Fursa Sa'ida

thinking about Göbekli Tepe

Found a new type of guy.

Best reply in the thread so far.

nevermind, this was an intentional change!

Seriously? Are you sure?

We're talking about this click area:

You're saying changing this small pink highlighted area to make it impossible to go to a specific post was intentional?

This breaks the entire concept of "prev tags" because it's now impossible to see what the previous tags are. Tumblr really hated the prev tags chains so much that they decided to nerf them like this?

It also makes it impossible to reblog a post starting from before a reblog addition was added—so now if you see an interesting post but it has a super long or annoying reblog section (and the reblog in question is inaccessible), you're out of luck. Those posts exist, but the UI for accessing them has been completely removed.

Why? What was the goal behind this change?

yes, i'm sure, just double-checked this morning. this is one change in a series of updates to the reblog consumption experience to help make it more intuitive and easy to understand for new users.

and you can still access those reblogs, you just have to go through the notes view for now.

WDYM "through the notes view"? if a post has 10k notes, and my mutual reblogs it with "prev tags", are you expecting me to scroll through hundreds of pages of reblogs to find the one they might have reblogged it from? that doesn't make any sense to me.

also, not only are reblog tags not included in notes view if they're more than a year or two old... if prev user has reblogged the post more than once, there is no unambiguous chain of attribution available in dash view anymore. none. zero. no matter how much of a workout you give your scroll wheel. and by turning off themes by default for new blogs, you've ensured that dash view is often all there is.

if whoever unilaterally decided to trash a longstanding feature with lots of site culture dependent on it thinks putting the link in the usernames is "unintuitive" or whatever, then put it on a little permalink icon or something. i don't care. but removing it altogether causes major problems that have zero satisfactory workarounds.

(also, why isn't this new whole-header click area a real hyperlink? why is it some janky faux-link that doesn't even have "open in new tab" functionality baked in? yeah, yeah, the permalink is in a menu somewhere, but if the goal is convenience...)

If @staff wants it to be intuitive, maybe make it a first-class part of the UI. Add an actual "show reblog chain" button or kebab-menu item, which will show you the whole chain with tags at each step. The way to make it intuitive is to make things more explicit, not hide them even deeper.

If you click on the post date under the user name, you get to the post itself.

The timestamp may work on desktop, but on mobile you're out of luck. The idea that this change is "more intuitive" is hysterical.

The thing I find most concerning about the sudden and rapid declines of platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and to a lesser extent Discord and Facebook, is the loss of digital third places that will result from it.

[Definition: a Third Place is a space outside of work or the home that you spend a significant amount of time in. Usually a social gathering place like a church, library, park, or gym]

It's a known issue that physical third places are disappearing. Cities, malls, and shopping centers have cracked down hard on loitering, resulting in a lack of public space for people to just hang out in. Parks exist, but their use is usually dependent on weather conditions. Church attendance has been in decline for decades for a lot of reasons I won't get into here. Libraries exist but they're not a good place to talk with friends. And pretty much every other third place I can think of (bars, game stores, bookstores, coffee shops, etc) requires you to spend money if you want to be there. None of these are new observations, smarter people than myself have written whole books on the loss of in-person third places.

Social media has been filling in the gap left by these third places for the last couple of decades. As physical space has become less accessible we've migrated online to find community - and especially during COVID, social media was really the only place you could socialize with others. None of this is new information either.

But the current issue, that I've seen very few people talking about, is that companies are starting to price and bully people out of those digital third places the same way they did with physical third places. The difference is that it's happening much faster, and usually at the whim of just one or two people. These are not broader sociological trends slowly shutting down social spaces like what we saw with the decline of shopping malls. There will be no slow adjustment to another social medium. We are seeing individual billionaires making a choice in real time to monetize people out of some of the only public social spaces we have left.

I've seen people bemoaning the loss of information that comes with these sites collapsing, but personally, I am far more concerned with the loss of social space. Don't get me wrong, social media of all kinds is an absolute nightmare, but for many people (and especially for teenagers who have more restrictions on where they can go and what money they can spend) online space is one of the only places they can reliably go to socialize.

In a country like the U.S. where the federal government is calling loneliness an epidemic this is actually a much bigger concern than I think a lot of people realize. How many people have more online friends than in-person ones? What happens to rates of loneliness as social media platforms become inaccessible and people lose those connections?

Obviously, the preferred answer is that people will go make more friends in person, but remember that in-person social spaces have already been severely limited. This is not the easy option that you might hope it is.

My actual call to action on this is to fucking fight to get your in-person third places back. Talk to your local representatives about repealing loitering laws - organize protests or ballot initiatives about it if you have to. Work with rotary clubs and parks departments to fund new public restrooms and park shelters. If there are places in your community that provide free workshop spaces/ game nights/ art walks/ etc go to them and support them financially when and if you're able. Go to your local library and check out a book so they get more funding! I know this shit can be boring, but things are only going to get worse if people don't have places where they can connect with each other. We can't keep letting capitalists take community spaces from us.

I just want to add that there is a trend here; it's not solely the personal vagaries of few billionaires. Social media companies are following the same trajectory: start out open and connective, get huge, become infrastructural (socially as third places and in many other ways, e.g. information during emergencies in many countries - the information and social aspects are both very important and to a significant degree cannot be separated from one another), then try to become as proprietary and exclusive as possible. This is effectively the same gambit "tech" startups like Uber have always aimed at and Amazon has succeeded with: spend a lot of money to gain market share, drive competitors out, and then jack up prices when you become indispensable.

For the social media platforms that means things like: No access without an account. Stratifying functions and reach to turn full use of the platform's affordances into paid privileges. Increasing rules about who and how you can be on the platform for the sake of advertisers. Limiting scientists' and journalists' access to data and coders' access to code. Facebook did it, many of Musk's idiotic decisions for Twitter are attempts at doing it, Reddit is doing it right now. Unlike Amazon, though, in the not-very-long run this will kill the platforms, which of course does mean the loss of these digital third places. (My hope, and there are signs of this, is that life online will go back to something more like it was before these platforms became the internet - people will find other ways to gather digitally, just less centralized.)

This is all rent-seeking behavior, because the actual value of these platforms is not really monetizable, and the monetizable proxies have hit their limits for growth. It may be being somewhat accelerated by AI, but ultimately it's exactly the same process that closed down third places in brickspace: enclosure.

Everything else OP said stands! But there is a pattern, and it is important.

reddit migrants y’all are adorable, it has been a pleasure watching you learn to tumblr like tadpoles coming up on land after growing legs. I am examining your terrarium with great interest

i am being compared to so many delightful critters

fjkalsdjfkldsajfklsdjf

Good news! The Indian Child Welfare Act was upheld by the US Supreme court, 7-2 even~

YAY!

The way this video lives in my head rent free and the number of times I find it applicable to so many instances throughout my day is unreal

Agnes Herczeg ; artist research ; inspiration for the weaving project.

ruh roh, it gets worse

I’m not a Redditor so I could be wrong. But this looks pretty fucking bad

this is a really funny move because the unpaid labour of thousands upon thousands of mods is a fundamental load bearing part of reddits functionality and if you start banning them then eventually the site just won't work

— M. John Harrison, Wish I Was Here

This unique self-portrait, also known as “view from the left eye”, is the creation of Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (famous for his work on supersonic fluid mechanics), who was born #onthisday in 1838. Read more about the image here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/self-portrait-by-ernst-mach-1886 #OTD

In 1913, a year before the Panama Canal was completed, the journalist Frederic J. Haskin wrote that “the conquest of the Isthmian barrier was the conquest of the mosquito.” This was a period when America [had] […] by 1902 taken control of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. […] The connection between mosquito control and the United States’ imperial conquest can be seen in the work of William C. Gorgas, the Alabama-born Army surgeon who led efforts to eradicate yellow fever and malaria – both mosquito-borne diseases – during the first US occupation of Cuba (1898–1902) and was subsequently appointed Chief Sanitary Officer of in Panama. For Gorgas, controlling yellow fever and malaria took on historic, imperial dimensions. Reflecting on his work, Gorgas claimed that he had “made sanitary discoveries that will enable man to return from the temperate regions to which he was forced to migrate long ages ago, and again live and develop in his natural home, the tropics.” […] In particular, the dwellings erected for the Isthmian Canal Commission (ICC) conjoined the management of mosquitos with manipulating the interactions between people of different races and social classes. […]

Gorgas arrived in Panama in 1904 […]. Gorgas and others saw sanitation work as indistinguishable from the military occupation in Cuba and the success of the canal construction in Panama. […] Spraying was largely carried out by mosquito brigades, which checked households for compliance […]. But […] these brigades also policed the activity of local residents. […]

—

There was much debate not only about who to enlist to build the canal, but also how to prevent organized resistance and revolt among them. As one official testified to the US congress in 1906, “there must be on the Isthmus a surplusage of labor. Otherwise, we will have interminable strikes.” […] Furthermore, rather than one vulnerable workforce, Chief Engineer John Stevens believed that having several different nationalities and ethnicities would be easier to divide and create competition, compelling them to work harder.

In order to do this, the ICC created a segregated, dual payment system: the gold and silver rolls. […] [W]hite workers from the US were mostly hired for skilled positions and received payment in gold. These “gold-roll” employees could spend leisure time in segregated clubs […]. West Indians and Black workers from the United States were mostly assigned to the silver roll. […]

[T]he gold- and silver-roll system constituted an apartheid society, a perverse reincarnation of the contemporary Jim Crow system that was in full effect at the time in the United States. […]

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Although the ICC offered free housing to all its gold-roll employees, silver-roll employees paid rent. […] As late as 1910, Galician workers on the silver roll were still living in boxcars ventilated only by a few small punched openings. […] When West Indians requested basic amenities like blankets and shelter to keep their clothes from being soaked in the rain, the US government responded that they didn’t even need sheds. […]

For white workers […] Type 13 [housing types] not only features a wraparound screened porch as a circulation space, but also a prominent band of empty space surrounding the enclosed bedrooms […]. For Black employees on the silver roll, Wright designed “Standard 1 Colored Barracks,” which features minimal screen space […]. For [Black laborers] […] screens allowed the ICC to maximize the number of people crammed into the barracks […]. The distinctions associated with the categorical, systematic definition of different domestic architecture for different classes of people follows a history of typology in architecture and criminology that was closely associated with scientific racism, social Darwinism […]. West Indians received some segregated barracks, but were served their food from an open-air counter. Worst off were convicts, most Black, who were relegated to a fenced-off corral with abysmal food and shelter, and forced to build roads and dig ditches without pay. […]

—

George W. Goethals, who took over as Chief Engineer of the project from Stevens in 1907, responded to requests for mosquito nets and screens for West Indians by repeating a common and racist misunderstanding: “It is generally admitted … [t]hat the colored people are immune.” Yet in 1912, “as many as two-thirds of all West Indians reported sick or required medical attention … [m]ost of them catching malaria several times […].” By concentrating their anti-malarial efforts on gold-roll employee dwellings, US government officials allowed disease to spread. […]

Structured by prejudice, anti-mosquito architecture allowed malaria to continue spreading while reinforcing racial hierarchies.

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The fact that different types of housing reinforced ethnic and racial divisions cannot be separated from US imperial concepts about the tropics as a place. […] [F]or Nancy Stepan, “the ‘tropical’ came to constitute more than a geographical concept; it signified a place of radical otherness to the temperate world, with which it contrasted and which it helped to constitute.” Gorgas’s belief that sanitation work in Panama proved that “the white man can live and thrive in the tropics” contains the familiar assumption that the tropics are fundamentally distinct, a place unto itself that can only be made suitable for civilization through the effort of engineering and science.

In using deep-screened verandas and roof ventilation to solve the problem of disease and heat, Wright and the ICC effectively adapted the mosquito houses, nets, and traps […]. Throughout the Caribbean region at the beginning of the twentieth century, the use of screen and net-covered structures mediated the relationship between people and mosquitos, and between people of different races and social classes. […]. While managing the laborers through their relationship to insects – and each other – this low-cost architecture was crucial in the broader effort to turn the Isthmus into an imperial outpost and render the landscape tropical.

—

Text by: Dante Furioso. “Sanitary Imperialism.” e-flux. 27 May 2022. [Essay published online in e-flux’s Architecture section. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

Parting company: “This stylish, well-coiffured Shetland pony was on Unst when my wife and I were on holiday,” says Hamish McIlwraith. “The pony was very curious and came over to see us when we were having a quick picnic break.”