Tag: Kaitlyn Tiffany

Bookmarked The GIF Is on Its Deathbed (theatlantic.com)

I think there will always be, at least, a handful of masochists who want to struggle to make a GIF and struggle again to post it somewhere—all because they are devoted to the perfect animated loop, and because they think there is something spiritually important about contorting themselves to create it. “[Igor] Stravinsky has a quote about constraints,” Kohler told me. Then he read the whole thing aloud: “The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”

Kaitlyn Tiffany reflects on the demise of GIFs. She discusses the embarrassing nature in which particular GIFs are used on repeat. In addition to this, the MP4 format is a lot smaller.

Ir is interesting to look back on when I presented on GIFs as a form of quick makes.

Liked Why QAnon Left Reddit (The Atlantic)

The tale of how Reddit squashed QAnon seems like it must hold a tangible lesson for the rest of the social web, but the internet is messier than that. The particularities of Reddit, its culture, and the timing of its QAnon purge cannot be replicated by other companies. QAnon has found fertile ground on even more mainstream sites than Reddit. It simply doesn’t need the platform anymore.

Bookmarked Is Anyone Going to Get Rich off of Email Newsletters? (The Atlantic)

In 2015, Meredith Haggerty produced an episode on TinyLetter and women’s writing for her WNYC internet-culture show, TLDR. In it, Haggerty quoted the essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” published by the French feminist scholar Hélène Cixous in 1976. “Women must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies,” Cixous argues, going on to explain that the only way women can make up for their absence from recorded history is to write themselves in now, super fast, with lots of detail and energy.

This, Haggerty argued, is what women were doing with TinyLetter, and what many of the best newsletters are doing now. In her newsletter Like This, the writer Meaghan O’Connell documented in gory and personal detail the experience of giving birth. Starting in 2014, the writer Charlotte Shane published a serialized memoir about her experiences as a sex worker in a TinyLetter called Prostitute Laundry. It was later adapted into a book, but as she was publishing the newsletter, she kept no public archive: You had to subscribe, and whatever you’d already missed was lost to the wind.

Kaitlyn Tiffany explores the ever evolving world of newsletters. Although not a traditional ‘blog’ this is another interesting post in regards to development over time. Intriguingly, this captures both changes to people and purpose, but also in regards to the various platforms. One question I was left wondering is whether there is an incentive from some of the freemium platforms for spam accounts to get users up to the magic ‘1000’ subscribers?