funny orange that ol rascal
happy modnay everyone
anyone who reblogs this post has a 100% chance to find something good in the neighbors garbage if you tear open their garbage bags and dig through them
see to me the Crab Day idea is ultimately about leverage.
it gives us something to take away if they do unpopular things. it's more effective than some kind of blackout, at least at this point, because they wouldn't lose anything from that unless it was sustained and they wouldn't have any reason to give us what we wanted specifically. that's part of the problem reddit had, though the situations are different. but since social media is free it puts it's users in a terrible position to make demands.
if however we prove that we will throw them a free fundraiser once a year or when we think they might need funds, the we can stop doing that when they refuse to listen. because as things stand they don't need to care about how we feel about things because we can do very little to effect their revenue without also hurting ourselves more.
Crab Day gives us the ability to show how much we love tumblr...and then also how displeased we are if they enact changes that don't serve the community AND potentially a way get them to enact changes that would.
will it actually work? idk, first off, it won't if crab day doesn't manifest as a significant bump to their revenue. and I have no idea if it will. second we'd need to either do additional ones or have a few years of successful crab days to make it more than a weird one off in their eyes. I don't know if we have that kind of patience if they keep doing bad changes in the meantime. after that, I think it would, but mostly only if we were organized and capable of communicating our objections/requests in a meaningful manner and that...I don't think we'd be good at.
but the IDEA appeals to me, not because we're all gonna crab tumblr out of debt (that's not the actual problem) but because it would, eventually and if done right, put us in a better bargaining position.
im a bit stupid.
i made a sourdough starter and you have to feed it regularly. the guide i use says every 12 hours. which somehow in my brain turned to "everyday at noon"
that's 24 hours. as i just realised, because my starter is a little drunk. (they get alcoholic when they are not fed often enough)
now that i finally learned how clocks work it will hopefully go better.
also i have to play very old games a lot, because the power cord of my win 98 laptop is the only thing in my flat that heats up enough to kerp the starter warm. everything else is either a new appliance with good insulation (like the fridge) or has LEDs (oven). and im not plugging in an entire heated blanket for 2+ days just to warm up some wet flour.
so settlers 3 it is.
I will never forget the fact that in like 2016, QAnon shit absolutely started getting unironically posted by leftists on Tumblr who fully believed in pizzagate, and it didn't actually stop until a few years later when QAnon became widely known as a far right conspiracy theory, and to this day I believe what killed it here was the "far right" part and not anything they were actually saying bc ppl on here were so ready to believe in the pedophilia ring and secret evil cabal parts.
People believe conspiracy theories to reinforce their social ties and to feel unique and superior - which is why a lot of people (chill, I didn't say all or even most) gravitate to social media, because they don't feel seen or part of a group in meatspace. That's something we can all fall victim to wherever we fall on a political spectrum.
I went to a library book sale this weekend and I found a very old book called “Electronic Life: How to Think About Computers,” which was published in I think 1975? I’ve been reading it kind of like how I would read a historical document, and it’s lowkey fascinating
There’s a whole paragraph that’s like “okay, find the keyboard. Don’t panic if it has more keys than a typewriter, that’s normal. Really, it’s fine. The extra keys don’t make things harder. It’s FINE”
Thought this section was particularly interesting:
Can the computer create something? At first glance it seems obvious that it can. Animated computer graphics, with their fluid transitions and whiplash perspectives, look strikingly new. And if one watches the machine doing animation work, there seem to be lengthy periods when the computer is acting “on its own.”
But if one observes these processes in more detail, it becomes clear that creation is not occurring within the machine. First of all, computer graphics are not unique. Computers have yet to generate anything that cannot be done by hand—and usually already has been done. Second, the apparent ability of the computer to “act on its own” is the outcome of thousands of hours of patient human effort to refine its instructions. The computer can manipulate a shape for us if we have already informed it what a shape is, what the rules for shape manipulation are, what this specific shape is, and so forth.
You can start an automobile engine and it will run by itself, too, but that doesn’t mean it’s being creative. It’s just running.
I know generations are centered around consoles, but if play games on PC or a handheld was your first system, then just pick which gen was going on at the time
If you don't play video games then move along
I don’t get it, man. why. why do we have to homogenize everything. why does every product have to look and behave and feel the exact same way. why can’t tumblr maintain its individuality? why can’t it lean into the things that make it a unique and refreshing offering instead of scrambling to make it a carbon copy of twitter? sucks, man. sucks.
it’s just like. this broadcasts loud and clear that the people behind the curtain have no pride or faith in this site at all. that tumblr, as a whole, has no worth or merit unless it’s somehow tricking the larger internet community into thinking it’s actually another site. and the users are supposed to celebrate this? where’s the dignity? where’s the self-respect? where’s the joy? it’s disheartening and embarrassing to be forced to conform. smh.
Da meine Fragestellung wohl teilweise etwas zu unspezifisch war, gieße ich noch ein wenig Öl ins Feuer der "gucken"-Debatte und starte hier nochmal einen neuen Versuch. (Vielen Dank für die rege Teilnahme bisher!)
Diesmal stehen meiner Meinung nach alle Aussprachemöglichkeiten von "gucken" (bezogen auf die "g"/"ck"-Laute und die Länge des "u"s) zur Verfügung - vielleicht mit Ausnahme der Schweiz oder Südtirol(??), wo es eventuell eher Richtung [x] geht? In dem und anderen Fällen gerne Option 9 wählen...
Erläuterung zu den Antwortmöglichkeiten:
k/kk - stimmloser velarer Plosiv (ob einzeln oder doppelt zeigt nur die länge des Vokals "u" an, nicht die Intensität des Konsonanten o.ä.) g/gg - stimmhafter velarer Plosiv (ob einzeln oder doppelt zeigt nur die länge des Vokals "u" an, nicht die Intensität des Konsonanten o.ä.) u vs. uu - zeigt zusätzlich an, ob das u kurz oder lang gesprochen wird
Wie auch schon bei der ersten Umfrage würden mich sehr die Heimatregionen der Leute interessieren, die die Option 4 (oder andere, noch ausgefallenere Varianten?) wählen! Und auch generell, erläutert gerne woher ihr kommt!
Okay tumblr, I need you to settle something for me.
My fiancé and I are currently both doing crazy video game challenges, and we can't agree on which of us is more unhinged; me for digging out a giant 64x64x127(length, width, depth) block hole in my single-player survival Minecraft world almost entirely by hand OR my fiancé for doing the Professor Oak's Challenge in Pokemon Legend Arceus.
For those not in the know, The Professor Oak's Challenge is a type of Pokemon challenge run where you are forbidden from moving on to the next gym/major area until you've finished the Pokédex page for every single Pokémon you can catch in your current area. So say you start a new file on FireRed, you can't fight Brock until every single Pokémon that is avaliable to you before hand has been registered in your dex, including evolutions. In regualr pokemon game this leads to a lot of grinding, since you have to do things like level your starter to it's final evolution, around level 30-35, by fighting pokemon that are level 2-5, but in Legends Arceus you have the added challenge of not having your pokedex pages count as "complete" until you fulfill a bunch of tasks like catching a certain number of them, or using a specific move in battle multiple times.
For my challenge, I'm just using like four enchanted netherite pickaxes, a beacon, and as much dynamite as I can scrounge together to clear out all the blocks in a 65 by 65 block square from a little below sea level all the way down to the bottom of the world. If I've done my math correctly each layer is 4,096 blocks, and I'm digging through roughly 127 layers, which all together means breaking ~520,192 blocks. According to my sources this would take around two months straight of 24/7 digging, but I've sped up the process with enchantments and the beacon and the dynamite. I'm also not planning on doing anything with the hole(though I have considered filling it with melons), I'm just digging bcs I find it meditative and for the satisfaction of a job well done.
#I've done both of these things#(not in legend arceus tho)#and the minecraft hole is the worse experience#digging is relaxing#but with a hole that big the relaxation part vanishes about halfway#and then it's just a chore#and you suddenly become very aware that this hole is pointless and will not even look that impressive when you're done#everyone wants to dig a big hole in Minecraft#but it's easy to overestimate how much fun it is#sorry but the ookemon challenge is less insane#also#catching every pokemon is literally a challenge provided in-game#to 10 year olds#so it is instantly more legitimate#even if this particular version of the challenge is a bit more ... challenging#poll
DASHBOARD UNFUCKER V1.0
as 90% of desktop users have probably found out, today @staff released an update that for some insane reason COMPLETELY remodels the dashboard to replicate twitter's. this is of course in the wake of numerous other thoroughly hated changes and a continued refusal to fix any of the site's actual problems, half of which stem directly from site management.
HOWEVER, thanks to the power of jQuery, i was able to throw together a userscript that remodels the dashboard back to its original look almost perfectly.
here is my dashboard right now, with the script active:
and here is the old dashboard in separate tab container that hasn't received the update:
it's hardly perfect; i had trouble making it force reload to the fixed layout when switching between other pages and the dashboard, and it currently only fixes just the dashboard. it's also completely untested on browsers other than firefox, and chances are it looks a bit screwy on ultrawide monitors. but for now at least, it's a good fix.
the unfucker is a tampermonkey userscript. all you have to do to use it is install the tampermonkey extension, hit "create new script", and replace the default code on the page with the script (link here) and save it.
Hi! I'm wondering if you can offer any insight into something that's been bugging me with all of the changes. This is genuinely not a hostile ask - I know first-hand how hard (necessary) change management is. I don't envy the position y'all are in.
That being said - I'm having a hard time making sense of the strategy around the roll out for the last few big changes/"experiments"). It seems like the folks doing the messaging vs the actual feature management are not on the same page.
It has been stated several times that:
"We’ll be testing [our new] ideas in an opt-in basis with people who’ve been using Tumblr for years, and more especially with people who’ve never even heard of Tumblr (a difficult group to find)."
We've also seen, repeatedly, that
"Tumblr is a place where you can tailor and customize your experience to individual preferences."
With those statements in mind, the choice to roll these new features out to folks who *didn't* volunteer - and not offer any way to "customize our experience" seems like a strange one.
An expectation (which was positive) was established only to be directly violated within a few weeks. It makes it challenging to get a read on what y'all actually mean -- and to extend good faith or trust when communications do come out.
If you say you're going to do something, then do it, it builds trust. If you don't, it erodes trust. And that just makes your already difficult jobs harder - and the userbase even more reactive and knee-jerk resistant.
Can you give us a sense of what's going on here? Or can you at least pass this feedback on to whoever is handling the messaging around this stuff? We can see that y'all are striving for transparency, but that's only effective if it's honest/consistent.
[TL;DR: Tumblr's messaging emphasizes testing changes with volunteers, and offering the ability to customize - but that doesn't seem to be what's actually happening. What's up?]
this is a really great question, thank you for asking it. you've accurately pointed out some glaring holes in our communication strategy -- some of that is even my fault, to be honest, as someone who tries to help shape our public communications.
the easiest answer is that there's a lot of work happening on the internal tumblr side, and not all of it is the same kind of work, and therefore not all of it is being communicated consistently. that's a huge problem if you're not inside of it, as you point out; the contradictions seem weird for anyone paying attention.
i'm currently a part of the @labs group and we're trying to come up with radical ideas for reshaping tumblr, prototype them quickly, show them to people, and iterate on them, and reject them quickly if they don't make sense. the Tumblr Mini thing recently is an unfortunate example of that -- something leaked way too early, before we even got a chance to really understand how the thing we prototyped would be received. that may never go beyond the thing people saw, for good reason: it doesn't make sense. we're learning from it, but it's unfinished.
in that Labs group, we do want volunteer-based feedback, and we're actually starting that very soon with targeted user research. you may see some surveys soliciting that feedback soon, or invites to be a part of the testing. i'm extremely excited by that, because some other ideas we have feel like they should've been a part of tumblr since the beginning.
but.......
there's a whole different group at tumblr that are making "core product" improvements, and a lot of their work is reflected in the recent staff post about product strategy. their aim is to alleviate a lot of common points of confusion and frustration, some of which will seem counter-intuitive to people who have been on tumblr for many years and learned (what i call) "the hard way".
a lot of that core improvement work will be rolled out, experimented with, and iterated on, the traditional way: involuntary A/B tests, rather than volunteers. that is standard industry practice, because when you're trying to understand the behavior of millions of people, just asking for volunteers introduces too much selection bias.
however, it's important to note that even today's rollout of the new desktop navigation was released to some XKit devs beforehand, so we could get early feedback. so sometimes we do roll these core things out for feedback first, before "regular users", before we A/B test it. usually those small initial experiments are hyper-targeted though... in this case, because we do actually care about XKit and third party developers. you don't see that though!
so full transparency: not everything we do is going to be volunteer-based, not everything we do can be communicated adequately before we test it, not everything during testing will be customizable, because how much we want to customize is dependent on the outcome of these tests. it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.
and furthermore, this is kind of how it's always been, for better or worse, since around 2016 when tumblr started believing in A/B tests and experiments, rather than just "ship it and we'll see"... the common denominator, though, is that we want your feedback. we don't do a good enough job soliciting that feedback, but we do want it. (i kinda wish we had an easy feedback button for the new layout.) we do make decisions based on feedback, but we augment that decision-making process with hard data from experiments.
i hope that makes sense? there's too much to cover to provide you with the full context. i could write a book about it. all i can confidently say is that we're trying as best as we can to balance the ideas of keeping tumblr special and unique, while trying weird/bad/good/uncomfortable new directions to help the platform grow and thrive. status quo and complacency aren't acceptable; tumblr needs to change to survive. i am just as uncomfortable and upset by that fact as anyone, and i worry every day and night about it, whether the price of survival is worth it.
we'll see, hopefully together.
#tumblr changes#this is all worded very carefully to sound positive#but it makes me lose hope even more#because if the 'very very small' tumblr team has such massive issues with communication there's a problem#especially if there are two sides that pull in drastically different direction and are clearly hostile to each others ideas#the labs team seems to care about the users and the integrity of the site#and the core strategy team cares about making tumblr 'successful'#bc twitter of all websites is such a good example to follow i suppose#something is very wrong at the staff of tumblr and as eloquently as cyle is even he can't hide his frustration#I'm not seeing a future for tumblr tbh#unless the core strategy team radically changed their communication - both with the rest of the team and the users#they will destroy all trust that users have in this site
Tuesday, July 18th, 2023
🌟 New
- We’ve renamed the “Include stuff in your orbit” dashboard setting to “Include posts liked by the blogs you follow”. It still controls the same behavior: whether or not you’ll see posts liked by blogs you follow in your Following feed. Also, reminder that you can hide your own likes from this feature in your blog settings.
- On web, on the mobile layout of the site, we’ve shuffled the order of the items in the navigation drawer slightly.
🛠 Fixed
- We fixed an issue with the activity graph on web that could cause your browser to cache an outdated copy of the data. Now your browser should refresh with the latest data every time you visit that page.
🚧 Ongoing
- Nothing to report here today.
🌱 Upcoming
- Starting tomorrow (July 19th), some of you will see a new navigation layout for the desktop website that we’re experimenting with.
Experiencing an issue? File a Support Request and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!
Want to share your feedback about something? Check out our Work in Progress blog and start a discussion with the community.
This sucks so bad.
First this "changes" blog is (as far as I know) the only place where tumblr mentioned that they change the site layout. At all. Without going into details of course. Why would you communicate such a big change to your (already agitated) users. Lol.
Second the fucking "feedback". This post and pretty much everyone else always says the same thing: "If you are unhappy with the changes, you should go the tumblrs WIP blog and tell them"
Yeah, too bad the WIP blog oly has their askbox open one day in the week. Mondays. It is probably just pure coincidence that this layout change that makes the site look like fukcking twitter happened on wednesday. Pure coincidence.
And that way tumblr can obviously completely ignore every post that has been made on the subject of the recent changes.
"You didn't send your feedback to the WIP blog. So it doesn't count. :) Fuck you :)
This sucks.
#tumblr changes#tumblr layout change#tumblr being deliberately obtuse#fuck this#there have to be other sites#no hate against the people who run these blogs of courses#but fuck#there is just no other way to communicate to tumblr directly so you'll end up in the crossfire#say thanks to your bosses for that
new genre of videos youtube’s algorithm has decided I needed to see