Patatitta wrote:
Achromalia wrote:
Patatitta wrote:
I mean, as long as you don't know people who would want to do malicious things to you over the internet, you should be fine
there's also the possibility that you don't have to know people, but that people merely need to know you
basically, if you're at all notable from doing something, making anything at all and having any following as a niche microcelebrity or greater, the continuity of consequence (a la "the internet is forever") allows plenty of things to happen if people want to find something that you happen to be sensitive about (if you happen to care for any effects that might have on anything you might do or submit to the public) for any number of loosely-related reasons
say something minimally controversial? you have an appearance to attach that to, you can use mostly minimally-mutable characteristics like a little key to follow someone around if you think they're funny enough to callously extract something from. of course, to someone's mind, maybe it's deserved, or something. people can be pretty terrible without you doing very much, as rare and as unreasonable as it might seem
there are analogies and examples that could be made in my mind, but they dont really crystallize coherently...
This is true, but I do think the actual chances of this happening are a lot more slim that we're making it out to be, if you get recognisable enough, people can hold you accountable for certaings things you may have said, but I don't think that is something that realistically people should be too afraid of
nowadays, at least 150% of the human population has uploaded a video to youtube or tiktok with their face on it, most people have a public instagram profile that is tied to them as a person, and yet, even with the top 1% of people who are hyper famous, facing bad real life consequences is not the norm, you have a lot of petty drama, but nothing that could actually harm you, for the people that are not in that 1% it's even less of a problem, go ask your friend who uploads daily to tiktok if they have ever been doxxed and harrassed and they will probably ask you what doxxing even means
I personally think that there is a certain prestige in both discord and forums, or any other form of communication where you talk to the same people over and over again. If I see some random video on youtube, that's just, any human being on the planet I don't really care about it, but if you go on and post a photo of yourself in the forum, that's a bigger deal, it's not a random person, it's achromalia, a person i've actually talked to in the past
but, if the actual danger of posting yourself online is people from outside this sphere of trust finding it and doing bad things with it, it really shouldn't matter if it's on a forum or in youtube, so I don't think we should be treating posting yourself in here or whatever as diferent as just uploading a video to youtube, where it's a lot more normalized
mm, i wonder. it may just be that i've absorbed too many disproportionate impressions of how people behave online, with my own observations informing the pattern-recognition of horrors i wish were never true, and as a result i'm increasingly wishing to never be visible despite the things i yearn for making it necessary that i'm visible enough to share something creative when i would rather disappear and have no narrative to frame a creation beyond what i craft of it
before i dig too deep into a tangent, it does seem important to note that the o!forum is a fundamentally different kind of context from the way visibility on youtube will be framed, there are distinct differences in parasociality and voyeurism. it's not just a face being seen but where and which contextual frame it exists in. you can edit a video and have your appearance serve a purpose for a subject you present-- if someone clips a screenshot from that video, people will still be likely to recognize and understand that it comes from a video with a particular narrative. on forums, or imageboards, or discord, the contexts can be variably more distanced and yet still be extremely personal because of these platforms being a more microscopic-frame scale, which can approximate the "small-rural-town effect" of "everybody knows you, and any attachment you have to this circle is vulnerable to any malice someone might want to inflict" where as youtube may appear ironically a bit more "safe" because it exists within a sort of self-contained substance
the rationale probably isn't that consistent though, and the opposite could appear true, that in discord you're safer with any effect being socially microscopic while a youtube channel is more likely to be macroscopic. you are less likely to have any number of specific informal stream-of-consciousness comments be uniformly visible to the internet because you're in an isolated communi--
...but there it is, on youtube (or twitter, which i notice is another common callout-from-discord destination) anyway, due to a culture of social vigilance/voyeurism intersecting with precedence of media where the practice is further legitimized (and perhaps even usually with sympathizable justification against people who truly do cause harm)
this practice is not limited to publicized youtube drama spats, is what i believe that emphasizes. it could alternatively just be that the people i spectate happen to be adjacent to places where this is commonplace, and/or it may be that your familiarity with the practice of cyberstalking and profile-scouring and message-searching and screencapping is more anchored on well-established instances of people who were already significant and controversial in general...
or the secret third possibility, that i might just be an extremely online lurker, and have very little concept of how to convince myself not to be extremely vigilant about my presence through the sloppiest and most inconsistent self-preservative instinct i can carry with me
really, my wariness of this is moreso reflective of what i fear for myself and others who i always saw as being incredibly obscure figures that do a specific thing or create a specific kind of art or have a specific interest and still find themselves involved in Something, Somewhere. and perhaps those impressions just blur together so grossly that i have minimal trust of people online and believe most people to be disaffected and callous until proven otherwise, when nobody did or said anything
...i think my tangents are losing some coherence, but i simultaneously want to agree and absorb your premise as more grounded in reality, but i just instinctively distrust it for Reasons, Mysterious Reasons
and i dont intend to imply anyone was compelling that visibility of anyone else, of course. it seems like a very widely-agreeable principle for safety or something else
(yikes i think i interrupted my own thoughts in the middle of drawing connections, idk how to revisit them and im exhausted but i also am intensely curious what you see/think of this)
