are significant expenses and without doing any actual research on it, I’d be very surprised if that cost hasn’t risen significantly over the years.
I’ve been toying with the idea of trying to make more low-cost text-driven sites; such as a competitor to Fandom that isn’t awful, but offsets hosting costs by being largely text-driven. At some point I’ll sit down and cost it out, but I suspect the answer is going to be ‘nobody’s going to pay a few hundred a month for a wiki for a popular game without a bunch of flashy images and other social media stuff’, and also there’s the very cynical truth that I’d make a ton less money doing it as well.
Yup. Women lost the war on women and no one can stand to admit it. How much one wants to be part of a dwindling resistance or how complacent with that one is will vary. But the days of prominent social support online for women’s issues are mostly gone and from my pov women’s rights have only moved backwards offline in my lifetime. Women born in the last decade in the US will likely have fewer rights than their grandmothers did and equally bad employment prospects save perhaps for the most extremely wealthy. With wars and genocides ongoing everywhere less privileged is even worse. Sex trafficking and general misogyny plus the economic burden of pregnancy means women will tend to see worsening situations. Bleak to say but I don’t see any evidence suggesting otherwise in the world or at home. And concurrently we are encouraged everywhere to shut up and not be angry.
"Don’t interrupt the sorrow…"
That being said I wish the satanic temple or ilk would buy Jezebel.
if you haven’t read it yet, check out that link from @RickMycroft
Lauren Tousignant, Jezebel’s interim editor in chief [said] the ads sales team asked if it could remove Jezebel’s tagline—“Sex. Celebrity. Politics. With Teeth”
“They took it off because they’re like, let’s see if this makes a huge difference,” Tousignant said. “So yeah, it was very much the problem here that no one will advertise on Jezebel because we cover sex and abortion… After it was removed one of the editorial directors was like, ‘I’m seeing an ad for J Crew for the first time ever, maybe this will be good.’”
He rebuilt it? The dithering is my favourite part of the whole thing! As is often the case, limitations led to great design. I’m glad turning it off is optional.
Cory wrote an excellent piece on how “Brand Safety” is at the root of this shutdown, and how it’s probably not the best idea to cheer on the Brand Safety campaigns that the progressives have…
“Brand safety” is a corporate CYA practise by beigist MBAs, not something progressives and liberals champion in and of itself. We do cheer when far-right sites and news outlets are starved of revenue from risk-averse reputable advertisers but that’s not really an endorsement of what we all know is a craven expression of the corporate “person’s” psychopathy.
That’s like, the entire point of the article. That cheering this on is actually not good for us, because reality tends to have an anti-conservative bias, and so we’re going to be affected more by it.
And yes, progressives and liberals are cheering for it, many of the groups I’m in have promoted letter writing campaigns to businesses trying to convince them to cut down advertising because of “brand safety” and “appearing next to Nazis.” Not all, obviously, because that’s a generalization, but it most definitely is a tactic being used.
I disagree. Reality may have an anti-conservative bias, but the corporate media tends rightward due to their all accepting the neoliberaldefault, which often views fascists as defenders of their capitalism. When they do the right thing, even out of risk aversion, there’s nothing wrong with our rewarding it.
You say that as though I denied it. If you’d taken the time to read carefully, I literally said:
So, yes, I acknowledged it. I also have no problem with it as long as we’re aware that the far right will (and has for a long time) weaponised it too and also understand that “brand safety” is a practise of corporate cowardice that can be exploited for good or bad. It’s fine for Cory to point this out, but he’s not really implying any false equivalency between progressives and fascists.
By the way, if you’re curious about what happens when corporations feel comfortable abandoning “brand safety”, just look to social media platforms. Until recently, the MBAs just decided to hope no-one would notice their ads running alongside masses of posts by Nazis and such (the “corpse in a battlefield strategy” mentioned earlier), and a lot of nasty people and the poorly moderated platforms that allowed them to stay both saw revenue as a result. I’m not going to clutch my pearls in concern over the fact that major brands finally left Xitter after progressives made it undeniably clear that the platform was now Elon’s Nazi Bar.
The same with Treehugger; they and Mother Earth News were bought by some company, then merged into just Treehugger then a couple of months ago I started to notice fewer and fewer new articles, and then mostly recycled content, and then all activity stopped a couple of weeks ago. A little digging revealed that the entire writing staff was let go at the beginning of the year. I guess they had enough new content to squeak by for a bit, then only re-posting old material, so there must have been someone doing some admin. and then nothing. And no mention that they have actually closed up shop on the actual website.
That does seem to be the point Cory decided to make, but I feel like he glosses over the effects of conglomeration or monopolization of the advertisers. The linked 404B article pointed out that 90% of online advertising dollars flow through a conglomerate whose algorithms are NOT connected to corporate identity or ‘values’ (if they have any) in any way. It’s become a generic, algorithm-driven approach to so-called brand safety.
The conflict around “Brand Safety” is a whole different thing than attempting to hold corporations accountable. IMO.
"Don’t interrupt the sorrow…"
