Date: 02/08/2025
Mood: sleeeeeepy
Listening to: Angst - Nero
enough is enough
It's live! It's working!! Come try it yourself 👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇
Basically, reject modernity of bot feeds, embrace galleries. Please take a look at the about/FAQ if you want to learn more about this project. I also have instructions there if you're a random search engine person on my blog who is thinking, "I want to help. I want to contribute." Great. See my FAQ and get in touch with me!
As I stated, my reasons for doing this is simple. Social media is cancer. The closing of image hosting websites has been detrimental in severe ways. The loss of Photobucket, Tinypic, Imageshack, and many others has done irreparable harm to many fandoms reliant on images. On top of that, IG is infamous for ruining the quality or cropping of images. Pinterest is also notorious for being impossible to use on desktop. Last year, I wrote up this really basic introductory tutorial on encouraging people to reduce reliance on social media. Inside of it, I realized I wrote the harsh truth.
It seriously was like 5k images going from 2019 to 2012 in reverse timeline order. It was crazy dedication for 7 years. Pinterest code math doesn't have anything on that level of genuine fan curation effort imo.
I'd rather get photos from a real flesh human who loved this band for 7 years of online work, than an AI bot trying to make me click ads and feed me things based on code guesses. Sorry. I pick human crafted via passion > sterile robot. Even if it's 'more effort'.
This is my sentiment for why I am doing this. Right there. It's effort. But this is worth it.
Fandoms used to be very highly curated experiences between people. Those with files, awareness, resources etc would share with others. Then those people would pass it on to the next person and so forth. It was always intercommunication that way like a trickle effect and people influencing each other. Then here comes IG and Pinterest completely smacked into the middle of this chain disrupting it. Rather than fans passing media around with each other in an equal mannerism of a shared interest, we all "submit" stuff to IG or Pinterest and pray the algorithm gods favor our posts to be seen. Even tumblr has began to struggle with this due to changes in how searching tags works, structured to push recent posts, and recommended posts. There's this terrible middle man between human to human connection for seemingly no reason at all. Why are we all talking to a computer bot for images? Just send them to each other. For god's sake. There's no reason to use IG or Pinterest. Talk to each other. Share to each other. Have blogs. Use direct messaging. Create a Discord server. Which is at least human-to-human even if social media. You do not need a big website algorithm to define your fandom experience anymore or ever.
I miss the ways of the past and I mean that in the non nostalgia way. I mean it from a genuine way about spending time with people online way. I remember when we'd host like 20-40 images on a place like Imageshack, create LJ posts with a read-more cut, then create like 10 pages like this to make fake-galleries. We called it "pic spam" and here is a 2007 fossilized example of it. I remember when, for no reason at all, we'd all hang out on forums and have a "post random R+ pictures" threads. Chances are, you'd go into one of those and come back out with three photos you never saw before. Back in the day, every fan blog or site had some kind of mini or large gallery. Now? What do we even have anymore? Where are fan sites anyway? Everything is taken over by Wikipedia and search engines, algorithms, and robots. Most people in this fandom appear to even struggle to watch older concert footage anymore. It's so embarrassing to me when like three years ago someone looked at a screenshot of Till from Live aus Berlin and said, "what's this from?" Are we not even watching concert anymore? What's the point? This isn't obscure little concert or some niche thing in a fandom. It's literally peak 1998 for this band's public breakthrough. Come on.
I noticed this phenomena back in July when I said, "oh my god Pinterest has like NO good Paul photos on the whole site." It's totally true and my view of this hasn't changed. I have attempted to curate this board for him and managed to get absolutely stuck at ~1,700 images. Nearly everything I see is a duplicate of the 1,700. Even if I'm not being shown the missing images, I highly doubt Pinterest has anything more than maybe another ~300-500 there at best. That's me being really generous right now. Because that website does nothing but spam me the same 500 photos of Paul on a regular basis that I have already put on the board. On my own website database, I have already surpassed Pinterest. I have doubled the board's 1,700 number and I am no where near done. Just my 2016-17 Festival era folder brings Pinterest to its knees at 1,740 files posted right now inside of it. Something that has pissed me off since July is that Pinterest basically has minimal images of Paul from this era on stage on it. Most of the ones there are cropped via IG and I can tell they look like really bad for it. That's why I refuse to add them to my board. They look terrible and square broken crops from IG.
That's why I said, yall truly are suffering in the Rammstein jpeg purgatory in hell. I can't believe it's like this. Couldn't be me. Won't be me.
I cannot tell you how many times I show up in a server, post a random Paul pic for fun, and leave. Only to come back to five people saying some variation of "I never saw this before omg" and I'm like... how. Why does this happen so often?? But then I see the state of Pinterest and I'm like, never mind I see now what the flaw is. People seem to have zero clue, interest, or willpower to search online for photos. They want random robotic feeds to give it to them. Why are so many modern fandoms lazy? Where's the community and experience anymore? I will never understand this. Why wait for R+ media to show up to you via falling from the sky from the robot code overlords? Just go to the store and get it yourself. Go find it. Go look it up. Dig around. Explore the Internet. Then I realized, oh wait many image hosts are dead. Even if you go looking, you're going to find a million broken links. Never mind. Like I said in my image tips post, Google and Bing are also getting progressively worse since 2023 for images specifically. So everyone sits here on IG, Pinterest, and tumblr. And we just suffer here like this doing nothing about it. I have had enough. ENOUGH! No more suffering.
It's time to return to the truest thing ever about any fandom: fan site galleries.
I am showing up right now and I WILL make you look at 2016-17 era Paul in non-IG square cropped format. I won't stand for this lmfao. I am truly this meme right now about Festival era. Look, please look. He played with his two hands ZERSTOREN. Will you please, LOOK.
We have to learn to share with each other again. I do the opposite of gatekeeping.
