The Male Hysteric

Watching Twitter go down the tubes is making me sad. Like the discourse of the people I'm adjacent to just keeps getting worse and worse and more and more frequent, it feels like and it's very unenjoyable to look at... but at the same time it's still the best source for artists I like because the artists haven't made the leap to another platform, it seems like.

I think the smart and sane thing to do is to try to set up an RSS feed for the artists accounts I like, but that's been mixed success, and nitter.net seems to be spotty right now as twitter falls apart. I am hoping eventually these artists make the leap to bluesky (or otherwise? I know bluesky is similar and has policies that allow NSFW, though it is very, very much so not a mature platform yet) or do... something. I just want other options and twitter just continues to deteriorate.

I'm very tired.

Apparently there are new “temporary” limits on Twitter: max 6000 tweets viewed per day for verified (blue checkmark) and only 600 per day for non-verified, going all the way down to 300 if the account is new.

Which is, totally nuts, especially considering it’s a weekend that he’s implementing it. Also that he wants to get rid of blocklists, well, the site is quickly becoming completely unusable. It’s very strange to decide to limit impressions when the site is run on SELLING those impressions… or does he really think squeezing $8/month out of individual users is actually going to work?

It’s incredible, but also as the big draw to Twitter these days has been fanart, incredibly disappointing. Like a significant amount of art is just going to be straight-up lost the longer this goes on for.

I get home from vacation and many larger subs of Reddit have gone dark, and all I hear about is how people can't search for normal how-tos because Reddit was the big repository for actual questions answered, especially now that Yahoo Answers is gone and almost all hobby forums are gone, disappeared into either Reddit, Discord, or otherwise.

Along with Twitter’s collapse in the last 6 months or so and ChatGPT clogging up SEO with garbage, all of this seems really... bad? Like it was bad enough before with the video takeover (especially because of my disability) but that was somewhat slow-moving and ongoing since about 2016. This is all happening in the matter of months. I know the reddit blackout is temporary but this all seems to bode ill generally with the reveal on how fragile this all is.

I would love it if forums came back, but I don't love that we will probably have to become much more desperate to make the jump back to them. Also a lot of things that made forums go round was free image hosting which is mostly gone outside of social media and let's be real everyone is on mobile devices which makes image upload extremely finnicky outside of apps specialized for it... and this isn't even getting into video.

All through this collapse I'm just watching and helpless. I mean maybe I could look into starting a forum, but what would it be about? I don't trust in my moderating abilities anyway...

I just. Don't like this. Don't like this at all.

A very interesting episode of the podcast Hooked On Pop came out last week called Invasion of the Vibesnatchers which seemed particularly relevant to my piece on AI art generators as potential IP laundering machines. It's a very, very interesting comparison on how two similar phenomena are being dealt with in two different mediums and how, with both of them, the artists seems to lose.

Most people are not familiar with how music credits and pay works. Various methods of what might be called 'collageing' have been used in popular recorded music since forever -- from literal clips being 'sampled' and used in a new way in a new song, or melodies repeated and reinterpreted and on and on. Also, in the United States, there's a very defined structure of who owns music, and therefore who gets money every time a song is played, so when pieces of a song are used in another song who gets a cut and how is very predetermined. Because of this structure of the business, nobody wants to step on anyone else's toes too badly, so often credit will be pre-emptively awarded before there's any kind of conflict leading to lawsuit if a company thinks there might be an issue. All of this is happening under the listener's nose unless they really look for these credits. Actual disputes like over Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines" are not common and when they do happen they're usually settled pretty quickly.

Now, an "interpolation" isn't as straightforward a copy as a sampled clip or a repeated line of melody. The example analyzed at the beginning of the podcast showed that no individual piece of the song could be considered really copied directly from the old song being credited, but given that it has a a similar instrumentation, similar structure, etc and certain parts that are relatively unique, like a repetitive whistled melody, the old song is given credit, and with that credit the owners of the credited song get some small cut of the profit of the crediting song.

Later in the episode the host reveals that interpolation credits in popular music have increased from about 10% per year before 2017 to about 20% per year afterward, and the major reason cited why is that, well, the record companies that own songs are encouraging it. There's a definite profit motive here -- when someone uses a song they already own to make something new, they will get a cut of the profit from that song, and the more vague the definition of "use" becomes, the more credits they can have, and therefore the more money they will make without having to even acquire more songs.

Now, I can make an argument against this practice due to the "modern media companies encourage homogeneous sludge" argument, but the more important note is how different the music industry is treating music credits versus how visual art credits simply do not work and allow for AI art to sneak in. If you made an AI music generator instead, made it scan top 40 hits back decades for its learning set, and then started posting the music as your own creation or as a way to get "free music", the RIAA would have your ass on a platter in less than a week.

And I am not saying this because the RIAA is 'good' -- it's not like the record companies, once they get that interpolation credit, are actually distributing that cut of profit fairly. But it's so demonstrative of how, when it comes to who makes money on art, it's entirely down to might makes right, and the only reason AI art is allowed to exist as "free art generation" is because it is taking exploiting artists who have no legal or financial power to stop them.

I am definitely feeling some kind of way and am not sure why, but alas, I think that is part of the human experience.

The more I learn about traditional publishing the more I feel like it's not for me. It was a dream I had since I was a kid but the world has changed to the point that I am unsure what publishers are for. They do not publicize, which should have been their main function, as that's increasingly being outsourced to authors on social media, and they don't protect the writers from their own mistakes and the public, which seems to be an increasingly necessary part of publication that they're also outsourcing to the writers. Reaching a wide audience as a trans person... no longer feels like my goal. Moreover it does not feel safe. I have thought about locking down my twitter now that it's reached a certain number of followers that's too high for my liking. I studiously block a lot of users on sight but I know it's impossible to do so fast enough. I wish DW was a bit more active because I do appreciate its slower pace. While my Tumblr is far more curated there's still the possibility that my posts will leave their intended orbit and that's... not great.

Anyway that's depressing and I've been having more depressing thoughts but then, there's the matter of what that means, which may be good. I'd like to... actually post some of my writing online, if I don't have to jealously guard first publication rights for a traditional publisher. Maybe even... here? That would be something. Though, honestly, I have not written anything besides essays for a while. I could post about ideas I have been working on, though that's a little sparse in my head right now too. But I feel like maybe I could be more open, in this little corner, where I don't have much of an audience, even if it's technically public. Because I would like to share these things, and I've been told to just sit on them for the past fifteen years for what I've learned is no good reason... and I am tired.

I understand that probably no one will read this here, but, Hell. Maybe.