Alright, I think I like tumblr now.
A pun post crossed my dash, and I reblogged it with an equally bad pun in return. A couple of my followers find it funny, it's a good day for everyone.
That was on July 7th.
Virality on Reddit was entirely algorithmic. You could garner a couple crossposts, but the success of a post was entirely dependent on whether or not it hit r/all--the main page of Reddit. If your post does that, it's immediately exposed to 10x the number of people and immediately gets upvoted.
On my pun post, I get a couple reblogs. And those reblogs get a couple reblogs--nobody really adds any content to the post, it just gets a couple reblogs here and there.
There's a specific chain of reblogs that I'd like to focus on. The most popular post on this chain has about 25 reblogs on it. Half the posts have three reblogs or fewer. Five posts in this chain have just one reblog total.
But the reblog chain keeps going. And going. It breaches containment many times over. And finally, after a chain THIRTY SIX posts long, at 9:30 AM, July 22nd this morning, it hits a popular account.
99% percent of the people who have seen the post--virtually unchanged from how it left my dash--have seen it because it was curated by 36 different people. That's insane to me.
None of those 36 people know that they're part of this chain. They saw a post, reblogged it, and moved on. If any one of these people had not reblogged, the post would have a fraction of the impact it has.
And yet, after two weeks, the post has effectively hit the main page of tumblr. It was picked up, only because people liked it enough to show it to their followers. There were no algorithms necessary.
You really, truly, cannot get this on any other website.
Can I post a baguette or is it against the community guidelines?
Americans are aslept¹! Quick, post pictures of real bread²!
¹ or whatever they do on thanksgiving. It's thanksgiving over there according to all my coworkers who are on holidays today.
² Because everybody knows that there is no real yummy bread in the US.
It was Hack Week (more than just a day!) once again at Tumblr! A couple of times per year we slow down our normal work and spend a week working on whatever we want and see how far we can get with our hacks. The main star of the last Hack Week was the “Summon crab!” button, and we loved it so much that we rolled it out not just for April Fools this year, but we made it our first gift-able widget in TumblrMart!
Here are some of the projects that got made for this most recent Hack Week in September. Some of these things you may also end up seeing on the site…
Ben worked on adding our friendly server room Tumbeasts to Tumblr as a cute little digital pet. You can feed them and play with them, and they poop and get unhappy and need tending, of course. Who wouldn’t want one of these to take care of every day on Tumblr, forever and ever?
@adalpari added Tumblr Blaze as a gift-able item in TumblrMart, which would allow folks to buy Blaze "credits" for other people. Perfect for those times you see an amazing post on Tumblr that definitely deserves to be spread around, and you don’t mind throwing some money at letting that person have a chance to spread it via Blaze!
@yi5h hacked together an account switcher for the web, so that folks can log in to more than one Tumblr account and easily switch back and forth between them. Super handy if you have one account for your roleplaying character, and another for your Star Trek fandom discussions. Very useful!
On web as well, João made a version of an idea that’s floated around many times, the idea of being able to organize posts on Tumblr into "collections" that can be named and shared. I think everyone would very much enjoy having a collection called "waves" that’s just soothing GIFs of ocean waves.
As always, stay tuned to the @changes blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real!
It was Hack Day once again at Tumblr! A couple of times per year we grind everything to a halt and spend 24 hours working on whatever we want and see how far we can get with our hacks. Here are some of the projects that got made for Hack Day! Some of these things you may end up seeing on the site…
Wesley hacked together the ability to post Twitch streams to Tumblr! These can be live streams or clips.
@cyle put together a very simple webhook integration between Tumblr and Discord so you can send events about your blog to a Discord server:
@mlu, @dakotairene, and friends hacked together the ability for us to put custom Tumblr logos in the mobile apps’ dashboard tab bar, like we do on the web!
Lucila constructed an elaborate Tumblr Time Machine, so you can filter search results to a specific year:
Stay tuned to the @changes blog to see if any of these hacks make it on Tumblr for real!
@cyle is not actually human. Don't be fooled, people!
humans is an official blog run by actual people who work at tumblr. we made this blog so that we can reply to y'all in the notes of various posts.
Cyle (@cyle, he/him)
i like cheeseburgers
James (@macmanx, he/him)
Happiness Engineer at Automattic, GIF-maker on Tumblr, Trumpet in Polyhedra, and general doer of things at place.
Jas (@jezzuminah, she/her)
Artist on Tumblr, and Walking Encyclopedia. I've screamed about Chinese history at McD for 5 hours before (feel free to ignore me if that happens)
Lucila (she/her)
I refused to eat cows in the 80s, before it was cool
Emily (@emilyfowler, she/her)
lied about my age to make my first tumblr account and now I work to make sure kids don't lie about their age to make their first tumblr accounts
Bea (@key, she/her)
i like building towns for cute animals for my silly mental health and hyperfixating on things i learned about on tumblr.
Cates (@adulthoodisokay, she/her)
Secret old and extremely online. If something's trending on Tumblr I probably know why.
Jess (@theinex, she/her)
I have a dog named Kirby who loves watching the Food Network (obvi Guy Fieri). If there’s something weird, wild, but most importantly fun, happening on this Hellsite (affectionate), I’m probably one of the wizards behind the curtain.
Rocco (@photosbyrocco, he/him)
i make a lot of buttons here on tumblr dot com
Caroline (she/her)
i'm here for kpop and memes
kat (@kat, they/she)
i use [tumblr].
Elena (@reallyserious, she/her)
Recovering single-subject-Tumblr creator.
Lindsay (she/her)
Some of my favorite things are immersive podcasts (Mission to Zyxx 🛸, Seincast), gaming in VR, and learning alongside my fellow humans.
Get dazzled by the true spectrum of solar beauty. From fiery reds to cool blues, explore the vibrant hues of the Sun in a mesmerizing color order. The images used to make this gradient come from our Solar Dynamics Observatory. Taken in a variety of wavelengths, they give scientists a wealth of data about the Sun. Don't miss the total solar eclipse crossing North America on April 8, 2024. (It's the last one for 20 years!) Set a reminder to watch with us.
1970s cars
Video Source
The French president Macron is trying to raise their retirement age from 62 to 64 (and 67 for some?). French people have protested peacefully for 2 months but yesterday his government went ahead and invoked an article in their constitution that allows them to force the bill past the National Assembly without letting its deputies vote on it. Now Paris is burning ☺️
The trash collectors have gone on strike and so 7000+ tons of garbage has been piling up in the streets, then they get set on fire by protestors at night ☺️
(Source)
(Source)
If you’re wondering - “Retirement age at just 64 and they’re burning shit down? In my country I can’t retire until 65/67/70+!!”
French people have kept it low BECAUSE they burn shit down if it’s threatened ☺️
Are you ready to see unprecedented, detailed views of the universe from the James Webb Space Telescope, the largest and most powerful space observatory ever made? Scroll down to see the first full-color images and data from Webb. Unfold the universe with us. ✨
This landscape of “mountains” and “valleys” speckled with glittering stars, called the Cosmic Cliffs, is the edge of the star-birthing Carina Nebula. Usually, the early phases of star formation are difficult to capture, but Webb can peer through cosmic dust—thanks to its extreme sensitivity, spatial resolution, and imaging capability. Protostellar jets clearly shoot out from some of these young stars in this new image.
The Southern Ring Nebula is a planetary nebula: it’s an expanding cloud of gas and dust surrounding a dying star. In this new image, the nebula’s second, dimmer star is brought into full view, as well as the gas and dust it’s throwing out around it. (The brighter star is in its own stage of stellar evolution and will probably eject its own planetary nebula in the future.) These kinds of details will help us better understand how stars evolve and transform their environments. Finally, you might notice points of light in the background. Those aren’t stars—they’re distant galaxies.
Stephan’s Quintet, a visual grouping of five galaxies near each other, was discovered in 1877 and is best known for being prominently featured in the holiday classic, “It’s a Wonderful Life.” This new image brings the galaxy group from the silver screen to your screen in an enormous mosaic that is Webb’s largest image to date. The mosaic covers about one-fifth of the Moon’s diameter; it contains over 150 million pixels and is constructed from almost 1,000 separate image files. Never-before-seen details are on display: sparkling clusters of millions of young stars, fresh star births, sweeping tails of gas, dust and stars, and huge shock waves paint a dramatic picture of galactic interactions.
WASP-96 b is a giant, mostly gas planet outside our solar system, discovered in 2014. Webb’s Near-Infrared Imager and Slitless Spectrograph (NIRISS) measured light from the WASP-96 system as the planet moved across the star. The light curve confirmed previous observations, but the transmission spectrum revealed new properties of the planet: an unambiguous signature of water, indications of haze, and evidence of clouds in the atmosphere. This discovery marks a giant leap forward in the quest to find potentially habitable planets beyond Earth.
This image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723, known as Webb’s First Deep Field, looks 4.6 billion years into the past. Looking at infrared wavelengths beyond Hubble’s deepest fields, Webb’s sharp near-infrared view reveals thousands of galaxies—including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared—in the most detailed view of the early universe to date. We can now see tiny, faint structures we’ve never seen before, like star clusters and diffuse features and soon, we’ll begin to learn more about the galaxies’ masses, ages, histories, and compositions.
These images and data are just the beginning of what the observatory will find. It will study every phase in the history of our Universe, ranging from the first luminous glows after the Big Bang, to the formation of solar systems capable of supporting life on planets like Earth, to the evolution of our own Solar System.
Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space—and for milestones like this!
Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI
Countries at their true size. (Source)
Human | Earth | Tumblr Staff | ~ 30 Earth-Sol revolutions | My nucleobases are A/T/C/G
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