Oh, Pillowfort, bless

[lizbee]

Baby's first fandom wank, and it is, of course, about banning fanworks (and people who create them) depicting underage sex. If you were here for Strikethrough, you know how this goes, but what's notable is the belated response from Staff:

Hello everyone, we just want to let you all know that we have seen this post and read nearly every comment left here, as well as all the email messages we have received on this issue. As is obvious from the number of discussions going on here, this is a complicated issue and there isn't even any clear consensus among the user base on how this should be dealt with. We are aware, however, that our TOS is currently vague on this issue in particular, but it is an issue we will need a bit of time to formulate a more specific approach to (for one, we'd like to confer with a lawyer who specializes in internet-related laws). We do promise that we will do research into this topic and add more clarity to the TOS on this subject before the site exits beta and opens to the public. (emphasis added)

I wish I had any faith that this wasn't the first time it occurred to them that they should consult a lawyer with regards to their TOS.

Comments

[sqbr]

Oh dear. I saw the post but not that staff comment.

[gelliaclodiana]

I wish I had any faith that this wasn't the first time it occurred to them that they should consult a lawyer with regards to their TOS.

I mean, I think the fact that they named the site Pillowfort tells you everything you need to know here.

[sassbandit]

It's interesting to compare the early days of pillowfort, with their anonymous "staff" and poor communication, to the early days of dreamwidth. I was just re-reading https://dw-biz.dreamwidth.org/332.html with great fondness.

[lizbee]

Yes! DW is by no means perfect, but it was so much more professional and transparent, even in its earliest days.

[sassbandit]

So I did a bit of digging around about Pillowfort's "staff". It seems to be one person, who has about 3 years' software development experience after having taking a "bootcamp" type of coding course. I've looked at their github and the code that's public doesn't fill me with good feels about their software development practices. To be fair it's a few years old, but there's no sign they've been involved in open source projects or other things that might have taught them some of the practices I'd want to see (eg. forking branches for development, meaningful commit messages).

Something like this needs, in my opinion, at least one senior developer with 10+ years' experience (as an architect and project lead) and one senior community manager with similar amounts of experience including dealing with abuse in contentious online environments. From there they'd need to additionally recruit other developers and support staff, but it would be enough to get started.

For comparison: DW had pretty much that pairing and recruited volunteer developers and support very early. Ravelry had one coder with 7 years' experience on top of a BS in Comp Sci (just checked Casey's LinkedIn). I don't know what Casey and Jessica's community mgt experience was but a knitting community site wasn't anywhere near as likely to be contentious from day one as a Tumblr/LJ replacement.

[nonelvis]

THIS THIS THIS. I am a UX designer with 20+ years of experience under my belt working on large corporate and other sites, and everything about Pillowfort has struck me as being designed and run by people in well over their heads. Their initial crowdfunding ask was something like $400 (ETA: $600, I looked it up) – which was meant to cover server costs, because clearly $600 is all you need to run an enterprise-level site – and I am still boggling that they didn't design a responsive site from the start, and instead have been slowly grafting mobile elements on as they go. (If they'd designed this site ten years ago, I'd be less wtf about the mobile support. In 2017, if you're designing a site aimed at the Tumblr audience and you don't have your mobile UX settled from the start ... you are flat-out doing it wrong.)

[genarti]

Face, meet palm. Oh lord.

[deird1]

Oh, bless.

It's slightly ridiculous to see iterations of Strikethrough still going a decade later...

[brewsternorth]

I wish I had any faith that this wasn't the first time it occurred to them that they should consult a lawyer with regards to their TOS

Sort of thing a professional website would've done before go-live, no? Facepalm.

[lizbee]

I know nonelvis asked them about GDPR compliance a couple of months back, and is still waiting for a reply...

[laurenthemself]

I stared too long into the abyss, and all I really want to say is that, paedophiles aside, I really wish more people would learn how to curate their online experiences and that filters exist for a reason.

[infiniteviking]

Ohhhhhhboy. The more things change, etc.

[fred_mouse]

Thank you for that link. Ah, fandom wank, how I love to sit and eat popcorn, as long as I don't have a horse in the race.