the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.

capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.

now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.

and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.

and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.

and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".

it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"

Was going to write this as a reply to something but realized it needed its own post.

The tl;dr is that, from the looks of it, Automattic absolutely has every intention of turning Tumblr into a marketing media platform.

I work for a marketing company. I build websites.

Specifically, I build websites on Wordpress.org, which is operated by the Wordpress Foundation.

The Wordpress Foundation is the non-profit counterpart to the for-profit company Automattic.

Automattic, as we know, is the company that currently owns Tumblr.

Now, the thing about Wordpress.org (not to be confused with Wordpress.com) is that it's very, VERY popular amongst small businesses. Not only can you build a fully-customizable website with relative ease, you can also add an online shop using another Automattic product: Woocommerce.

Not too long ago, I noticed a new feature was added to Woocommerce: A button next to each Woocommerce product which allows you to Blaze them to Tumblr right from the comfort of your dashboard:

This is what I get when I click that little "Blaze" button...

As someone who understands these tools, I understand the potential implications of these features:

The Blaze feature is basically an up-and-coming ad campaign system that's directly integrated with Woocommerce websites, which I think is the first ad marketing system of its kind. You don't have to log into a social media account to advertise your products, use a second-party integration, or even pay another service to manage your social media ads. It's all baked right into your business's website.

THIS is their planned money-maker, folks, not the rainbow checkmarks or crab armies. And the reason why Automattic would do this kind of thing is simple: Businesses are wealthier than individuals. By implementing a B2B service, Automattic can make more money off of Tumblr than user subscriptions and shoelaces will ever provide.

It's all the same song and dance. Businesses can now shove more ads into your face in a new, convenient fashion. It'll be ads that don't look like ads disguised amongst ads that do look like ads, just like it is with Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and literally every other marketing media service that calls itself a "social" media.

(Tumblr's new video feature? My guess is that it's there to prepare for video-format Blaze campaigns. Influencer-style videos are the only kind of ad format Gen-Z is receptive to, which is why you're suddenly seeing videos on every platform.)

All they really gotta do now is make Tumblr look appealing to the normies so they can draw in a userbase that isn't trying to escape the onslaught of commercialism that plagues other sites.

Tumblr is one of the last true social medias we have; a place where content is made purely for the sake of talking about it. But given the writing on the wall...I doubt it'll stay that way.

a fun thing about being a tumblr user since 2009 is that ive seen this site go through so many distinct eras, it's fucking wild. i was here when this place was just for blogging and photography, 2010s hipster central, and then it was nothing but memes and rage comics, band photos, then fandoms and ask blogs, phan, bronies, homestuck, the fucking onceler for some reason?? self-discovering teens and just as many self-righteous ones who would tell you to kill yourself if you shipped the wrong thing. then the porn ban happens and almost everyone jumps ship to twitter, and everyone left here is just chill. it was seriously so weird to come here the day after and see maybe like 90% of my dash just gone. and over time people trickle back in, looking for a slice of low-stakes social media away from doomscrolling and People You May Know. of course then musk buys twitter and a bunch of people flood back in looking for some sanctuary. and meanwhile through all this, this place is just here, doing it's own thing, taking the shape of whatever the current times call for. say what you like about tumblr but through all its changes of ownership, site cultures and userbase sizes, it really is one of the last social media experiences that feels like it's in service to you, not the other way around. if they could just let me look at dick on the timeline again it really would be perfect

YOU THERE!!!!!! TUMBLR USER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Are YOU tired of how Tumblr treats trans people, particularly transwomen and transfemmes? Are YOU tired of how Tumblr treats people of color, particularly black folks? Are YOU tired of fandom trying to police the madeup bullshit you like to draw, write, or read about? Are YOU tired of all this fucking AI bullshit? Are YOU looking for a new online home to settle in?

Consider Pillowfort.social!

I’m not going to go into the nitty-gritty of how Pillowfort functions, because others have talked about that and explained it much better than I can (I recommend reading @/vergesm’s post here for a more general Pillowfort overview). What I’m going to do is explain what I, personally, get out of Pillowfort and why I enjoy it.

To preface, I’m not being paid to make this post or promote Pillowfort or anything. I wouldn’t think that needs to be said, but people make things up sometimes so idk. I’m writing pro-Pillowfort propaganda because I genuinely like the place and want to see it thrive. If you want to take a look at my own fort and get a feel for the place, you can do so here.

So with that out of the way – let’s talk about it!

Pillowfort is quite a bit like Tumblr, in that it’s a blogging platform, but it’s got a few things that make it better than this hellsite imo. For one thing, you can post NSFW content there. Although I don’t draw much explicit stuff, it’s nice to be able to post art there without worrying I’ll get shadowbanned for a picture that’s just a lil too suggestive. It's nice to know that the option is there. Honestly, it’s freeing not to have to worry about that shit. And it’s also really cool that there’s a built-in system for marking certain posts as NSFW, because as well as being able to mark your own posts as NSFW, you can choose whether you want to see other people's posts marked as NSFW. And for minors, the ability to see NSFW content is automatically turned off. Pillowfort’s got a really good system for both allowing NSFW content and keeping it away from people who don’t want to see it. I really like that flexibility, and how that flexibility isn't detrimental to the users.

And speaking of being able to see or not see certain content, the content filtering is pretty solid. You’re able to block tags and even words in the body of a post, and like I said, you can control whether you want to see posts marked as NSFW. You can even control who sees your own posts! There’s blocking users, of course, but you can limit who sees your own posts even further than that. You can make them visible to anyone, visible only to logged in Pillowfort users, visible only to your followers or mutuals, or hell, even visible to you alone!! It’s cool to have that level of control, and I find it reassuring to know I have those options.

Another big appeal of Pillowfort, for me, is the userbase’s strong “don’t like don’t read” policy. A lot of the people there operate under the mindset of “as long as it’s fictional, whatever dude. I don’t have to like it, but you do you." There are still dipshits, of course, but it’s WAY better than the insane purity culture that’s developed here. I don’t have to worry about some wannabe-conservatives telling me I’m just as bad as Ted Bundy for [checks notes] sexualizing Michael Myers or some shit. Plus, this general userbase mindset is backed up by actual site policy! I’ve heard that Pillowfort is very swift in responding to reports of harassment – whether it’s fandom-based harassment or bigotry. I haven’t had any experience with this personally (and hopefully it’ll stay that way), but I’ve heard good things about it, and it makes me feel more comfortable being there.

Also, did I mention Pillowfort has an explicit anti-AI policy? AI generated images and writing are banned on the website, and staff made this decision once its userbase and community made it clear that they wouldn’t welcome that sort of shit. And GOD, does it make me feel so fucking good as a writer and artist to know that.

And that’s another thing – Pillowfort staff actually fucking listens to its userbase. The website is crowd-funded and relies on subscriptions and monthly donations to keep things running. And because it relies on its community, it relies on keeping the community happy. So complaints, bug reports, suggestions and alterations and things the users would like to see on the site – it’s all taken pretty seriously. And again, it’s just really nice to know that the staff of the place actually give a shit and are looking out for its community rather than trying to suck the dick of the biggest investor.

Really, the only problem I have with Pillowfort is the fact that it’s a bit small. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because the people there are lovely. But since a lot of people aren’t happy with Tumblr, and haven’t been happy with Tumblr for some time, I thought I’d just ask you guys – maybe consider it. Consider making a Pillowfort account. Consider making your own little fort, stringing up some colored lights and cool art and making yourself cozy. Consider offering some money, if you can spare it, because it’s genuinely a really cool place that I want to spend more time in and see prosper.

So far, I’ve had a lovely time there. It’s cozy and friendly and it feels like one of the few places where a queer artist like me is actually welcome. And I think a lot of Tumblr users might really like it too.

I hope to see you there! 💜

I feel like we're dealing with a bit of a catch-22 here.

On the one hand, I don't want to be buying tumblr merch and premium options to REWARD the garbage decisions they're making right now, and I know enough about how upper management at tech companies operates to know that they WILL see an influx of money right now as basically saying either "ohhhh, so they LIKE these changes" - or, if they actually listen to the staff members fielding feedback, "ohhhh, so THREATENING to make the user experience worse gets us money!"

On top of which, I don't want to encourage an OVERLY friendly relationship between the company and its userbase. Tumblr may be...by FAR the best we've got at its scale, despite the fact that they literally seem to be trying to hide that fact where they're not threatening to change it outright, but they are still a company. They're still inclined to make shitty decisions and lose touch with the userbase in the interest of Company Bullshit.

On the other hand...if we DON'T try to get them to at least break even, we're going to lose the site eventually, and possibly have some REALLY heinous shit go down in its death throes. Definitely not today or tomorrow. Maybe not for many years; it's hobbled along on life support via changing hands for many years already. But it will happen. They can fake it for a significant time if there's enough demand, enough hope - tumblr's not the only one pulling it off - but a company CAN'T go on forever when it's hemorrhaging money. Money doesn't become a nonissue when it's not YOUR paycheck.

I'm sick of the illusion that the internet is an immaterial, intangible thing...except when we're criticizing mining and energy usage and basically implying it shouldn't EXIST. It's not just a fake thing that exists in our phones and computers and the LITERAL ATMOSPHERIC clouds. Servers cost money to buy or rent, even when the software running on them is a buggy mess. Staff and contractors cost money to pay, even when the skeleton crew your company has is laughably insufficient for the scope of its services - we want them to expand staff to respond to tickets and improve their moderation system faster, well, with what money?? You want these improvements made with whose man-hours?? I wholeheartedly agree with most of the userbase that this Twitter-knockoff layout and some of their other stupid ideas lately are a huge waste of the ones they're paying for, but that doesn't mean they can redirect 1,000 man-hours from an ill-advised project and magically get a 10,000 man-hour project done!

Consider the moderation system. It's bad! It's biased! We've proven this! It's also mostly automated. What are our potential solutions here?

Go back to fully manual: Puts real human people through a PTSD meat grinder. For this to be done even REMOTELY ethically demands hazard pay, short hours, and the best mental health care coverage money can buy. Where are these human moderators getting paid from, let alone if they're going to be paid fairly?

Modify the software: ...they're already trying; retraining a whole system is easier said than done, especially in the very likely event that posts that are taken down by report-brigading innocuous content are feeding BACK into the system as "This Is What A Bad Post Looks Like." I'd love it if they could do it better and faster - but again, with what money?

Train their OWN software from the ground up: Requires EXPERT software engineers to build the framework AND a large human moderation crew in the short term to hit that "good post"/"bad post" button all day; refer to the problems with fully manual moderation. No one is quite sure how to bulletproof a moderation system against report-brigading in a way that won't ALSO deprioritize reports against content so heinous that everyone who sees it reports it. Once again - where is the money for all this labor coming from?

Every option is human labor that must be paid for. Every single possibility.

Anything else that needs doing? Fixing search? Human labor - money. Improving the bot filters to ban more bots and fewer real people? Humans have to do that - needs money!

So the money-seeking WILL continue until they're breaking even or better, or the site shuts down completely. Those are the two options. You cannot anti-capitalist Theory your way out of them. You can have your grand ideas for how things will work in a healthier, restructured economy, but that's not the point we're at. For now? Operating at a deficit = enshittification or shutdown. Those are the options. There is no third one. The level of hostility I see from some users against the very concept of tumblr BREAKING EVEN is absolutely absurd and completely detached from reality.

But what's the conclusion? Where do we go from here? Fuck, man, I have no fucking idea.

little (big) announcement

Well, looks like Tumblr has taken the turn to sell data to Midjourney.

According to my archive, I've been in here for 6 or so years. I've stuck with this site for a long time, and believe it or not I'd call this hellsite a net positive for my life. I never intended to leave, even when Tumblr was boiled down to its skeleton crew. I thought I'd go out with the whole site when the servers rotted away. I've heard rumors that the CEO was taking a gander at AI but I never thought it'd pull through since the Tumblr userbase is vocally anti-AI. And, lo and behold, they slipped it as an opt-out thing into the settings very casually.

I want to hold out hope that the resulting backlash will urge Tumblr's CEO (as I don't blame most of the staff for this) to back out, but the trust has been damaged greatly over the past few months.

I do not want my art or writing or anything to be used to feed AI. As for my art, I am hesitant to keep posting here. I don't know what I'm waiting for. But if that nebulous reckoning of the end times comes, I will log out. I think I'm too emotionally attached to delete my account.

I have a Bluesky account which I am thinking of wholly migrating to. That feels weird to say; I never thought I'd make a social media account anywhere else. I made a lot of friends on Tumblr (who I am connected to via Discord and not strictly here, thankfully), and will be hunting for people I follow on BSKY as well.

I know, inevitably, not everyone will migrate to BSKY. Some people will choose Cohost (I did make an account there, but so few people I know here go there, it's not my first choice) or Dreamwidth as their new platforms of choice. But for those who are moving to Bluesky, I hope to find them.

I really don't want to leave Tumblr. Its culture and UI is truly one of a kind and is the biggest reason I've stayed. I don't want to wholly abandon ship just yet; maybe I'm too sentimental and we're already past the point of no return. I'll still be here, even if for a little while.

I'll be making this my new pinned for the foreseeable future, so let's get all this out of the way. Here's where I lurk:

Tumblr (Main) (here!)

Tumblr (Art Blog)

Bluesky (Main)

Bluesky (Art Blog)

Cohost (Main) (most likely to collect dust)

Archive of Our Own (writing only)

Neocities (as a side project, I suppose)

It's been fun. May we all trip over our shoelaces on our way out the door. o7

listened to a podcast from tumblr ceo matt mullenweg abt his plans for tumblr and such and wrote down some quotes i found Interesting . (some are not word for word bc auditory processing + memory etc but i tried to stick to what he said as much as i could)

(on being ceo of a social network) "it is as hard as being the leader of a country"

"it needs to do a good job at showing you things you want to see- so both the people you follow but maybe also exposing you to new things you don't know about yet"

"people want their own home on the web, they want it to be something reflects them, not the needs of an advertiser"

"how do we make this amazing and really give the tumblr community what they deserve, and also give the world an alternative from these closed-proprietary advertisement-driven social networks?"

"you can have custom themes, you can customize it every little bit .. what we wanna do is making it be the best of both worlds, giving you the full customization that u currently have on tumblr, that u also have on wordpress, but still provide a streamlined interface, particularly on mobile ... you kind of move in and out of that full customization"

"that's ultimately what we're about, is giving power in the hands of users"

"what people really want isnt what they say they want ... its kind of like expressed preferences vs stated preferences ... thats probably why [other social medias] dont give u total control over ur algorithm"

"i want to have a path where you can start with, call it 'just' a tumblr ... but if you want to turn that into an e-commerce store, or customize it in a different way, or build a newsletter, or a mailing list, or create a membership site- these are all things that are supported by wordpress today"

"tumblr's userbase are primarily young .. more women than men which isnt common in technology .. its a very safe place and vibrant community for lgbt+, i think its over a quarter of the userbase.. kind of a place for art and artists"

"how do we make that a path to the wordpress open source community ... excited about ..bringing a younger demographic into wordpress"

"[the amount of new users from twitter/reddit are] less than you would think in the long term"

(to reddit/twt migrants) "give us feedback! what do you miss from the old thing when you move over?"

"i'd definitely like it to be as big as twitter or instagram"

"for tumblr for example i think [AI] could make our developers a lot more productive, their coding could be checked/tested by ai, .. that'll allow us to do a lot more .. maybe our pace of development could increase."

"ai can be a huge help in assisting on moderation, if it could help flag things before people even report them, that someone could look at and review."

"the algorithm [for the feed/dashboard] is a form of ai- its really machine learning, people use the terms interchangeably- if we could make the feed a lot better, we could tweak it and really learn the things u want to see and the people u want to follow"

"it could provide some really cool tools, when u think of the generative ai stuff, whether its dall-e or midjourney. so much of what people do on tumblr is expressing art and creativity, and theres some people who are resistant to this, but im actually hearing far more artists that are like 'wow! this is another tool in my toolbox!' its not just like using it instead of doing ur work, it's helping with the first draft, or helping u come up with new ideas, or maybe accelerating part of a workflow. so i see it like a new type of paintbrush, or new colors they can use. they see it as a new way to express their creativity. to me that's also the future. .. just like any other tool, like when we moved from typewriters to word processors."

(asked if generative AI worries him) "bad actors using ai to do more bad things .. that's definitely smth that's gonna happen, that's true with any new technology. if u rob a bank before, u used to have to get away on a horse, now you can get away on a car [laugh]. so like, think of it like that. we don't say "oh, banks are gonna be robbed so much more cuz now people can drive away faster". the good guys have cars too, so the police have cars .. it becomes something that is part of society .. there's more good people than bad people"

In response to staff's recent post concerning AI and how we now have to opt out of our work being scraped by AI on here:

Staff y'all really decided THIS would be a good time to announce this? While your userbase is already upset because your transmisogynist CEO is having a public meltdown online (instead of, you know, getting a PR team to address users' concerns, at the very least)?

I've supported Tumblr financially before. I've purchased checkmarks. I've purchased ad-free browsing and then disabled it, because I genuinely think this website has been a great alternative to other shitty social networks in the past, and could absolutely continue being that great alternative if given the chance by the people who make these sorts of decisions - but for all your talk about how you want to make Tumblr better and continue improving on it, you sure do seem determined to run it into the ground. Including in terms of financial viability, because I have SEEN smaller sites like Pillowfort run successful fundraisers and manage to stay afloat despite userbases a fraction of the size of yours, because your userbase feels exploited, used, and disrespected by you.

Your lack of financial viability and the userbase's contempt towards staff is a symptom of how you treat them. And if you don't get your act together soon, there is only so long people are willing to spend on a platform that seems to actively go out of its way at every opportunity to make choices that they are CLEARLY not on board with.

Anyways, join Pillowfort, Cohost, and/or InkBlot Art (InkBlot and Pillowfort explicitly do not allow AI art, idk if Cohost does but I know the company that runs it put out a very strongly-worded manifesto criticizing NFTs which did state that trying to promote those on Cohost was not allowed, and from their other stances on the current state of the software industry, I'm guessing they'd probably be against AI art). All of these platforms are great alternatives to Tumblr (InkBlot is more of a DeviantArt alternative, but still), especially for creative folks, and Cohost allows customizing your posts with CSS (like. a lot. You could make a post look like a Discord chat log if you wanted, that's how customizable it is.). InkBlot Art is QTPOC-owned. All of these platforms allow NSFW, have filters to allow you to control what you see on your dashboard, and Cohost allows you to make multiple pages (like sideblogs), follow from pages that aren't your main page, and switch your main page at any time.

ooooh my gods okay look i have nothing against the old dollieguts art style but recently the dollkin angelkin yamikawaii etc tags have been flooded with people who are just using that art style and its just ...

as an artist ? inspiration is okay but please make it your own , its so obvious that youre trying to perfectly recreate the old look and i dont even think that artist would want that from what i know

and as a nonhuman ? STAY OUT OF THE TAGS ? PLEASE ?? i know thats the feel you want for your art but thats not how its being seen . ive seen a few posts about this too so i know im not the only one whos upset by this ..... the " creepy cute " tags and things similar to that are more your thing with this kind of art if thats really what you want . angelkin and dollkin etc have very specific vibes and its largely not anything similar to the art youre posting , and its only starting to bother us ..... for your sake and ours , please leave the tags

and just as someone being picky and a bit rude ? tagspamming is against tos . you really need to look into the tags and the culture around them before using them because if you use them wrong people arent gonna be happy . and i know tumblr has a really pessimistic userbase and i dont want anyone getting bullied or harrassed for trying to show their art

find or make your own tags and let us have ours .

Ruminations on Social Media Platforms

Since Tumblr has decided that it Needs to Make Money and the Only Way to Make Money is to turn all users into Mindless Servants of the Algorithm, I've been thinking a lot about social media platforms.

Tbh, I'm always thinking a lot about social media platforms, it's kind of part of my field of scholarly endeavor, if you will. But I think a lot about them not in the abstract but as an active user of many of them. And Tumblr is my faaaavorite. And of course so much of what makes Tumblr my favorite is what makes it "unprofitable" or whatever. I put these words in quotes because the definition of "unprofitable" is an extremely narrow one in our capitalist society. Could a website that has allowed many people to form communities / relationships / friendships / connections with people they would otherwise never have met in ways that have vastly improved their lives really be considered unprofitable, ever? Could a website that gives people any moments of pleasure or joy or delight be considered unprofitable? Could a website that sometimes makes you think or at least give you pause be considered unprofitable?

Yeah, it's also a website that's, you know, a hellsite, but, like, it's on the internet and it's made up of people, c'est la vie.

I left Twitter when the Elon Musk thing went down, partly because in those days he was actively taunting Twitter's userbase and it felt a little like I was just on this social media platform being bullied by its owner? Idk, I didn't like it, so I decided to take a break until things calmed down. I really thought he'd get bored and sell it, so kudos to Elon Musk for not doing that. But, anyway, sometimes I think about going back to Twitter. I miss my friends there, I miss knowing what they're up to. Twitter was actually, let's face it, terrible for keeping up with people but Tweetdeck, where you could put people in chronological order and better organize things, was great for it! (As usual, the only way to make the social media platform usable was to use it in a way it wished you wouldn't.)

But I've been going back to Twitter recently to find Tourdust content and I was reminded that Twitter is just...awful. Like, it is almost impossible to have an encounter with Twitter that doesn't drag you down a rabbit hole of terrible discourse of people being awful. I fully admit this is my own fault, for clicking on things I know are going to upset me, but this is why it's better for me just to be off Twitter entirely. Twitter's functionality makes it way too easy to trace and follow outrage, and then you end up just hate-clicking deeper and deeper into these spirals. My mental health is much happier for having given up Twitter, because I'm not a strong enough person not to get sucked into all the unhealthy snippiness of the place.

The reason I've been on Twitter looking for Tourdust updates is precisely because it's better-organized than Tumblr, easier to find the stuff you want to find (in among all the other stuff you wish you wouldn't find, of course). So Tumblr's poor searchability is why I was driven to Twitter, BUT I've come to the conclusion that in a lot of ways that is a feature and not a bug. I can see the ripples of a bunch of kerfuffles that have happened in bandom recently, they lap delicately up against my dash, but by the time they get to me they're the tiniest of waves instead of a tsunami, and if I wanted to figure out what went down, it would take me actual effort. I'm sure I could do it, of course -- it's not like it's utterly impossible -- but it's not as frictionless as figuring out on Twitter. I have to make more of an active effort to go in search of the drama, it's not just RIGHT THERE blinking at me to click on it, and that makes me better able to resist it. I am at heart a lazy person, after all.

So, like, in a way Tumblr doesn't function right, and in a way Tumblr functions beautifully. It all depends on what you're using Tumblr for. And Tumblr was always my escape platform, even when I was still active on Twitter. When I was feeling anxious or sad or upset, I would scroll my Tumblr dash and it would be mindless and soothing and endless (I follow a lot of people. This is for me the key to Tumblr, but see, it all depends on how you're using Tumblr! They don't all share my interests anymore, but I don't care. I just want to sometimes not be in the shouting match that Twitter seems to devolve into so often). And so this is why I feel like it does make sense that there should always be multiple social media platforms in the world. This idea that social media platforms seem to have that they should be the ULTIMATE ONLY ONE is so harmful. Different platforms are for different things. Chill out. (Of course, this is the conquer-the-world mentality formed by capitalism. I am really worried what's going to happen when Netflix realizes it can't keep growing subscribers indefinitely because the population of the planet is finite. Does it know this? I don't think it knows this...)

I was thinking of all this not just because of Tumblr's algorithm thing but because everyone's fussing about Threads, and like, in a way I get it. Clearly I still have a need for Twitter in my life even if I'm simultaneously aware how dysfunctional it is for me. I get that everyone's still trying to find a way to replace Twitter. But first of all, I dislike Facebook as a company so intensely, like, a lot. (I refuse to call it Meta. That's how much I dislike it lol). Second of all, the fact that people seem to think it's a good thing that Threads integrates with your Instagram, I'm just like, ......imagine behaving on Twitter exactly the same way you behave on Instagram? What??? This doesn't even computer to me lol. The same platform that wants you to post photos of your kids should be integrated with the one where people are constantly just yelling at each other over nothing???? Those seem like two completely different places to me?????

Facebook is obsessed with the idea that everyone needs to be Exactly The Same on every corner of the internet, and I just do not agree with that at all. Imagine me being the same on LinkedIn as I am on Tumblr. Like, God, what a boring world that would be!! What a boring life I would be leading!! I guess some people ARE that way, and either that is awesome that they are so fully themselves at work as to just post porn they've written, or it's that they never have any interests that aren't totally aligned with work, which just...is astonishing to me.

What I REALLY think Threads is doing -- and honestly what I think Facebook essentially wants -- is to turn all of us into some curated facsimile of ourselves. I mean, all social media does that, but if you only have one facsimile of yourself, then you never have any other aspects to explore. And if you only have one facsimile of yourself, it's probably going to be the one most designed to make yourself money. Like, isn't that what everyone wants to be doing these days? Using social media to make money? I saw people talking about Threads, and every single one of them was talking about building their brand.

So in a way I am totally sympathetic to Tumblr's problem. They're right. Social media is just a way to sell us stuff now, and if they're not selling us stuff, it's a "problem." Capitalism has finally succeeded in commodifying literally every relationship we have. Literally every single one. And we kind of just let it happen, like there was no other possible way the internet could ever have been designed but to create a handful of billionaires making money off of the fact that people want to feel connected to each other. And then taking that fact and making it all about "but what's the point of connection without making me some more billions?"

Anyway. I wish things weren't like that. Tumblr still is my favorite. Who knows what happens next. Sigh.

I'd like to recommend that anybody who would miss something about tumblr, if it vanished tomorrow, read or listen to some of Cory Doctorow's recent posts about platform enshittification and the high switching costs in the modern tech ecosystem. He's been writing with a lot of clarity and pragmatism and anticapitalist gung-ho about exactly the thing we're all facing down right now, so let me offer him as a shortcut.

Here's what I'd like to see clarified as we all work through this together: we all love it here, and we all know that it sucks. What do we love, and what sucks? And then, and this is the important bit, which parts of what we love are things that tumblr the corporate entity did, which parts are things that some specific people working for tumblr did at some point in time, and which are things that we the userbase of tumblr did while the company watched?

One of the major realizations I've gotten out of reading up on the coporate internet and enshittification has been the realization that all for-profit social media sites are selling you access to the things that other largely-unpaid users are creating and then trying to make it as annoying as possible to leave. Platforms are places that make money (or at least try) by connecting you with other people and then staying in the middle of that relationship so they still have something to monetize.

It's not just about advertising and subscription models--social media sites have all built themselves up by making it easy to join, easy to find content you like that they are not themselves making, and then making it more annoying to leave than to stay. In order to talk about this and to talk about what we actually want, as a behemoth of an internet community made up of hundreds or thousands of smaller interconnected communities, is to decouple what we've done from what the platform has done and to realize that criticizing the platform is not attacking the individual staff members working there who want to support the community tumblr accidentally built. The for-profit social media model is a kind of capitalist extraction at its very core.

And to call a spade a spade I think we all need to be better about clarifying what's tumblr the platform and what's tumblr the community, the us. That we could, potentially, replicate elsewhere.

One of the other things that Cory has pointed out that I didn't really realize because I wasn't on social media until a lot of the behemoths were already established--there was a time when you didn't necessarily have to be on the same website as somebody to be able to interact with them or see their content. This is why everybody's talking about RSS readers now. We will never get everyone to all hop ship to the same thing at the same time, but we can prioritize looking for or building places where the cost of switching is low, where the platform isn't walled off and will interoperate with the other places people are jumping ship. We can share emails and set up our own little web aggregators and try to imagine the future of the web a little differently.

I'm not jumping ship tomorrow, and I'm not trying to say that the next big thing in the internet will be successfully seamlessly free and adless, but I also still find myself bristling whenever anybody suggests that we owe Automattic our money to keep tumblr afloat. I don't trust them with my money, and they're not even the ones responsible for the shit I like here. I think it's perfectly reasonable and pragmatic for people to give them money, even to do it joyfully because of their love for tumblr as a weird little internet hole. But let me be very clear. The parts of tumblr we all love, we are the ones who did that. And we can do it again, or something like it, somewhere else. We will probably have to give up on one big walled garden that will be a 1:1 tumblr replacement. And we will lose records of the joy that once happened here. But I'm not going to let a corporation that's been here for a fraction of the time I have guilt me into giving them money to keep accessing the stuff we made because they developed new features nobody here wanted trying to make the line go up forever when tumblr was never going to break its "previous usage peaks". I'm not going to thank a corporation for being a corporation and give them more of my money hoping they'll really listen to us this time. They don't have to. They're not us.

We can simply do it again.

On this Nintendo Direct day, I'm pondering how Sony's PlayStation division went from "amazing press conference events" to "sucky State of Plays"

I know Tumblr - and indeed, even myself - tend to be pretty radically anti-capitalism these days, and for good fucking reason. But right now I'm going to write about being an unapologetic consumer of marketing hype like a fucking shill, so I just wanna warn you in advance of that.

*AHEM* Today is September 14, 2023. Nintendo Direct time let's GOOOOO!!!!

Nothing will ever again be as HYPE as E3 conference presentations were at their peak, but Nintendo Direct is the closest we get these days, and today brings us another one. I feel confident there will be causes for most of the userbase to get excited during that show. But oddly, today ALSO is bringing a State of Play that is... almost sure to disappoint.

About E3: You see, in the days of E3's peak press conferences, it's hard to argue that Sony wasn't the best at that particular style of presentation. Obviously, they had famous fumbles like 2006's meme-inducing show — but it was usually Nintendo who had the most sleep-inducing E3 shows in those days. Sony managed to pivot most successfully when E3 transitioned from "industry trade show" to "mass-marketing event," whereas Nintendo was by far the least successful at ditching that "trade show" vibe.

My point is: You look at how Sony did their thing in the mid-2010s, and like... DAMN. People STILL talk in reverent tones about those 2015 and 2016 shows, but even 2013 and 2017 were powerful presentations to sit through. PlayStation even ran their own convention where they'd do utterly kickass stage showcases of their upcoming games A SECOND TIME each year - the sadly defunct "PSX," which happened towards the end of each year during its too-brief lifespan. Those presentations were ALSO fucking fire, albeit slightly toned down from their E3 shows. Sony's PlayStation division had this game on lock, not only in how the stage itself gave a grand feeling of scale but most especially in perfectly pacing out the reveals of mass-appeal titles, hardcore-geek titles, and more niche games that still managed to hold intrigue. They knew how to slooooowly reveal a game everyone would lose their minds over. They knew how to give people a buffer space after the cheering died down and let them take in something that would somewhat intrigue, maybe, but probably be more of an obligation before the next heavy-hitter smashed down.

But let's talk about where PlayStation's presentations are *today*.

I really, really want State of Play to offer the Nintendo Direct-level hype, but... Sony just utterly fucking sucks at this game. And maybe it's because they started the "digital presentation" trend, but somehow Nintendo has gone from "probably/possibly the worst at E3 showcases" to "EASILY the BEST at digital video showcases." Nintendo knows how to do the hype-ass editing where you go from a vague introductory statement to a black screen that slowly lights up to reveal some game that most of the hardcore userbase is gonna freak out over. Yet Sony can't seem to imitate that to save their lives.

PlayStation doesn't even seem to know (or more likely, doesn't care) what their hardcore users want — usually Sony shows us just one or, extremely rarely, two games that get the geeks talking. And a number of "Uh?" vagaries that are too early to really explain/understand. And some games very, very few people will care about.

Yes, of course Nintendo ALSO tends to include games that are extremely limited in their audience, but they know how to buffer and surround those titles with things that will appeal to certain significant demographics. PlayStation? Not so much. Which is particularly strange given how EXCELLENT they were are doing precisely that on live stages during the late PS3/early PS4 era.

In fairness, Sony usually at least knows what their biggest gun is. They knew that Resident Evil 4 remake was a big reveal. They still revealed it at the wrong time in their presentation and with a lack of buildup that felt pretty amateurish, but at least they knew it was a big deal and put it in an important slot.

But do I expect great things from Sony today? Not really, no. I suppose I should be grateful that they've progressively lowered my expectations to a reasonable level; I mean, I remember some people being disappointed by their E3 2017 show because 2015 and 2016 were so incredible. At least now, they've set me up to where, if they do a decent State of Play, I really *will* be blown away.

Here's hoping they surprise me. And I hope whatever your dream for the Nintendo Direct and/or State of Play is, it comes true for you.

If i was tumblr id really lean into the whole mutual thing i mean like if u think about it this site is really the one that MADE the term mutual as its own thing 😭 like it popularized if not created it. Without tumblr mutuals we would never have “oomfs” so i would create a mutuals only tab (idk why it doesnt exist they have tabs for everything) and i would allow the option to make posts only visible to mutuals in the same menu where you can categorize a post as mature. And there would be a tiny marketing campaign but not one where its outright like We created mutuals but like thats the subtext.. bcus without it its like oh theyre trying to copy twitter circle or close friends so itd be necessary but not like a full on campaign or anything just some hype around the change. but no theyd rather make posts on desktop round?? for no reason and change the way reblogging looks? Like those tiny changes make no sense to me i get the dashboard even tho i hate it but like really bruh -__- also if they added this it would redeem them a little bit in the eyes of their userbase I think. But yeah itd be awesome.

I was gonna try to clear out a few asks today and maybe respond to some reblogs, but then I saw this post on my dash and started getting emotional because it really helped put something I've been thinking about for a while into words, even though I am neither this post's subject nor its target audience, so instead I decided to just shitpost a bit and then get my feelings out. I didn't feel comfortable reblogging the post even though I think a good bit of it is also applicable to me because I didn't want to turn this into an example of a straight white man making everything about him somehow and taking focus away from marginalized groups, but I did want to express my thoughts and feelings because they exist and matter to me.

I'm a bit less put together than I usually am when I post, so forgive me if I start to ramble or use terminology incorrectly or misinterpret aspects of LGBTQ or BDSM culture.

Ironically, despite my most recent Arknights shitpost, I'm... actually absolutely freaking terrified to express any serious desire to be sexually dominant - and I do have those desires (don't get me wrong, a strong, confident woman taking control is really hot, all you have to do is read my various shitposts to know I'm happy to sub, but the fact that I even feel like I have to qualify my desire to be dominant with "I also enjoy subbing" is the perfect illustration of my point). Men being submissive is treated as funny, like the setup to a joke about subverting typical sexual/gender roles. Men being dominant, despite what tumblr "punish me, daddy" thirstposting may lead you to believe, is often treated as threatening. Predatory.

This is especially true in the case of men who are attracted to women, at least from what I've seen. I'm very scared to approach women I'm interested in, because women in turn are scared of strange men. It's a justifiable attitude. There are more than enough shitty men out there that it makes sense for women to adopt that coldness, that wariness, as a defense mechanism. Given how much of the tumblr userbase, especially the userbase that participates in the same fandoms I do and thus might realistically be considered my audience, is female, I imagine that many of the people reading this post have had negative interactions with men who don't respect their boundaries or even treat them as human beings, and I am by no means trying to downplay that very real and reasonable fear. I'm just trying to explain how these circumstances and attitudes have shaped my own interactions with women.

The result of this need to watch out for danger is that unless you are a stunningly attractive man, women are on guard when they talk to you. I'm not a stunningly attractive man. Oh, I'm decent-looking, don't get me wrong (admittedly, my status as a proud short king is apparently a dealbreaker for many women, but there's not much I can do about that) - I'm in good shape, I bathe regularly and take adequate care of my skin and hair/facial hair, I wear clothes that fit me and aren't horribly unfashionable, I've been told I have pretty eyes and a nice voice, etc. - but I'm not the kind of heartthrob that can walk into a room and command the attention of every woman in it. I'm not a complete mess socially, but I'm not overly charismatic either, and I'm shy and awkward around people I don't know. As a result, when I approach a woman, she ain't thinking "wow, he's talking to me <3", she's thinking "who's this freaking weirdo, I hope he goes away before I have to pepper spray him".

Because of all this, I try to be nonthreatening. I try to be harmless, and that means repressing anything that might frighten the people around me, whether that be anger, personal conviction, or the desire to (consensually) pin a girl down and rail her. I'm terrified of scaring away potential partners just by having normal human desires and emotions, and it takes a mental toll.

I grew up (and still live) in Texas, which is not exactly a wellspring of progressive attitudes towards anything, much less women and relationships and sex and sexuality. I've been taught since I was very young that men, like me, should protect and alternately defer to or "care for" women (in a very patronizing and controlling sense), and in return, our reward was sex. While my immediate family was never this backwards, I can't say the same about the world around me at large, and the media I consumed (and still consume, because we've made progress but by no means conquered the issue) absolutely bombarded me with the idea that sex was not a thing women enjoyed. Sex was an activity they engaged in reluctantly, if at all, something they gave to men in exchange for whatever nebulously-defined benefits those men brought to the table, which were usually few, enumerated in derisive fashion, and far outweighed by the inherent flaws men possess for the crime of existing. I was taught that sex was a thing men enjoyed and women endured. I was taught that sex was transactional at best, a thing to be earned for good behavior because a woman would never want it for its own sake outside of procreation, and outright undesirable for half the participants at worst, forced upon women by brutish, animalistic men who could never be anything better than lust-ridden beasts.

This is without even mentioning the incredibly heavy, pervasive cultural influence of Christianity in America, and Texas in particular. I'm sure we're all well aware of how Christianity treats sex and sexuality and sexual expression, so I'm not going to go too deep into that, but rest assured the framing of sexual desire as inherently evil and sinful did plenty of damage to my psyche.

No matter how much I know that those views aren't true, that they're doing everyone a disservice, no matter how hard I fight against attitudes that have been ingrained in me since before I even knew what sex was by every bit of stupid bullshit "I hate my spouse" boomer humor I've ever encountered, they still impact my own ability to express my own wants and needs. They still make me feel like I am wrong or bad or evil for wanting to have sex with women, and especially for wanting to be an active participant or engage in sex acts where the focus is my pleasure, like having a girl go down on me.

I think that's one of the reasons I find pleasure in submission: if I'm not the one in control, I can't hurt anyone. I can't be a threat. I can't force anyone to do anything if I'm the one taking orders. If my partner is in control, if she's the one calling the shots in the bedroom, then I'm as sure as I can be that she actually wants to be here, that this isn't just a chore she wants to get over with as quickly as possible to keep me satisfied so she can go do something that actually matters to her.

There are a lot of men like me. I know a lot of them personally. While I hesitate to call myself a good person, I can say with confidence that I would never willingly hurt my partner, that I would never knowingly force her into something she didn't want to do or violate her boundaries, and there are plenty of good, considerate men who would be horrified at the thought of doing something to a girl that that girl didn't want. So we live with the fear that we're monsters, that we're rapists waiting to happen, that even showing interest in a woman means we're unsafe and have done something wrong. We end up starved of physical and emotional intimacy, and it's a very sad and lonely experience.

I think I saw a post a while back, probably before I even started this blog, about a trans man talking about how very different socialization and social intimacy was as a man, and that post also did a great job of putting how I felt into words, but I can't find it right now. Regardless, it made the point that we're lonely. Isolated. We're not encouraged to be vulnerable. Writing this post has been very difficult for me because I was taught to never show weakness, that vulnerability made me a target, made me less, rather than a person in need of and deserving of support. We're not encouraged to develop emotional intimacy with other men outside of very specific situations (competition against opposing forces). Women look at us as threats (because to do otherwise without very good reason to trust runs the risk of actively putting them in danger). We are... so very alone.

I think what people really mean by Twitter being 2015!Tumblr is that the age demographic of Tumblr has changed (based on polls, I think the age group with the biggest user size is early-mid twenties), a lot of shitstirrers left for Twitter in the Purge of 2018, a lot of guys who used Tumblr for p*rn also left in 2018 (seriously, when I interacted with a guy at uni once who wanted in my pants I mentioned Tumblr because I am socially inept and he was like, oh the website for p*rn? *smirk* and I was like no I use it for my Reylos... he was wearing a Star Wars t-shirt, it's a long story) and obviously in general anybody else who used it for that reason also left, but you know exactly what sort of demographic I'm talking about - far be it from me to unturn that stone, I understand it's a mixed issue - and then overall you've got the fact that Tumblr is slightly better than it was, but it's not perfect.

I do think platform culture influences the way people interact with each other, and there are definitely ways you can fit somebody's interaction patterns into a typology - but the style of detraction you might see in Reddit comments is exactly the stuff you see on Twitter and it is the thing you encounter on Tumblr. Because Tumblr allows you to run your own personal blog, though, you have much more control over your interaction style. If Reddit is a free debate space, Tumblr is curated by comparison.

But it's also just a human nature thing lol. There are plenty of teenagers who have growing up to do on here (I was one of them) and you see a lot more on platforms popular with teenagers (Tik Tok, Twitter, Instagram) which changes the site culture. But I also think that teenagers need their own space to be edgy and get the angst out of the way. It's just much harder to do that when the platforms they're on also encourage putting your face, name, where you live etc. on it.

I find it a fascinating question because I don't think the Internet is wholly iredeemable and clearly we get some joy out of it - the things which concern me about the Internet have parts to do with social media and some not. I want to know what it is that makes Tumblr a pleasant site to use for hobbyist purposes. I can write longform posts, and consider topics which interest me, and curate my experience - by in large the the site has a slightly more mature userbase...

I also had on my mind recently how hard it is to write posts where you have people coming to you with the worst interpretation of what you've said. I think I am starting to accept again that I can't control that and people will read into what I'm saying because that's what they're looking for. That's something which still happens on Tumblr. It's a product of the Internet medium where it's very hard to clarify something you've said the way you could mid-conversation, and the fact that generally people are quite defensive. It feels like a combative space at times.

The real point I'm sort of trying to make is that like, part of what makes Tumblr a good platform is a consequence of its medium - it's a microblogging website - and part of it is a consequence of the userbase evolving. But I also think that loyal userbase is a consequence of what it offers in contrast to what others don't. Equally, issues with Tumblr aren't necessarily specific to platform, and I'd go so far as to venture that to be true of other social media websites. It's just very apparent that there are very bad decisions being made with them killing all user goodwill and reason to use them, but the myopic eye of short-term gains does not care for long-term growth and stability. It's a pretty sobering realisation to know that most of those guys up there think you're as dumb as a rock and will just take what you get. It's not some big conspiracy. They just think their site users are dumb. It's a pretty haunting and narrow view of humanity lol. There is no honour in it and yeah, it is actually nonsensical even from the view of a capitalist philosophy, because why would you willingly kill something with great brand and cultural foothold? Why would you abandon something that makes the platform what it is? This goes for Tumblr with its changes to the dashboard from Following (seeing things your followers post) to For You (algorithm).

i weighed in on this on twitter but ill say it here too since tumblr seems to be giving it attention as well but its my personal belief that reigen should NOT have come as close as he did in that tumblr sexyman poll and sans had every right to win that poll. not only is sans arguably the poster child to tumblr sexymen (rivaled only by the onceler or komaeda) but reigen is conventionally attractive by most standards. i dont really care if you argue that hes silly looking in the original manga or that hes a pathetic guy, he is visibly conventionally attractive in every sense of the word. and it is my belief that the true nature of a tumblr sexyman is to be unconventional, as unconventional as possible. to be almost completely inhuman by every standard. think bill cipher, king dice, discord, sans. and if they are not completely inhuman than they have to be a weird looking dude, like the onceler, the warden, ect. i have my own gripes with komaeda because of this reason but this is not about him.

to me, sans had every right to win that. and im writing this as one of the many social rejects who grew up on the internet, attracted to men and deeply awkward and lonely. i was very attracted to sans when i was a kid! even moreso towards papyrus even! and i believe that the appeal of tumblr sexymen is that they speak to awkward confused preteens and teenagers bcs they are not typical to societal standards at all. they feel different and welcoming and fun. while reigen is a cool character, and very attractive and seen as beyond sexy by the majority of people online, he does not appeal bcs hes weird looking or inhuman or non conventional, he appeals bcs he is genuinely sexy. and that goes against what a true tumblr sexyman is. yes, tumblr sexymen are mostly born bcs they appeal to the general userbase of sites like tumblr, but i think he appeals for different reasons than other sexymen do. and that is why i whole heartedly and passionately believe that sans deserved that win, by a landslide.

yeah i know im taking this too seriously but idrc ive taken sillier things seriously and regardless you know deep down im right.