love how there are three competing camps of people on tumblr right now. what a moment!
camp one: let’s one star review the app to get them to change things! (this doesn’t work, it makes tumblr get shut down faster, sorry.)
camp two: let’s buy each other crabs so tumblr can get some money and then they can get a chance to stop chasing growth and focus on us customers instead! (this would actually work and we’d be able to keep tumblr alive and stop working on growth features.)
camp three: blissfully unaware anything is going on at all. (this is the vast, vast, vast majority.)
#an endorsement of the reasoning behind Crab Day by someone who knows what they’re talking about #Crab Day #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: A User’s Guide #discourse cw? #this post was queued to ensure proper timing
As we now know, Tumblr is $30 million dollars in debt. Oops. Tumblr has announced some major (and unpopular) changes to the site in their attempt to get back above water. The alternative is that Tumblr ceases to exist. But maybe we can change that…
How:
There are 327 million unique tumblr visits per month, and almost 500 million active accounts. If 10 million unique users (or less, if we bought more than one) bought or gifted Crabs from the Tumblr store, we could knock out Tumblr’s debt easily. Buy crabs!
When:
July 29, 2023 is Crab Day, running through August 5 (for anyone who can’t log on that day) as Crab Week!
Who:
Everyone!! If you truly can’t afford to participate with a $3 crab, (or other item from the shop) post crab memes!
Time for Tumblr users to rise again and surprise everyone…
Please I need their next financial report to have a header that says ‘Crab day’
Tags:
#…you know what‚ sure‚ I’ll throw four CAD in the donation bucket when it’s passed around #yeah I’ve already mentally (and digitally) prepared myself for Tumblr to go the way of all things #and of necessity I am pretty ruthless about cutting down my living expenses (and wish I could be even more so) #but even *I* occasionally buy festival pastries‚ and it’s worth half the price of one to #encourage Tumblr’s final death to be later rather than sooner #especially if it can nudge them a bit towards the‚ like‚ Dreamwidth end of the how-aligned-a-website-is-with-its-users spectrum #Crab Day #signal boosts #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: A User’s Guide #flashing gif? #this post was queued to ensure proper timing #(namely‚ right after the already-queued-two-days-ago previous post)
i don’t even give a shit if they pack the site with algorithmic garbage to appeal to new users i dont look at the ‘for you’ page anyway and xkit blocks out all that other dumb shit but the phrase ‘the outdated decision to focus on the following page’ is like if one million canaries marched on stage with red flags and died in perfect synchronization with each other
Tags:
#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #yeah pretty much #I feel like I’ve basically already been through the grieving process with the Purge #I keep Tumblr at arm’s length now #fully ready to move on when the day comes that it isn’t there #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Look it’s not that I think recommendation systems are evil. Recommendation systems are an attempt to sort through the immense flood of Content™ that is the modern internet. I like the option to, when I don’t know what I want, to just let The Computer figure that out for me; it’s not that great at it, and it’s got its own goals to further that aren’t quite aligned with mine, but it’s better than random draws from the set of everything that exists on the platform.
But “option” is a very important word in that sentence; it’s one tool among many. It’s a thing to resort to when other things fail, like say “things tagged by a human being as relating to a specific subject” and “the things my friends are saying” and “keyword search”. Various tools need to coexist, and I want some of those tools to be more transparent to me than “idk the algorithm decided you’re into this now for its own reasons”.
A chronological feed that contains all of and only those posts that were made by a specific set of blogs is very transparent; I can tell exactly why a certain post ended up in front of me, which gives me control to adjust my feed to include stuff i want to see and exclude stuff I don’t. It’s coarse-grained control, of course, which is why I think it’s important to combine it with other tools like keyword filtering and tag-following and so on, but it very clearly exposes cause and effect.
Recommendation systems are opaque; I cannot tell why a post was recommended to me. If I’m lucky it’s at least responsive to “no this sucks stop recommending it to me”, but honestly I have not found that to be a very good tool to stop getting shit I don’t want shoved in front of me.
Onboarding new users presents a problem when they don’t know who to follow yet, sure. It makes sense to foreground other tools when introducing people to your website. Just don’t take away the other tools. Let people transition from “new user who has no idea how anything works” to “experienced user who can use the tools at their disposal to choose the content they see”
And the other thing is:
I want to be on platforms where the content restrictions are minimal. I don’t trust them to not exclude me and I don’t trust them to enforce them fairly (because moderation at scale is unsolved problem).
I don’t care if this means nazis and terfs exist on the same platform as me, as long as I have a robust set of tools that means I can curate a small bubble within that platform. There’s a lot of shit on tumblr, very rarely does any of it make it to the stream that is my feed, because I can trust the people who make that stream not to put it there.
(do you ever see some tangential discussion of the latest horrible callout post or nonsensical discourse and thank your bubble for never actually showing you the terrible thing in the first place, only third-hand discussion of it? I do. all the time)
but minimal content restrictions are unworkable when anything on the platform is fair game to put on your dash. Recommendation systems as the only option mean that suddenly it’s entirely my business how much shit is being dumped into the massive ocean of Content, because I no longer have my carefully filtered little stream. I have a carelessly slapped together spoonful of whatever’s out there, selected by whatever criteria the recommendation system has (hey, did you know this post is getting a lot of Engagement? that’s good, right? when lots of people are yelling back and forth about a topic that means we should show to more people who’ll went to yell at one side or the other)
we get people angry about staff not pressing the “remove all nazis” button they probably for sure have now, imagine what it’d be like if you can’t even unfollow the person who put nazi shit on your dash.
“sanitising the platform of anything potentially offensive” is a much higher priority when people can’t be trusted to be adults who choose what they see, and as the potentially offensive content this is not great for me.
Tags:
#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #disappointed permanent resident of The Future #discourse cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
I’m sure you understand this very well and don’t need me to tell you, but I also need to somehow express my appreciation for the fact that “a perplexed, slightly worried and completely enthralled expression of an entomologist checking up on his favorite bug and finding it doing tax returns on a little calculator” is an objectively completely hysterical way to describe the facial expression of any human regarding another, and an especially hilarious way to describe Havelock Vetinari when looking at Sir Samuel Vimes in particular.
he even stopped shaking the container to just watch the lil bastard for a change !
thank you sm, I’m very pleased yall are having fun with this <3
Tags:
#I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #Discworld #fanfic #(I poked around and this is apparently a thingy in the style of Disco Elysium) #(with Tumblr polls voting on which response option Vimes takes next) #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#comics #art #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
I’ve been working on this project for a while and I think it’s time to show them off. These are propaganda/health and safety reminder posters for the Office for the Preservation of Normalcy, an organization that deals with the supernatural in a canon I’m working on. I have some lore I’m working on, but these posters will be the main thing that exists for now. The “sample” watermark is because I would like to sell higher-quality printouts and files in the future.
At this stage I’m looking for feedback. How do they look visually? Could a tagline be punchier? Please please let me know what you think.
Tags:
#storytime #art #death tw #unreality cw? #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
On snakes, scars tend to heal over with attempted regrowth of scales. Scars often have a weird scale pattern as a result – the scales over the scar might have a weird texture or color. Look at this ball python with a burn scar over their entire spine – the scar is noticeably a different color and texture.
In my experience, a lot of scars on snakes will retain scale growth, but that’s not always true, especially for scars on the head:
Deep wounds tend to heal over white. In wildlife rehab, we mostly see these in snakes who were involved in car accidents or had run-ins with lawnmowers.
But that can happen with any deep wound, like these on a ball python from rat bites.
Deep wounds on wild snakes that don’t heal without veterinary help may look puckered and a bit gruesome:
Lizards are more prone to have scars that are missing scales.
Scars on crocodilians look a little different. Instead of scales like snakes and lizards, crocodilians have what we call “scutes.” On a crocodilian, scutes are large, hardened plates, and instead of shedding at once they’re constantly shedding in teeny-tiny flakes (like us!). On crocodilians, scars look like divots in the scutes, and they will fade somewhat with time (again, like people).
Tags:
#snakes #lizards #crocodiles #biology #the more you know #injury cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#look‚ in my defence the cacti-Wikipedia-page vandalism was for a good cause #(…hey‚ if I edit tangents into my personal Kiwix copy‚ does that count) #though the fanfic spider-sense *is* tempting #surveys #amnesia cw? #food mention #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
Brinens and Things 