Human | Earth | Tumblr Staff | ~ 30 Earth-Sol revolutions | My nucleobases are A/T/C/G
240 posts
Latest Posts by mlu - Page 2
any thoughts on the new post that staff went scorched earth on which is now making the rounds abt tumblr live? it basically screenshots all the tos and claims if you've ever opened the app (or in some rbs, unsnoozed live) tumblr has gotten your data. on the one hand i feel like this is fearmongering, but on the other its true that MOST sites have your data as is so its pretty standard. you seem pretty knowledgeable abt data gathering so i was wondering abt your take
This is going to be pretty unkind but watching tumblr users interact with staff and live is a great primer on how conspiracy theories happen.
Nobody on this fucking website knows how to read a ToS, nobody on this website knows how anything fucking works (sorry, this is not a dig at you but how would tumblr "get" your data from you clicking or unclicking live; the only data that tumblr has on you is the data that you have put on tumblr what data do people think that clicking the "new" button is scooping up that is anything beyond interactions or posts or IP addresses which are the things that tumblr already has information about like you do not introduce new information into the tumblr ecosystem by clicking a button you haven't installed anything you haven't changed permissions on your browser if everyone is so goddamned scared about live stealing their data i strongly recommend they stop using anything but public internet through an anonymizer and making sure location data is shut off on all of their devices and anyone who is flipping their shit about the type of data that live is collecting but who is using chrome on any device needs to chill the fuck out about live and flip the fuck out about google)
this is like that post about twitter's content policy that circulated the other day or that post about deviantart's content policy that circulated ten fucking years ago nobody knows how to read legal documents and nobody knows how to read technical documentation and this comes together into unholy matrimony on the no reading comprehension at all moral panic website
live never violated the GDPR it was just rolled out in the US first but the entire userbase decided that because it hadn't been rolled out simultaneously in the EU and the US that it was SO UNSPEAKABLY PRIVACY VIOLATEY THAT THE EU HAD BANNED IT FOR ITS CRIMES with, like, nothing whatsoever backing that up because, again, even at its most intrusive Live collects about as much data as Twitter or Yelp, both of which are *capable* of meeting GDPR standards with that level of data collection (even if musk sometimes makes decisions that violate GDPR).
Live is significantly less intrusive than any facebook product, than Amazon, and than any Google product. If you use youtube logged in, don't worry about live, the horse is out of the barn and tumblr is the least of your worries *regardless* of live. If you regularly use Google as a search engine please god learn how to evaluate and compare risks across platforms because Live is like a coughing baby compared to about a dozen things that most highly online people interact with every single day.
If you don't want to use live don't use live. Clicking the button doesn't magically transfer your secret FBI file to tumblr and even agreeing to the ToS doesn't share anything that tumblr doesn't already have if you don't continue to interact - if you don't interact with live after agreeing to the ToS it's not collecting any data except your non-interaction.
For everyone who is losing it over Live just turn off your goddamned location on your fucking cellphone and turn off your location on your goddamned computers and that's it, you're good, you're fine, relax. If your response to "turn off your location" is "but I need it for _____" then don't worry about Live, whatever "_____" is was already collecting and selling your data.
Do you use an activity tracker? Congrats, you have much, much bigger privacy issues to worry about than tumblr live.
Okay but also I yelled about that post and the very many ways in which it was incorrect in January.
And I happened to take an archive of the page at that time because I'm a paranoid motherfucker.
And if you want my guess as to why staff went "scorched earth" on that post it's probably because if you scroll down to the bottom of the page on the archive, OP calls on everyone looking at the post to send a kind fuck you to the CEO then tagged his tumblr.
If you look at the other posts that went scorched earth in relation to tumblr staff they were also posts that very pointedly directed a lot of ire at a single staff member.
I don't think that any individual tumblr staff members are above criticism and I don't think that staff as a whole is above criticism but part of learning to read a ToS is understanding that someone can be shitty and vague and use TERF talking points and skirt the line and be technically okay under the ToS while someone can have a legitimate gripe about another user being horrible and manage to violate the ToS by accidentally spinning up a harassment campaign or suicide baiting someone.
Shitty people like nazis and terfs thrive on being edge cases. They are very good at finding a boundary and standing juuuuuuuuust on this side of it and going "la la la I'm not violating the ToS, you can't stop me!" and that blows and it leads to a lot of people encountering a lot of shitty stuff on a lot of websites but personally I'm pretty glad that there's a lot of gray area because when you cut out gray area that's when you see things like It's Going Down getting banned as extremist content alongside white supremacists. Please continue to report nazis and terfs, and when possible go deep into their pages to report because a pattern of behavior is more likely to get recognized as hate speech than a single post that gets reported a hundred times. Please block as many people who it's harmful for you to interact with as possible because it's clear that staff is not going to do the kind of work protecting users that users would like staff to do.
However I just can't get angry on behalf of a blogger who got nuked for saying "Hey everyone who hates this feature that we all hate please go tell the CEO to fuck himself at this URL specifically" - that is an extremely clear violation of the ToS because it is absolutely targeted harassment.
So now tumblr-the-userbase is going off on its merry conspiracy way skipping through fields and lacking reading comprehension and saying "users are getting banned for reporting the crimes of tumblr live and its gdpr violations" and ignoring the fact that the post was nuked because the last line was saying "hey everyone, let's all individually tell the CEO to fuck off in messages sent directly to him that are certainly not going to include any threats, exaggerations, gore, etc. etc. etc."
If I were to make a post that had 50k notes and the last line was "and while you're at it, please send tumblr-user-ms-demeanor a personalized message telling them why they're a terrible person so they know what we think of them" it would absolutely be reasonable to say that was harassing that user. And that post did it with the CEO. Who is not above criticism (and I have my criticisms! I don't think he really gets tumblr and that's a problem!), but jesus fucking christ don't tag the goddamned CEO or any other staff member in a call to action asking users to send them messages saying "fuck off" this is literally the stupidest thing I've ever seen a tumblr conspiracy theory coalesce around.
Anyway thank you for giving me a place to vent i've been getting more and more pissed about this for three days. Everyone feel free to kindly tell tumblr user ms demeanor to fuck off.
Introducing Collections
Hello again, Tumblr. Labs division here!
A while back, we announced our comeback as a new team that would imagine big ideas for Tumblr—and would build them in public (aka with you). We recently announced our first failure, and today we're very excited to announce our first possible success!
A bit of context
As we've said before, an essential part of how we're working in Labs is speaking to people who use Tumblr pretty much on a daily basis and those who don’t use it at all.
In those interviews and focus groups, we learned that curating the Tumblr experience around different interests and fandoms is a big part of making Tumblr feel like your own space — and one of the main ways you do that is through blogs and tags (be it following or creating them).
So here at Labs we're working on ideas to help you curate the content you care about, and to help share what makes your experience fun with other people, even if they are not on Tumblr already.
Ok, but what's the idea?
Have you ever put together a song playlist to listen to when you're in a certain mood, or share with a specific friend? Or sent them books you know they'll love? Now imagine if you could do that with blogs and tags on Tumblr…
Maybe you're a veteran in a fandom and have the best recommendations of who to follow for your followers. Or your best friend won't join Tumblr because they don't know that their favorite TV show is actually really popular here. Or maybe you want to curate and browse content from a specific fandom, or a group of your mutuals, your own way.
That's the idea behind Collections!
You can check out that example collection on the web here!
We want your help
The first way we're testing Collections is by inviting some of you to create your own and share with followers and friends—they'll be able to follow all the blogs and tags in your collections. So we're looking for volunteers!
You want to help? Great! Here's what you need to do:
Come up with your own Collections of blogs and tags, write it down somewhere. Focus on introducing people to Tumblr or recommending stuff to your followers. What would you want them to first see on your version of Tumblr?
Come up with a name, cover image, and description for it. Also try to think of who you would send your collection to, and where you might post about it.
Write out that idea as a reply or reblog on this post!
We’ll give it a few days, and pick a handful of people to play with Collections. We'll let you know. Then we’re off to the races!
If you decide to participate (and get selected), please note that this early release won’t work on the apps yet, only in your web browser.
What happens next?
Our goal is to keep working on improving and adding Collection functionalities while you test what we've built (and share your feedback with us).
Next we’re exploring making a collection something you can follow on Tumblr, as a way to curate Tumblr around your many interests and moods, and to give you more freedom to curate content on your dashboard.
And if this idea is not for you, remember we have many more experiments in progress, so stay tuned!
With love,
Labs division
附近 14
Nearby 14
Translated by Guandi Wu
instagram: cheri.png
Tec, Untitled, 2022-23
Digital Collage
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.
We should update it to a @janky bird emoji instead.
i don’t think we’ll ever get around to updating ours, but discord is giving in!
please do not mistake a small group of people on the internet doing something stupid, or something that makes you mad trending with 100-1000 tweets, for an urgent and widespread social issue. it’ll make you mean, complacent, and easy to manipulate before you realize it
instagram continues to devolve into those awful extended family's vacation slide shows you are forced to watch as a child
the new dj crazytimes song … now that’s what I call music!
jupiter & the galilean moons
composite of two shots, both taken on my 8'' dobsonian and ASI178mc astronomy camera at 1200mm. first shot was overexposed to show the 4 moons of jupiter, second shot was exposed to get detail on jupiter itself
A little store, for tiny travelers. A shelter on rainy nights.
Gamer cats
Beaver 🌿🦫 🩵 + watercolor and ink process
Okay so I did some research, very basic research, on the user base of tumblr and how many of us there are.
There are at least 300 million unique visitors worldwide on this site. Over 500 million blogs.
Listen. Tumblr is $30 million in debt. This is Super easy for us to solve.
If each user gifts one blog crabs, which costs slightly over $3, that would be roughly $600 million at least. Far more than enough to get Tumblr out of the red zone.
If we want tumblr to stay afloat and not change something as integral about their operating system, we need to show them they can be profitable without reducing themselves to common social media sites. What we have here is special. It is different. We are the social media site people run to when theirs collapses and for good reason.
If we want this to work, we have to make it work. We can even make it into a game. Just how long can we outlast the other social media sites?
how does tumblr even work do you just like talk to yourself until people are like "i like this one"
This is what (almost) all of the Tumblr @staff team looks like in a room. 192 people here at the meetup! In my introduction I ended up doing an impromptu presentation on typography and how that brought me to open source. I originally learned about this stuff through our Automattic colleague @apartness, in this article on A List Apart The Trouble With EM ’n EN (and Other Shady Characters.
RB for the largest sample size this site has ever seen
twitter limiting the amount of tweets you get to read per day is ridiculous but if tiktok limited the amount of videos people got to see per day it would be the biggest win for mental health since ssris
StreamBuilder: our open-source framework for powering your dashboard.
Today, we’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re open-sourcing the custom framework we built to power your dashboard on Tumblr. We call it StreamBuilder, and we’ve been using it for many years.
First things first. What is open-sourcing? Open sourcing is a decentralized software development model that encourages open collaboration. In more accessible language, it is any program whose source code is made available for use or modification as users or other developers see fit.
What, then, is StreamBuilder? Well, every time you hit your Following feed, or For You, or search results, a blog’s posts, a list of tagged posts, or even check out blog recommendations, you’re using this framework under the hood. If you want to dive into the code, check it out here on GitHub!
StreamBuilder has a lot going on. The primary architecture centers around “streams” of content: whether posts from a blog, a list of blogs you’re following, posts using a specific tag, or posts relating to a search. These are separate kinds of streams, which can be mixed together, filtered based on certain criteria, ranked for relevancy or engagement likelihood, and more.
On your Tumblr dashboard today you can see how there are posts from blogs you follow, mixed with posts from tags you follow, mixed with blog recommendations. Each of those is a separate stream, with its own logic, but sharing this same framework. We inject those recommendations at certain intervals, filter posts based on who you’re blocking, and rank the posts for relevancy if you have “Best stuff first” enabled. Those are all examples of the functionality StreamBuilder affords for us.
So, what’s included in the box?
The full framework library of code that we use today, on Tumblr, to power almost every feed of content you see on the platform.
A YAML syntax for composing streams of content, and how to filter, inject, and rank them.
Abstractions for programmatically composing, filtering, ranking, injecting, and debugging streams.
Abstractions for composing streams together—such as with carousels, for streams-within-streams.
An abstraction for cursor-based pagination for complex stream templates.
Unit tests covering the public interface for the library and most of the underlying code.
What’s still to come
Documentation. We have a lot to migrate from our own internal tools and put in here!
More example stream templates and example implementations of different common streams.
If you have questions, please check out the code and file an issue there.
Bringing this bitch back in this here 2023
We can always fix it later
i’m currently going through the process of getting my new laptop ready for mobile development through Cordova, a setup with the reliability of a coughing baby. i’ve painstakingly written down notes detailing every single step over the years and it is still giving me headaches every time. everything has changed somehow. i’ve just reinstalled a precise version of gradle (don’t ask) and the folder architecture is apparently completely different this time around. help me
TW water temple in OOT, I guess
zelda dungeon design peaked in twilight princess
breath of the wild and tears of the kingdom have a combined total of one (1) real dungeon - the spirit temple in totk, which barely gets a passing grade. everything else is just "turn on the 4 batteries" over and over again, which is such a decline from what we used to get
sure, there were a few "turn on the 4 things" in previous games, but that would be just ONE of the AT LEAST 6-7 dungeons. we used to have such variety as
"enter this giant fish and navigate its insides"
"this is my yeti house and i'm a wife guy ohnO my wIFE is EVIL FOR A bit"
"flood and drain this cavern infinite times to access different areas, screw the ecosystem. also fight yourself"
what's your favourite colour of the sky?
