Boost! great local-to-DW reading

[jesse_the_k]

fancake is an open themed fanwork rec community. Follow the excellent organization of tags by theme or fandom, and it's a great place to make baby's first rec post.

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siderea asks "So are there 'canonical' SF movies that are romances?" and gets more than 50 answers

https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1476828.html

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muccamuk provides some history as to how people found friends on LJ, then transferred them to DW, and why "finding friends on DW" is a lot harder for newbies than it is for those of us who have been here all along.

I think it's really key here that if you wanted to find fic/art/icons/meta, you pretty much had to be on a fandom-specific community. Fanworks existed in personal journals, and there were still fandom archives and webrings, but the hottest new stuff was getting posted on comms. AO3 didn't exist, and ff.net banned smut, so if you were in an active western media fandom, LJ comms were more or less where you were going to find content.

[… snip …]

So fanworks, the central pull of LJ comms, aren't the central pull of DW comms any more. There are multi-fandom clearing houses for icon makers, those that survive, but I've never met anyone in comments of an icon post.

https://muccamukk.dreamwidth.org/1178261.html

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Pillowfort issues

kalloway gathers info from Twitter and fail_fandomanon documenting Pillowfort's willingness to ban a user over their TOS violation before Pillowfort published the relevant TOS

Who-what-where-when in https://kalloway.dreamwidth.org/1628277.html

jamethiel discusses Why I Won't Be Doing Fandom on Pillowfort https://jamethiel.dreamwidth.org/397510.html

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melannen in general is just great—her December posting meme has been delicious. https://melannen.dreamwidth.org/tag/december+meme

Let's Read A Scientific Paper: Is Social Media Bad For You? is a coherent step-by-step deconstruction of a recent psychology study which has generated a bunch of headlines. From her summary:

Actual interesting results from this paper that I would have put in an article about it if I was a science journalist:

• People who are unhappy probably think they are wasting time on social media more than they actually are. (Or, perhaps, happy people think they’re using it less.)
• It’s possible that the reason studies like this get positive results is that press coverage of studies like this convinces people that if they’re unhappy they must be using more social media which means that when they participate in studies like this they report that they use more social media if they’re unhappy which means the studies get press coverage and the cycle repeats, because science doesn’t happen in an ivory tower.
• Tracking your social media use - or possibly just any sort of small, achievable daily task that feels productive, such as tracking your social media use for a study - seems to make people less unhappy.
• Reducing Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat use on mobile devices among mostly-female ivy league college undergraduates appears to improve their mental health (which, given that Facebook at least was invented in order to make ivy league college girls feel like shit about themselves, is not a surprising result regardless of your opinion of social media in general!) Given the mental health problems being seen among Ivy League college undergrads, this is probably a very useful thing to explore further even if it’s kept to that limited scope.

https://melannen.dreamwidth.org/453235.html

Comments

[satsuma]

the 'lets read a scientific paper' link has some extra characters on it that are confusing DW (looks like half a cut tag?)

I was able to edit to the correct address, but I figured I'd let you know :)

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks! That was a markdown artifact, fixed now.

[sophus]

That discussion of the changed role of communities was really interesting.

[tozka]

(YEARS LATER) Thanks so much for this link list! Some really great reading on it. <3

[jesse_the_k]

Never too late to comment here. I live in the eternal now.