People make fun of DNIs but do they understand that Do Not Interacts originally served a pretty specific purpose within the autistic community here on tumblr and actually completely made sense within that context?
Like I kinda agree that listing Exclus DNI or T*rfs DNI isnt actually going to stop them from interacting, though it does tell everyone else that you don't tolerate that kind of hate. So I think they have some value as they are used now.
But still they're clunky, right? Yeah well the first DNIs were used by stim gif blogs to tell sexual age regressor/play blogs to stop interacting with their content because they themselves are minors or it makes them personally uncomfortable to see people sexualising anything so strongly related to children.
Over time it widened as people realised they could use it to make clear where they personally stood on the MOGAI discourse (yes this was back when that was big, DNIs have been around that long) and within several months you had DNI post banners with tiny tiny text full of stuff.
Which is why those jokes that are like DNI if (insert 30 random things here) kinda feel weird to me, I know those folks aren't actually trying to make fun of that era specifically, but those banners tended to go for heavy stuff, mostly the kind of things you generally would expect someone to be uncomfortable with like p*dophiles & N*zis. So some part of my brain links the two and goes 'do you find this funny? why would you want to make fun of it?' before I can remind myself that OP almost definitely doesn't have the same understanding of DNIs as me.
But it's taken me seeing a dozen 'why DNIs are crap/overrated/whatever' takes to realise that people who weren't on autism tumblr in 2015/2016 just Don't have the context for them that I do. They served a purpose that no one really disagreed with, and then a couple of years later they broke containment and started being used in a different context. And sure, they sort of work, but not so well and that makes sense! It would be better to perhaps tweak this concept for the change of platform, but that hasn't happened.
All this to say DNIs aren't 'bad' they're just being used in a kind of weird way.
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