#actually this applies to all social media

[blank-house]

As a fellow 23-year-old, I'm lowkey shook to find out y'all are around my age and able to set aside enough time to undergo such a huge project as Keyframes! How did you guys get started in game development?

aha, only marina is 23. the other two of us are at the opposite end and almost or at 30, lol.

i can't speak for the others, but i started in game development because i applied to a writing job on a whim. lol, i'd been following indie studios up until that point on social media for a while but i didn't actually consider the possibility of making my own game. i got hired, got experience, left and then went on to work on other games! not all of them have seen the light of day, but some have! marina: On god my dev origin story was: I finished playing Blooming Panic during uni and was inspired to make a game lol. So when I saw someone looking for a programmer for a game jam, I volunteered even though I legit had 0 experience in making a game/using ren'py (shoutout to the Shooting Star Otome team for taking a chance on me lol). Two years and some projects later, I've felt confident enough to just dive in on a game of my own, and now here we are! Woo!

Floss: i've been writing for a looong time, but i'm in game dev now thanks to the original keyframes otojam project. it was definitely one of those things where you blink and suddenly you're actually making a Game, not just racing to the finish line for a jam. (couldn't ask for a better team to be doing it with.)

[animentality]

A word of advice, for all new and returning and old Tumblr travelers:

For your own peace of mind, remember you are talking AT people, not TO people here. For the most part.

You put your silly little ideas out there and if someone gets angry or starts beef for no reason or decides to be nasty, block, turn off replies, turn off anon.

Talk AT people. Not to people. Your posts are like public announcements.

You are on a pulpit, preaching to whoever stops by to listen.

But you have no obligation to respond to or argue with anyone who wanders in.

[afrenomes]

It feels like I’ve forgotten how to make art

which sucks because I’m supposed to be, like, making a career out of this

[psithurista]

Hey on the off chance you’re a fellow Australian seeing all our American mutuals in absolute despair today, you need to get really fucking serious right now about our own upcoming election. Historically we follow America into left- or right-swings. This time, we are already there. What happened in America shouldn’t be a shock to anyone who paid attention in Queensland. People in my home state voted for a racist, ultra-conservative Christian pro-life advocate whose only policy was putting traumatised ten year-old First Nations kids into adult prisons instead of the guy promising cheap public transport, free school lunches, and cost of living relief through reduced electricity bills and car registration fees.

You need to look at the Auspol news stories from today alone if you don’t think shit is already fucking dire.

Jing Lee was threatened and intimidated into voting with Joanna Howe’s frankly terrifying abortion amendments despite the prior commitments she’d made otherwise. Parliament is abandoning its responsibility to protect whistleblowers, including the one that revealed the unlawful and unethical debt collection practices in which the ATO was engaging. The government quietly made its response to the DSP inquiry today, and that response was “We don’t need to do anything because it’s been so long since this was raised.” This, following the Disability Royal Commission where over two hundred recommendations were made from the findings and not a single one was implemented.

And now the spineless little cunt who sold out every single one of his values the day he was elected Prime Minister announced the social media ban is going ahead. In order to enforce this, what this will almost certainly mean for you is you will, under legislation, be required to connect your ID against all of your internet use. If the implications of that when it comes to censorship, personal privacy, freedom of information, media and journalistic freedom, the ability to organise and the ability to protest, particularly when faced with the prospect of the reversal of women’s and LGBTQ+ peoples’ rights not to mention the everpresent Newscorp machine don’t scare the absolute living shit out of you, then they fucking should.

We are NOT America. All the posts you’ve seen today claiming third-party or independent voters are to blame for the second coming of Trump do NOT apply to us. We have a beautiful thing called preferential voting. This means that when you vote Green (the only major party working to protect abortion rights AND your freedom and privacy online, the only major party calling for the dissolution of AUKUS, the only major party calling for meaningful sanctions on Israel AND an overhaul of our disgusting asylum seeker policy (especially crucial after the IDF openly announced today they have no intention of allowing displaced Palestinians to return home), the only major party trying to wipe student debt and make uni free again, the only major party trying to protect and EXPAND Medicare, the only major party with a serious climate plan, and the only major party actively prioritising a reconciliation plan to treaty with First Nations people), your vote is not wasted even if you’re the only person in your electorate to do so.

If a single other Australian person is following this silly little blog, please please please realise that we WILL see a repeat of the American election here if we don’t start getting serious right now. I don’t know a single LNP voter who knows fuck about shit about policy and isn’t just voting based on however their family voted, and most of them are horrified when they actually hear what they’re voting for. Talk to your friends, family, co-workers about the policies Dutton and Albanese are proposing. Make a bunch of Volduttonmort memes and stick them up around your city. Just fucking do something.

I'm so scared guys I'm so scared

[ladywaterfall]

gonna learn some canva to better my chances of getting a new marketing job. to make it fun and Not Scary for myself I'm thinking of making little graphics themed around ponies I like, so i can get a little practice and post them here without feeling like they need to be the Best Thing Ever

[sheerwillpower]

i do think we could benefit from not yucking people's yums and also encourage further literacy and media criticality at the same time

[aqours]

shares this thing from the rp server i run with absolutely zero context whatsoever. u are welcome

[shinyswablu]

you gotta kill the part of you that uncritically takes the opinions of people online and accepts them as truth

[maximusboltaqon]

most appealing part of the inhumans is that theyre all middle aged with back pain

[lyxthen]

Please don't base your political ideology on anime. I know that it sounds obvious but please don't do it.

[noxtivagus]

woah i. wrote a lot.

[akajustmerry]

people treat bisan, motaz and plestia like they're influencers instead of, you know, people who have endured/are enduring war crimes beyond imagining and ethnic cleansing. what I mean is, they never asked to be spokesperson for their people's humanity, or planned to be so visible. they're just people, ordinary people who can never go home, who are surviving colonial violence. what they're doing and what they have done defies any term of admiration or respect I could apply. But I wish that people would stop thinking of these individual Palestinians trying to survive in war zones like celebrities or politicians with actual power because it's just another form of dehumanisation. Ask yourself, what will you do if something happens to Bisan? If she is killed or goes dark or inshallah she escapes? Everyday I see posts like, "if Bisan dies, I'll riot!" riot NOW. speak up, now! Palestinians and Lebanese and Syrian people who aren't going viral on social media are being murdered by the occupation in the 100s everyday. I am begging people to stop hingeing their faith in the free Palestine movement and the movement to end the Zionist occupation on individuals. I love Bisan and Motaz and Plestia with all my heart and pray for them every day, but I'm begging people not to reframe Palestinian liberation through individualism. Support BDS, donate to UNRWA or the Red Crescent Society, listen to Palestinians across Palestine and the diaspora. Your belief in the freedom of Indigenous peoples has to transcend the ones most visible and palatable to you.

[phantomrose96]

I enjoy long informative threads on social media but I also think they should be taken with a grain of salt. Because as soon as you see one on a topic YOU'RE an expert in, the anatomy tends to break down like this:

Post from an OP who is clearly a professional or at least a well-informed hobbyist. Information is correct.

Elaboration from OP because they got excited about the original post doing number and wanted to add more

Interloper who THINKS they're contributing to the conversation but they're mostly just parroting talking points they loosely remember from like a youtube video or a different post. They're maybe not WRONG but you wouldn't be comfortable calling it a reputable addition given all the details that are glossed over

Person going "wow that's fascinating :0" and asking a follow up question

Different person giving an answer to that question but it rubs you the wrong way because it ignores a ton of "it depends" nuance

Person making a joke which like. You get what they were trying to do. But the joke is categorically different from the matter at hand.

Someone posting an XKCD that does not actually apply.

[thymewayster]

Really good Twitter thread originally about Elon Musk and Twitter, but also applies to Netflix and a lot of other corporations.

Full thread. Text transcription under cut.

John Bull @garius

One of the things I occasionally get paid to do by companies/execs is to tell them why everything seemed to SUDDENLY go wrong, and subs/readers dropped like a stone. So, with everything going on at Twitter rn, time for a thread about the Trust Thermocline /1

So: what's a thermocline?

Well large bodies of water are made of layers of differing temperatures. Like a layer cake. The top bit is where all the the waves happen and has a gradually decreasing temperature. Then SUDDENLY there's a point where it gets super-cold.

That suddenly is important. There's reasons for it (Science!) but it's just a good metaphor. Indeed you may also be interested in the "Thermocline of Truth" which a project management term for how things on a RAG board all suddenly go from amber to red.

But I digress. The Trust Thermocline is something that, over (many) years of digital, I have seen both digital and regular content publishers hit time and time again. Despite warnings (at least when I've worked there). And it has a similar effect. You have lots of users then suddenly... nope. And this does effect print publications as much as trendy digital media companies. They'll be flying along making loads of money, with lots of users/readers, rolling out new products that get bought. Or events. Or Sub-brands.

And then SUDDENLY those people just abandon them. Often it's not even to "new" competitor products, but stuff they thought were already not a threat. Nor is there lots of obvious dissatisfaction reported from sales and marketing (other than general grumbling). Nor is it a general drift away, it's just a sudden big slide. So why does this happen? As I explain to these people and places, it's because they breached the Trust Thermocline.

I ask them if they'd been increasing prices. Changed service offerings. Modified the product.

The answer is normally: "yes, but not much. And everyone still paid" Then I ask if they did that the year before. Did they increase prices last year? Change the offering? Modify the product?

Again: "yes, but not much."

The answer is normally: "yes, but not much. And everyone still paid." "And the year before?"

"Yes but not much. And everyone still paid."

Well, you get the idea. And here is where the Trust Thermocline kicks in. Because too many people see service use as always following an arc. They think that as long as usage is ticking up, they can do what they like to cost and product.

And (critically) that they can just react when the curve flattens But with a lot of CONTENT products (inc social media) that's not actually how it works. Because it doesn't account for sunk-cost lock-in.

Users and readers will stick to what they know, and use, well beyond the point where they START to lose trust in it. And you won't see that. But they'll only MOVE when they hit the Trust Thermocline. The point where their lack of trust in the product to meet their needs, and the emotional investment they'd made in it, have finally been outweighed by the physical and emotional effort required to abandon it. At this point, I normally get asked something like:

"So if we undo the last few changes and drop the price, we get them back?"

And then I have to break the news that nope: that's not how it works.

Because you're past the Thermocline now. You can't make them trust you again.

[getvalentined]

An open letter to @staff

I already submitted this to Support under "Feedback," but I'm sharing it here too as I don't expect it to get a response, and I feel like putting in out in public may be more effective than sending it off into the void.

The recent post on the Staff blog about changing tumblr to an algorithmic feed features a large amount of misinformation that I feel staff needs to address, openly and honestly, with information on where this data was sourced at the very least.

Claim 1: Algorithms help small creators.

This is false, as algorithms are designed to push content that gets engagement in order to get it more engagement, thereby assuring that the popular remain popular and the small remain small except in instances of extreme luck.

This can already be seen on the tumblr radar, which is a combination of staff picks (usually the same half-dozen fandoms or niche special interests like Lego photography) which already have a ton of engagement, or posts that are getting enough engagement to hit the radar organically. Tumblr has an algorithm that runs like every other socmed algorithm on the planet, and it will decimate the reach of small creators just like every other platform before it.

Claim 2: Only a small portion of users utilize the chronological feed.

You can find a poll by user @darkwood-sleddog here that at the time of writing this, sits at over 40 THOUSAND responses showing that over 96 percent of them use the chronological feed*. Claiming otherwise isn't just a misstatement, it's a lie. You are lying to your core userbase and expecting them to accept it as fact. It's not just unethical, it's insulting to people who have been supporting your platform for over a decade.

Claim 3: Tumblr is not easy to use.

This is also 100% false and you ABSOLUTELY know it. Tumblr is EXTREMELY easy to use, the issue is that the documentation, the explanations of features, and often even the stability of the service is subpar. All of this would be very easy for staff to fix, if they would invest in the creation of walkthroughs and clear explanations of how various site features work, as well as finally fixing the search function. Your inability to explain how your service works should not result in completely ignoring the needs and wants of your core long-term userbase. The fact that you're more willing to invest in the very systems that have made every other form of social media so horrifically toxic than in trying to make it easier for people to use the service AS IT WORKS NOW and fixing the parts that don't work as well speaks volumes toward what tumblr staff actually cares about.

You will not get a paycheck if your platform becomes defunct, and the thing that makes it special right now is that it is the ONLY large-scale socmed platform on THE ENTIRE INTERNET with a true chronological feed and no aggressive algorithmic content serving. The recent post from staff indicates that you are going to kill that, and are insisting that it's what we want. It is not. I'd hazard to guess that most of the dev team knows it isn't what we want, but I assume the money people don't care. The user base isn't relevant, just how much money they can bring in.

The CEO stated he wanted this to remain as sort of the last bastion of the Old Internet, and yet here we are, watching you declare you intend to burn it to the ground.

You can do so much better than this.

Response to the Update

Under the cut for readability, because everything said above still applies.

I already said this in a reblog on the post itself, but I'm adding it to this one for easy access: people read it that way because that's what you said.

Staff considers the main feed as it exists to be "outdated," to the point that you literally used that word to describe it, and the main goals expressed in this announcement is to figure out what makes "high-quality content" and serve that to users moving forward.

People read it that way because that is what you said.

*The final results of the poll, after 24 hours:

136,635 votes breaks down thusly:

An algorithm based feed where I get "the best of tumblr." @ 1.3% (roughly 1,776 votes)

Chronological feed that only features blogs I follow. @ 95.2% (roughly 130,077 votes)

This doesn't affect me personally. @ 3.5% (roughly 4,782 votes)

[prokopetz]

I'm not gonna claim that most Tumblr polls are anything like rigorously structured, but I've seen a lot of folks rather smugly asserting that having a "not applicable" option that ends up dominating all other responses is evidence that the person who created the poll is incompetent, and y'all: under the specific circumstances in which these polls are constructed and distributed, that outcome is evidence of good poll design, not bad poll design. Yes, even when the "not applicable" responses outnumber all other responses ten to one. There are several reasons for that:

At the time of this posting, Tumblr polls have no "see response" button. The only ways to see a poll's distribution of responses are to wait for the poll to conclude, or to respond yourself – and not only are people on social media typically curious and impatient, many of them also know that there's no way they'll remember to check back later once the poll has concluded, so in practice, their opportunity to see the results is now or never. Adding a little note to the poll insisting that people who aren't part of the targeted demographic should refrain from voting isn't necessarily going to restrain that impulse. Indeed, it may end up encouraging folks who otherwise wouldn't have picked a random result-revealing response to do so, because fuck you, don't tell me what to do.

Many respondents genuinely won't realise they're not part of the targeted demographic until after they've voted. It doesn't matter how much text you add to contextualise the poll, because they'll read the poll first, and if they read the accompanying text at all, it's only after they've responded. Heck, a lot of folks don't even bother to read the question before responding to a poll; they just start going down the options and reflexively click the first one that seems like it might apply to them, then go back and read what was actually being asked (and complain in the notes if it turns out that they misunderstood). Even a well-meaning person can only comply with instructions they've actually read; for those folks, clicking the "not applicable" option is what compliance looks like.

Even folks who do fit your poll's targeted demographic can fall prey to the imp of the perverse. Giving the most accurate response rather than the most entertaining one can be a real struggle for a lot of folks; in scientific analysis of polling data, this is known as the "mischievous responder bias". In an informal setting like Tumblr, it's reasonable to suppose that the mischievous responder effect might be exaggerated compared to polls conducted in more formal contexts, and a well-designed poll is going to take that into account. A humorous "not applicable" option provides an escape by affording folks the freedom to screw around with the knowledge that they're not polluting useful data by doing so; in practice, the "I am a toaster" option is a mischievous response filter.

What this adds up to is that a poll where 90% of the responses hit the "not applicable" button is more likely to have yielded useful data than a poll with a narrow target audience where some unknown percentage of the responses represent folks not reading the instructions, clicking random options to see the results, and/or taking the piss.