Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

I was looking over my older entries here and reread "A Goon is a being who melts into the foreground and sticks there", from four years ago about ideal Dreamwidth features. And in this little moment when so many of us are thinking about social media user experiences and the kinds of interactions and communities they enable (both lovely and toxic), I find I still agree with my assessment of the time. I would love DW to have a much nicer interface for posting and hosting media, but realistically large-scale media hosting would need to be paid features. (Remember that DW doesn't monetize its userbase at all.)

(Also, I stand by another post I made the same month, "Oh brave new internet, / that has such Nazis and MRAs in't!", in which I argue that DW is still a wonderful place because it is unpopular and high friction. The internet has made it trivially easy for bad actors game out how best to ruin every nice thing; DW is protected because it's quiet enough to be not worth it. Not to downplay the incredible work the DW Abuse team does. But they wouldn't be able to be successful over the long term if assholes didn't have easier and more popular targets.)