Let’s say someone is looking for porn and they put “wife caught her husband cheating,” into Google. There are a lot of porn sites (and some news sites) with that title. So Google has to decide which order to show them in, because most of the time, people pick something off the first few pages of Google.
Google wants to have the very best “wife caught her husband cheating” (or whatever else you search for) sites on the first page of the search. Google has several ways to try and decide which site are the best, but one of them is that it looks at how popular it is by seeing how many other websites link to it. If a lot of other sites are linking to it, it was probably useful to them, so Google will put it on the front page.
So if I’m a sleazy pornsite owner, I could create like a thousand websites and make them all link to my “wife caught her husband cheating” site, and act like a whole bunch of different websites thought it was pretty great. They’d be like “xdfgt .com”, “xdfgy .com”, “xdfgh .com,” just nonsense addresses nobody else was using, or whatever. I’d try to make Google think my site was awesome, because all these other websites are linking to it.
But Google has already caught on to that. Google would know “xdfgt .com” was a crappy fake website, because nobody else is linking to “xdfgt .com”. Any website that is only linked to by crap websites is also crap, as far as Google is concerned. Google won’t put it on the first pages of search results.
So instead let’s imagine the sleazy pornsite owner creates a thousand fake tumblrs instead, like “xdfgt.tumblr .com” and “xdfgy.tumblr .com” and “xdfgh.tumblr .com” and just puts one or two posts on them to add links to the “wife caught her husband cheating” porn site. Google can still tell those tumblrs are crap websites, because nobody else is linking to them. But the difference is … on tumblr, the sleazy pornsite owner can make your website link to him.
Let’s say your tumblr is “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com”. If “xdfgt.tumblr .com” likes one of your posts, there’s link on your blogto “xdfgt.tumblr .com.” Somewhere on “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” it will say “xdfgt liked this” with a link from your blog to “xdfgt.tumblr .com.”
Google’s bot looks at “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” and it sees that your blog is a good website. People are linking to it (talking to you or reblogging from you), you write like an actual human being, you have nice pictures, you update sometimes, you aren’t a bot. So Google decides your blog isn’t a crappy scam website. Then it sees the link to “xdfgt.tumblr .com” and it thinks “oh hey, a nice website with good stuff written by a real human linked to this “xdfgt.tumblr .com” I guess maybe “xdfgt.tumblr .com” is a decent website too.”
Then it looks at “xdfgt.tumblr .com” and it sees the link to the porn site with “wife caught her husband cheating”, and it says, “well, I guess that “wife caught her husband cheating” site is a good site. I know that because there’s a good site linking to it here at “xdfgt.tumblr .com.” I know “xdfgt.tumblr .com” is a good site because “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” linked to it, and I know “mostlyaestheticandfunny.tumblr .com” is a good site because it is updated and writes like a real person and people talk to it and link to it.”
So basically the porn bots are using the fact that you have a good blog to make themselves look better and to try and trick Google’s bot into thinking they’re very popular and it should put them at the top of its list when people search Google for porn.
It’s really annoying! It would be really nice if the people running tumblr figured out a way to not be free advertising for every sleazy porn site on the internet
hey wow thats actually really useful! and its written in a way that i (a bird with no knowledge of the wizardly internal workings of a website) can understand!
Something to remember, as the election approaches:
The work is never wasted.
Even if the Republicans keep control of Congress–yes, that would be terrible, yes, I would be furious and frustrated and sad and it would hurt like hell–EVEN SO: the work we have done to get here was not wasted.
I was part of the previous “biggest worldwide protest ever,” the global protests against the Iraq War in February 2003.
We lost. The war happened. Is still happening.
But some of the people who got involved then worked for Obama’s campaigns, a lot of them are part of the resistance now, and all of us learned something. The work was not wasted.
Even if we lose. There were Democratic primary debates in my hometown for the first time I can remember. Even if our terrible Republican Congresswoman gets re-elected, there’s still a broader and stronger Democratic Party organization in Mike Fucking Pence’s home state.
The election can’t be an end. It will only be an end if we win and get complacent, or if we lose and give in to hopelessness. We cannot afford either. We do the job that is in front of us. No matter what.
The work is never wasted.
The stories our world tells us are about Great Heroic Struggles With Triumphant Climaxes In Which Good Vanquishes Evil And They All Live Happily Ever After. It’s all about the one extreme emergency during which people rise to the occasion.
Problem is, that’s not how the world actually … works. That’s not how change happens. That’s not how societies are reshaped. We hear about MLK and the bus boycott and the protests, but not the DECADES OF WORK that came before, the organizing and the education and the legal challenges and the hundreds of thousands of people, from great heroes to ordinary people, who put in the grinding every-day work to make the world a better place, step by step, bit by bit. The big things–the speeches, the marches–were the tip of the iceberg. Nothing would have happened without the rest of the iceberg.
The 2018 midterms are the tip of the iceberg. They are incredibly important, yes. But without the rest of the iceberg, they mean nothing. Without ordinary people across America organizing and talking to their friends and coworkers and paying attention to politics and getting involved and volunteering (not just politically, but for all the nonprofits out there working to make the world a better, fairer, more just, more merciful place) the election is useless.
This is not a sprint. It is a relay marathon. If you can run a major leg, awesome. If you can help organize the marathon, awesome. If you can coordinate the people running, awesome. If you can hand out bottled water along the route, awesome. If you can cheer along the way, awesome. If you can remind people that the marathon is happening, awesome. It’s not about great heroes or one person doing it all or one climactic battle in which everything magically gets fixed.
It’s about ordinary people doing what they can. What you can do right now is vote. What you do on November 7 and the months and years following (no matter who wins the election) is stay involved and stay working.
Take care of yourself. Take care of others. Don’t hyperfixate and burn out. Be the tortoise, not the hare. Vote. And then keep moving on.
Don’t be. You’re hearing media do what it does: harp on one person’s lack of enthusiasm and make it seem that that one opinion is held by thousands.
This race went precisely as I thought it would. Precisely.
And it was absolutely a massive success.
So let me tell you why, so that you feel better and can easily put down the annoying crowing that republicans are going to do, because they managed to cling to a few things.
If the votes fall as I believe they will, the democrats will have retaken the house by some 30 seats. This is impressive and somewhat unique in our country’s history. The GOP, upon taking the house originally, gerrymandered these districts in impressively screwball ways. Wherever that rigging has been overturned, the districts have gone blue. Which is, of course, why they did it. Democrats have the house now, 30ish flips in republican rugged districts. 15 of those being female candidates.
That is absolutely impressive.
A few key candidates to whom many people were paying close attention did not perform as people desired. Abrams, O’Rourke, Gillum. Well…I’m not surprised. Abrams faces absolute state wide fraud. Her opponent being the person also in charge of voter registration, withholding some 50k votes of which 70% were black. Voter intimidation. This is blatant corruption. And yet still…her race was very close. So too with Beto. Ted Cruz was a presidential candidate! When he took Texas, he did so with a wide margin in most districts. Last night in Texas he was fighting tooth and nail. Gillum’s gubernatorial race for Florida was a figurative dead heat. 99% of the vote in—49% Gillum, 49.7% DeSantis. These are CLASSICALLY and FULLY republican regions in which Trump took the presidency by huge margins. That these races, with all those challenges, were as close as they were PROVES that something unprecedented happened.
3-400% voter turnout increases for a midterm election. Mostly with the youth.
But let’s talk about what it means to have the house.
Now I know you’re probably concerned about the federal judgeships that are about to pop up for consideration, and it’s true that the Senate was needed to stop approvals of those candidates, but…
Control of the house means that Democrats now take hold of some critical committees. These committees are the very ones that will be overseeing corruption allegations. Ways and Means, energy and Commerce, Financial Services, Intelligence, appropriations, foreign affairs, armed services, judiciary, transportation and infrastructure, and…government reform.
How do you feel now?
The worst political fallout of a GOP controlled government, the worst sound bites that weren’t Trump’s, the worst slaps across the face? All came from footage of those very same committees. Those committees now belong to Democrats.
Massive policy shifts also occurred in many classically conservative states—legalizing marijuana votes, Florida giving the vote back to former criminals who’ve served their time thus giving the vote back to a HUGE portion of the African-American Community that has been held in check by a racist and classicist policing method, then there were upsets in many small ways too.
I promise you…this is all excellent and it will have truly important and forceful impact. In 2020, if we can keep that same enthusiasm and rage, the entire government will shift. But that can only happen if we keep moving forward, if the candidates who won keep their noses to the grindstone and push back hard, if you and I and everyone on the ground continues to talk about this and force out bigots and greed.
Do not be discouraged. I promise you…this was an amazing election. Don’t focus on a few bright stars and think that all is lost because they fell. There is a great deal happening here, and one thing I know from being at sea—when a wave is building, there is first a terrifying shift, as the water level begins to rise. The ship will first dip, surrounded by walls of water, and then of a sudden, the swell. The ship raises and passengers suddenly realize that they are much higher than before, with an incredible view. Then the wave crests and takes the ship with it.
We didn’t see a wave crest tonight. So what? That means it’s a much larger wave than we realized. It will crest in the future. But only if that fluid pressure is maintained.
This is good. It is. So long as everyone keeps working. This is good.
Calm down. Have a glass of champagne. A cup of tea. When they Trumpet all their noise…say nothing. Nothing needs to be said. You’re higher than you were with an excellent view of the ending. So relax. Don’t fret.
I am going to tell everyone a secret, especially people in rural areas.
You…can do a slow social progressive takeover of your local Democratic party, probably. You just need to carve out some time for it.
“Renay”, you say, exasperated, “that sounds fake, but okay.” But I’m here to tell you that if you’re in a rural/red state (or even blue states), you have an excellent chance of infecting the Democratic Party in your area with some straight up radical empathy. And you can do it in sneaky ways. It’s a long game. Here is a list:
1. Find your county Democrats. You may have to start at state level, but eventually you should be able to track down the chair of the county party and find out where and when they meet. Start attending meetings. If they’re not having meetings, hoooooboy. That’s a totally different thing. I spent two years fighting that battle, but if you want help, ping me.
2. At the very first meeting, if the group isn’t using a microphone, bring it up. Ask if the committee can invest in a portable PA system to bring to meetings to help people who have trouble hearing. If they balk (ables often will), don’t worry. Make the request once, and then make the request at every subsequent meeting, kindly, until they get so sick of you they cave and/or start empathizing with you. My position here: who cares why it gets done. Just get it done.
3. Keep going to meetings. Generally county parties meet every month.
4. If there are nametags at meetings, always use them and put your pronouns on them. Yes, even you, cis people. ESPECIALLY YOU.
5. At your third meeting, if the group is using sign in sheets, ask the secretary, or meeting chair if the former is unclear, if the sign in sheets could have a field for pronouns. It’s not about getting people to use it yet—that’s later—we just want it on the template so YOU can use it and set an example. Yes, you can make this request even as a cis person. In fact, it’s probably better that you do because it will cost you less. You can do the emotional labor instead of making trans and enby friends do the labor. This goes back to nametags: if you do it, you create a safe bubble for others to do it, or a social pressure situation for people to do it. Social pressure is sometimes toxic, but we can use it for positive things!
These are Very Simple things you can do to Increase Inclusion in local Democratic spaces and shove them left. This is just the start, too. There’s language scrubbing (kind of advanced because you need to have relationships with the people), requesting the committee invite guest speakers from marginalized communities, and becoming a delegate to the state party annual convention. This is Very Advanced because it generally means travel, but I plan to do it myself because in two years I’m going to make the Arkansas DPA adopt gender neutral language in their platform instead of this “he or she” business.
I mean, maybe you think of going to county meetings and go, “ugh I would rather eat glass” but you can always take an ebook on your phone or something (I do this…soon I will have time to knit again and I’ll be doing that). Take 3-4 hours out of your month and invest it.
What shoves the Democratic Party left? We do. A bunch of people taking small steps in their local communities. And then the candidates coming out of those committees get more progressive and thoughtful, too.
The world doesn’t change just because we want it to. We make it change.
Go do the work.
Additionally: show up to enough meetings and there’s a non-zero chance you could be running things, which is also helpful for the whole slow radicalisation process.
(in NZ if you show up to enough local meetings of a major political party you basically get elected to Parliament if that’s a thing you’re into, you think I’m joking but I’m not really, so I figure for the US ‘running things on a local level’ is totes achievable)
for a quick change of pace–i know we’ve all seen a thousand posts about voting, but what i haven’t seen (not yet) is one saying thank you.
thank you for those who made it out in the rain and the cold, who organized and canvassed and took on the onerous task of working with non-voting & conservative friends/family to change their stance if at least just this once. thank you for those who stood in line for hours, who had to travel because your voting place was moved, who had to jump through ridiculous fucking hoops to register, who weren’t inspired but showed up anyway for the disenfranchised and the greater good. thank you as well to everyone who voted early, absentee, and provisional.
rip tumblr 