I did a very quick, sketchy comic because I was extremely inspired by this post. (Credit to @pinkdiamondprince for the original post.)
The entire analogy was just fantastic and so, so accurate, and I wanted to make a comic for it, even if it’s very sketchy because my attention span is nil.
so apparently its our (users) fault for automattic cutting staff and stopping to focus on tumblr and not………staff implementing shit updates including catastrophical UI changes which are an accessibility nightmare, censoring trans women, taking down nsfw posts, implementing tumblr live with no way to turn it off and being condescending to the users
no its us not liking those shit updates that are at fault
funny that this is on jv’s blog, a guy that got fired from staff after being repeatedly called out and reported for harassing users that criticized staff.
I’m thinking about Tumblr Live again and ruminating on WHY it’s such a huge flop and I think I’ve figured it out: They’ve completely refused to make it a tumblr feature…
By which I mean (begrudgingly goes to unsnooze Tumblr live) this:
^This is meant with zero insult or derision to the people above, but these are absolutely not Tumblr users.
Every single thumbnail I’ve ever seen for Tumblr live seems to say “This is for clout!” “This is for a thirst trap!” “This is for influencers!” “This is for Tiktok wannabe stars!” “This is for showing your pretty filtered face and reaping what people on Instagram and Tiktok are desperately chasing!”
I’m remembering that Reddit has (or had) livestreams you could tune into like this. I’ve tapped into some. Ones I remember offhand include:
a guy just wandering around downtown in his city silently showing people the streets and stuff
a guy streaming his attempt to beat the last level of Celeste
a guy streaming his dog he was petting
And that, that was Reddit. That was undoubtedly just regular Reddit users going “oh stream feature? yeah okay. here’s my dog.” “here’s my video game.” “here’s my street corner in Prague.”
And when I think of all the recent successful Tumblr features, they’re all things that correctly tapped into actual Tumblr user interests. Blaze had people go “haha yeah here’s my dog.” “here’s my advertisement for a horse lawyer (lawyer who is a horse).” They let us buy crabs because, fuck it, crabs. The blue checkmarks were funny. Polls turned into the fandom brackets people have desperately wanted to make for a decade+. I’d wager the merch that calls on old Tumblr memes is at least decently successful.
If Tumblr Live wanted the chance to be successful, it should have been angled toward Tumblr users. “Here, you can livestream your cat if you want.” “You can livestream yourself working on some fanart and chatting.” “You can livestream yourself going bird watching because birds are your hyperfixation and you can identify them all by their song to all your followers who want to tune in for bird facts.”
But Tumblr Live has never tried to be that. It ONLY seems like it wants to be a Tiktok-clone, Instagram-clone, clout-chaser baited-hook trying to pull converts over from Tiktok/Insta/etc who are trying to grow their influencer brand, which Tumblr is lethally hostile to.
(And ALL of this is only touching on the concept behind what’s happening here. I haven’t even touched on the third-party streaming service and questionable data protection.)
Like fine, I guess I get it from a business model of trying to grow your userbase–since catering to your existing userbase doesn’t pull in new meat. But this will not work. Because anyone, tumblr-native or not, trying to grow themselves as an influencer will NOT find success here. This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. We will not watch your Shein haul stream.
allowed false flags of 100% sfw posts made by transfem users (and blacklisted trans and trans adjacent tags) (edit: ’#tgirl’ is still blocked as of sept 8th, 2023)
pushed tumblr live, a feature users actively dislike which is mostly unused and overrun by spambots, that also collects all of your dataEDIT: staff deleted the blog and post of the user who made the data harvesting expose post (iamdealwithit), as well as rbs. partyjockers and iamdealwithit both had their blogs purged by staff for criticizing them.
STOP GIVING THEM MONEY! stop trying to make crab day or whatever else happen. paying for stuff from the shop is rewarding them for ignoring the userbase continuously and doing things the majority don’t want, even if the things they’re doing and allowing can cause actual deaths. staff shouldn’t be praised and get profit for ignoring their users in exchange for trying to turn tumblr into twitter 2 ft. tiktok. (and now going scorched earth when you criticize them). at this point i don’t even care for “staff are people 🥺 be nice” arguments, because even when people are being very polite in feedback, they’re perfectly fine ignoring it in exchange for implementing changes nobody wants or asked for (now claiming negative feedback is responsible for them being suicidal), all because new users may like it more (and forget anyone who’s used the site for years, apparently).
leave bad reviews. don’t buy things from the shop. send feedback, even if they never reply. email them and @ the staff, send asks to the wip blog. don’t just blindly buy into “we need to support the site, buy xyz shop product”, they don’t deserve more money for giving a worse product.
I, as a very tiny blog, remember the time when I posted something about the huge political scuffle in my country (Terror Bill) and this popular blog ((with 20k followers with some tiny fucking pans)) reblogged it once and overnight it got 2,000 notes. So basically the post reached more of my countrymen and I’m thankful to that person because in the middle of a battle, we need information, and moreover, we need signal boost of correct information.
Also… Wow dude, we’re not even from the same country. She’s from the country where a popular filipino TV series was set, and where the breads are big.
this is so funny this literally sounds like a right-wing paper from 1860s france
This is really fucking funny, and op is right about how it sounds. But I felt a strong need when moving to reblog this to say something about the situation– not aimed at op who just dunked on clickbait propaganda, but just as something to keep in mind the more this kind of thing gets said by news outlets. This is way more public than I usually comment on posts (I like posting in the tags) but it felt a bit important.
My store successfully managed to both get the unionization vote underway and win the vote with only one ‘no’ to speak of, and the people who worked the hardest and put the most sweat and tears into making that possible were not college-educated. The people who went out of their way for several months now to provide information to combat the slew of lies and fearmongering that corporate directed at my coworkers were people whose formal education ended at high school and who came from all different walks of life.
The (returning) CEO of the company put out a statement in an hour long video we were forced to watch right after our votes were read where he chalked the unionization efforts up to “outside influences” who take advantage of the ignorance of the other employees to push an agenda, and listening to that made my blood boil for so many reasons.
But what I want more than anything else to say to H.S and all the people pushing this narrative is that the people who are unionizing have been there– in the trenches– for years, and they aren’t stupid or easily manipulated by sneaky college students. They’re single mothers who have been with the company for 15 years; they’re people who’ve been previously-homeless, putting in extra effort to foster an environment of love and respect among coworkers; they’re people from other parts of the restaurant industry who’re using their spare time to learn sign language to better communicate with others; they’re 17 year olds who can see that the way things are are so far from the way they should be.
I’m a college-educated worker who took a job because I had no options, but when I said we should join the tide of stores unionizing the work had already been done and they’d just been waiting to see if I was a person they could trust. I have so much love and respect for the people who will never get the credit they deserve, and that’s why I felt like I wanted to speak. The incredible strides being made in this country right now in terms of unions are being made on the backs of people being called “uneducated” and “unskilled”.
love that period in the late 2000s and early 10s when being able to competently use google was considered arcane nerd knowledge
This vanished not because everyone learned how to use google competently, but because google degraded so badly using it competently is no longer possible.
A lot of American cooking is really quite French and it has been for centuries and I used to not know that and everyone talked up French cooking so much and then I started actually looking into it and I was like. I. Cook like this. Everyone I know cooks like this. This is just butter. It’s butter, Michael. It’s butter. You were hyping up butter. I can already do this.
Percy Jackson but Hestia has a cabin. that is where the unclaimed go because she goddess of home and family. Demigods get claimed faster because when they show up Hestia glares at her siblings, nieces and nephews untill they claim them.
The maths fandom is wild. “Real” and “imaginary” numbers? I think you mean canon and non-canon. You guys seriously go “this is my number oc his name is i and he is the square root of -1” when in numbers canon lore it’s actually impossible to square root a negative but sure whatever. “Complex numbers”? I think you mean a character x oc ship. “f(x) = 3x - 5”? That is self-insert fanfiction.
i DO enjoy when seedlings start pushing their way through the soil but they havent gotten big enough to break the surface yet so all you see is a little dirt lump that wasn’t there before and its like ohh shit watch out world here they come in a short 8 to 48 hours!!
Are teens really anti-social and non-conversational and stuck on their phones or are you just trying to form a conversation while asking them about stuff like their school curriculum (a tedious repetitive thing they at best suffer and at worst suffer from) while dissmissing them whenever they attempt to talk about their interests?
in-school-suspension was honestly so extremely funny because i had undiagnosed Problems Disorder and unironically i LOVED being sent to ISS.
average day of ISS (sent there for 3 days because i was late to a class three times within a 9-week period):
arrive at school and say a silly dramatic farewell to my besties
stop at each of my classrooms to receive makeup work from my teachers which always ends up being some bullshit worksheet or textbook busywork
arrive at ISS portable and go through the daily rigamarole intro of “you are Bad and you should Feel Bad. welcome to Bad Class, a confirmation that you will never make anything of your life, you horrid creature. you are not allowed to speak, eat, or feel joy. no doodling or reading, if you don’t have makeup work or homework i will assign busywork to you. fuck you. *spits*”
spend the next 4 hours doing my busywork. it is QUIET. i can CONCENTRATE. the work gets DONE EARLY.
the work only took 2 hours maximum, i spend the other 2 hours writing fanfiction manually in a composition book pretending that I’m doing textbook work. i am having the time of my life.
our lunch time is the 10 minutes between the two lunch periods. there is no line, because there’s only ever 5-15 ISS students. i get to EAT instead of STANDING IN A LINE for half an hour and only having 4 minutes to scarf down my garbage.
at the end of lunch, we are led in a big duck line through the school and we each get to stop off at our usual classes and pick up work to do. i already did this in the morning, so i use my time to say hi to my friends and figure out what the homework will be tonight.
for the last 2 hours of the day i do my homework. IT GETS DONE. this is the ONLY time during high school where homework gets done. zero exaggeration. i never did homework unless i was actively in a classroom with no choice but to do homework.
we get the usual outro of “this has been your day in Bad Class, because you’re a Bad Child. some of you will be here tomorrow, some of you will not, but i’ll see you again in a couple of weeks, because you are Bad and will always be Bad.”
the school day is over, i did not encounter any of my bullies, i did not have to ‘participate in class’. i got all of my work done and then some. i got to work on my fanfics. i hang out with my friends after school and talk to others on myspace/facebook.
it is the best three days i have in recent memory.
This is the guy who will ask THE GOD OF WAR if he’s scared to fight him, hold up the sky, fall into Tartarus, save Olympus AND defeat the monsters it takes the other hero’s years to defeat
hello shrimp! you must be exhausted from frying all that rice. why don't you come take a nice warm bath in this completely unsuspicious pot that i have? ignore all the carrots. they are also just destressing :)
i’m tired of seeing memes for shit i’ve never fucking heard of so here’s some memes for a piece of media that doesn’t fucking exist. fuck you.
i was getting real sick of this post and seeing everybody reblog it and thinking “what the god damn is with these memes from shit ive never heard of that everybody suddenly knows that i dont” and then i finally read the comment
i’m tired of seeing memes for shit i’ve never fucking heard of so here’s some memes for a piece of media that doesn’t fucking exist. fuck you.
i was getting real sick of this post and seeing everybody reblog it and thinking “what the god damn is with these memes from shit ive never heard of that everybody suddenly knows that i dont” and then i finally read the comment
Remember Longcat? I remember Longcat. Fuck the picture on this post, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull.
You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity. “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!” “Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals.
But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, Jane. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language beyond the reflexive, it all went to shit. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us.
Remember when you could summon Longcat in Scribblenauts
And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself.
It goes right back to the Phaedrus, really. Think about it. Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Fucking Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. He offered us an updated choice, and we greedily took it, oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of a contemporary meme, he baked us a pharmakon, and we eated it.
Remember Longcat? I remember Longcat. Fuck the picture on this post, I want to talk about Longcat. Memes were simpler back then, in 2006. They stood for something. And that something was nothing. Memes just were. “Longcat is long.” An undeniably true, self-reflexive statement. Water is wet, fire is hot, Longcat is long. Memes were floating signifiers without signifieds, meaningful in their meaninglessness. Nobody made memes, they just arose through spontaneous generation; Athena being birthed, fully formed, from her own skull.
You could talk about them around the proverbial water cooler, taking comfort in their absurdity. “Hey, Johnston, have you seen the picture of that cat? They call it Longcat because it’s long!” “Ha ha, sounds like good fun, Stevenson! That reminds me, I need to show you this webpage I found the other day; it contains numerous animated dancing hamsters. It’s called — you’ll never believe this — hamsterdance!” And then Johnston and Stevenson went on to have a wonderful friendship based on the comfortable banality of self-evident digitized animals.
But then 2007 came, and along with it came I Can Has, and everything was forever ruined. It was hubris, Jane. We did it to ourselves. The minute we added written language beyond the reflexive, it all went to shit. Suddenly memes had an excess of information to be parsed. It wasn’t just a picture of a cat, perhaps with a simple description appended to it; now the cat spoke to us via a written caption on the picture itself. It referred to an item of food that existed in our world but not in the world of the meme, rupturing the boundary between the two. The cat wanted something. Which forced us to recognize that what it wanted was us, was our attention. WE are the cheezburger, and we always were. But by the time we realized this, it was too late. We were slaves to the very memes that we had created. We toiled to earn the privilege of being distracted by them. They fiddled while Rome burned, and we threw ourselves into the fire so that we might listen to the music. The memes had us. Or, rather, they could has us.
Remember when you could summon Longcat in Scribblenauts
And it just got worse from there. Soon the cats had invisible bicycles and played keyboards. They gained complex identities, and so we hollowed out our own identities to accommodate them. We prayed to return to the simple days when we would admire a cat for its exceptional length alone, the days when the cat itself was the meme and not merely a vehicle for the complex memetic text. And the fact that this text was so sparse, informal, and broken ironically made it even more demanding. The intentional grammatical and syntactical flaws drew attention to themselves, making the meme even more about the captioning words and less about the pictures. Words, words, words. Wurds werds wordz. Stumbling through a crooked, dead-end hallway of a mangled clause describing a simple feline sentiment was a torture that we inflicted on ourselves daily. Let’s not forget where the word “caption” itself comes from: capio, Latin for both “I understand” and “I capture.” We thought that by captioning the memes, we were understanding them. Instead, our captions allowed them to capture us. The memes that had once been a cure for our cultural ills were now the illness itself.
It goes right back to the Phaedrus, really. Think about it. Back in the innocent days of 2006, we naïvely thought that the grapheme had subjugated the phoneme, that the belief in the primacy of the spoken word was an ancient and backwards folly on par with burning witches or practicing phrenology or thinking that Smash Mouth was good. Fucking Smash Mouth. But we were wrong. About the phoneme, I mean. Theuth came to us again, this time in the guise of a grinning grey cat. The cat hungered, and so did Theuth. He offered us an updated choice, and we greedily took it, oblivious to the consequences. To borrow the parlance of a contemporary meme, he baked us a pharmakon, and we eated it.
I wonder what Christian meme groups are like. I mean some Christians have the biggest victim complexes in the world and if you couple that with first person perspective memes, you’d probably get memes like:
Oh thank fuck it is my time to shine
These are all from a Christian meme group that I joined for some reason but fell in love with
And around 31 October, reformation/Lutheran memes start to make an appearance in my social circles!
Thanks to these memes, I’m now a born again christian and I see the light, amen
some i have two contribute
i’m so impressed by these memes, christian memes are incredible actually
I am such a person of habit that i forget i can just do things differently. Like, hon, you don’t have to keep up with that. Just try this. Instead, it’s gonna be okay. Or you realize you can do this now, right? You don’t have to keep up doing this anymore
Please, for the love of god, please don’t be this person. No matter how long it’s been since an update, no matter how many unfinished stories are sitting on their account, no matter what - do not be this person.
Not only is it insanely rude, but you also do more damage than you think be being such a self-entitled ass about something someone created for free and for fun. “This author” can see what you say.
