i hate the “on average a user only sees 25 posts per session so they have to be good and varied” bullshit on that staff post. if i open tumblr and the 25 posts i see are nothing but a single mutual mass reblogging their favourite thing that i couldn’t care less about. well. that’s what i enjoy
If my beloved mutual needed to reblog a thing 25 times then by all things sacred I am going to read it once and then scroll past it 24 times as they intended me to!
A cut transgirl romance comic by Garun
This just restored my faith in humanity
Honey are you OK? You rebloged Garun’s comics 5 times today
Aight time to cry and reblog trans girl yuri again
can’t get over when famous gangster lucky luciano was like “hey lansky seems like quite a hassle getting all those nazis offa your terf you want us to help ya out” and meyer “Left Russia Because of Pogroms and Became A Gangster In The US” lansky was like “no. no getting to beat the shit out of nazis is reward enough for us. sorry lucky this one’s personal don’t worry about it”
here’s a quote from a New York Times article abt it
also bonus quote from that article
“quick question about the punching, judge perlman: how about murder instead”
everybody says that “the government” enlisted these mobsters to beat up nazis, but like. no. no that didn’t happen? judge nathan perlman illegally called up a man who could have him shot dead at a minute to say “hey. i’ve scoured the fucking law books tryna find a way to get these fucking nazis out of here, but my legal means have unfortunately run out. so-” and meyer fucking lansky was like “ah say no more boss lemme call a buncha friends and we’ll get this sorted out real quick don’t even bother paying me.“
can you imagine that phone call. like genuinely. how am i supposed to continue living my normal life knowing this happened. people who loooove talking about punching nazis, taKE FUCKING NOTES
this is my favorite Meyer Lansky story.
my second favorite Meyer Lansky story is about the time, many years later, that he was at a meeting of mafia heads and one of them started bragging about how his son was following him into the family business.
Meyer Lansky said “That’s nice. My son works for NASA.”
i am sorry in advance for the man i'll become when this happens
dude i am RIGHT next to you. and if they don’t make the jokes, then i will lmaoooo
Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy
Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.
The Diagnosis
In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience.
Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content.
To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.
Our Guiding Principles
To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.
- Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.
- Provide high-quality content with every app launch.
- Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.
- Retain and grow our creator base.
- Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.
- Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.
Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.
they r turning her into twitter! if you take away the blog pages I am blowing up the building !!
Frankly Tumblr can tinker with the For You/Trending/Today pages all they want in order to deliver "high quality content" because as they are now, those tabs are pretty terrible.
However, messing with the way the dashboard works currently, or trying to introduce a spam of suggested/recommended posts to the dash which can't also be opted out of (the way IG is) would be a recipe for disaster. One of the main reasons I use Tumblr is because I don't have to see crap I don't want to see.
As would trying to pull in big creators or trying to foster any sort of influencer culture on here. Tumblr's search feature is broken as hell, so I'd welcome any attempt to fix that.
If the site wants to improve on the algorithm-based tabs and social connectivity without interfering with the dash, I think some things that Tumblr is also in great need of is more options to curate one's "social circle" on Tumblr.
Some things I'd like to see personally:
- Ability to mute users without blocking them. This would prevent you from seeing their posts or receiving notifications from them, but not prevent them from seeing your posts/blog.
- If users are blocked, don't let me see their posts on any of feeds/tabs
- Options to curate who can follow your blog. I.e, options to prevent users of a certain category from following your blog (users who haven't been registered to Tumblr for over a week, users without posts, etc)
- Option to snooze Live indefinitely
- Option to choose a default feed tab on mobile between the "following", "for you" and "your tags" tabs.
- Posting options to show posts only to mutuals or only to a customizable friend circle
I’m not trying to attack you, but do you know that proshipper means someone who supports and romanticizes pedophilia, incest, and abuse? Your reblog on that post seems to read that you think antis just hate on people for having ships they don’t like. But it’s completely different than that. Just looking on the proshipper side of Tumblr and the internet and you can see people happily shipping children and adults and making nsfw content of such things.
i appreciate that you’re not being outright hostile, but i have to say, that on its own put you above basically every anti i’ve interacted with.
i understand where antis are coming from, i really do. there are a lot of things on the internet that make me deeply uncomfortable, including the minor/adult ships that you mention. i don’t want to anything to do with those kinds of ships and i would be happiest if i never saw them again. which is why i’m proship.
nine times out of ten, if i see that kind of ship brought up on my dash, it’s because i was following an anti without realizing it, and they brought it up unprompted and untagged, to talk about how bad it is that they exist. they are the ones putting that kind of content in front of my face and making it harder to avoid.
the thing about people who ship those ships is that they’re generally very aware that not everyone wants to see that kind of content, and so they tag it. they make sideblogs to talk about it. they don’t go out of their way to shove it in people’s faces. that means i, and everyone else who doesn’t like it, can avoid it.
what antis want is for it to not exist at all. they want the tags to be purged and blocked, and for anyone who uses those tags to have their accounts deleted. and sure, that might get rid of some of it, but do you know what would happen to the rest? it would stop being tagged. people who don’t want to see it wouldn’t have the tools to avoid it. this isn’t just a hypothetical, that’s what’s happened any time a fan space has tried to do that.
that’s not even getting into the rabbit hole of what should be banned and what shouldn’t. obviously any content that depicts real children or real life abuse shouldn’t exist and shouldn’t be allowed to be posted, but basically any platform that people use already enforces those policies, and there’s not much of a slippery slope to go down there. if it involves real living breathing people being abused, it’s bad. end of discussion.
but the same can’t be said for fiction. ask ten antis for a specific list of all the content that should be banned, and you’ll get ten different answers. what about kink? what about roleplay? what about horror and murder and anything that involves fictional characters being graphically tortured? what about people using art to process terrible things that have happened to them? what about art that uses dark themes as a horror element? if you just want to ban anything questionable to anyone, that’s the line of thinking that gets any mention of lgbt existence banned. and again, this isn’t just a hypothetical, this has happened before, and that’s generally where it leads.
i know, from personal experience, that antis do, in fact, send harassment to people just for shipping things they don’t like. i’ve gotten accused of absolutely vile shit for shipping two fictional characters who were both consenting adults. i’ve seen ship wars turn into moral battlegrounds, over ships that an average person wouldn’t bat an eye at.
the thing about “romanticization” is a whole other can of worms. the anti logic goes like this: if someone sees something (even if it’s very obviously fictional) in a positive light enough times, they will start thinking it’s okay in real life, and go on to hurt real people. the problem with that is that it’s just. blatantly untrue.
if it were true every horror movie fan would be a serial killer, every person that studies dark media would be an unhinged psychopath, and everyone who is into ddlg would be a pedophile. but they’re not. they just aren’t. people have directed movies just as fucked up as the darkest shit on ao3, and are still capable of being normal human beings who know right from wrong in real life.
even if someone is that impressionable, scrubbing away the existence of every piece of questionable content isn’t going to solve their problem, because they’re still going to be vulnerable to con men, scams, and cultists. the only thing that would actually materially help someone like that is developing their own morals and critical thinking.
children are also more impressionable, and there’s a lot of content that’s not suitable for them, but that doesn’t mean that content shouldn’t exist. it just means that they should stick to spaces designed for them (which most social media sites, tumblr included, are not) or, if they’re old enough to be responsible for their experience online, they, or a trusted adult in their lives, should block and filter out things that they aren’t comfortable with.
which is what everyone on the internet should be doing. it’s what i do, and it’s made the internet a much more pleasant place to be. and it’s why i sometimes worry for antis mental health, especially teenagers, because they’re being told it’s right and moral to seek out content that makes them uncomfortable and to engage with the people making it. and that’s just. really bad. it’s not good for the creators that they’re harassing obviously, but it’s also really bad for them! it’s not healthy to seek out things that make you feel bad, and it’s a terrible internet safety lesson to teach minors that it’s okay for them to seek out and engage with people making adult content.
individual harassment and crusading is never going to succeed at removing dark content from the internet. it just isn’t. at best you might get a small percentage of people who create that content to stop sharing it, at worst you’re just going to make people stop tagging it, and either way, you’re exposing yourself to things that make you feel bad, when you don’t have to.
if you want to materially change the type of content you see, you can. the block button is your friend, use it liberally. same with content filtering and tag blocking.
This is a tough topic that has been handled beautifully here. The people who really need to read it probably won’t, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be said. Maybe it will reach someone who is pulling their hair and rending their garments over fictional things. One can only hope.
Boosting signal
somehow instead of saying "as a treat", I've started using the phrase "for morale", as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.
and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.
I'm not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me
In response to Slate's article on the possibility having non-heteromative team in figure skating (particularly, ice dance and pairs), Oniceperspective shared a glimpse of Gabriella Papadakis (FRA) and Madison Hubbell (USA) working on their same-sex program. You can see how they switch the leading figure between them.
You can see them trying out lifts in this video.
The rest is on Instagram here:



































