doES ANYONE ELSE REALIZE THAT WE’RE LIKE, THE FIRST GENERATION ON TUMBLR

GIVE IT 10-15 YEARS AND WE’LL ALL BE GROWN UP AND AN ENTIRE NEW SET OF KIDS WILL BE ON HERE BLOGGING ABOUT COMPLETELY DIFFERENT SHOWS AND BANDS AND MOVIES AND BOOKS

THE ONLY THING THEY’LL STILL BE BLOGGING ABOUT THE SAME AS WE WERE IS DOCTOR WHO

HOPEFULLY

We’ll probably all be blogging about Sherlock season 4.

maybe

7/22/2013

Watching the new @staff and @changes on tumblr who actually listen and respond to their userbase is so bizarre to see, because I feel like I've come full circle on the site.

I joined 10ish years ago (shortly post-Reichenbach, if that dates me) and that time was still solidly in the era of David Karp. Staff communicated but were overall seen as lovingly incompetent. Everyone used Missing E to fix all the problems, and then Xkit when Missing E stopped working, but nobody thought twice about it. We mostly just joked about how often they fiddled with the shade of background blue.

I remember the sale to Yahoo, and how it took a while to notice, but the site kind of just got worse. We got ads, which everyone hated. Changes were passed down from above with little to no fanfare. But staff was still there and making some effort to reach out to users; we got some of the best April Fools jokes in that era, like Coppy and Decision 2016 that showed that someone in there knew what users liked. Features like direct messaging and rebloggable asks and stacked posts were still coming through, even if the communication with users was opaque. Bots invaded every inch of the site. And then we got the porn ban, which snapped the site like a twig.

After Verizon bought tumblr, there were a few years where staff almost seemed to vanish, or did their best to hide what they were doing. I can't even remember the last few years of April Fools jokes, if they happened at all. Ads got bigger. Changes just happened and there was no way to tell if it was intentional or glitches. If they were intentional, they seemed almost malicious. Users started talking about shadowbans and tags getting wiped out and some posts not showing up in tags or searches and user deletions happening behind the scenes. Bots got worse and worse and less was done about them. If anything went wrong, there was no confidence that reaching out to support would do a thing. Staff was spoken about in posts with the same tone as Bezos or Google, just another tech giant slowly making our lives worse for the sake of squeezing another buck out of us and then selling us to the highest bidder. If nothing else, we could be proud of squeezing the resale value out of the site for them.

I don't know exactly what happened over the last year, if it was because of the sale to Automattic or other internal changes. But all of a sudden, staff started talking to us again. And we didn't fuckin trust em an inch, and rightly so. Changes got rolled out again, and we started complaining again, because we may have no power to make any web experience better so the least we can do is go down complaining.

But the things they started changing were... stuff we wanted? We got tag viewers, timestamps, dash customization, filtering that actually worked. Most new features get toggles so you can turn it off if you don't want it. Huh, we thought, that doesn't seem right. Ideas flopped like Post+, and god did we complain. But after we did... the features... changed? Staff started testing out the ideas that the users endorsed? Like tipping posts on a per-post basis to avoid copyright issues with fanworks and an ad-free subscription model? Huh, we said.

And the final nail in the coffin was that new iOS tag-copying "feature" that we all complained about to no end... that was actually a glitch. Not some coder's whim that got passed down and we just had to deal with it forever. Sorry, staff said, we'll get that fixed right away.

Huh, we said. Huh.

Aside from being an unexpected change for tumblr, it's making me realize how weird it feels in the internet as a whole to have some transparency and communication between site developers and the userbase. When I joined tumblr, forum culture and the heyday of the early creator-run internet were fresh memories. Staff who posted like users were common, and popular demand was the actual goal of web design. But now there is no social media where the developers speak directly to the users and incorporate real feedback into the changes they make. Algorithms drive everything, moderation happens silently, and it's impossible to tell what a human has laid eyes on. Decisions are made based on what can get the most eyes on sponsored ads and drive clicks. Social media is now Big Tech, driven by Big Money Decisions and ad space.

Having a staff who talks and listens to the userbase is a direct return to tumblr's roots and also the most jarring and noticeable jump back to Classic Internet that the rest of social media has long since abandoned.

this year's tumblr april fools is maybe the best they've ever done, alongside coppy (rip)

h my god

look, millenial sense of humour aside, what other website in 2022 puts this much genuine effort into doing something weird and absurdist just for fun? every other social media site is run by silicon valley freaks who have never had real human friends or laughed off-cue and their users are not 'people' to 'entertain' so much as they are 'metrics' not worth 'disrupting'. every blog is centralised around a service framework or else trying to be a serious news outlet. 10 the only fandom sites that still exist are behemoths like AO3 who will be torn to shreds if they step out of line because their userbase is every fandom on earth bc 20 goto 10. the internet sucks, nobody has fun any more, everyone is on their hustle full time and fun has been professionalised. please pay for adless tumblr because nobody else lets you spawn crabs. im begging you.

Somewhere in my area there is a couple that met here on Tumblr. One of them thought that moment was worth commemorating with a custom star chart poster. The other person… did not. I desperately want to know more about this story.

(@ Goodwill)

😭

I always love coming back here because every other social media platform is too loud

And they’re all telling me how to boost post interactions and gain 10k followers a day. Here we just share stuff with each other like little trash goblins showing each other bottle caps and interesting bits of garbage. I love it.

This. :)

Is anyone else more entertained than they should be by the vintage 1990′s straight-to-DVD, home shopping network aesthetic of the pinned ad for “Tumblr Ad-Free Browsing”?

Staff 1: “We should advertise this.”

Staff 2: “I can put together something slick and modern.”

Staff 1: “Are you new here? They’d hate that with the power of a thousand suns. No, our only options are retro tackiness or off-the-wall bonkers.”

Staff 2: “I don’t have any ideas for bonkers.”

Staff 1: “Retro it is.”

It’s gone!

Good thing I saved a copy for posterity.

All that’s missing is “Now with links!!!”