The Great Tumblr Apocalypse

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

txttletale:

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to new users i dont look at the ‘for you’ page anyway and xkit blocks out all that other dumb shit but the phrase ‘the outdated decision to focus on the following page’ is like if one million canaries marched on stage with red flags and died in perfect synchronization with each other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

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sigmaleph:

sigmaleph:

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

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

nostalgebraist:

About my fake staff ask

How I made it:

Currently, the tumblr API just… lets you make a post in which you “reply” to an “ask” from an arbitrary user, containing arbitrary content.

In tumblr’s Neue Post Format (NPF), responses to asks look similar to other posts. The only difference is that they have a special entry in their “layout,” specifying which part of the post is the ask, and who it is from.

Right now, if you try to create an NPF post with this kind of layout entry in it, it just works! You can use this to make an “ask” from anyone, containing anything, and answer it.

This is a huge bug and presumably will get fixed sometime soon?

How I discovered the bug:

Weirdly enough, I find out about it while trying to improve @nostalgebraist-autoresponder’s alt text features this past week.

As you may have noticed, Frank now writes alt text differently, with more clarity about which pieces are AI-generated and what role they play.

While making this change, I found myself newly frustrated with my inability to use line breaks in alt text. The API used to let me do it, but then it stopped, hence all the “[newline]” stuff in older alt texts.

After poking around, I found that you can use line breaks in alt text on tumblr, and you can do this through the API, but only if you create posts in NPF.

Frank creates posts in legacy, not NPF. This has been true forever, and it works fine so I’ve had no reason to change it.

Fully rewriting Frank’s post creation code to use NPF would take a lot of work.

Right now, Frank’s language model generates text very close to a limited subset of HTML, which I can send to tumblr as “legacy” post content basically as-is. To create posts in NPF, I’d have to figure out the right way to convert that limited HTML into NPF’s domain-specific block language.

I wasn’t going to do that just to support this one nicety of alt text formatting.

“But wait…”, I thought.

“Frank is already making these posts, with the alt text, in legacy format. And once they exist on tumblr, it’s easy to determine how to represent them in NPF. I just fetch the existing post, in NPF format.”

So all I need to do is

  1. Have Frank make the post, as a draft, with the alt text containing “[newline]” or something in place of the line breaks I really want.
  2. Fetch this draft, in NPF.
  3. Create a new NPF post, with the same contents that we just fetched, in whichever state we wanted for the original post (draft, published, or queued).
  4. Delete the draft we made in step 1.

This was convoluted, but it worked! I patted myself on the back for a clever workaround, and went on to do other stuff for a while…

…and then it hit me.

In the case where the post was a response to an ask, Frank was doing the following:

  1. Responding to the ask.
  2. Fetching the response in NPF.
  3. Creating a completely new post, identical to the response – including the contents of the original ask.
  4. Deleting the original ask.

Meaning, you can just make asks ab nihilo, apparently.

So after a few more tests, I went and made the @staff ask, as one does.

Unfortunately, once the bug gets fixed, Frank’s newlines-in-alt-text solution won’t work for asks anymore… oh well, it wasn’t a big deal anyway.

Tags:

#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

eightyonekilograms:

Oh hell yes, poll results are now to tenths of a percent. But @staff can we pretty please have the raw counts?

​

eightyonekilograms:

wildgifthorses: I think you can get raw counts from the API

Yeah, and you can also get the vote percentages to six decimal places in web debugger, thanks to a truly wild web design choice:

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Sticking the raw percentage directly into the width attribute is just a delightfully bonkers way to implement that, and I love it. And with six decimal places that’s enough to derive the raw count unless you go really mega-viral (and maybe even then it just adds more decimal places).

But it would be nice to have a way I can see right on the dash without having to tinker.

Tags:

#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #fun with loopholes #fun with statistics #the more you know

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

demonboyhalo:

bundibird:

bundibird:

APPARENTLY TUMBLR HAS ADDED A COLOUR OF THE SKY THEMED TRAVEL CUP TO THEIR MERCH STORE!?

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83e2b078a6e8d3ae53419b1754dc9d8eb645492d

okay but this actually kinda fucks. like the design is so covert and well done. no one who isn’t on here would think it’s anything but some meaningless artsy aesthetic quote

Tags:

#oh my god #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #”Due to overwhelming demand this product will take 3 – 5 days to ship”

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

tunamoth:

crankyteapot:

crankyteapot:

BUG RACE

bug-race-poll

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the competition is intense

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Our champions are now taking their deserved rest.

Tags:

#I know I am very late here #my consider-reblogging list piled up a bunch while I was sick and whatnot #(and for that matter I didn’t even *originally* see this post until it was too late to vote) #but what a beautiful piece of history #I especially love the illustrations #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #surveys #bugs #I wonder how polls will show up in tumblr-utils scrapes #(…oh my god‚ in the new post UI you can edit tags)

{{Polls show up in tumblr-utils scrapes like this:

bug-race-poll-tumblr-utils

This is similar to what you’d see visiting the webpage. Almost all of the information is missing, available only through the dashboard view. As such, I will be using cropped dashboard screenshots to display polls here.}}