#and by introducing a new 'default' way to use the site
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Putting my anthro/socio/technologist hat on and reblogging again w/ some thoughts
No, you're not imagining things - this shift away from tumblr's traditional culture of cultivating 'beloved but largely anonymous mutuals' has been building for a while
And, yes, it's partially as a result of the waves of users coming over from twitter (and, to some extent, reddit).
BUT - just based on the comments on this post and those on some of the 'how many people do you follow' polls? What I'm seeing is the result of changes tumblr made - specifically the ones that encourage people to use the site like it's twitter.
And like this shouldn't be a surprise because they told us explicitly the changes were intended to make tumblr easier for new users to use - particularly twitter users
Again, based on reading comments here and elsewhere, by making the 'For You' the default tab for new users, tumblr has essentially broken the follow culture by making it so people no longer have to follow other users to populate their dash.
Now all people have to do is create an account, follow a few tags and refresh the For You feed. Why would you bother to follow random people at that point when that might mean seeing other stuff they post that you aren't interested in?
Instead they just let the algo spoon feed them whatever, maybe dip into the tags if they want more of a specific thing, and occasionally open up the following tab if all they want to see is the people they "know".
Personally, as someone trying to get into a new fandom for the first time in a while and running into this new cultural norm, it frankly sucks from a user experience perspective to go out and follow a ton of new people in your new fandom and have no one follow back and show zero interest in interacting with anyone outside their set circle.
I suspect the new proposed Communities is tumblr's attempt to somewhat recapture the community building aspect that's been lost to the algo, but IMO all it will really do is create different silos and further encourage the in-group / out-group mindset that's already taking hold.
Hopefully I'm wrong.
So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????
I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.
Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?
#tl;dr#tumblr was unique because of its culture#and its culture arose from the way the site was designed to be used#and by introducing a new 'default' way to use the site#they're killing off the culture that made it unique#fandom#tumblr
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feel free to ignore if this is too personal a question, but i’m curious- what does the username cilil mean / why did you choose it?
Heh! Good question, anon, I'm actually surprised nobody asked that yet (not on here at least), so let me tell you a fun little story.
cilil - or Cílil, if we want to be grammatically correct - is technically just that: A name. It's Sindarin and means "renewal" (cîl - renewal plus feminine suffix -il).
Since I know some have been wondering about this, I want to take the opportunity to add that Sindarin c is always pronounced [k], so it's "kilil", not church Latin style "silil"; though don't worry about it, since it's just my username and the latter version sounds like "seal-il" I don't get my panties in a twist about it or anything :D
I made the name Cílil many years ago, years before I showed up here or talked to anyone in the Tolkien fandom. It was supposed to be given to a Maia who is wandering Middle-earth on her own to experience life and be part of creation, unaligned with both the good and evil Ainur - just on her own and serving no Vala.
At the time, however, I didn't really "do the OC thing" - not trying to be shady or act like I'm "better" of course, I've grown to love OCs, have a few of my own and support them, as you all know. It was just what my modus operandi and level of comfort was at the time; I still had cringe culture to kill, plus being in other fandoms and whatnot, so the idea was shelved for the time being.
Then, years later, I came back to the Silmarillion fandom and it suddenly occurred to me that the username(s) I was using at the time were rather specific to my old fandom that I wished to leave behind. To make matters worse, I had just joined a Discord server and was now sitting in front of my laptop, mildly panicking like "girl think quickly now and rename yourself before people know you under a name you no longer want".
Cílil was the first that came to mind. And I liked it - not just the sound of it, but also because it was so fitting. Renewal. That was exactly what I was doing. Closing a chapter, going somewhere else, beginning a new one, starting from scratch (most notably this blog). It was poetic in a way. And so I took it. Just put it in lower case because I liked that aesthetically and some sites like Tumblr and AO3 don't allow the í, so there.
As for the Maia whose name I stole, I also kind of stole the whole persona to turn it into a sort of bit for me to play, this funny little meta side joke that I am a Maia who's hanging out with the mortals in Middle-earth and spilling all the tea and sharing all the stories I collected over the years. It's just a thing I do with all my online personae for shits and gigs and running gags with friends, pretending I'm part of the universe in question in some silly (dare I say sill-il? :P) way.
The character, though I never introduced them on this blog, has since been revamped, remade, remixed, remastered and most importantly renamed, but they keep "Cílil" as one of the many alternate names they were given in Middle-earth, just as a sort of easter egg. They would've required a Quenyan name as a default anyway, so that all worked out nicely.
So yeah. This is the lore of Cílil/cílil/cilil. Hope you all enjoyed the ancient lore :)
#asks#cílil answers#the lore of cílil#i also know many people just call me cílil in general which is of course absolutely fine since it is an actual name even :D#y'all can pick and choose between it and what's in the bio
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Version 0.2, the first big update for Dandyville, is here!
This update introduces 8 new lots (6 residential, 2 community) and 4 new households!
New Households
The Loste Family
The Pierrot Household
The Sputnik Household
The Tiller Family
New Lots
I noticed version 0.1 seriously lacked starter homes, unless your Sim wanted to live in some burned down ruins. So now there are 4 new starter homes for your Sims to move into: 50 Plumbbob Road, 62 Mulberry Court, 67 Mulberry Court, and 74 Llama Lane.
View all new Residential Lots here!
There's also a couple of new community lots: Jukebox Junction, a classic diner with adjacent karaoke bar and dance club, and Four Paws Quarter, a place about anything for the feline and canine at home!
View all new Community Lots here!
Requirements
I created this neighborhood with The Sims Complete Collection, but you might be okay if you simply have all expansions installed.
(Optional) Hungry Hungry Hamster Game -- Official Maxis object! I basically used it just to fill another space on the carnival lot. I also recommend getting the other official objects from that site, but your game might already have most of them. (Mine did, at least. If you notice missing objects in Dandyville, it's likely one of these!)
(Optional) Livin' Large Extreme Character Pack -- A set of skins that were given out as a preorder bonus for The Sims: Livin' Large! I only used some of these for the occasional townie and I suspect if you don't have these the game will just use a random skin.
(Optional) No Buskers Sign -- The ONLY piece of unofficial custom content I used! I use this on community lots where the old town busker feels unfitting and where he might trap your Sim by standing in the way of the only exit. Currently only used on the Aquamarine Quarter lot.
Downloads
Sim File Share
Simblr.cc
itch.io
Install Instructions
Go to your The Sims folder (default location: C:\Program Files (x86)\Maxis\The Sims). You may need admin rights for the next steps!
Inside you will see a folder called "UserData8". Rename that folder to something like "UserData8backup".
Open Dandyville.zip and copy "UserData8" from the .zip-file into your The Sims folder.
Open the game and switch to Neighborhood 8. You did it!
#the sims#the sims 1#ts1#custom neighborhood#sims 1 custom hood#sims 1#the sims unleashed#sims 1 custom neighborhood#custom hood#ts1 hood#dandyville#sims 1 simblr#simblr#ts1 simblr#update
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WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT NEGOTIATION
This kind of work is the future. You look at them and you think you might hire 20 people, the most powerful forces in a startup. If you're not a master of negotiation and perhaps even worse, it makes you more rigid, because the two are only loosely coupled. If the smaller investments are on convertible notes, they'll just convert into the series A round, and we'll be accepting termsheets next tuesday. There may also be a benefit to us. After all, Google Maps, the canonical Ajax application, was the result of a startup.1 Avoid investors till you decide to raise more, and the reason is that between your ability to delude yourself and the wildly unstable nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble. But because the lies are indirect we don't keep a very strict accounting of them.
VCs, most of whom are not particularly imaginative.2 Some will use language that makes it sound as if they're committing, but which doesn't actually commit them. The idea that we're the center of things is difficult to discard. And not just in obvious ways, like making them register, or subjecting them to annoying ads. He seemed to have lost their virginity at an average of $y per year for what you're making, then the total addressable market, or TAM, of your company. I grew older, suburbia started to feel suffocatingly fake. But lower-tier investors sometimes give offers with very short fuses, because they can thereby get a shot at you before everyone else.
He knows what happened in every deal in the Valley. Plenty of companies seem as good a bet a few months in. Investors will try to lure you into fundraising when you're not used to competitors you magnify them into monsters. One can imagine evolutionary reasons for that. Schlep was originally a Yiddish word but has passed into general use in the US. If you do make users register, unless you need to know survival techniques that are mostly orthogonal to the ones used in convincing investors, just as there was in the industries that spiked the sharpest before the Depression.3 Now everyone can, and we make a point of exerting less. One group got an exploding term-sheet from some VCs. If you're talking to several investors. Painters discover that they're expressionists.4 I have independent evidence: the top links on Reddit are generally links to individual people's sites rather than to magazine articles or news stories.
You should always talk to investors in parallel rather than serially. The bar will be higher next time. Ditto for the idea of her having sex even if there were zero risk of pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases are just as much.5 If this is such a thing as Americanness.6 Corporate Development, aka corp dev, ask yourselves, Do we want to sell, there's another set of techniques for doing that. Now they're rapidly running out of runway. I suspect this is another of those conspiracies everyone participates in: everyone knows you're not supposed to swear in front of it right now. A round, or leads for them. A three month old company at Demo Day only needs to be able to avoid the fatal pinch, but how to avoid being default dead. That must also mystify outsiders. Those in a position now to buy other companies.7
Police investigation apparently begins with a motive. Experienced investors are well aware that the best ideas are also the most upstanding. 0 is democracy.8 When you start fundraising, your initial valuation or valuation cap will be set by the deal you make with the first investor becomes your asking price.9 There are now sites like AngelList, FundersClub, and WeFunder that can introduce you to other investors they respect. But it's ok to use a high estimate when fundraising to add a margin for error. That problem is irreducible; it should be universal, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no correlation between their ages and how well they're doing.
And till they confirm, regard them as saying no.10 A round, and we'll be accepting termsheets next tuesday. So either existing investors will start to get cold feet. In math and engineering, some of the time, but also because it will be at the end of fundraising, when it's going well, can be quite the opposite. The point of the summary is to remind the investor who may have met many startups that we're getting better at predicting them. It's as if a chunk of genetic material from the old-fashioned robber baron business world got incorporated into the startup world. Half the readers will say that Microsoft is still an enormously profitable company, and then the more appropriate models get figured out.11
But most err on the side of overestimating this need rather than underestimating it. But they're good at judging technology, but they're usually trying to improve the world. Then X children will grow up feeling it's part of their identity to be honest and industrious. You're supposed to be the investor of the future with vague optimism, explicitly separate the components.12 I myself don't. But that gives them confidence to keep working, and their performance improves. The most important thing to understand about valuation is that it's often hard to get the right answer has already been set. If this would be the default.13
Notes
Public school kids at least for those interested in you, it becomes an advantage to be considered an angel round just converts into stock at the company's present or potential future business belongs to them this way.
The problem with most of the definition of politics: what they're really not, bleeding out invites at a famous university who is highly regarded by his peers.
But it's telling that it also worked for spam. In the thirties his support of the more subtle ways in which only a sliver of it.
As Secretary of Labor Statistics, about 1. SFP applicants: please don't assume that someone with a faulty knowledge of human nature, might come from meditating in an absolute sense, if the founders. Another approach would be very unhealthy.
Decimus Eros Merula, paid 50,000, because it has to be, yet. You end up with an associate if you seem evasive than if you like shit.
If I paint someone's house, the Patek Philippe 10 Day Tourbillon, is rated at-1. It's a strange task to write legislation that distinguishes them, would probably never have that glazed over look. Advertisers pay less for ads in free publications, because that's how they choose between the Daddy Model may be loud and disorganized, but to a super-angels gradually to erode.
Above.
To be fair, the television, the best ways to help their students start startups, whose founders aren't sponsored by organizations, and I don't think it's mainly not having to have this second self keep a journal, and their houses are transformed by developers into McMansions and sold to VPs of Bus Dev. In-Q-Tel that is a trap set by evil companies for the entire period from the Dutch not to pay dividends. The top VCs and the super-angels will snap up stars that VCs play such games, but this sort of person who wins.
Hackers don't need that much to say hello on her way out. 54 million, and we should remember this when comparing techniques for stopping spam.
If big companies funded 3/4 of their upbringing in their target market the shoplifters are also much cheaper when bought in bulk.
Is what we need to go behind the rapacious one. Comments at the company's PR people worked hard to game the system? But the early adopters.
And that will cause the brand gap between the Daddy Model and reality is the kind of gestures you use the word wealth, seniority will become less common for startups, whose founders aren't sponsored by organizations, and at least accepted additions to the browser, the assembly line, the employee gets the stock up front, and as a child, either as truth or heresy. Forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups. But wide-area bandwidth increased more than just getting started. 7 reports that in the sophomore year.
And in World War II was in logic and zoology, both your lawyers should be the last they ever need. Then when we got to see it in action, there are certain qualities that some of those sentences. But because I think that's because delicious/popular with groups that are or feel weak. Ii.
Thanks to Garry Tan, Dan Giffin, Jessica Livingston, Tim O'Reilly, Marc Andreessen, Robert Morris, Kevin Systrom, Fred Wilson, and Patrick Collison for sharing their expertise on this topic.
#automatically generated text#Markov chains#Paul Graham#Python#Patrick Mooney#world#Ii#sliver#Day#school#organizations#li#end#future#Labor#chunk#Collison#child#ones#register#sup
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My tips to new users to make Tumblr more usable
This is kind of random but I think Tumblr is one of those websites that hides a lot of its functionality from users and comes with default settings that makes it kind unusable (at least for me). So I've decided to collect some suggestions about things to do immediately in order to make Tumblr a much more usable website:
Most important: Put the content you actually opt into on your dash. First, go to Settings > Dashboard and turn off "Best Stuff First." In general, (1) I don't think it's good to let social media sites curate your content feed (they're not very good! you can curate your own content feeds!), and (2) chronological ordering is much more helpful for making sense of information. I don't know why you would want posts on a site to be presented in any other way. Please save yourself and make your dash chronological by toggling this monstrosity OFF. Also for the love of god, turn off "Include posts liked by the blogs you follow" and "Include 'Based On Your Likes!'" too. Other people's experiences might be different from mine, but when Tumblr first introduced this feature and I tried it out for a while, it was so predictable that every time I came across a post that made me viscerally angry and think, "How the HELL did this get on my dash?" it was always always some random post from someone I wasn't even following… So yeah, get rid of that.
Second, make the "Following" tab your default, instead of the "For you" tab. How to do this is not particularly obvious. From the Tumblr homepage (not settings), you need to find the tabs at the top of your dash (For you, Following, Your tags) and then click the toggle/settings icon to the right of those tabs. This will allow you to reorder your tabs. In particular, what you need to do is click the pin icon to the right of "Following," and this will set Following to be your pinned and first tab. By default, when you open Tumblr, your dash will show the posts of people you have actually opted into following rather than what Tumblr suggests to you.
Next, make sure timestamps on posts are on. This should be the default (despite what Tumblr says?), but if you don't see timestamps at the top of all posts, I highly recommend turning this setting on (under Settings > Dashboard). Knowing when a post was made is hugely helpful for understanding the context of the post, and I don't know why websites would allow you to hide this, really, unless they want you walking around with no sense of time or context, which uh… I don't recommend that social media experience!
Turn off endless scrolling (under Settings > Dashboard): Websites like endless scrolling to keep people from leaving the site. I recommend turning this off to make it more obvious how many posts you've scrolled through on Tumblr, to make it easier to find your place in older posts, and also to make the website just lighter to load. When I last used it, the Tumblr mobile app does not allow pagination, which is pretty typical of social media apps in general. Honestly, I recommend just not using the Tumblr mobile app at all. I've uninstalled it and aside from missing the convenience of being able to attach photos from my phone onto Tumblr posts, I really don't miss it…
Things that you may or may not be interested in:
Enable custom theme on (each of) your blog(s): So fun fact: If you don't have a custom theme enabled, then when people visit your blog when not logged into Tumblr, they will only be able to scroll through a few of the posts on your blog before being prompted by Tumblr to log in if they want to see more. This popup cannot be gotten around, and so people without Tumblr accounts or who are browsing on a device/browser without a login session just won't be able to see your posts. Personally, I do not like this behavior -- I like my blogs to be archives with useful permalinks that can be browsed by anyone. Anyway, you can get rid of this annoying prompt by going to Account > (select blog) > Blog settings and toggling that "Enable custom theme" slider. It doesn't really matter what theme you use (although there are a lot of options to choose from), just use a custom one!
Turn off "Shorten long posts" (under Settings > Dashboard): YMMV, but I personally don't find this setting very helpful as the maximum length for when it starts cutting off posts is pretty short and falls far short of what I would consider a "long post" that is inconvenient to scroll past. Instead, you may want to turn off this setting and create a filter for the tag "long post" (under Settings > Account > Filtered Tags).
Mature content: If you're interested in possibly seeing mature content, you may want to review your mature content settings (under Settings > Account) as by default, Tumblr is set to hide it entirely and doesn't tell you that it's hidden posts from you and so you probably just will not be aware this setting is a thing! Personally, I use the "Blur" setting.
Hiding content from users you don't want to see: As far as I can tell, if you see someone's posts in (e.g.) tag searches and would prefer not to see any of that person's posts in public places like that tag or appear on your dash by people you follow reblogging their posts, you should block them. Official Tumblr documentation does not say that this is a feature of blocking, but it is.
When Tumblr's functionality isn't enough… External tools such as XKit Rewritten provide a whole lot of QoL fixes to Tumblr's interface like making it easier to reply to replies, hiding posts you've already seen, showing how many new/unread posts are in tracked tags, showing all tags on posts by default rather than requiring you to click "See all," etc. For me, one thing I needed in order to make Tumblr semi-usable for me is hiding notes in tag searches (because I don't really need constant reminders that my tastes aren't aligned with wider fandom's tastes lol). I couldn't find a tool that does this, so I wrote a simple Tampermonkey script to do it for me.
Hope this helps new users of Tumblr, and feel free to add other helpful tips if you have them!
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Crystal Valley: A (Belated) 10th Anniversary, Just in Time for the 13th Anniversary!
Hey simblr! I've finally decided to queue up the posts of my custom 'hood I've been talking about for the past three years on here, lol. I posted this originally in the Fall 2021 season on Boolprop, which served to honor the 'hood's proper 10th anniversary. Given that the sims bug has bit me again and so has the desire to share, I'm going to do so now! The text will be lifted from Boolprop and all posts will be adjusted to a Tumblr format the best I can given the limitations of this site compared to a proper forum.
Text from the forum will start below! If you'd like to get ahead of the queue and check out how it appeared on the forum, you can do so by clicking HERE.
------------------(Remember proper line breaks? I do.)------------------
So after three months [May-July 2021] of downloading lots, CC, building houses, placing 'hood deco, making sure the sims were just right, I finally have completed a passion project of mine!
I (re)introduce to Tumblr for the first time: Crystal Valley!
Now, what's so special about this 'hood?
This 'hood, as the thread's title implies, is a recreation of one I made 10 years ago! Back in 2011 when I was gifted a laptop for my 13th birthday, I took it upon myself to install my copy of TS2 and the EPs and SPs I owned one by one so that I could get a chance to play with them a bit more in-depth than I did on the family desktop at the time (where I had installed everything I got immediately from about 2008 until then). This 'hood quickly became my go-to place to play, outpacing the then record holder of Pleasantview by a landslide. It also helped that in the summer of 2011 when I made the 'hood, my cousin was staying with us from Georgia, so I had someone to bounce ideas off of and relay this story to a bit. (She, however, was playing on her laptop in Belladonna Cove with some sims she made.) After that summer, this became the go to neighborhood for me. Wanted to play more of this convoluted story? Wanted to test mods? I booted up TS2 and went on down to Crystal Valley! Sadly it went by the wayside around 2013/2014 as I didn't take backing up seriously then. I used the name only to make a new neighborhood in 2015, but it wasn't a true recreation. Realizing that in 2021 it had been 10 years since I had created it, I figured now was as good a time as any to make this 'hood again! (Giving it some cosmetic updates that my 13 year old self wouldn't have done, like using defaults, and not including the premade bin sims because I have since learned how to stop them from being created.)
I should make a little content warning ahead of the posts about the families. There's nothing uber spicy (this is a recreation of a neighborhood I made at 13 after all), but it's really just about same-sex pregnancies? Fitting for this forum's [BoolProp's] name, this is where I tested out the boolprop testingcheatsenabled true and used the Tombstone of Life and Death to simulate genetic mergers, and two of the households storylines revolve around that. I also dabbled with InTeen in the 'hood back then, which was active in the recreation process, but not actively used outside of spawning sim's biological clocks. Hell, the household I used for that I didn't recreate 100% faithfully, and made it make a bit more sense storywise. (Even then it's not a major part of the Crystal Valley narrative, but rather a creative way to callback to that original household of tester sims.) Again, nothing too terribly offensive, but could be some rather crunchy bits for others that I wanted to give a quick heads up for. The first street we'll be heading to is Crystal Lane! It's where the first families I made were located, so it's only natural to start there. Not every family will be on that post, seeing as there's four households (Baker, Waters, Lopez, and Rizzo) on the street. The Baker's will be first!
#I'll be popping in periodically as this posts to make sure everything's going smoothly#sims 2#Crystal Valley: The Original
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Omegle has been shut down.
Posting here for posterity. Retrieved directly from omegle.com on Nov 8 2023
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C.S. Lewis
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” — Douglas Adams
Dear strangers,
From the moment I discovered the Internet at a young age, it has been a magical place to me. Growing up in a small town, relatively isolated from the larger world, it was a revelation how much more there was to discover – how many interesting people and ideas the world had to offer.
As a young teenager, I couldn’t just waltz onto a college campus and tell a student: “Let’s debate moral philosophy!” I couldn’t walk up to a professor and say: “Tell me something interesting about microeconomics!” But online, I was able to meet those people, and have those conversations. I was also an avid Wikipedia editor; I contributed to open source software projects; and I often helped answer computer programming questions posed by people many years older than me.
In short, the Internet opened the door to a much larger, more diverse, and more vibrant world than I would have otherwise been able to experience; and enabled me to be an active participant in, and contributor to, that world. All of this helped me to learn, and to grow into a more well-rounded person.
Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shield – one that empowered me to be less isolated than my trauma and fear would have otherwise allowed.
I launched Omegle when I was 18 years old, and still living with my parents. It was meant to build on the things I loved about the Internet, while introducing a form of social spontaneity that I felt didn’t exist elsewhere. If the Internet is a manifestation of the “global village”, Omegle was meant to be a way of strolling down a street in that village, striking up conversations with the people you ran into along the way.
The premise was rather straightforward: when you used Omegle, it would randomly place you in a chat with someone else. These chats could be as long or as short as you chose. If you didn’t want to talk to a particular person, for whatever reason, you could simply end the chat and – if desired – move onto another chat with someone else. It was the idea of “meeting new people” distilled down to almost its platonic ideal.
Building on what I saw as the intrinsic safety benefits of the Internet, users were anonymous to each other by default. This made chats more self-contained, and made it less likely that a malicious person would be able to track someone else down off-site after their chat ended.
I didn’t really know what to expect when I launched Omegle. Would anyone even care about some Web site that an 18 year old kid made in his bedroom in his parents’ house in Vermont, with no marketing budget? But it became popular almost instantly after launch, and grew organically from there, reaching millions of daily users. I believe this had something to do with meeting new people being a basic human need, and with Omegle being among the best ways to fulfill that need. As the saying goes: “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.”
Over the years, people have used Omegle to explore foreign cultures; to get advice about their lives from impartial third parties; and to help alleviate feelings of loneliness and isolation. I’ve even heard stories of soulmates meeting on Omegle, and getting married. Those are only some of the highlights.
Unfortunately, there are also lowlights. Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility. The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother “happy birthday”, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.
I believe in a responsibility to be a “good Samaritan”, and to implement reasonable measures to fight crime and other misuse. That is exactly what Omegle did. In addition to the basic safety feature of anonymity, there was a great deal of moderation behind the scenes, including state-of-the-art AI operating in concert with a wonderful team of human moderators. Omegle punched above its weight in content moderation, and I’m proud of what we accomplished.
Omegle’s moderation even had a positive impact beyond the site. Omegle worked with law enforcement agencies, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help put evildoers in prison where they belong. There are “people” rotting behind bars right now thanks in part to evidence that Omegle proactively collected against them, and tipped the authorities off to.
All that said, the fight against crime isn’t one that can ever truly be won. It’s a never-ending battle that must be fought and re-fought every day; and even if you do the very best job it is possible for you to do, you may make a sizable dent, but you won’t “win” in any absolute sense of that word. That’s heartbreaking, but it’s also a basic lesson of criminology, and one that I think the vast majority of people understand on some level. Even superheroes, the fictional characters that our culture imbues with special powers as a form of wish fulfillment in the fight against crime, don’t succeed at eliminating crime altogether.
In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users.
To an extent, it is reasonable to question the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcomed constructive feedback; and indeed, Omegle implemented a number of improvements based on such feedback over the years. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so, explicitly and avowedly; other times, it can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are not humanly achievable. Either way, the net result is the same.
Omegle is the direct target of these attacks, but their ultimate victim is you: all of you out there who have used, or would have used, Omegle to improve your lives, and the lives of others. When they say Omegle shouldn’t exist, they are really saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to use it; that you shouldn’t be allowed to meet random new people online. That idea is anathema to the ideals I cherish – specifically, to the bedrock principle of a free society that, when restrictions are imposed to prevent crime, the burden of those restrictions must not be targeted at innocent victims or potential victims of crime.
Consider the idea that society ought to force women to dress modestly in order to prevent rape. One counter-argument is that rapists don’t really target women based on their clothing; but a more powerful counter-argument is that, irrespective of what rapists do, women’s rights should remain intact. If society robs women of their rights to bodily autonomy and self-expression based on the actions of rapists – even if it does so with the best intentions in the world – then society is practically doing the work of rapists for them.
Fear can be a valuable tool, guiding us away from danger. However, fear can also be a mental cage that keeps us from all of the things that make life worth living. Individuals and families must be allowed to strike the right balance for themselves, based on their own unique circumstances and needs. A world of mandatory fear is a world ruled by fear – a dark place indeed.
I’ve done my best to weather the attacks, with the interests of Omegle’s users – and the broader principle – in mind. If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next? That is far and away removed from anything that could be considered a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool, but a physical-world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil. A healthy, free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent.
Unfortunately, what is right doesn’t always prevail. As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s.
The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection. If that sounds like a bad idea to you, please consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that fights for your rights online.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who used Omegle for positive purposes, and to everyone who contributed to the site’s success in any way. I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep fighting for you.
Sincerely, Leif K-Brooks Founder, Omegle.com LLC
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Have there been any ways that Default and Bracey as characters and their dynamic together have developed over time that you find are particularly interesting?
Been really fascinated by the ideas in the "Paradox of Fantasy" post and got curious about if/how they might've changed since first being introduced on the site up to now
Thank you so, so much for the question!
The characters of Bracey and Default date back to 2006, so they're actually older than the Goodbye Strangers project itself. Default, Adrian, Fifi and Bracey were all part of a story called Comatics, which didn't have anything to do with the strangers. Default had always been more-or-less of an "author stand-in", with his past being somewhat of a blank slate, and his personality mirroring my own. As such, he hasn't changed too much, aside from a few name changes and design adjustments over the years; at first, Default and Bracey were both anthropomorphic animal designs (Default was a rat, and Bracey was a jackal), but this was something that changed pretty quickly. Adrian never had an anthro form, for example.
As for Bracey, he initially had a lot of the same characteristics that he does now, but was much more of a direct antagonist. He was Default's stalker/ex, lived underground, had social anxiety, and wanted to take Default's brain out. He's always existed to be an internal outlet for my own self-destructive/masochistic desires, and the way that he treats Default mirrors the sort of treatment that I desire in a sort of "dream fantasy scenario". It's never been a secret that his character exists to represent a kind of "dream partner" (albeit in an obviously stylized way… I can truthfully say that I have absolutely no desire to have a romantic partner perform fatal brain surgery on me, lol).
At first, he was named "St. Patrick", after hearing the line "you will want it all / as St. Patrick pipes on". It just somehow 'grabbed me'. Most of the details in my work aren't decided with much particular initial intent – or rather, the initial intent is to capture the details that appear most solidified to me. Clovers already had some sort of meaning of "love psychosis", so somehow the "St. Patrick" imagery became aligned with that. He'd been a more-or-less 'dormant' character for a number of years after that, until in 2014, I was traveling from North Carolina to New York, and passed a town named "Bracey". Somehow his character came to mind immediately, along with the last name of "Wray" (I tend to gravitate towards alliteration/assonance in names) – though aside from the re-name, he didn't get too much more development until around 2019.
At some point (around 2016), I began to write about "alternate universe" versions of the Comatics cast set in the Strangers universe. The exact timeline for this is a little fuzzy, in terms of when different qualities were assigned; I don't remember when the concept of dissemblers and psychics came to me, for example – but this is when I started to include character and story details more overtly in the project. At some point, the "alternate universe" got developed enough that it became the "main universe", and this is when the Comatics storyline was integrated into Space Madness.
I'd been gradually using Bracey as more and more of an "avatar" character without thinking about it; internal worlds always have a "central" character that is most like myself, which grounds the narrative details – so a lot of his traits were developed as he came to take on more aspects of myself. When I first created him, he had sort of a "punk/metal" vibe, in terms of how I would have described his music tastes – except I don't listen to this kind of music, myself. So, this is when I started to associate him more with 90s rap music and dubstep; since this is the sort of music that I like to listen to when I'm in a more upbeat or energetic mood. He also started to "mellow out" during this time, in terms of having a side of himself that is more sentimental and protective of others. This is also during a time when my own mania and psychosis were starting to rear their head more noticeably, so he also conversely reflected this kind of unhinged state (…I'm doing a lot better now).
After the split from the team, I was dealing with pretty severe mental trauma, with my creative work factoring into this in part (I had always been very shy to share these characters, so the accusation that I created them specifically to upset people on purpose is something that hurt a lot to think about). For the first half-year or so after the split, I couldn't really talk to people at all, and was having a lot of panic attacks multiple times a day. So I started to use these characters as a source of internal comfort by imagining myself as one of them being comforted by the other, depending on which one I felt more like at the time. This is when their relationship became more solidified as something "unhealthy, but not abusive" – and I started to get more comfortable opening up about them and their role in terms of my conception of my 'self'.
Thank you so, so much for the question – hopefully that covers everything, it was fun to write all of this out! It's wild to think about these characters having been around so long that they're old enough to drink…
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From the Omegle Website:
““Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C.S. Lewis
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.” — Douglas Adams
Dear strangers,
From the moment I discovered the Internet at a young age, it has been a magical place to me. Growing up in a small town, relatively isolated from the larger world, it was a revelation how much more there was to discover – how many interesting people and ideas the world had to offer.
As a young teenager, I couldn’t just waltz onto a college campus and tell a student: “Let’s debate moral philosophy!” I couldn’t walk up to a professor and say: “Tell me something interesting about microeconomics!” But online, I was able to meet those people, and have those conversations. I was also an avid Wikipedia editor; I contributed to open source software projects; and I often helped answer computer programming questions posed by people many years older than me.
In short, the Internet opened the door to a much larger, more diverse, and more vibrant world than I would have otherwise been able to experience; and enabled me to be an active participant in, and contributor to, that world. All of this helped me to learn, and to grow into a more well-rounded person.
Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shield – one that empowered me to be less isolated than my trauma and fear would have otherwise allowed.
I launched Omegle when I was 18 years old, and still living with my parents. It was meant to build on the things I loved about the Internet, while introducing a form of social spontaneity that I felt didn’t exist elsewhere. If the Internet is a manifestation of the “global village”, Omegle was meant to be a way of strolling down a street in that village, striking up conversations with the people you ran into along the way.
The premise was rather straightforward: when you used Omegle, it would randomly place you in a chat with someone else. These chats could be as long or as short as you chose. If you didn’t want to talk to a particular person, for whatever reason, you could simply end the chat and – if desired – move onto another chat with someone else. It was the idea of “meeting new people” distilled down to almost its platonic ideal.
Building on what I saw as the intrinsic safety benefits of the Internet, users were anonymous to each other by default. This made chats more self-contained, and made it less likely that a malicious person would be able to track someone else down off-site after their chat ended.
I didn’t really know what to expect when I launched Omegle. Would anyone even care about some Web site that an 18 year old kid made in his bedroom in his parents’ house in Vermont, with no marketing budget? But it became popular almost instantly after launch, and grew organically from there, reaching millions of daily users. I believe this had something to do with meeting new people being a basic human need, and with Omegle being among the best ways to fulfill that need. As the saying goes: “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.”
Over the years, people have used Omegle to explore foreign cultures; to get advice about their lives from impartial third parties; and to help alleviate feelings of loneliness and isolation. I’ve even heard stories of soulmates meeting on Omegle, and getting married. Those are only some of the highlights.
Unfortunately, there are also lowlights. Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility. The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother “happy birthday”, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.
I believe in a responsibility to be a “good Samaritan”, and to implement reasonable measures to fight crime and other misuse. That is exactly what Omegle did. In addition to the basic safety feature of anonymity, there was a great deal of moderation behind the scenes, including state-of-the-art AI operating in concert with a wonderful team of human moderators. Omegle punched above its weight in content moderation, and I’m proud of what we accomplished.
Omegle’s moderation even had a positive impact beyond the site. Omegle worked with law enforcement agencies, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help put evildoers in prison where they belong. There are “people” rotting behind bars right now thanks in part to evidence that Omegle proactively collected against them, and tipped the authorities off to.
All that said, the fight against crime isn’t one that can ever truly be won. It’s a never-ending battle that must be fought and re-fought every day; and even if you do the very best job it is possible for you to do, you may make a sizable dent, but you won’t “win” in any absolute sense of that word. That’s heartbreaking, but it’s also a basic lesson of criminology, and one that I think the vast majority of people understand on some level. Even superheroes, the fictional characters that our culture imbues with special powers as a form of wish fulfillment in the fight against crime, don’t succeed at eliminating crime altogether.
In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users.
To an extent, it is reasonable to question the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcomed constructive feedback; and indeed, Omegle implemented a number of improvements based on such feedback over the years. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so, explicitly and avowedly; other times, it can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are not humanly achievable. Either way, the net result is the same.
Omegle is the direct target of these attacks, but their ultimate victim is you: all of you out there who have used, or would have used, Omegle to improve your lives, and the lives of others. When they say Omegle shouldn’t exist, they are really saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to use it; that you shouldn’t be allowed to meet random new people online. That idea is anathema to the ideals I cherish – specifically, to the bedrock principle of a free society that, when restrictions are imposed to prevent crime, the burden of those restrictions must not be targeted at innocent victims or potential victims of crime.
Consider the idea that society ought to force women to dress modestly in order to prevent rape. One counter-argument is that rapists don’t really target women based on their clothing; but a more powerful counter-argument is that, irrespective of what rapists do, women’s rights should remain intact. If society robs women of their rights to bodily autonomy and self-expression based on the actions of rapists – even if it does so with the best intentions in the world – then society is practically doing the work of rapists for them.
Fear can be a valuable tool, guiding us away from danger. However, fear can also be a mental cage that keeps us from all of the things that make life worth living. Individuals and families must be allowed to strike the right balance for themselves, based on their own unique circumstances and needs. A world of mandatory fear is a world ruled by fear – a dark place indeed.
I’ve done my best to weather the attacks, with the interests of Omegle’s users – and the broader principle – in mind. If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next? That is far and away removed from anything that could be considered a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool, but a physical-world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil. A healthy, free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent.
Unfortunately, what is right doesn’t always prevail. As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s.
The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection. If that sounds like a bad idea to you, please consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that fights for your rights online.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who used Omegle for positive purposes, and to everyone who contributed to the site’s success in any way. I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep fighting for you.
Sincerely,
Leif K-Brooks
Founder, Omegle.com LLC”
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Mizu REDUX VCV Review
It hasn’t really been a secret that I fell out of UTAU this year. I took a huge break from recording AND using UTAU and it’s taken time to get back in again (other than listening to other people’s stuff on Youtube...) I’m getting this in just before my Christmas plans get finalized. Happy Holidays! Since Hisaki is just a g-flag genderbend of Mizu I felt it redundant to talk about them as if they were separate voicebanks. You can read about Hisaki here. This review was requested by Animloid54.
*Art by Animloid54
Hear a Sample of Mizu
Bio
Name= Mizu (水) Age: 19 Gender: Female Sexuality: Hetero Height: 4ft 11in/152cm Personality: Mizu is a sweet, kind-hearted teen who loves to be helpful to others. She is also very energetic and loves to be active. Due to this, she mostly likes to spend her free time (when she isn't singing) hiking, rock-climbing or playing basketball. Mizu was introduced to music by her closest friends and she has loved it ever since.
Official Site
Mizu has an official site on Wix. On her page there are 3 voicebanks up for download. REDUX VCV is 193 MB when unzipped. It comes with mostly generated frq, pmk, and llsm files.
First Impressions
I was excited to look at Mizu since I’ve been following animloid for a while on YouTube. Mizu has a gentle, feminine tone. Her recordings seem to have been done on a lower end mic, lending the final results a very artificial tone. I personally like this sort of thing if it complements the voice, which I think it does here. The voicebank sounds good with g flags, but it dulls the edge a bit.
Configuration
The voicebank folder has one unsorted base pitch along with two other pitches. There’s F#3 and a strong C4 pitch, with the base pitch being about A3. There's no prefix.map included, meaning that pitches must be activated manually by default. The A3 pitch alone has impressive coverage, but the strong pitch adds a much needed bit of oomph to the high range. When you find a song that’s good for Mizu, it sounds really good, almost as satisfying as way more popular UTAus like Sora Denatsu.
Her oto is overall good. The preutter/overlap generally uses a 1:2 ratio or 1:1 ratio. The ん samples tend to be a bit cut off. There’s also a lot of duplicates, suggesting a moresampler base was used. Even more strangely, there are many blank oto entries on certain lines.
This doesn’t matter as much from a user’s standpoint, but BGM doesn’t seem to have been used during the recording process, making nearly every oto entry have to be adjusted manually. Having a consistent tempo while recording makes otoing easier on yourself. The recordings are alright, but are off pitch quite a lot.
My recommended flags: F3A40Y99
My recommended resamplers: doppeltler, f2resamp, w4utau
Final Thoughts
Mizu is impressive for someone who’s relatively new to UTAU. I’d recommend polishing up the recording process a bit, but I love the voicebank otherwise.
Got any other UTAUs you want me to review? Send an ask!
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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.
Okay, so I for one, DO NOT believe this remotely. If this was the case, then how is it so many people have come from Twitter and Reddit recently due to the Twitter limit and Reddit API scandals and survived ? How is it that the 400+ people I personally follow were able to learn to use the site if it is so horribly difficult? Also, most apps/sites require some learning to use. Most people are not born knowing how to use Facebook, Twitter, 4chan, Reddit, etc. Many kids have had to help their friends learn how to use Tiktok or Musically back in the day.
Even so, if it IS SOOO hard, then why do you have this page when a user makes a new account?
This is obviously meant to be showing them different things they can try looking at, thus simplifying the user experience. This opening sequence makes it much easier than to have nothing happen at all like when I joined the site in 2013. And have another example of what happens when you sign up:
the site clearly tells you that you should start following blogs and helps you find some. These must be failures if you think the site is still too difficult.
Sometimes the most rewarding experiences are the ones that require some learning to do. I was not born with the ability to make gifs and yet I find it rewarding, for example.
If it is so difficult, provide an in depth tutorial for new users that automatically pops up when they finish making their account. Many other sites, apps, and programs do this and function perfectly fine. Many of the people interested in this site also play videogames and as such, are able to understand tutorials.
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.
A good way to start this would be by having it so that people can view posts/tags without needing to be logged in. The reason many people avoid sites like pinterest, twitter, or instagram is because they require you to make an account simply to view what the site even has on it.
If you are also struggling to find new users, start advertising. Many people think Tumblr is completely dead due to the porn ban.
Advertise on fandom forums, advertise on 4chan’s banners, advertise on Facebook, advertise on Reddit. If people think the site is dead or do not know of it at all, they will never come here if they don’t get lucky on Google searches. Relying simply on someone getting lucky by word of mouth or through a fandom search on google, is shooting yourself in the foot. I can honestly say I have never once seen a Tumblr ad. I learned about the site through word of mouth on a comics forum I browsed as a teenager. I would imagine many of my mutuals learned through similar avenues.
Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.
This is actually a great idea because I frequently use the search engine to help run my side blogs and the search engine as it is almost never shows me what I want. It is very, very poorly optimized. I would imagine many of my friends who also assist in running big, group-run blogs would support a repaired search feature.
The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application.
Also what does this even mean? This is an extremely IT oriented statement and belittles the intelligence of the average person. How stupid do you think your userbase is that they cannot figure out how to search up their fandoms or to follow a blog? Especially when you already provided semi-tutorials at sign up? If you want your userbase to not respond to you so viscerally, using tech-bro language such as this would be something you must stop. People will continue responding with anger and cursing if you continue communicating in such a way.
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.
If this is the case, repair your search engine as hinted at in your earlier point. I am always confused when I search up the game Firewatch or other small fandoms and I get five thousand KPOP gifs/fanfictions and Character X Reader pornographic fanfictions. I am often getting completely unrelated content even for big fandoms.
On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr.
One point that might be leading to this is the existence of side-blogs and alternate accounts. Many users I know have alternate accounts to maintain curated interests. If I am popping in and out of accounts, I really wouldn’t see more than 25 posts and that is okay.
I want the first 25 posts on my dashboard to be by people I follow. NOT by ANYBODY else. I also want it to be the most recent reblogs/posts. A non-chronological dashboard is completely antithetical to why I use this site. I and many other veteran users WILL leave if this is altered.
Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.
I largely do not have an issue with this one as I do enjoy using Tumblr to communicate with my mutuals/other people I follow. However, I cannot agree with this point:
Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed.
I DO NOT care about duplicates and I would wager many other users do not. My reasoning for this is that I can easily skip duplicates with the ‘J’ key and also, often there are new, interesting tags on each reblog that I would miss if duplicates were cut entirely. If this anti-duplicate feature were something that could be toggled, it would be more acceptable and many users would probably turn it on. However, I could keep it turned off which would be to my preference and would be the most equitable for the entire userbase.
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.
This is entirely true when many people do not reblog creations and you have staff members like cyle who actively discourage reblogging in favour of ‘liking only’ which any gif creator, fanfic writer, or artist could tell you is entirely useless.
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.
If you want to foster creators, return the legacy editor. There have been an endless amount of gifmakers who have listed the various ways the new editor is unintuitive and actively harmful to the graphical quality of their gifs. Even JPEG, PNGS and art is harmed by the new editor as it actively lessens the quality of the image.
The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”),
If a post from someone I do not follow shows up on my main dashboard feed, that goes ENTIRELY against the purpose of the dashboard. The dashboard, for me, is for chronological posts from people I follow or tags I follow. I NEVER want to see random, unrelated content on there. This WILL make me leave the site if any algorithm or unwanted content shows up on my feed. If I wanted a completely random feed, I would go on reddit or facebook. Many people from those sites have complained about algorithms and random content. So beware!
perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators.
Most of the blogs I follow are not popular. I have many people I follow who are under 1k and even under 500 followers. They are the ONLY people I want to see on my dashboard. If you want new creators to get their gifsets/art pieces found, encourage them to use the tagging system. Many do not tag their content appropriately which leads to their works never being discovered. For example, if I made a gifset for Overwatch of one of its characters and I never tagged it with the game’s name, the character’s name or any of the gaming-adjacent tags, it will NEVER be found. That would be my fault entirely for failing to use the system in place. Provide a tutorial for new creators perhaps. Don’t ruin someone’s curated dashboard because people don’t use tags for their gifsets.
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.
Simplify the reporting system and blocking system. Right now it is very easy to see blocked users on your dashboard. Also, it is extremely difficult to report stolen artwork or gifsets on this site and often users have to argue with the thieves themselves in order to get anything done. I had to report a user who kept posting nude selfies in a tag frequented by children/teenagers for over a month before anything was done. That is not acceptable.
Though I will admit, there was an improvement to the blocking of anons by having anon be requisite on being logged in and by blocking the user behind the anon. So that was definitely a good thing!
Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it.
Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.
Encourage new users to use tags and encourage new users to actually reblog content. Creators WILL stop if their works are never reblogged. And actively listen to creators’ hatred of the new editor. Putting your thumbs in your ears on the issues of the new editor, will NOT make creators stay as they will get frustrated and leave over it as many already have or are currently considering.
Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.
I have no issue with the section on emails and notifications as long as users are given an option to opt out as I would be doing.
Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.
I have no issue with this as I primarily use desktop and have no experience with the mobile performance.
Also if you want users to stay, do something about the insane amount of pornographic blogs that run rampant on the site. I have had to report over 600 from one of my side blogs and I am frequently getting new porn bot followers and now even likes from such bots on my gifsets. I do NOT want my gifsets to be liked by porn bots as I do not want to associate with them.
Also, it is ironic that this post was made with the legacy editor considering how much staff loves to force the new editor.
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.
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The selectmenu Element is No More…Long Live select!
New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/the-selectmenu-element-is-no-morelong-live-select/
The selectmenu Element is No More…Long Live select!
I was looking over an older article Patrick Brosset penned for us introducing <selectmenu>, a new proposal at the time for a more style-able cousin to <select>. From there, I clicked the linked-up <selectmenu> explainer and got… this:
OK, link rot is a thing and happens all the time. Perhaps the site needs a little URL designing? But no, it’s not that at all. I searched a bit and found Jared White’s post saying that <selectmenu> is no more, which came by way of Una’s post over at the Chrome Developer Blog seeking feedback on a “customizable select”. And Adam Argyle’s got a wonderful demo dedicated to it, no surprise there.
I’m only sharing the links for now but plan to spend some time with it and jot down notes on Open UI’s new page for the Customizable <select>. I enjoyed looking at the boilerplate from Adam’s demo as a first glance:
select &, &::picker(select) appearance: base-select; &::picker(select) transition: display allow-discrete 1s, opacity 1s, overlay 1s allow-discrete ; &:not(:open)::picker(select) opacity: 0; &:open::picker(select) opacity: 1; @starting-style opacity: 0;
I see the ::picker(select) there that’s driving all of it. If I sneak a peek at Una’s post, I see that there are more ways to select different <select> parts, including:
<selectedoption> (the current selection)
<option> (which now accepts HTML in between the tags!)
option::before
option:checked (a little confusion here with the selected option)
<button> (the little chevron arrow marker thingy)
So, perhaps Chrome is more of a fan of extending the native <select> with additional CSS features for selecting the existing parts rather than moving forward with a completely new element. That’s cool, as one of Una’s demos shows how we still get the default <select> behavior even if a browser does not support the new selectors.
Direct Link →
#amp#Article#Behavior#Blog#browser#chrome#CSS#Developer#display#driving#Features#Forms#how#HTML#it#Link#links#marker#notes#One#plan#selectors#time#transition#UI#URL
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A Comprehensive Guide to Implementing Google Tag Manager (GTM) in Magento 2
Marketing is entirely contingent upon knowing the user's patterns of behavior. Using Google Tag Manager (GTM), industries can effectively measure marketing trends, gather informative data, and monitor user actions. GTM and Magento 2 integration will enhance your data collection skills even more, helping you make the proper decision. This how-to manual graciously introduces the GTM system in Magento 2, emphasizing IoCheckout as a specific example and explaining the benefits and easy installation differentiator.
Understanding Google Tag Manager (GTM)
Google Tag Manager is a free tool for managing and deploying marketing tags (code snippets or tracking pixels) on your website without cheating the source code. GTM makes it simpler to attach new tags, which in turn enables you to follow up on user interactions, conversion rates, and other main factors.
Benefits of GTM Tracking
Ease of Setup and Use: GTM's interface is friendly and intuitive, just like you would expect it to be, even if you are not a computer professional.
Centralized Management: All your tags are stored in one place, which helps prevent mistakes and simplifies the whole process.
Customization and Flexibility: GTM allows for incredible custom changes, which let you monitor almost any user interaction and behavior you like.
Enhanced Marketing Insights: By analyzing user movements, GTM gives you real-time data crucial for refining marketing campaigns and increasing overall performance.
Integrating GTM with Magento 2
Integrating GTM into Magento 2 encompasses some cardinal steps, briefly run below. Also, the IoCheckout extension can be used in this situation; it will be easier this way, and the store admins will already have the checkout tracking set up as a default, which will take care of the user experience for the customer who is shopping on the site.
Step 1: Create an Account and Integrate IoCheckout
Sign Up for GTM: If you do not have a GTM account, you can get one by signing up at tagmanager.google.com.
Create a Container: After the sign-in step, reserve a new container to manage all your tags, triggers, and variables for your Magento 2 store.
Step 2: Add the GTM Code to Magento 2
Obtain the GTM Code: When you create the container, GTM will give you the HTML code and a second snippet.
Insert Code into Magento 2: Enter the following code into your Magento 2 store. Ideally, utilize the code in multiple web page regions, such as the header and body sections.
Step 3: Configure GTM Tags, Triggers, and Variables
Get Tags Ready: Tags are short pieces of code that you can insert into your website to track user actions. Well-known tags are Google Analytics, AdWords, and remarketing tags.
Setting Triggers: Triggers are the ones you can use to get your tags fired on any page you want. For example, to include or exclude a single or multiple pages on a website, click a form, or click an element.
Variable Creation: The variables replace the values that GTM uses to produce the tags and triggers. Surprisingly, this includes the contact form ID, website click text, and page URI.
Enhancing GTM with IoCheckout for Magento 2
IoCheckout is a Magento 2 extension that simplifies the checkout process and includes GTM tracking features. Customers can practically discern the advantages and disadvantages of these online stores by providing a glimpse into the network of grocery chain retailers.
Key Features of IoCheckout
Pre-configured GTM Tracking: The Magento 2 IoCheckout module comes with pre-configured GTM tracking for each step of the checkout process. It, therefore, facilitates the development of one to several technology concepts, including IoT and human-machine interaction, growth and management of local data, introducing analytics, network security, software development, and many other similar disciplines. Users can select and start navigating to their chosen day and time. This helps the customer to know the start time while watching for the train arrival timeframe.
Customization Options: Customizing the tracking code would be very useful. For example, it can be the addition of a required personal data field for a smoother registration process or the live address validation that saves customers time by ensuring they use the correct address the first time. These are steps where IoT technology can assist in dealing with actual problems.
Comprehensive Data Collection: IoCheckout, which you might have heard of and will tell you more about, is a powerful tool for upgrading the checkout process of your e-commerce store. Having given you all these examples, we want you to appreciate the IoT power and the hurdles the industry might face in the years ahead.
Examples include the possibility of unlocking doors through your voice, whether this will replace traditional security quickly or not. Research has been carried out on various IoT technology applications already on the market, and some are still under development. To replicate it, almost the same data should be available.
Measuring Checkout Steps with IoCheckout
Users will talk about their experience in the grocery retail environment, followed by solutions and innovation with new technologies. The checkout process is the most crucial stage in a customer's journey. You can only hop on with the task after first intelligently personalizing the network service for the customer so that you don't end up providing the wrong item, equivalently failing and potentially losing customer trust. IoCheckout's GTM tracking features make it possible for you to:
Track Each Step of the Checkout: Monitor user progress through each checkout process step, from cart review to payment confirmation. To deliver the broad range that customers have come to expect, networks must figure out how to achieve long-term success in terms of their connections' number, variety, and speed. One of the benefits of IoT for the development of smart cities is that it could help.
Optimize User Experience: By utilizing GTM tracking observations, you can customize the checkout process and improve the consumer's experience.
Essence
Google Tag Manager integration into Magento 2 is the best way to improve your different angles of tracking and marketing. GTM allows you to set short descriptions that can be managed and deployed through tags. Additionally, you can do configuration tracking according to your specific needs, and as a result, you will have access to the user behavior data. Implementing the IoCheckout extension can further optimize the process, as it was designed to include the GTM pre-configured tag system for checkout and comprises the option of extra customization. Through GTM and IoCheckout integration with your Magento 2 store, you can reach the full potential of your marketing efforts, make your website more user-friendly, and convert more customers.
#magento 2 google tag manager#Magento 2 GTM Tracking#GTM Tracking#magento 2 gtm#magento google tag manager#magento 2 tag manager#Google Tag Manager#Magento 2#eCommerce Solutions#google tag manager magento 2#magento 2 google tag manager extension
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change over any PDF into a flipbook with only a single tick
Making an outwardly captivating and intuitive flipbook from your PDF records can essentially improve your substance conveyance and client experience. For WordPress site proprietors hoping to add this usefulness, Fliperrr is a strong module that makes this change easy. Accessible on CodeCanyon, Fliperrr permits you to change over any PDF into a flipbook with only a single tick and soon. Here is a thorough aide on the best way to utilize Fliperrr to add dynamic flipbooks to your WordPress site.
Stage 1: Buy and Introduce Fliperrr
To start with, visit the Fliperrr create flipbook from pdf page on CodeCanyon to buy the module. Subsequent to finishing the buy, download the module documents to your PC. Sign in to your WordPress administrator dashboard, explore to "Modules" > "Add New," and click on "Transfer Module." Select the Fliperrr compress record you downloaded and introduce it. When the establishment is finished, enact the module.
Stage 2: Design Essential Settings
Subsequent to enacting the module, you'll see another Fliperrr menu in your WordPress dashboard. Click on it to get to the module settings. You should arrange a few essential settings to tweak how your flipbooks will show up on your site. This incorporates picking default subjects, changing the size, and setting other presentation choices to guarantee your flipbooks coordinate consistently with your web architecture's.
Stage 3: Transfer Your PDF
With the fundamental settings arranged, you're prepared to make your first flipbook. Explore to the Fliperrr segment in your dashboard and snap on "Add New Flipbook." Transfer your PDF record by moving it into the assigned region or by choosing the document from your PC. Fliperrr's strong motor will consequently change over your PDF into a flipbook soon.
Stage 4: Tweak Your Flipbook
When your PDF is changed over, you can additionally tweak the flipbook to improve its intelligence and appearance. Fliperrr offers a scope of customization choices, including the capacity to add ambient sound, change page flip speed, and consolidate intelligent components like connections and mixed media. These elements guarantee that your flipbook gives a connecting with and vivid perusing experience for your clients.
Stage 5: Distribute and Install Your Flipbook
Subsequent to modifying your flipbook, now is the right time to distribute it. Fliperrr makes it simple to install your flipbook into any post or page on your WordPress site. Just duplicate the shortcode gave by the module and glue it into the ideal area. You can likewise utilize the Fliperrr gadget to add flipbooks to your sidebar or other gadget prepared region of your site.
Advantages of Utilizing Fliperrr
Fliperrr offers various advantages, going with it an optimal decision for adding flipbooks to your WordPress site. The module is easy to use and requires no specialized skill to utilize. It saves time and exertion via computerizing the transformation cycle and gives a scope of customization choices to improve your flipbooks. Moreover, flipbooks made with Fliperrr are dynamic, guaranteeing a smooth and pleasant perusing experience across all gadgets.
Utilizing Fliperrr create flipbook from pdf to change over your PDFs into intuitive flipbooks is a straightforward and powerful method for improving your substance conveyance on your WordPress site. By following these means, you can make outwardly engaging and drawing in flipbooks that enamor your crowd and give a prevalent understanding encounter. Whether you're exhibiting an item inventory, a digital book, or a magazine, Fliperrr makes it simple to rejuvenate your static PDF records.
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"Dear strangers,
From the moment I discovered the Internet at a young age, it has been a magical place to me. Growing up in a small town, relatively isolated from the larger world, it was a revelation how much more there was to discover – how many interesting people and ideas the world had to offer.
As a young teenager, I couldn’t just waltz onto a college campus and tell a student: “Let’s debate moral philosophy!” I couldn’t walk up to a professor and say: “Tell me something interesting about microeconomics!” But online, I was able to meet those people, and have those conversations. I was also an avid Wikipedia editor; I contributed to open source software projects; and I often helped answer computer programming questions posed by people many years older than me.
In short, the Internet opened the door to a much larger, more diverse, and more vibrant world than I would have otherwise been able to experience; and enabled me to be an active participant in, and contributor to, that world. All of this helped me to learn, and to grow into a more well-rounded person.
Moreover, as a survivor of childhood rape, I was acutely aware that any time I interacted with someone in the physical world, I was risking my physical body. The Internet gave me a refuge from that fear. I was under no illusion that only good people used the Internet; but I knew that, if I said “no” to someone online, they couldn’t physically reach through the screen and hold a weapon to my head, or worse. I saw the miles of copper wires and fiber-optic cables between me and other people as a kind of shield – one that empowered me to be less isolated than my trauma and fear would have otherwise allowed.
I launched Omegle when I was 18 years old, and still living with my parents. It was meant to build on the things I loved about the Internet, while introducing a form of social spontaneity that I felt didn’t exist elsewhere. If the Internet is a manifestation of the “global village”, Omegle was meant to be a way of strolling down a street in that village, striking up conversations with the people you ran into along the way.
The premise was rather straightforward: when you used Omegle, it would randomly place you in a chat with someone else. These chats could be as long or as short as you chose. If you didn’t want to talk to a particular person, for whatever reason, you could simply end the chat and – if desired – move onto another chat with someone else. It was the idea of “meeting new people” distilled down to almost its platonic ideal.
Building on what I saw as the intrinsic safety benefits of the Internet, users were anonymous to each other by default. This made chats more self-contained, and made it less likely that a malicious person would be able to track someone else down off-site after their chat ended.
I didn’t really know what to expect when I launched Omegle. Would anyone even care about some Web site that an 18 year old kid made in his bedroom in his parents’ house in Vermont, with no marketing budget? But it became popular almost instantly after launch, and grew organically from there, reaching millions of daily users. I believe this had something to do with meeting new people being a basic human need, and with Omegle being among the best ways to fulfill that need. As the saying goes: “If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.”
Over the years, people have used Omegle to explore foreign cultures; to get advice about their lives from impartial third parties; and to help alleviate feelings of loneliness and isolation. I’ve even heard stories of soulmates meeting on Omegle, and getting married. Those are only some of the highlights.
Unfortunately, there are also lowlights. Virtually every tool can be used for good or for evil, and that is especially true of communication tools, due to their innate flexibility. The telephone can be used to wish your grandmother “happy birthday”, but it can also be used to call in a bomb threat. There can be no honest accounting of Omegle without acknowledging that some people misused it, including to commit unspeakably heinous crimes.
I believe in a responsibility to be a “good Samaritan”, and to implement reasonable measures to fight crime and other misuse. That is exactly what Omegle did. In addition to the basic safety feature of anonymity, there was a great deal of moderation behind the scenes, including state-of-the-art AI operating in concert with a wonderful team of human moderators. Omegle punched above its weight in content moderation, and I’m proud of what we accomplished.
Omegle’s moderation even had a positive impact beyond the site. Omegle worked with law enforcement agencies, and the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, to help put evildoers in prison where they belong. There are “people” rotting behind bars right now thanks in part to evidence that Omegle proactively collected against them, and tipped the authorities off to.
All that said, the fight against crime isn’t one that can ever truly be won. It’s a never-ending battle that must be fought and re-fought every day; and even if you do the very best job it is possible for you to do, you may make a sizable dent, but you won’t “win” in any absolute sense of that word. That’s heartbreaking, but it’s also a basic lesson of criminology, and one that I think the vast majority of people understand on some level. Even superheroes, the fictional characters that our culture imbues with special powers as a form of wish fulfillment in the fight against crime, don’t succeed at eliminating crime altogether.
In recent years, it seems like the whole world has become more ornery. Maybe that has something to do with the pandemic, or with political disagreements. Whatever the reason, people have become faster to attack, and slower to recognize each other’s shared humanity. One aspect of this has been a constant barrage of attacks on communication services, Omegle included, based on the behavior of a malicious subset of users.
To an extent, it is reasonable to question the policies and practices of any place where crime has occurred. I have always welcomed constructive feedback; and indeed, Omegle implemented a number of improvements based on such feedback over the years. However, the recent attacks have felt anything but constructive. The only way to please these people is to stop offering the service. Sometimes they say so, explicitly and avowedly; other times, it can be inferred from their act of setting standards that are not humanly achievable. Either way, the net result is the same.
Omegle is the direct target of these attacks, but their ultimate victim is you: all of you out there who have used, or would have used, Omegle to improve your lives, and the lives of others. When they say Omegle shouldn’t exist, they are really saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to use it; that you shouldn’t be allowed to meet random new people online. That idea is anathema to the ideals I cherish – specifically, to the bedrock principle of a free society that, when restrictions are imposed to prevent crime, the burden of those restrictions must not be targeted at innocent victims or potential victims of crime.
Consider the idea that society ought to force women to dress modestly in order to prevent rape. One counter-argument is that rapists don’t really target women based on their clothing; but a more powerful counter-argument is that, irrespective of what rapists do, women’s rights should remain intact. If society robs women of their rights to bodily autonomy and self-expression based on the actions of rapists – even if it does so with the best intentions in the world – then society is practically doing the work of rapists for them.
Fear can be a valuable tool, guiding us away from danger. However, fear can also be a mental cage that keeps us from all of the things that make life worth living. Individuals and families must be allowed to strike the right balance for themselves, based on their own unique circumstances and needs. A world of mandatory fear is a world ruled by fear – a dark place indeed.
I’ve done my best to weather the attacks, with the interests of Omegle’s users – and the broader principle – in mind. If something as simple as meeting random new people is forbidden, what’s next? That is far and away removed from anything that could be considered a reasonable compromise of the principle I outlined. Analogies are a limited tool, but a physical-world analogy might be shutting down Central Park because crime occurs there – or perhaps more provocatively, destroying the universe because it contains evil. A healthy, free society cannot endure when we are collectively afraid of each other to this extent.
Unfortunately, what is right doesn’t always prevail. As much as I wish circumstances were different, the stress and expense of this fight – coupled with the existing stress and expense of operating Omegle, and fighting its misuse – are simply too much. Operating Omegle is no longer sustainable, financially nor psychologically. Frankly, I don’t want to have a heart attack in my 30s.
The battle for Omegle has been lost, but the war against the Internet rages on. Virtually every online communication service has been subject to the same kinds of attack as Omegle; and while some of them are much larger companies with much greater resources, they all have their breaking point somewhere. I worry that, unless the tide turns soon, the Internet I fell in love with may cease to exist, and in its place, we will have something closer to a souped-up version of TV – focused largely on passive consumption, with much less opportunity for active participation and genuine human connection. If that sounds like a bad idea to you, please consider donating to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that fights for your rights online.
From the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who used Omegle for positive purposes, and to everyone who contributed to the site’s success in any way. I’m so sorry I couldn’t keep fighting for you.
Sincerely,
Leif K-Brooks
Founder, Omegle.com LLC"
#geez what a eulogy#omegle#i learned to write stories on that website#yes there were bad parts#but overall i really enjoyed it
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The Ultimate Guide to Genshin Impact Top Up Options
As the popular free-to-play action RPG Genshin Impact continues to expand and introduce new content, many players seek to enhance their experience by purchasing premium currency. This allows access to powerful characters, weapons, and other upgrades to progress faster. However, topping up can be confusing for beginners. This ultimate guide covers everything you need to know about Genshin Impact top up options.
What is Genesis Crystals?
The premium currency in Genshin Impact is called Genesis Crystals. It can be purchased with real-world money and then used to obtain the Battle Pass, Blessing of the Welkin Moon, and converted to the non-premium currency Primogems at a 1:1 ratio.
The Battle Pass unlocks rewards as you gain experience points.
The Blessing provides 90 Primogems daily for 30 days.
Primogems summon new characters, weapons, and other loot.
Top Up Options
There are a few ways to buy Genesis Crystals and top up your account:
Directly in-game
Official miHoYo sites
Third-party seller platforms
In-Game Top Up
You can access the in-game shop from the Paimon menu. This is the default way to top up offered within Genshin Impact itself. Various Genesis Crystal bundles are available depending on your budget.
Official Site Top Up
Both the official Genshin Impact website and Hoyolab community offer top up options as well. This ensures security since it's directly from developer miHoYo. However, prices are identical to in-game purchases.
Third-Party Seller Platforms
Alternative marketplaces like LootBar give players more flexibility on pricing. As a trusted seller with 24/7 support, LootBar provides Genesis Crystals at cheaper rates along with discounts or cashback rewards.
LootBar emphasizes a 100% safe transaction environment, ensuring a secure and satisfactory customer experience.
How Third-Party Top Up Works
When buying from third-party sellers, customers first select their desired bundle of Genesis Crystals. After checkout with payment methods like PayPal, the crystals are delivered directly by the platform for instant in-game access. This process is safe and convenient.
Benefits of Third-Party Top Up
Why choose websites like LootBar over the default options?
Better prices and discounts compared to in-game purchases
Faster delivery of crystals after purchase
Wider variety of secure payment methods available
Excellent 24/7 customer service support in case issues arise
As an authorized seller, LootBar provides all this and more. Players can conveniently stay stocked up on Genesis Crystals without breaking the bank!
Improving Your Genshin Impact Experience
Here are some of the valuable upgrades unlocked in Genshin Impact by topping up Genesis Crystals:
New Characters
The primary use of Genesis Crystals is converting them into Fate to summon new powerful characters from the rotating banners. 5-star characters in particular can greatly boost your party's strength.
Battle Pass
This premium reward track awards plenty of upgrade materials, weapons, Primogems, and other loot by completing missions and earning XP.
Blessing of the Welkin Moon
A monthly subscription that provides 2700 Primogems over 30 days. This equals nearly 17 pulls towards the next 5-star character you want!
Investing in some Genesis Crystals opens up faster progression and more enjoyment in Genshin Impact. And third-party seller platforms like LootBar make topping up easy with their discounts and service.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is it safe to buy from third-party sellers?
Yes, reputable sellers like LootBar are authorized providers that deliver Genesis Crystals through secure delivery protocols. Players' accounts and payment info remain protected throughout the transaction.
How long does delivery take?
Delivery of the purchased Genesis Crystals is near instant after checkout. Players can expect to see them credited to their account almost immediately.
Can I get banned for buying from third-parties?
No. As officially approved sellers, platforms like LootBar work directly with miHoYo to provide a legitimate service. There is no risk of bans or other account issues.
Ready to ascend new heights in the world of Teyvat? Follow this guide to seamlessly top up your Genesis Crystals! Whether you're a new Traveler or seasoned veteran, sites like LootBar make the process easy and affordable.
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