September 1, 1949: Birthday of Comrade Leslie Feinberg, communist, anti-racist organizer, journalist and author who revolutionized the struggle for transgender rights. Leslie passed away in November 2014.
Download Leslie’s classic “Stone Butch Blues” at http://lesliefeinberg.net
I know you aren't with Tumblr anymore but idk who else to ask. Why does tumblr make so many random changes AND never give any forewarning or a reasoning for why they made it, AND never give any data on the feedback we send or the results they get from those changes? I understand that tumblr doesn't make money so changes are necessary but it's the sudden changes with no warning or explanation combined with the fact that they ask for feedback and then ignore all of the feedback we send and never release anything related to that feedback we send in that gets to me and makes me not want to use tumblr and refuse to recommend it to friends.
Well well well...
this is a very difficult question to answer. Because... things... are complex.
I guess the gist of it is "the reality where a good part of the tumblr community lives is not the same reality that staff experience". Mind you, I'm not saying that Staff is oblivious or uninformed. Kind of the opposite. Staff manages a big extra layer of data we the users don't get access too. Things from "how long we have to achieve X or close" to "this change had very bad feedback but didn't make the usage numbers go down and it's bringing 0.03% more revenue".
There's a hard reality we tumblr users who like tumblr as-it-is need to start accepting: We are not making tumblr make money, so we are not going to be the 'client' here.
While I was in staff, we tried. We tried hard: Post+, the merch store, blaze, ad-free ... all those were attempts to make tumblr a platform funded by its community. The results were ... not great. Like, two orders of magnitude worse than they needed to be. That let tumblr in the hands of advertising money (that even if tiny compared with other sites, it still is the main Tumblr source of money by far). And for that, if you want to make the site stop burning millions per month you need way more people than we tumblrinas are right now.
Mix that with.. a certain disdain for tumblr as a platform from part of the top management. A big bunch of staff are hard-core users of tumblr who are more or less in tune with the feelings of the community, but in the upper management layers... there's only one or two persons I can think of that actually seems to like and enjoy tumblr. The rest of them are mostly users of other platforms in their personal lives, and ... they just don't get why tumblr is so hooking for some of us. They don't understand how it works, they don't understand the popular content here, they don't understand the people who already use this place.
Earlier this year I actually had a call with the CEO to try to explain him why tumblr was a great platform for a certain type of mindsets, how I have adapted to this boiling cauldron of feral goblins so quickly and become enthralled by it when I started using it four years ago. And I think I failed completely at trying to make him excited or even interested in either the site culture or its community. Or convince him that tumblr could expand vertically (bringing more tumblr-minded people in) instead of horizontally (broad the appeal of tumblr for the masses even if it dilutes the current essence).
So for management, it's just a game of numbers: The current tumblr community doesn't cover the costs of running the site, so they need a new community that does. And if in the process, some of the old community leaves forever, :shrug:, not a big loss, since they weren't making the company any money anyway. It's more important for them to get all those people leaving twitter or other platforms to actually come here and stay, and get those key metrics up up and to the right. Of course, this is just my personal opinion and I'm sure if someone send this post to those in management who I'm vaguepostingly mentioning here, they would be all "Of course we CARE about our community and tumblr's history!". But hey, you know you really don't.
"But Javi, isn't alienating the core community who creates most of the content in this platform a stupid and terrible idea in the long term?". Why, dear anon, of course it is. Or that's what I think. And that's what I ended arguing about again and again and again and again while I was part of staff. And that's, maybe, one of the handful of recurrent points where I wasn't "aligned with the direction of the company" that made me un-staffed (take that, tiktok kids!).
Why, then why tumblr management keeps pushing for this pace of rapid and alienating changes? Because Automattic, tumblr owner, is a private funded company. And there has to be smoke and mirrors showing that tumblr is actually moving fast and making the numbers go up up up. Every. Fucking. Quarter.
Do you know what's the most stressing time of the year for your random staff member? Is it eurovision with its peaks of traffic? april's fools with all the tomfoolery? No. It's the biannual Automattic board meeting. Because in every. single. one. of. them. we didn't know if that was going to be the day where tumblr's downsizing would be greenlighted. Literally, every six months the board would look at what happened at tumblr and say "ok, this is terrible but moving in a promising way, let's see if these things you are planning work and re-evaluate in six months".
Does this mean they are in the wrong and me and the people pushing to keep tumblr more tumblr were right? Well, no. Not necessarily. Tumblr has been under a very real existential thread for ... at least a couple of years. And the reality is that 'trying to monetize tumblr as-is' didn't work at all from a purely economic point of view, and tumblr wouldn't have survived for much longer without showing clear gains. So who knows, maybe by diluting tumblr they could manage to make it profitable and keep this site live for decades. I would be VERY happy to be in the wrong here.
At the end of the day, put yourself in staff shoes. You have been trying a lot of "sensible" things to try to make Tumblr sustainable. Your boss is reminding you that tumblr keeps losing money and setting dates for "lines of no return" where the company would need to deinvest on Tumblr if there is not a clear financial improvement. You know you are burning the midnight oil and the sensible changes requested by the community you have made barely had put you closer to the goal. So it's time to try the crazy stuff and see what happens. Yeah, maybe that makes the boat explode, but maybe it changes it enough to keep it afloat. The alternative is letting it slowly sink into the darkness.
So, as I warned at the start of the post, this is a very complex issue with a lot of factors involved. And of course, this is just my particular view on it, I'm sure other ex-staff members would see it in a different way. Staff members need to keep their voices 'aligned with the direction' so they don't get un-staffed, but I can tell you that a good bunch of them are in private slack channels saying things like what I'm saying here (hello friends from #********* and #******-****!). Some of them like the X change but hate Y. Others don't really care and are just doing their job and doing what their boss told them (which is a completely valid stance... this is a job).
So yeah, it's complex. Believe me, a lot of folks in staff listen to what the community says. Deeply. But right now I don't think management thinks that catering to the current community is a valid path. And given the constraints of time and money that staff needs to operate within, I'm not even sure it matters much.
Wait, there is people in the notes chanting the usual "it's not staff it's the executives who force them to do shitty changes against their will". And truly, that's not what I'm saying. Again, reality is complex.
What I'm saying is that execs couldn't care less about Tumblr becoming pets.com and start selling blue parrots, as long as it started making some money. And they want whatever to happen NOW. Staff usually cares about the community, culture, etc, but at the same time are under extreme pressure to make it profitable or become the generation who closes the door forever.
And the "listen to the community, give them what they want, provide a way for them to get money in return" path had been tried unsuccessfully, so what's left is to try and rest of unorthodox approaches that may not be our cup of tea, because focusing mostly into catering at the community was producing some results that would directly lead to Tumblr going sayonara you weeabos.
I guess that, in a nutshell, what I'm trying to say is "staff needs to try different things because the current things are making the money people lose a lot of money and, losing money is really the only thing the money people really care about. So staff needs to find a way to summon chests full of gold before the money people decide to eat them whole instead".
With all the data about Tumblr finances that had been shared, this should be obvious to see for everyone, I think. Losing 30mill every year creates a heavy incentive to.... well, stop losing them by any way possible.
tumblr trying to be like tiktok then trying to be like twitter then giving us the 3rd unreality inducing immersive ad, its staff members being condescending to the userbase, the marketing team trying to parasocialize their way into your pockets, youtube trying to do away with adblockers after upping the percentage of ads by 40% and making it so even if your video is demonetized watchers will still get them, youtube removing the dislike button then making it so you don't get a home feed if you have watch history turned off, google being able to remove your synched bookmarks if they don't comply with their policy, if i listed every way in which twitter has gotten worse in the last year this post will be as long as a novel, ai generated articles and images everywhere, google searches sucking ass in general, reddit charging for its api, KOSA being introduced into the US senate, tiktok in general, every social media under the fucking sun introducing log in walls, being unable to browse most sites on mobile from the sheer amount of popups taking over your screen WAUUUGH social media being products and thus requiring infinite growth and thus trying to introduce newer and newer shit that alienates its dedicated userbase. saturated sludge era of the internet
Maybe we could just try turning off the internet and starting again?
Outfit for butch bar ⚔️
In light of @staff ‘s recent post, let me remind you of the absolute irony of this piece about censorship of trans identities and bodies getting hit with a mature label
Which I cannot seem to be able to appeal 🙃
oh you didn’t like the dashboard changes? well here’s a fucking scary clown. how do you like it now, asshole? I bet yesterday’s dash seems like the land of milk and honey.
Hanging out with Fluttermop
Rubbermaid® 60" Invader Side Gate Wood Mop Handle, Yellow - FGH116000000
Microfiber Kentucky Mop Loop/Taped Pink
queer love / queer rage
[Image description: a black and white art piece of a two-headed wolf creature, with one of its head biting on black thorns with rage and the other head looking happy in front of white roses. White text on black background at the top and bottom reads: “queer love / queer rage” End ID.]
actually……1 more thing because I realised I haven’t posted this yet. the best & worst piece of art I’ve ever made - 3D shark called biscuit that I modelled for a class a few years ago. toiled on him for hours, cried over him, went on a journey with him. still failed the class. he haunts me to this day
LMFAO hell yeah give biscuit 2000 notes. why the fuck not. are you seeing this professor? are you seeing what my “failed” experiment has achieved
op please tell biscuit that i love him very much❤️
Ok it's very funny to laugh at Tuxedo Mask for showing up and doing nothing, but his job was never to actually fight the monsters.
His job was just to show up and believe in Sailor Moon so overwhelmingly resolutely that she remembers she's a fucking demigod long enough for HER to fight the monsters.
Because she's the only one strong enough to do it in the first place, and in this regard Tuxedo Mask is the first example of being "Kenough" in this essay I will
Motorcycle lesbians ♀ ♀
trick or treat except i’m the treat. hello vampires come bite this neck
spoiler: the weird trick was "offering more pay and benefits"
fr this was an excellent article though. it has the "no shit" energy of a study that says not bullying your children makes them happier, but tears apart the "nobody wants to work anymore" rhetoric and points out how it was the mbta *ceding to union demands* that caused the spike in applicants. read it here
did anyone see that video of the guy who was like “im really good at finding moles” and hes saying that hes gonna pull a mole right out of the ground and for a few seconds youre like ok whats the joke and then he just squats down to the grass and and jams his fist into the ground and pulls a mole up
i think about it so much
how the fuck
This is what he was like when I saw him at a real estate conference around 2012 or so. The other people there just talked about how sad he was that he clearly couldn’t put a coherent sentence together or stay in topic without his daughter guiding him. One of my friends kept saying, “that was fuckin bizarro, man.”
Little did any of us know how much worse things would get.
So let’s talk about Flex.
I’ve been getting email from them and my apartment complex. Flex is a new payment options where they take your rent and divide it over two to four payments. But of course flex has it own fee.
So essentially Flex pays your rent with a fee and you pay flex back. Sounds good right.
But I did some digging because they are pushing this so hard.
Come to find out, Flex is horrible. It doesn’t tell you how much the fee is until you sign up. Once you sign up it’s damm near impossible to get out of it.
So let’s say you need to split September rent, but in October you are fine. You still have to go thru flex and pay the fee.
Then I found this article. Not only could the lady not get out of flex, she ended up oweing them about 1k in fees.
That article also states that Flex as a business has 1 out of 5 stars on BBB. Their customer service is damm never nonexistent.
But I think we are missing a bigger issue. Apartments are pushing flex because they know people can not afford the rent. And because people can’t afford the rent there are more evictions and loss of payment. So instead of lowering the rent they push flex. They want it to seem like they are helping when they are not.
Most people get evicted and the apartment never get their money. 7 years later it falls off your credit report.
So to keep people in these buildings and to keep a steady income they offer some shit like flex.
It’s predatory and will most likely leave a tenant in worst standing than before.
Please don’t use it.
please do not put me in your pocket & then forget. i will melt in there
people who use she/her and it/its pronouns have it so fucking hard honestly
you list your pronouns as she/it? that sounds like shit. you have poopnouns instead of pronouns. what the hell.
it/she? now you're itchy. girlthings just can't fucking win
So in Baldur's gate, every time you take a long rest you must spend food or supply items totaling 40 camp supply. However, it doesn't say what the supply or food items has to consist of, as long as it adds up to 40. Some of my favorite meals that I have served my group: 1. Yep, This is Just Garlic 2. Bratwurst and Watermelon 3. You want. Fucking. Beetroot? 4. Ingredience 5. Several Dozen Bottles O' Booze
