Cool and actually useful features @staff could’ve given us from their @engineering blog’s hacker day/week/month posts that I think would’ve been very welcomed by the user base instead of making the site look more like twitter among other decisions I find questionable:
Caption Translator
User Account Switcher
Collections*
Interacting as a Sideblog
Post Only to a Tagged Page**
* I think the way they showed collections would not have gone over well, but the idea of saving posts into a collection that lets you find those posts easier rather than scrolling through likes/drafts I do really like. Having the collections page only show once you made one so that it’s optional and being able to access it through the drop down account menu and an icon on your blog would be nice. Collections is a feature I can get behind if presented well.
** A post that is set to only show in the tag will not show on your dash, blog, or your follower’s dash. I’m pretty much behind this, however, I do think they should still show on op’s blog since it’s a post op made. But for posts where you don’t want to bother all your followers with and is meant for people who are interacting with the tags you’re adding is very useful. I would’ve definitely found it very useful during summer2020 at least...
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To be clear, unless staff trips over the trail of extension cords keeping the servers running, Tumblr likely isn't going anywhere any time soon.
What the info we've seen suggests is that updates are going to slow down, maintenance is maybe going to get a little shaky, and we're going to see more glitches as time goes on and the remaining staff gets further behind their workload.
Is this a good thing? No, absolutely not.
Should you be panicking, jumping overboard, running for the hills, etc? Also no.
So what does it mean?
Well, for myself and several other creatives you all saw tagged in that post, it means we're looking around trying to figure out what to do in the long run. We're not running for the lifeboats. We're just eyeing the iceberg in the distance and getting our shit together in the event that the worst comes to pass.
Speaking for myself, I intend to crawl through the walls of Tumblr until they pry me out of the air vents armed with a broom and oven mitts. I'm not going anywhere until the lights go out, and even then, I'll be chewing on the wires.
But that doesn't mean I'm not looking around for somewhere to land when the time comes.
Myself and several others are not panicking about this, but we are trying to be organized about it.
I'm just old enough to remember when fandom websites being nuked overnight was a very real thing. You'd go to bed one night and wake up the next day to find friends you'd known for years were just gone with no means of contacting them because the site you'd been using got wiped. Entire collections of fandom history were just destroyed in the blink of an eye.
We don't want that again. And the good news is, we have time. We have time to back up our shit, time to swap contact info with our friends, and time to find a new place to exist within our communities while also staying here because Tumblr ain't dead yet.
She's just slowly going to wind down over time.
Unless, of course, they trip over the cables. Then we're fucked.
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Your posts are in an AI model
and then Tumblr decided to sell them to AI models.
Now, don't get me wrong, tumblr selling out the users to AI companies is bad, yes, they shouldn't do that. It sucks.
but don't lets get this confused: your posts were already in there. Tumblr selling them is about tumblr making some money and about the AI models having more exhaustive post collections. It's not about your posts being in an AI model, vs not being in one. That battle has already been lost.
Can you find your post on google? Then it's almost certainly in an AI model already. Think about it: These AI sites showed up before all the sites were making deals to sell their users' content, right? How do you think they built them in the first place?
They scraped the posts. Just like google and bing and such do when they build their search indexes.
It's a fundamental part of how the open web works: you want your posts on tumblr to be visible to users, right? You want them to be readable?* Like, look how much stuff broke when twitter changed their whole read-while-not-logged-in policy, ruining a bunch of thread links/NSFW links. And if it's visible, it's scrapable. That's what the AI models were built on.
I've done website scraping before (not for AI models, of course. I was doing search engines and website archival), this is just how it works. You hire a few relatively smart CS graduates and tell them "build me a scraper that'll give us a bunch of tumblr posts" and they go off for a month or two and come back with a database of a few billion posts, and you stuff that into your AI model. That's how they got all the deviantart and flickr and twitter and pinterest and so on posts. They didn't pay for them: they just took them.
They only ever pay for this shit because either:
they fucked up in such a way that the site might be able to sue them for taking rather than paying
They can buy them cheaper than they can finish taking them. Maybe they'd need to pay the CS grads for an extra month? well, that might be more expensive than just throwing the site a couple hundred thousand bucks.
ANYWAY: my point is, don't treat this "oh no tumblr is selling our posts to AI" like it's a big thing that might happen and it would be bad to happen. Yes, it's bad, tumblr shouldn't do this, this'll let AI models get continual updates of content for far easier than just scraping them would be, tumblr betrayed user trust, and so on...
but realistically, this is not a black and white matter of "if only tumblr didn't do this, then we'd be safe from AI models!"
Nope. We already lost that battle. I'm sorry, and it does suck, but that's just how it is. The avalanche has already started, it's too late for the pebbles to vote.
* I'm assuming here that you don't run a private blog that's set to only followers or something. You'd be safer then, of course, but you're not really my target audience for this rant
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Danny is a house husband.
That's it, that's all it is.
As the years went on. Danny retired from being a superhero. There was no need for Phantom when the GIW were dealt with and all the ghosts were under control.
Now what's left for him to do but to just sit back, relax, and finally be able to live his life.
Sam and Tucker on the other hand....
Well, they had plenty of pent up rage, wits, and chaos inside their mind to become villains.
But they had one rule.
Never bring work home and to never involve Danny in any of their supervillain business.
Okay that's technically two rules, but they're kind of synonymous especially since Danny has been taking care of their house while also entertaining himself with trying new hobbies.
Tucker and Sam both make sure that they never bring any of their villainy home to Danny, because all they want is for Danny to enjoy his happy hero retirement.
And Danny in turn, doesn't bat an eye when watching the news and seeing that there were magical plants that were attacking sites that oil companies were digging or that somehow Lex Luthor had lost five hundred million dollars and had somehow leaked records showing he was building weapons of mass destruction.
He also doesn't bat an eye when he sees that Tucker had brought home a telescope that definitely looks like it came from some fancy lab because hey, Tucker was making him an observatory so he can look at the stars and planets. While also how they were able to make a great gaming pc with computer parts that are definitely not sold in stores, because hey at least the newest update of Doomed wasn't lagging.
Or that Sam comes home with various plants and animals that are definitely not from planet earth, but hey the three headed wolf-lizard-eagle- hybrid thing (that Danny has affectionately named Fluffy) is pretty great at keeping the pests away from his vegetable garden and likes to eat any of Danny's new food creations and is a great playmate for Cujo.
So you can imagine how the Justice League thinks when dealing with the pair of new villains: Upload (Tucker) and Sam (I could not think of a villain name that would suit her, so it's up to you what you think her villain name would be)
And how they were currently wreaking havoc in the city either by cyber warfare with robots or by magic plant monster or a Frankenstein of both approaches. The heroes had all evacuated the civilians from the battle zone and are currently fighting a losing battle. When they've been effectively captured and restrained by the two. Right before the villains could go into a monologue, they hear a person clearing their throat.
Everybody looks to see a 25 year old man wearing a sweater vest (he made it himself, thank you very much) currently holding onto the leash of a giant glowing green dog and some kind of giant animal hybrid. The man's arms were crossed and was currently not sporting a very happy look on his face.
Tucker and Sam (looking at Danny with hesitant smiles): Hi honey.
Danny (frowning): you missed our anniversary dinner.
Tucker and Sam both pale as they quickly realized what the date and time was.
The league all watch as Sam and Tucker immediately start apologizing to the man that just walked into a battle zone.
Danny (still frowning): Hmph! I guess since you two didn't want dinner you can go back to your little fight. Don't expect me to make you any lunches for the next month, and since you two are having so much fun here, you'll be sleeping by yourselves for the next couple weeks.
The league all watch as they were let go as Sam and Tucker yell as they run after Danny yelling apologies as he was walking away from them.
This is not the last they see of Danny.
When Danny is displeased with either of his partners, he'll invite a hero over to have lunch of afternoon tea.
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lmao tumblr letting their users choose whether or not they want their likes to be public but then pulling a twitter 2.0 and showing your likes on your followers’ dashboards and specially saying who liked the posts in their new update, without the users’ consent or a way to turn it off, is actually pretty insane.
like how many times to we — the users — have to tell them we don’t want tumblr to be like any other social media platforms and that tumblr’s being different than twitter, instagram, tiktok is actually what makes us stay on this silly little site.
respectfully @staff you’re driving your users away. stop trying to “fix” things that are good and don’t need to be fixed. we want tumblr to be tumblr. we don’t want the site to be twitter or instagram 2.0
edit: so at first I was under the impression that you could turn off the “posts liked by blogs you follow” in your dashboard preferences, but couldn’t control how your own likes showed up on the dashboards of your followers, after I saw several posts claiming that this was the case. — however, now I think I might be wrong and it thankfully does look like as long as you have your likes set to private, they will stay private and will not be showing up on your followers’ dashboards. apologize for any misunderstanding this may have caused.
* from my understanding now, you can choose not to see other people’s likes by going to your dashboard preferences in the settings and turning off the “posts liked by blogs you follow” option, and if you have your own likes set to private, they won’t be showing up on your followers’ dashboards.
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