Saturday, May 30, 2020
"God is dead". . . and so is Blogger?
One of the stranger gifs I've ever found (provenance unknown). So now I get an alarming message from Blogger, which I was afraid would soon be discontinued outright as obsolete technology, telling me that there will be a "new interface" on Blogger as of "late June".
YouTube has threatened all sorts of dire things over the years, including disabling comments on videos featuring "minors" (in my case, dolls!), and then threatening to shut down channels altogether if they did not designate whether or not the videos are "made for children". All sorts of penalties were waved about for even taking one step in that direction, i. e. featuring a puppy for a few seconds (FOR CHILDREN!), OR, a puppy and a nude woman in THE SAME video (mass confusion and more penalties).
In my case, completely confused and panicked, I agreed to designate one video at a time as "made for children" or "NOT made for children", literally ticking a box for each one, but with an archive of about 2000 videos, I had no idea what to do with all the old ones and was seeing vague threats about having my account terminated forever. I sweated this for a couple of weeks while people posted videos with titles like "IS THIS THE END OF YOUTUBE???!!!" and worse, until the dread moment came, and. . . nothing happened. I mean, NOTHING.
It was just like the "videos featuring minors" thing - they haphazardly "applied" it to random videos for a few weeks, then dropped the whole thing. In this case, the FTC was after YouTube for allowing companies to access personal information about children, which was ENTIRELY YouTube's fault, but passed along to creators to terrorize them and make sure they knew Who Was In Charge.
This Blogger thing is quite different, or at least I hope it is, an update of sorts, but I want to be able to keep my massive archive, access it easily, and post new things equally easily. The new version of anything is always infinitely harder to use and less effective (as I found out when I was forced to adopt YouTube's new editing program). I can try out the new one, and they do say there will be an option to keep the old "interface", whatever the hell THAT is.
If the new one is easy to use, updates the look of it a bit (it DOES look very dated, and there seem to be hardly any Bloggers left), then fine. But I dread losing stuff I have lovingly toiled over since about 2011 (!). I just don't want to lose any of it. I DO look for things in my archives several times a week, so if I can't do that without turning it upside-down and shaking it, then I will have to try to stick to the old one. I don't know. But at least there are no dire threats that are never carried out. Yet, anyway.
Meantime, now YouTube is saying "this version of YouTube is going away soon. Try the NEW YouTube!" This is a way to phase out desktop applications entirely, so I will be hanging by a thread once again as some sort of dusty museum piece.
But for now. . .