![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
2023 holiday points bonus will begin 1 December!
Hello, friends! It's almost December, and long-term dwenizens know what that means: it's about to be time for our annual December end-of-year points bonus. This bonus is not active yet -- it will begin at midnight UTC on December 1 -- but I had some time today so I'm announcing it a bit early!
Our annual holiday gift tradition to y'all is simple: for the entire month of December, all orders in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.
The fine print: this bonus only applies to orders of paid time and points: rename tokens and bonus icon slots don't receive bonuses. If you buy paid time for a friend or for another one of your own accounts, the bonus points will be sent to you (the account that placed the order), not to the account the gift was sent to.
The order must be completed in the month of December. IMPORTANT: when we say "the month of December", we mean by server time (which is in UTC), not by your local time zone. Every year, a few people think they have more time to make an order than they actually do, so if you want to take advantage of the promo, it's a good idea to do it before the last day. (I always like to include this warning because I, too, leave things to the absolute last minute and have it bite me in the ass frequently.)
This is our annual way of saying "thank you" to everyone who supports us. 2023 has been a wild year for us, full of meltdowns from other social media services from Twitter (excuse me, "X") to Reddit to Tumblr, each one proving yet again the fundamental theory we founded Dreamwidth on: that modern ad-supported, VC-funded, all-things-to-all-people social media services are incapable of putting the needs of their communities and their users first. I will always love social media for what it is and what it can do for people, but the last fifteen years have made it painfully clear that it's really, really hard to do social media in an ethical fashion, and that gets even harder when you have to choose between the good of your users and the desires of the people who are funding your platform. The fact we're 100% user-funded means that unlike most other social media platforms out there, you can be positive that for us, those two groups of people are the same people: you. We don't have to chase ad dollars or engage in creepy unethical privacy-violating behavior: our only goal is to do the best we can at providing you a service you think is worth paying to keep it going.
Those stubborn, ad-free, privacy-focused, user-centric practices resulted in the thing we're most proud of this year: our contribution to the lawsuit seeking to invalidate California's "Age-Appropriate Design Act". Despite the name and the way people talk about it, the law is not a data privacy or child protection law: it's a backdoor censorship law that will hand the state of California wide powers of prior restraint on the protected speech of adults and require websites to forcibly deanonymize their users and require proof of both identity and age. Both the oral argument before the court and the judge's ruling granting the preliminary injunction cited to us as an example of a service the law would require to collect more user data than we want to, and to use it in ways we find horrifying, in order to demonstrate all the (many) ways the law is pretextual and show that its actual goal is controlling your speech and ending anonymity online.
It will take several years for the final resolution of the lawsuit, but the injunction means it won't go into effect in the meanwhile, and the judge has made it incredibly clear that nearly every aspect of the law is unconstitutional. (Because it is!) We're thrilled to have been able to contribute to this particular effort, and stay tuned: there's a good chance we may have some additional "fighting for your right to stay anonymous and read/write porn on the internets" news coming in 2024.
If you're in the US, meanwhile: please take a moment to contact your representatives to oppose KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, which looks to make a very similar set of requirements a nationwide law and which is just as harmful and just as unconstitutional. Even if you've already contacted them to oppose it, and I hope you have, it's very worth doing again and again. (My representatives are probably at the level of "oh god, not her again" with me by now over this issue, but it really is that important.)
We don't need to raise money to finance these legal efforts to protect you -- there's a broad coalition of advocacy groups spearheading the fight, from industry trade groups to privacy advocates to free speech defenders, and our participation so far has been at no cost to us -- but throwing us a few bucks will definitely help us keep the place running while we do. We haven't raised any of our prices since we first opened the doors in 2009, because we've worked hard to keep our costs as low as possible and because so many of y'all choose to support us with your payments: we're one of the only sites out there that can consistently, year-over-year, finance its cost of operations through user payments alone, and we're incredibly thankful for the trust you put in us. I always hate asking people to pay us, because I know times are tough for everyone and so many of us are all passing the same $20 around and around. But if you have the cash to spare, tossing some of it our way will help us continue our mission of providing an online home that will always have the door open and a pot of tea waiting for you, no matter what else is going on outside.
I say every year that we couldn't do this without you, and it sounds cheesy and sentimental, but every year it's true. When we started Dreamwidth, it was a wild gamble: I wrote every one of our early news posts hoping that I'd still be here fifteen years later, trying to tame my parentheticals and cut off my digressions before I get lost in them, but we were painfully aware of how much of a risk we were taking and that all our experience, preparation, and planning could only take us so far. It's y'all and your willingness to trust us that's kept us going for these almost-fifteen-years since then.
So thank you, yet again, to each and every one of you who's made this place your online home. We're grateful to every one of you who's helped us prove that years-ago thesis about how there is a better, more ethical way to do social media, and we're going to keep repeating the message of "we need more smaller, community-focused platforms that provide a service their users find valuable enough to pay for" for as long as we have to until it sinks in. Mark and Jen and Robby and I wish you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and we hope that 2024 brings us all good things.
Our annual holiday gift tradition to y'all is simple: for the entire month of December, all orders in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.
The fine print: this bonus only applies to orders of paid time and points: rename tokens and bonus icon slots don't receive bonuses. If you buy paid time for a friend or for another one of your own accounts, the bonus points will be sent to you (the account that placed the order), not to the account the gift was sent to.
The order must be completed in the month of December. IMPORTANT: when we say "the month of December", we mean by server time (which is in UTC), not by your local time zone. Every year, a few people think they have more time to make an order than they actually do, so if you want to take advantage of the promo, it's a good idea to do it before the last day. (I always like to include this warning because I, too, leave things to the absolute last minute and have it bite me in the ass frequently.)
This is our annual way of saying "thank you" to everyone who supports us. 2023 has been a wild year for us, full of meltdowns from other social media services from Twitter (excuse me, "X") to Reddit to Tumblr, each one proving yet again the fundamental theory we founded Dreamwidth on: that modern ad-supported, VC-funded, all-things-to-all-people social media services are incapable of putting the needs of their communities and their users first. I will always love social media for what it is and what it can do for people, but the last fifteen years have made it painfully clear that it's really, really hard to do social media in an ethical fashion, and that gets even harder when you have to choose between the good of your users and the desires of the people who are funding your platform. The fact we're 100% user-funded means that unlike most other social media platforms out there, you can be positive that for us, those two groups of people are the same people: you. We don't have to chase ad dollars or engage in creepy unethical privacy-violating behavior: our only goal is to do the best we can at providing you a service you think is worth paying to keep it going.
Those stubborn, ad-free, privacy-focused, user-centric practices resulted in the thing we're most proud of this year: our contribution to the lawsuit seeking to invalidate California's "Age-Appropriate Design Act". Despite the name and the way people talk about it, the law is not a data privacy or child protection law: it's a backdoor censorship law that will hand the state of California wide powers of prior restraint on the protected speech of adults and require websites to forcibly deanonymize their users and require proof of both identity and age. Both the oral argument before the court and the judge's ruling granting the preliminary injunction cited to us as an example of a service the law would require to collect more user data than we want to, and to use it in ways we find horrifying, in order to demonstrate all the (many) ways the law is pretextual and show that its actual goal is controlling your speech and ending anonymity online.
It will take several years for the final resolution of the lawsuit, but the injunction means it won't go into effect in the meanwhile, and the judge has made it incredibly clear that nearly every aspect of the law is unconstitutional. (Because it is!) We're thrilled to have been able to contribute to this particular effort, and stay tuned: there's a good chance we may have some additional "fighting for your right to stay anonymous and read/write porn on the internets" news coming in 2024.
If you're in the US, meanwhile: please take a moment to contact your representatives to oppose KOSA, the Kids Online Safety Act, which looks to make a very similar set of requirements a nationwide law and which is just as harmful and just as unconstitutional. Even if you've already contacted them to oppose it, and I hope you have, it's very worth doing again and again. (My representatives are probably at the level of "oh god, not her again" with me by now over this issue, but it really is that important.)
We don't need to raise money to finance these legal efforts to protect you -- there's a broad coalition of advocacy groups spearheading the fight, from industry trade groups to privacy advocates to free speech defenders, and our participation so far has been at no cost to us -- but throwing us a few bucks will definitely help us keep the place running while we do. We haven't raised any of our prices since we first opened the doors in 2009, because we've worked hard to keep our costs as low as possible and because so many of y'all choose to support us with your payments: we're one of the only sites out there that can consistently, year-over-year, finance its cost of operations through user payments alone, and we're incredibly thankful for the trust you put in us. I always hate asking people to pay us, because I know times are tough for everyone and so many of us are all passing the same $20 around and around. But if you have the cash to spare, tossing some of it our way will help us continue our mission of providing an online home that will always have the door open and a pot of tea waiting for you, no matter what else is going on outside.
I say every year that we couldn't do this without you, and it sounds cheesy and sentimental, but every year it's true. When we started Dreamwidth, it was a wild gamble: I wrote every one of our early news posts hoping that I'd still be here fifteen years later, trying to tame my parentheticals and cut off my digressions before I get lost in them, but we were painfully aware of how much of a risk we were taking and that all our experience, preparation, and planning could only take us so far. It's y'all and your willingness to trust us that's kept us going for these almost-fifteen-years since then.
So thank you, yet again, to each and every one of you who's made this place your online home. We're grateful to every one of you who's helped us prove that years-ago thesis about how there is a better, more ethical way to do social media, and we're going to keep repeating the message of "we need more smaller, community-focused platforms that provide a service their users find valuable enough to pay for" for as long as we have to until it sinks in. Mark and Jen and Robby and I wish you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and we hope that 2024 brings us all good things.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Page 1 of 2