The community

marielgum:

I have been thinking about writing this post recently and there was always that social anxiety/fear that people and JAck might hate me for saying the stuff that I’m about to talk about. But I’ve been in this community for a long ass time now and I know when something is wrong. So I decided to just address it and hope that Jack will read through this post and help us out.

As you’ve probably already heard, there have been many art/gifs/edit thefts recently, way more than it’s ever happened. People are straight up stealing stuff and reposting it non-stop, forcing creators to report them (which doesn’t usually work, mind you), often to no avail since these people do not know (or don’t care about) the simple rules of content copyright, which yes, also apply to websites like Tumblr, Instagram and DeviantArt. 
We have tried numerous times to put a stop to this situation but it’s progressively getting worse and worse. I have a feeling that Jack can help us sort this out with us by openly saying that art theft is not okay, ever. Maybe hearing this from Jack (and other content creators) will help these people change their minds and actually stop being so damn irreponsible and disrespectful.

Another issue that is slowly making the community’s positivity fade away is the fact that some people are being incredibly rude to one another and starting to tear each other down instead building each other up. I’ve noticed that this happens when it comes to theorising about Anti or about Jack’s personal life. Some people feel so entitled and often don’t realise that this is supposed to be a safe place where people can come to share thoughts, ideas, content and a good laugh and not a place to start drama in or to affirm oneself as the bigger and more important blog around. We are all the same here. Someone who gets reblogged (or “noticed”) a lot is not more important than you and someone who never gets noticed is not less important than you. I think we need to remind ourselves of this more often and I feel like Jack himself should state once again that anon hate, rudeness and arrogance are not welcome in the jse community.

Last but not least, the infamous closed captions. I personally have never dabbled in captioning a video but I know people who have and I also know how much time, effort and passion it takes. Good captioners work their asses off to help people with hearing issues to enjoy the video just as much as we all can enjoy it. So, surely you can understand how frustrating it is for them (and it should be for us as well as a community) to see captions being altered and used as means of self-promotion, witty remarks and unrelated Anti hints (don’t even get me started on people who straight up put Zalgo text in the caption. I mean, seriously?).
Fortunately for all of us, there has been found a potential solution to this: a captioning system that will allow people to actually create a caption file and upload it to Youtube without it being filtered or altered in any way. This means: clean captions and potential good captioners who can focus on making subtitles for everyone who needs them. No more public caption system but a more solid, legit and valid one we can all rely on. (tagging @chaenir-sam because she worked her ass off to find this solution).

Now, I don’t know if Jack ever heard of any of these issues that are threatening the community but in the fortunate event that he has or that he reads this, I really hope we can count on him to help fix the situation, which is currently getting out of control. We, as a community, can only do so much.

Jack has been really spotty lately (probably because of PAX prep and getting back into drumming?) so I honestly don’t blame him for any of this and I don’t want to put pressure on him. I just think that we, now more than ever, have to acknowledge that it’s not all starshine and rainbows in the community and I feel like our green bean can help us in this  endeavour.

Thank you all for the patience and the attention!