She gave up her fucking life
a mother's love knows no bounds
Why do you think tumblr will die in only a few years?
Answer with jargon: a strong correlation between recent economic shifts and chaotic choices by major tech companies is most easily explained if the 'traditional' social media platforms of 2005-2020 are mostly a zero-interest rate phenomenon.
Longer answer, with less jargon: Even though Musk's takeover is making all the headlines recently, the last year has in fact seen major shakeups at many social media platforms, so Twitter is actually part of a trend. Almost inevitably, these are cases of social media companies trying to find a way to squeeze more money out of their userbase (Reddit), cut costs dramatically (Twitter), or both. This marks a sudden departure from a much more relaxed attitude towards revenue in the Pictures Of Cats industry, where the focus was historically more on expanding the userbase to a global scale and then counting on world domination to sort of <????> and then the company would become profitable eventually.
We joke, correctly, that Tumblr has never been profitable. But the entire structure of ad-supported content curation between human users is deeply suspect as a business model; IIRC Twitter was never profitable either, and Facebook has been juicing its numbers in very shenanigany ways. Discord was actually making money on net last I checked, at least a bit, so they're not all completely in the hole. But even if you take the accounting figures at face value, none of these companies has anything like the amount of money that their cultural prominence would suggest. Instead, they're heavily fueled by investment dollars, money given by super-rich people and institutions in the expectation that fueling the growth of the company now will pay off with interest later.
So what changed?
I'm not an expert here, but I'll do my best to muddle through. The American Federal Reserve has one mandate that dominates all others (sometimes called the 'dual mandate'), and one primary tool that it uses to enforce that mandate. The goal is to maintain low (but nonzero) rates of inflation and unemployment, which in their models are deeply interlinked phenomena. The tool is 'rate hikes', or more specifically, tweaking the mandatory rate of interest that banks charge one another when making loans.
As a particular consequence of this, hiking the rate also means that bonds start paying out much better. When the rate hike goes through, that affects people who let the government borrow their personal cash- that is, people who buy bonds- as well as institutions like banks that lend to one another. A rate hike means that you, personally, can make a little extra money by letting the government borrow it for a while. The federal government of the US is a rock-solid low-risk choice for this kind of moneymaking scheme, so the federal interest rate sort of defines the 'number to beat'; to attract investors, a company has to give those investors money at a better percentage than whatever the feds are offering. Particularly since a company is a lot more likely to go out of business than the state!
To wrap this back around to the Pictures Of Cats industry: the higher the rate hike, the better your company needs to be doing (or the less risky it needs to be as an option) to attract big investment dollars. Very high rates make it very hard to convince people to invest in business activity rather than the government itself, and very low rates put moonshots and big dreams on the table, investment-wise, in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Social media companies were one of these big dreams.
In the great financial crisis of 2008, the Fed took the dramatic step of reducing their rate to zero, trying to juice the economy back to life. And ever since then, they've kept it there. This has produced an unprecedented amount of funding for very crazy stuff; it's part of what has allowed so many weird new tech companies (Uber, streaming services, etc.) to get so much money, so quickly, and use that to grow to massive size without a clear model of how they're ever going to make money. This state of affairs kept going for quite a while, with no clear stopping point; that zero-interest environment has been one of the shadowy forces in the background that shaped fundamental contours and limits in how our Very Online World has grown and developed. Until COVID.
Or rather, the bounce back from COVID: we suddenly saw a massive spike in inflation and an incredibly strong labor market, as employees quit in record numbers, negotiated higher salaries, and found better work, and at the same time supply chain issues and other economy stuff caused prices to climb dramatically. Recall the Fed's 'dual mandate', to control the employment rate and inflation. This was, basically, kicking them right in the jooblies. They responded in kind, finally finally raising their rates for the first time in 15 years. For some of the people reading this, it'll be the first significant shift in their entire adult lives.
The goal, as I understand it, is to fight inflation by reducing the amount of outside investment into private companies, forcing them to hire fewer people and pay smaller salaries, ultimately drawing money out of the working economy and driving prices back down by lowering demand for everything. You get paid less, so you eat out less, and buy at cheaper restaurants when you do, so restaurants have to compete harder by lowering their prices; seems pretty dodgy to me as a theory, but it's the theory. And the first part will almost certainly work- companies are going to see less investment.
For social media companies that are still paying most of their salaries with investor dollars instead of revenues, this is especially catastrophic. Without outside investment, they're just a massive pile of expenses waiting to happen, huge yearly costs in developer salaries and server fees. This is why, all of a sudden, every social media company is suddenly making bonkers decisions. They're noticing that nobody wants to give them any more money! So they're trying to figure out how to live a lot more cheaply, to actually somehow for reals turn their giant userbases in to some kind of actual revenue stream, or both.
Tumblr is kind of the ur-example of this kind of thing, supporting a very large userbase with no coherent plan whatsoever to start paying its staff with our dollars instead of investors' dollars. When interest rates were low and Scrooge McDuck had nowhere else to hide his pile of gold coins, a crazy kid with a dream was the best alternative available to him. But now, unless something changes, he's going to notice he can just buy bonds instead, and that crazy kid can go take a hike.
That's why I think Tumblr is living on borrowed time, though I don't know how much. Like all cartoons, the economy doesn't really fall off a cliff until somebody looks down and notices they've been standing on thin air this whole time. But they always fall eventually; that's the gag.
I don't think you even need to get into the macro stuff too much. Tumblr has never been a good economic prospect, despite always feeling like it could be. I recall hearing that when Automattic bought Tumblr, they earmarked a certain amount of money to try to make it profitable. It seems like that they will not, in fact, make it profitable, and once they've reached that window -- likely very soon -- they will probably put it back on the market, content to have other irons in the fire and to have wasted less money on it than most of its past owners.
But the more times the site gets resold, and the more it looks like a dog rather than a wild but majestic horse just waiting for the right person to tame it, the more likely it is that the remaining buyers will be interested in brutal asset stripping that maximizes the badness of the site, at which point everyone will leave.
(Since I want to register a prediction in advance to get out in front of it: this will also happen to Firefox, probably in the next five years. One day they'll just give up and ship a bunch of adware/malware with it, everyone will quit, and that'll be the end of it. You should still use it today, but be aware that it's coming!)
#and tumblr is not exactly a lucrative market for advertisers
100% correct, but I do wonder if Tumblr has a road to profitability by selling, basically, cosmetics and vanity items. That's what the checkmarks are, for example, and the "Blaze" system, both of which were very well received. I don't know how much money they actually made, but surely it's not nothing, right?
Reddit has been doing this for a while and I think it's genius, but my impression (unsupported by data, so others should feel free to correct me if I'm wrong) is that it hasn't been a big fraction of their revenue to date, despite the fact that their ad revenue is also rather low. My impression is that the only people who really succeeded at basing their profit model on that sort of thing are video game companies and I'm not sure how you transfer the same logic to social media. In theory you should be able to, social media is kind of like Fortnite or World of Warcraft, right? Twitter Blue is kind of like horse armour? But the devil's in the details.
Why do you think tumblr will die in only a few years?
Answer with jargon: a strong correlation between recent economic shifts and chaotic choices by major tech companies is most easily explained if the 'traditional' social media platforms of 2005-2020 are mostly a zero-interest rate phenomenon.
Longer answer, with less jargon: Even though Musk's takeover is making all the headlines recently, the last year has in fact seen major shakeups at many social media platforms, so Twitter is actually part of a trend. Almost inevitably, these are cases of social media companies trying to find a way to squeeze more money out of their userbase (Reddit), cut costs dramatically (Twitter), or both. This marks a sudden departure from a much more relaxed attitude towards revenue in the Pictures Of Cats industry, where the focus was historically more on expanding the userbase to a global scale and then counting on world domination to sort of <????> and then the company would become profitable eventually.
We joke, correctly, that Tumblr has never been profitable. But the entire structure of ad-supported content curation between human users is deeply suspect as a business model; IIRC Twitter was never profitable either, and Facebook has been juicing its numbers in very shenanigany ways. Discord was actually making money on net last I checked, at least a bit, so they're not all completely in the hole. But even if you take the accounting figures at face value, none of these companies has anything like the amount of money that their cultural prominence would suggest. Instead, they're heavily fueled by investment dollars, money given by super-rich people and institutions in the expectation that fueling the growth of the company now will pay off with interest later.
So what changed?
I'm not an expert here, but I'll do my best to muddle through. The American Federal Reserve has one mandate that dominates all others (sometimes called the 'dual mandate'), and one primary tool that it uses to enforce that mandate. The goal is to maintain low (but nonzero) rates of inflation and unemployment, which in their models are deeply interlinked phenomena. The tool is 'rate hikes', or more specifically, tweaking the mandatory rate of interest that banks charge one another when making loans.
As a particular consequence of this, hiking the rate also means that bonds start paying out much better. When the rate hike goes through, that affects people who let the government borrow their personal cash- that is, people who buy bonds- as well as institutions like banks that lend to one another. A rate hike means that you, personally, can make a little extra money by letting the government borrow it for a while. The federal government of the US is a rock-solid low-risk choice for this kind of moneymaking scheme, so the federal interest rate sort of defines the 'number to beat'; to attract investors, a company has to give those investors money at a better percentage than whatever the feds are offering. Particularly since a company is a lot more likely to go out of business than the state!
To wrap this back around to the Pictures Of Cats industry: the higher the rate hike, the better your company needs to be doing (or the less risky it needs to be as an option) to attract big investment dollars. Very high rates make it very hard to convince people to invest in business activity rather than the government itself, and very low rates put moonshots and big dreams on the table, investment-wise, in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Social media companies were one of these big dreams.
In the great financial crisis of 2008, the Fed took the dramatic step of reducing their rate to zero, trying to juice the economy back to life. And ever since then, they've kept it there. This has produced an unprecedented amount of funding for very crazy stuff; it's part of what has allowed so many weird new tech companies (Uber, streaming services, etc.) to get so much money, so quickly, and use that to grow to massive size without a clear model of how they're ever going to make money. This state of affairs kept going for quite a while, with no clear stopping point; that zero-interest environment has been one of the shadowy forces in the background that shaped fundamental contours and limits in how our Very Online World has grown and developed. Until COVID.
Or rather, the bounce back from COVID: we suddenly saw a massive spike in inflation and an incredibly strong labor market, as employees quit in record numbers, negotiated higher salaries, and found better work, and at the same time supply chain issues and other economy stuff caused prices to climb dramatically. Recall the Fed's 'dual mandate', to control the employment rate and inflation. This was, basically, kicking them right in the jooblies. They responded in kind, finally finally raising their rates for the first time in 15 years. For some of the people reading this, it'll be the first significant shift in their entire adult lives.
The goal, as I understand it, is to fight inflation by reducing the amount of outside investment into private companies, forcing them to hire fewer people and pay smaller salaries, ultimately drawing money out of the working economy and driving prices back down by lowering demand for everything. You get paid less, so you eat out less, and buy at cheaper restaurants when you do, so restaurants have to compete harder by lowering their prices; seems pretty dodgy to me as a theory, but it's the theory. And the first part will almost certainly work- companies are going to see less investment.
For social media companies that are still paying most of their salaries with investor dollars instead of revenues, this is especially catastrophic. Without outside investment, they're just a massive pile of expenses waiting to happen, huge yearly costs in developer salaries and server fees. This is why, all of a sudden, every social media company is suddenly making bonkers decisions. They're noticing that nobody wants to give them any more money! So they're trying to figure out how to live a lot more cheaply, to actually somehow for reals turn their giant userbases in to some kind of actual revenue stream, or both.
Tumblr is kind of the ur-example of this kind of thing, supporting a very large userbase with no coherent plan whatsoever to start paying its staff with our dollars instead of investors' dollars. When interest rates were low and Scrooge McDuck had nowhere else to hide his pile of gold coins, a crazy kid with a dream was the best alternative available to him. But now, unless something changes, he's going to notice he can just buy bonds instead, and that crazy kid can go take a hike.
That's why I think Tumblr is living on borrowed time, though I don't know how much. Like all cartoons, the economy doesn't really fall off a cliff until somebody looks down and notices they've been standing on thin air this whole time. But they always fall eventually; that's the gag.
I don't think you even need to get into the macro stuff too much. Tumblr has never been a good economic prospect, despite always feeling like it could be. I recall hearing that when Automattic bought Tumblr, they earmarked a certain amount of money to try to make it profitable. It seems like that they will not, in fact, make it profitable, and once they've reached that window -- likely very soon -- they will probably put it back on the market, content to have other irons in the fire and to have wasted less money on it than most of its past owners.
But the more times the site gets resold, and the more it looks like a dog rather than a wild but majestic horse just waiting for the right person to tame it, the more likely it is that the remaining buyers will be interested in brutal asset stripping that maximizes the badness of the site, at which point everyone will leave.
(Since I want to register a prediction in advance to get out in front of it: this will also happen to Firefox, probably in the next five years. One day they'll just give up and ship a bunch of adware/malware with it, everyone will quit, and that'll be the end of it. You should still use it today, but be aware that it's coming!)
Twitter is bad but I'm realizing that if it dies then there will be zero mainstream social media platforms where NSFW content can be posted without restrictions (reddit doesn't really count, it's a combination forum host/link aggregator), and that really, really scares me with regards to where we are at as a society.
I am reminded of the famous burrito test, which states that "if you cannot get up at 3am and microwave a burrito, you live in an institution". I propose an analogous maxim for community and social spaces, both online and offline; if you cannot post hole for your friends to see, despite your mutual consent, you aren't in an "open social platform", you are being farmed as somebody's product.
honestly we don't talk enough about how weird it is that twitter ended up in this position. like it's useless for text, you can't even fit a drabble in a tweet, so twitter nsfw is all images. but twitter only added images like 5 years after it launched, at which point it had been huge for years, and the goal was probably to make it more friendly to brands rather than to enable the taking-pictures-of-your-food and posting-citizen-journalist-videos-of-protests trends that actually came to dominate its use. the fact that this afterthought of a feature ended up being the central reason for the platform's use for porny stuff, and then only due to the collapse of all other venues actually suited for sharing images, is a really extraordinary degree of path dependence. there was never a point at which twitter wanted or attempted to become a shelter for porn artists and models, even incidentally or temporarily!
nothing more annoying than when I want to read a news article about a topic simply because I'd like to efficiently inform myself about what its deal is, but it's a feature so I have to ruthlessly skim past all the artsy scene-setting and human interest stuff trying to pluck out the actual information. like look feature articles are valid, they have a place, but that is not what I am here for, I am not listening to NPR while wearing a shawl and cradling a mug of cocoa and watching the sailboats on the lake, please just give me some kind of cliffs notes version of what this article is actually saying and maybe I'll put it on my reading list to go back and read your elegant painterly prose later on when I have nothing to do
is this anything
"In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter: and in that direction," waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mid." "But I don't want to go among mid people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mid here. I'm mid. You're mid." "How do you know I'm mid?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
We have GOT to stop being assholes to people with receding and balding hairlines. There's not a single person that it can't affect. It affects trans men, particularly on hormones, it affects trans women, particularly those not on hormones, it affects people with endocrine issues, something that's becoming more prevalent and common, and it can affect people without a particular cause, including cis women. It's a normal part of being human and we NEED to stop dehumanizing and humiliating ppl for it
My bf started losing his hair in his early 20s and the effect it's had on him is devastating.
He's an actor and he was dropped by his agent after he stopped hiding his hair loss. The roles he was cast in narrowed and shifted from more heroic characters to villains, and eventually he became so miserable about it that he stopped going to auditions altogether.
He used to enjoy dyeing his hair bright colours, and he lost that means of self expression. It alienated him from his own appearance, which knocked him back in coming out and exploring his queerness. The way he talks about it often feels dysmorphic. He says shaving makes him feel like he's "rotting" - like he's "scraping the mold off [his] head".
I've seen drunk people and teenagers yell at him in the street and mock his baldness. I've seen people come up to him and slap his head or touch it without asking for permission. I've witnessed this behaviour from other trans people and women who I know would absolutely kick off if he took such a degrading or entitled attitude towards a part of their body, but seem to think it's OK to do it to him.
Since going bald people perceive him as more masculine. He feels people are more suspicious of him. Women are less likely to approach him. Folks are quicker to put him in a box or misread his behaviour as aggressive or threatening, when the reality is that he's neurodivergent and can't conform to rigid social norms.
Baldness is a heavily gendered characteristic. If someone is conventionally masculine enough and/or is protected by other intersecting powers and privileges (eg wealth) then baldness can reinforce their maleness and the harm to their social standing is minimised. But if their performance of maleness is complicated by something like queerness or disability, it creates a dissonance. They have what is perceived as a hypermasculine trait standing in sharp contrast with their refusal/failure to perform normative, idealised masculinity.
And that's how baldness is typically read - as failure. Especially when it exists outside of wealthy, successful, heterosexual masculinity but tbh even there too - just look at all the jokes about Jeff Bezos' baldness or Elon Musk getting hair plugs. It's similar to insulting Trump over his weight. Like yeah fuck those guys but all you're really doing is revealing to the fat and bald people in your life that you think their bodies are deserving of mockery.
And God help you if you're a bald woman. All women with receding hairlines are at a huge risk from transmisogyny.
Sorry for the essay. Baldness is absolutely a body neutrality issue. It's an ageism issue, and a trans issue, and I WISH there was a broader recognition of this.
I was really surprised at how many bald people there were when I got my first white-collar job. It was an aging, nerdy workforce in a large uncool company, and the of majority guys who worked there were bald or balding, and right at the beginning I was trying to figure out, like, is baldness associated with being interested in that kind of work or something? Because it was by far the highest concentration of bald guys I'd ever seen in one place.
Eventually I figured out that no, this is basically just the prevalence of baldness in general. It's like 50% of the population by middle age, with visible thinning or hairline recession topping out above 80% IIRC. The reason I was seeing a lot of it is just because the workforce there skewed older than I'd been used to, and because these weren't the kind of guys who would go to great lengths to prevent or conceal it. Add to that the fact that the rate at which it's depicted is vastly lower than the rate at which it actually exists, so you end up with a very distorted idea of prevalence when your acculturation relies heavily on media and celebrities.
I think it'd be cool if you could get addicted to those experimental tooth regrowth drugs and if you took too much of them you'd develop weird overgrown teeth
when did like "states with no state religion" become like. a thing. i guess theres always been small non-state religions. and always been small states with no religion? idk. im trying to express something. most states used to have a state religion and most religious activity seems to have been state religious activity (b/c of the dominance of the temple in religious thought?)
I think it obscures too much detail to talk about "state religion" as a cohesive thing. Like, Rome had a state religion in both the polytheistic and the Christian period, but the latter feels closer to what we mean by the term, because official Roman polytheism was incredibly syncretic and extensible, and the state's role feels there like a combination of "administration" and "getting to choose the centre of this huge multifarious complex", in the sense of choosing, like, which gods are deemed the most important.
It's a lot easier to be religiously cosmpolitan in syncretic polytheism even while maintaining a state religion, which I think makes it a more attractive proposition. Nowadays a lot of world religions, and the majority of religious individuals, consider veridical incompatibility with many other faiths as a central and important tenet, and so there's way more pushback aganst syncretism, and a state that wants to avoid fomenting conflict really is often better off just giving up on the topic, and moving the social funcitons of "state religion" to something less contentious.
I think this undersells the role of religion in a lot of early states. There was a state religion because large chunks of religion were fundamentally state activity. E.g. Bret Devereaux:
Kingship has three core roles in almost all human cultures where the institution appears: kings are 1) chief judge, 2) chief general, and 3) chief priest. That third role appears more or less prominently in almost all societies. In ancient Egypt and (at times) in Mesopotamia, kings were held to literally be either earthly incarnations of major gods or minor gods in their own right. Roman Emperors held the office of pontifex maximus, and took over as the chief priest of the state, before becoming gods on their deaths. The Chinese emperor was the ‘Son of Heaven’ and was tasked with maintaining the right relationship with the divine (the ‘mandate of heaven’). The emperors of Japan are purported to be direct descendants of the goddess Amaterasu (and they have a family tree to back it up).
One of the chief roles and goals of the state is to make sure that religious rituals are conducted properly. The Medieval Christian take is actually less state-focused, because there is a chief religious authority that isn’t part of the state.
"Making sure that religious rituals are conducted properly" is absolutely what I'd characterize as an "administrative" role!
That said, I think this is secondary to the point I aimed to make, which is that it's less about how important the religion is and more about about how much it interferes with cosmopolitanism and internal divides on matters of faith. The ideal is for the state religion to not force anything unpleasant on the population that it didn't already need to force on them for general statehood reasons (e.g., deference to the ruler), and this is a lot easier to do in a highly syncretic religious framework than in something more modern.
when did like "states with no state religion" become like. a thing. i guess theres always been small non-state religions. and always been small states with no religion? idk. im trying to express something. most states used to have a state religion and most religious activity seems to have been state religious activity (b/c of the dominance of the temple in religious thought?)
I think it obscures too much detail to talk about "state religion" as a cohesive thing. Like, Rome had a state religion in both the polytheistic and the Christian period, but the latter feels closer to what we mean by the term, because official Roman polytheism was incredibly syncretic and extensible, and the state's role feels there like a combination of "administration" and "getting to choose the centre of this huge multifarious complex", in the sense of choosing, like, which gods are deemed the most important.
It's a lot easier to be religiously cosmpolitan in syncretic polytheism even while maintaining a state religion, which I think makes it a more attractive proposition. Nowadays a lot of world religions, and the majority of religious individuals, consider veridical incompatibility with many other faiths as a central and important tenet, and so there's way more pushback aganst syncretism, and a state that wants to avoid fomenting conflict really is often better off just giving up on the topic, and moving the social funcitons of "state religion" to something less contentious.
coolcatgroup
The power
honestly not comfortable with the thing where online delivery services and stuff talk about what the relevant worker is doing using their first name. like this is the same kind of creepy that always existed with nametags, this uncomfortable coerced artificial familiarity, but nametags were at least easier to ignore
anyway I think there should be a law that if you do this the employees have to be able to make up their own handle and you can't discipline them for their choice of handle as long as it's something you're allowed to say on primetime television. then people could call themselves "bongrip666" or whatever and it'd be fine, I think everyone would be happier with that
from what i understand this was basically the movement right
Twitter: what level of enshittification are you on?
Tumblr: I dunno, 4, maybe 5? We took away the ability to easily go directly to an individual post off the dashboard and we're still trying to Pivot to Streaming
Twitter: you are like little baby. watch this
Twitter: [BANS READING POSTS]
Broke: Only free users see ads Woke: Both free and paid users see ads Bespoke: Only paid users see ads
worst part of twitter being unusable is I really want to see what people are tweeting about it
Declawing cats is unethical so, gluing claw extensions on would be superethical
giving them a knife even more so
LMAO Elon is now charging people to read posts. There’s posts everywhere buddy, the average post has a negative monetary value
forcing people to consume less twitter is basically a humanitarian act. ~e13 more decisions like this and he makes up for helping start openai
This is even funnier when you realize a lot of spam bots do get verified
sadly packing my things into a cardboard box after I get fired from the twitter wing of the deep state propaganda machine. maybe there's still room at substack
was thinking about this recently, you could actually just publish an edition of Arsène Lupin vs. Herlock Sholmès that does, like, a search-replace to "Sherlock Holmes" to remove the fig leaf, thereby healing the historical injustice
Anonymous asked:
You don't seem to know anything about the 303 decision at SCOTUS. The point was you can't be forced into any expression that violates your beliefs, not just religious beliefs. I really hope that you're okay with that, because it's pretty much at the heart of what being an American is all about.
you're correct that I've done something improper here but the actual sin is something more like "mash together a lot of issues that are conceptually related, which brush against the 303 thing on their perimeter but aren't centrally about that". I'm more concerned about more general services, but most of the action there there thus far has been at the state level, so it's unduly confusing of me to conflating it with what SCOTUS has been getting up to.
all that being said, with regards to 303 specifically I think applying the free speech exemption to graphic design is a bit tenuous. There are cases where I could imagine it applying there, but the majority of graphic design is stuff like font, layout, and colour/value choices that do not really contain ideological or propositional content of the sort being implied here.
Windswept
Grace Under Pressure (The Golden Thread)
Ice Blue Gaze
Glisten
Study for Nameless Queen