Tumblr: a User’s Guide

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

itsbenedict:

vash3r reblogged your post 
thanks-for-the-advice%E2%80%9A-terrifying-ex-yakuza-dad”>#>thanks for the advice‚ terrifying ex-yakuza dad  #you can have commas in tags just by copy-pasting?!?!?!

no no, i just use a special unicode character that happens to look exactly like a comma but isn’t one. windows alt+0130 is ‚ which differs almost imperceptibly from ,. compare and contrast ‚,‚,‚,,,,‚‚‚,

Tags:

#I was wondering how you did that #now I know‚ which will probably come in handy #Tumblr: a User’s Guide

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

serinemolecule:

shlevy:

sadoeconomist:

Holy shit

I just missed the J key and hit K instead for the first time and it scrolled up a post

Is that new or has it always done that

Is there a list of hotkeys for this site anywhere? I don’t want to just start randomly pressing keys because it might bring the whole site down

Press ? to bring up the list

(K has always been there as far as I know, it’s the same keybindings as vi)

Incidentally, pressing ? brings up keyboard shortcuts on basically every website that supports them. Try it on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Gmail, GitHub, really, any major site.

J and K are also pretty consistently “down” and “up” on any website with keyboard shortcuts. (Except Danbooru, which uses WASD!)

Tags:

#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #this is probably at least the third time I’ve reblogged something along these lines #but it’s good to reiterate occasionally #and that bit about ? being common across websites is new to me and important

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

livebloggingmydescentintomadness:

x0twod:

aliasgareth:

fyi, if you are looking for a particular post in your blog and only remember a certain word or phrase, you can always do this:

yoururl.tumblr.com/search/keyword

you’ve saved many lives

also if you want to cross-search your tags, try /search/tagone+tagtwo

it has helped me find so many things

You might also be interested in Siikr, which can sometimes find things the first-party Tumblr search function misses.

Tags:

#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #I didn’t know about the plus thing

Anonymous asked: Have you joined pillowfort? Why or why not?

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

lavender-sprinkles:

I personally don’t have a Pillowfort account yet, but my partner does and she has let me look at her account fully to see what it is like. I’ve also viewed Pillowfort’s demo account which is linked to on their Kickstarter. I am waiting with anticipation when I can make my own account, but right now Pillowfort is in a closed beta which means the only people who have access to the site are ones who have been given special registration links. They were doing waves of free beta accounts a bit ago (which is how my partner got her account), but right now for every $5 you pledge to their Kickstarter you will receive a registration key if the Kickstarter gets fully funded (they are as of today 40% of the way to their $39,900 goal).

Here is why I’m excited for Pillowfort:

  • If you delete your original posts, every reblogged version will be deleted too. Edit your original post and the changes will appear on every reblog,
  • The ability to make posts visible to everyone, just followers, just mutuals, or just yourself.
  • A functional blacklist where you can blacklist a post body & tags or just tags.
  • A terms of service that explicitly states you hold all rights to your own intellectual property. It also states clearly that it forbids callout posts, doxxing, degradation, harassing, hate groups, spamming of tags with unrelated or offensive material, and slurs against minorities. If there is a user that is doing anything offensive or hateful, it is encouraged and mandated you don’t make posts about it and instead flag it and let the site moderators take care of it. This sort of system cuts down on “dashboard drama” and harassment that sites like Tumblr are known for. 
  • They have threaded comments which means discussions or praise no longer clog up your posts and your blog, keeping things much more organized and clean. We can also use tags for their ACTUAL purpose, tagging of posts for ease of search and organization instead of talking.
  • They have communities and a more connected user-based and user-led environment.
  • Posts in chronological order like they should be!
  • A staff that actually cares about the input of their members and is driven to listen and collaborate with their members to create a site that the users actually want instead of being led by a corporation that has their own agendas in mind.
  • A staff that wants to avoid corporate involvement, unwanted ads, and selling of user info to fund Pillowfort.
  • The future possibilities of what the staff can do with the site that we didn’t dream could be possible to have all in one place including accessibility and a functional mobile app.

So far, I’ve seen a lot of good things and I’ve been really impressed with how the staff is handling the site and how they have explained their plans for the future of Pillowfort.

If you say you really want a social media site that actually cares about their users, this is it. This is your chance to have what pretty much all of us want. This new blogging platform is all the best parts of Tumblr (and for those who miss Livejournal this is like a wedding between Tumblr and Livejournal) with all the parts we hate and loathe about the site scraped out of it.

If you like everything that you’ve read about Pillowfort.io, please pledge to their Kickstarter. Even $5 can help and it will get you a registration link to get on Pillowfort yourself if the Kickstarter gets fully funded.

If you can’t support Pillowfort monetarily, then please, please reblog, tweet, share, and spread it about everywhere you can. 

This is our chance to have a social media made with us in mind and it’s already starting out so well with 10,000 users in the closed beta. Let’s bring it to the next stage of its life!

 

Um.

Look, I understand why people would think having veto power over your OPs is a good thing, but also I really don’t want a site where bits and pieces of *my blog* are rotting out of existence because the thread originators unilaterally decided to delete them. Especially if–and I can’t find anything in the site’s about section that says for sure whether or not they do this, but it seems like the most obvious way to handle it–deactivating your account deletes all of your posts. You ever look at a years-old section of someone’s Tumblr and see how many of the OPs are deactivated? I want my blog to be an archive, not just an ephemeral stream†.

And I don’t want comments to be sequestered away within their associated posts, so that it’s not a standard action to say “hey, Brin often has interesting things to say and good taste in things to say them about, I want to be shown every thread where she comments”.

(having the *option* to make a particular comment sequestered rather than shown to your followers is good (perhaps a more robust version of the Tumblr “reply” function), but it should not be the default)

(likewise, occasionally you want a post to be sequestered, and I do agree that a better version of Tumblr would have a friends-locking system)

Pillowfort doesn’t have the best parts of Tumblr. It has the parts of LiveJournal that make LJ inferior to Tumblr, the parts that exalt posters over commenters, force you to make primarily OPs or be a second-class citizen.

(And, as I was saying the last time somebody tried a (somewhat more literal) marriage of Tumblr and Dreamwidth††, the whole reason I’m able to make Tumblr OPs is because I know my OPs are just one aspect of my blog and don’t have to stand alone.)

Each blog being a combined feed of the user’s posts and comments *is* what makes Tumblr great, and no “”new and improved”” Tumblr-inspired social-media site is ever going to have a hope of attracting me and others like me until they understand that.

—

†And yes, I *have* taken steps to ensure my blog archive outlives Tumblr itself.

††Notice how the OP on that post deactivated two years ago? And I’m still able to show you what my comment was?

Tags:

#reply via reblog #<– my favourite thing about having a Tumblr #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #amnesia cw #discourse cw? #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Pillowfort

Anonymous asked: Do you think the age to be an adult should be lowered from 18?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

theunitofcaring:

I think we probably shouldn’t primarily be using a discrete legal category of ‘adult’, and should try to transfer each right to people at the point where the coercion made possible by denying them that right is worse than the harm they can do with it. So the voting age should be a lot younger, the driving age probably shouldn’t be, teenagers should be allowed to sign a lease or check into a hotel, you should absolutely never get charged with sex crimes for taking naked pictures of yourself. 

And then in other areas we’re wading into some serious competing access needs. I’m one of those kids who really benefitted from having to interact with zero sexual content until I was 18, and I actually found sex-ed in middle school and high school mildly traumatic because it was giving me information about sex which I did not want to know and wasn’t allowed to opt out of knowing. But sex ed is still really important. I suspect lots of rights-and-access-for-teenagers runs into stuff like that, where some kids genuinely do benefit from being prohibited because they wouldn’t be good at opting out on their own, while other kids really need it. I don’t know exactly how to navigate those. I suspect in general we’re currently erring too far on the paternalistic side.

Here in Ontario, we have a little more progress towards having a staggered adulthood, though I’m sure we have a long ways to go and some of the unlocks might not be in the right places.

That one news story that was all over the place a few years ago, a 17-year-old who tried to refuse cancer treatment and the hospital forced her to take it anyway, is *extra* horrifying if you live in a jurisdiction where the age of medical consent is 16.

(it is a little weird that you can legally consent to *prescription* mind-altering drugs three years before you can consent to *recreational* mind-altering drugs†, though I am aware there exist ethical frameworks in which that makes sense)

I’m not very clear on what exactly legally happens at 17, but I do know my 17th birthday was when our bank started bugging me to take control of the investments my father held on my behalf. (I was, however, allowed to keep my youth bank account until my *19th* birthday (at which point it was transmuted into an adult chequing account).)

(Other banking note: when I first signed up for that youth account at 13, I was immediately offered a debit card, albeit with a pretty low withdrawal limit (a maximum of $100 in purchases and $20 in ATM withdrawals per day, IIRC). I just went and looked at the fine print on youth accounts, and there is no mention of a minimum age for debit cards. It seems doubtful that they would actually give a debit card to, say, a five-year-old if the parents said no, and presumably there’s *some* age before which you need parental permission and after which you don’t. (my parents said yes to the card at 13, so I did not test it then)

The youth account I had at an American bank from age ~6 – 13 did not give me a debit card, though now I wonder if they would have if I had thought to request one and my parents had signed off on it.)

I’d never really thought about it before, but I find that the idea of having a minimum age to check into a hotel feels intuitively nonsensical when I consider it. (I mean, we probably do have one, and I never tried to test it, and maybe there’s some non-obvious reason why it’s a good idea, but) My brain just goes “We serve unattended children at work all the time; why should a hotel clerk respond differently from a fast-food maker? If you’re capable of showing up, communicating your request for purchase, and giving the cashier enough money, and you would be legally allowed to have the thing if somebody else had gifted it to you, then you are old enough to buy the thing.”

P.S. Okay, I went and Googled it and apparently hotel rooms are a little like sex, in that it’s kind of 16 and kind of 18 depending mostly on who you can talk into what. [http://hotelassociation.ca/pdf/Renting%20Hotel%20Rooms%20to%20Minors.pdf] Note, however, that it appears to be *much* harder for a 16-year-old to talk the higher-ups into letting them have a hotel room than into letting them have a sexual partner. A 16-year-old is assumed capable of consenting to sex unless somebody can come up with a good enough reason why not [http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/faq-age-of-consent-law-canada-1.3851507], and assumed incapable of consenting to a hotel room unless they can come up with a good enough reason why. (and a 14- or even 12-year-old can sometimes be allowed to have sex under the right circumstances, and never allowed to get a hotel room)

(How much you want to bet that nobody involved in deciding what any of the ages in the above paragraph should be directly compared the two acts? made any attempt to ensure we didn’t end up with stricter standards for a smaller deal?)

—

†Alcohol, tobacco, and–soon–marijuana [https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/pm-trudeau-says-cannabis-will-be-legal-in-canada-on-oct-17-1.3981228] are all at age 19 in Ontario.

P.P.S. Huh, I still got the ask bug. Maybe the first-degree ask needs to have text in it in order to allow further commentary to display in the notes?

Tags:

#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #(and for the above post) #medical abuse mention #nsfw text?

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

theopjones:

silver-and-ivory:

On the subject of vaguely paranoid precautions, I would like to be able to contact certain people I know over Tumblr right now even if something happens to Tumblr.

I think this would probably be best achieved individually by simply asking these people for contact information.

I don’t know how it would be accomplished on a larger scale.

Yah. I’m also worried about this. And also the related issue of losing the content I’ve posted here if something happens to this blog. 

Re: losing content, I use this backup-creation program. I’ve scheduled it to run automatically every evening, and once a week I (manually) make a zip copy of the folder to put on my phone as well. (I tried copying the folder without zipping it, but turns out copying tens of thousands of individual files takes an infeasible amount of time.)

You can also use it on blogs other than your own, since it only uses publicly available stuff.

(In addition to that backup, I keep Tumblr messaging logs in a collection of LibreOffice documents–one document per person–and my inbox and outbox are each in documents as well.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

Safe mode is now on!

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

likkezg:

You can toggle it off following these easy steps

tumblr_inline_p3u8z0wpdl1slw70b_540

I wonder why did they force it on for everyone xD I dont even see any benefit they get out of that other than just pissing people off :p

 

eroticlava:

might be a good idea to to check your stuff and make sure its off! many of your favorite artist will start to seemingly disappear

 

copperbadge:

Just turned mine off. 

 

justice-turtle:

I’m not finding it on the app. Is it only on desktop, or still rolling out?

“Seemingly disappear” is exaggerated, looks like:

‘If you find yourself wanting to see any particular item that’s hidden—and your age has been calculated to be over 18—there’s a “View post” button that allows you to do just that.‘

Thanks for the heads-up, though.

(For completeness and in case anyone else was wondering, I’ll include a link to justice-turtle’s followup post regarding how to turn off Safe Mode on iOS.)

Tags:

#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #debunking

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lierdumoa:

Okay, so it turns the problem with my activity feed that I’ve been complaining about for the past 3 days (the flood of unwanted reply notifications I’ve been getting from other ppl’s viral posts) is indeed a new “feature,” and not a glitch. 

THE PLAGUE OF SPAM HAS A NAME: Conversational Notes 

Apparently, tumblr thinks that turning our activity pages into an endless YouTube comment section will “encourage more conversations” and “increase engagement” (see: TechCrunch article). 

Eat shit, @staff. 

Y’all been warned. 

I got to be an early adopter of this bullshit. 

Not all blogs have yet been “gifted” with this “””feature””” but I don’t doubt that soon your blogs will also be affected. 

You won’t be able to leave a reply, or reblog comment on any viral post without having your activity page flooded with every single subsequent reply that post receives. 

GLHF

 

thewordywarlock:

YOU ARE A LIFE SAVER

 

cryptiquenightmare:

Oh joy

 

eloarei:

@lilacnebulae Is this like the problem you were having???

Tags:

#The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #(I have not received this feature yet) #(thank you for the preparation) #((or is it an app-only thing? I don’t use the app))