#New presentation sites

[soft5ku11]

REALLLLY starting to notice that mass twitter/DA exodus in the makeup of my notes on my art.

FUCKING REBLOG STUFF! THATS HOW ITS SUPPOSED TO WORK! TUMBLR IS NOT ALGORITHM DRIVEN! IT'S NOT REGULAR SOCIAL MEDIA, IT'S BLOGGING WITH A SOCIAL MEDIA ASPECT TIED ONTO IT!!

[freshthoughts2020]

[raskullion]

really wish more ppl didnt know what afab or amab means because if you called me a “afab, masc presenting non binary person” i think i would have to kill you

[the-littlest-goblin]

not the series finale of Ted Lasso, not season 4 of Ted Lasso, ALSO not a secret third thing (spin-off), but a secret FOURTH thing (rebranding the show as AFC Richmond)

[corvidaedream]

frequently I will say to myself, especially in tourist-heavy times, i would like a more serious job at a more serious museum where members of the public do not keep touching me inappropriately

but, unfortunately, my coworkers are so fun and kind and have created such a positive little pocket of queer community that idk if i could bear to leave unless something big changes

[blueish-bird]

love and peace to you, today I’m practicing the tumblr ritual of saving everything to drafts to reblog later because I’m currently lacking in self to express

[izzy-b-hands]

Yesterday, in light of things going not so great to poorly for myself and others, I hoped for today to be kinder...

My fucking bad apparently y'all, I jinxed us. I'm not hoping shit for tomorrow, good or bad or neutral, I'm just gonna exist and try not to break anything, fuck's sake

[keroppingg]

Ahhh it's my birthday tomorrow and my mum has bought all but one of my presents from sites like temu and shein 🫠 and I feel like I can't really say anything or risk seeming ungrateful and entitled

[marurumai]

i was thinking that i wanted some kind of blog and remembered that tumblr is a blog site... anyways hello??

[arnold-layne]

btw if you ever shared your fics/writing in Russian? I would totally go use a translator to understand the gist of it and enjoy it in any way I can!!!! (might even get back into studying the Cyrillic alphabet and learn more vocabulary because I'd have a reason/motivation)

just wanted to let you know 💕💕💕

aw you're too kind 🥺 i mean, i have a ficbook profile with some motley crue and led zeppelin stuff, although all of is quite old and doesn't really reflect my current style. there's also an issue with gay fic here now so slash works will get transferred to a different website in the nearest future, i believe, to avoid the blocking of the main website. if you can't see my stuff through the link above just tell me, i'll give a new one.

but if my fic motivates you to learn cyrillic (or russian in general) i will be very happy <3 i don't have time or energy to translate my stuff myself unfortunately but if you run into something untranslateable\unclear just ask me :)

[bironism]

bironically, my unremarkable career in law has already toed the line of infamy. my ex-employer, a literal millionaire, paid for an interview with him to be published on my birthday and had the last two questions tailored to make a directly inderect jab at me (that is, a jab that points at me but doesn't name me, starting out true and ending false, the sort of thing that can't be classified as libel as it doesn't unmistakably point in my direction without insider knowledge). it's a 10-questions format, so it's quite obvious which questions deviated from the previous interview rosters. it's a 10-questions marketing gimmick meant to define the interviewee's business ethic for potential clients. the business ethic here being a vengeful cunt.

[ryssabrin]

the problem is tumblr keeps trying to implement features from other social media platforms (post+ is patreon, group chat was maybe discord? live is tiktok, etc.) hoping they'll be successful here when the reason anybody is still on tumblr is that it's not those other platforms! figure out what people like best about tumblr that is unique to tumblr and improve on that!

[hoeterra]

Can’t wait till it turns out tumblr polls are susceptible to privacy deanonymization attacks and someone can tie an individual tumblr account to whatever anonymous key tumblr backend uses to make it so an account can’t vote in a poll more than once (something like a reconstruction attack or reidentification attack) and then, from that, use that account and its key to figure out how it answers in other polls to figure out exactly who that person is based on other info shared on other social medias/public info/online spaces (:

[girinma]

read through all of field studies institute so far and i don't think they needed a character to explicitly state "THIS IS COMMENTARY ON THE LACK OF SPACE FUNDING" like i got it man. can we not just have subtext.

that being said as someone who's day job has recently involved digitizing data from the 70s the presentation is fantastic. love how dirty shit is. however theres should be emails about someone poorly stapling something decades ago and now its your problem -_-

and lightest spoilers below

i do enjoy that it starts as a very SCP "haha we just collect items from other universes!" but you start reading and wait a minute. this is all from one alternate timeline. i dont think this is a natural multiverse situation at all.

[staff]

Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Retain and grow our creator base.

Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up. 

We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.

Actions & Next Steps

Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.

Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.

Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.

The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.

Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant. 

Actions & Next Steps

Deliver great content each time the app is opened.

Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are. 

Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. 

Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.

Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.

Actions & Next Steps

Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.

Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs. 

Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.

Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread. 

Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads. 

Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed. 

Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.

Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.  

Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.

The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.

It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.

Actions & Next Steps

Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it. 

Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.

Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.

Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.

Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.

Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.  

Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.  

Actions & Next Steps

Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.

Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.  

Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages. 

Test what the right daily push notification limit is. 

Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.

Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.

The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.

Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.

Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users. 

Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.

Conclusion

Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.

[ot3]

heartbreaking news. between this, tougher crackdown on illegal tv streaming sites (kimcartoon has just permanently gone down), coming after scanlation sites, and the general moral panic around AI having people actually root for wider nets and stricter enforcement of copyright/ip law, i have a feeling the state of art and media online is going to get much much worse.

the precedent this sets for what people are allowed to do with physical print books they own is absolutely horrible, since there is nothing the Internet Archive loaned out that they didn't have a 1:1 legally acquired physical copy of before digitizing.

“This appeal presents the following question: Is it ‘fair use’ for a nonprofit organization to scan copyright-protected print books in their entirety, and distribute those digital copies online, in full, for free, subject to a one-to-one owned-to-loaned ratio between its print copies and the digital copies it makes available at any given time, all without authorization from the copyright-holding publishers or authors? Applying the relevant provisions of the Copyright Act as well as binding Supreme Court and Second Circuit precedent, we conclude the answer is no,” the decision states. [...] “This characterization confuses IA’s practices with traditional library lending of print books. IA does not perform the traditional functions of a library; it prepares derivatives of Publishers’ Works and delivers those derivatives to its users in full,” the court held. “Whether it delivers the copies on a one-to-one owned-to-loaned basis or not, IA’s recasting of the Works as digital books is not transformative.”

i hope all of the authors who went to bat for taking books away from the public don't know a moment of peace for the rest of their careers lol. i hope it was worth solidifying the publishing industry's grip on the entire sphere of literature just to get a few extra royalty pennies in your pockets.