#like i KNOW it's just xkit but i've got this weird Thing about it

[deadtower]

hey uhmmm btw if you have the extension turned on on xkit where you import the tags of the person you reblogged the post from please delete them for me bc it really freaks me out. thx <3

[dullweapons]

If you could give a single piece of advice to new people in the roleplay community, what would it be?

i see you've sent this to a few others nonny : twiliae's post is v good & so is puxrlunae's . i haven't seen others on my dash at the time of writing ( tho i can guess other ppl have been asked but idk lol ) but imma try not to duplicate what they said but / shrug

i'd recommend learning when you do need to stay in your own lane & have some critical thinking . don't push yourself into drama cause the rpc says you just have to stay informed & don't believe everything you see . i've seen a callout where they screamed that the person the callout was about was transphobic cause they used the wrong pronoun for a muse ..........in a whole roleplay where they than used the correct pronoun & it was simply a mistype in one or two places . but the callout post highlighted the wrong pronoun use to make sure you believed them & not the would-be offender & people are quick to the gun . this wasn't in the zelda rpc nor any connected one & was years ago so i don't remember anything beyond it was so shitty to bend the truth . like maybe english was their second language so they got confused or forgot or maybe someone writes the same muse with different pronouns ?? idk

sometimes it's better to just turn around & go back to writing ur little doll kissing ur friends doll lol

this is why my rules states this :

i do read the callout posts but i reserve the right to my own opinion that may differ from yours . please do not come to me if someone i am writing with has a callout post unless they have done something illegal ( child grooming , abuse , major harm , ect )

it's not so much my own opinion in the way of " oh i don't think what they did was wrong ✨ " & more of " does this callout have any weight ? " & sometimes i find that no , no it does not .

beyond that idk ... write for urself , be nice to others . you don't have to have fancy graphics to special formatting you just need to follow common courtesy . you want fun questions & starters you gotta also send them to others . tag ur triggers . don't reblog threads if they aren't for you & enjoy your time here because its a hobby !! don't stress if you feel like your writing isn't the best ⸺ you will only improve the more you write & soon you'll find yourself writing some really sexy threads with amazing friends <;3

also !!!!! you can find resource blogs that have posts about what you need to know or what might be helpful if you're super new & find xkit weird ( i had such a hard time figuring out xkit vs new xkit vs xkit rewritten omg but resource blogs helped a lot ) or don't get what reblog karma is or other little things like that . some even have templates for free or good prices ! i'll list a few that i follow & use still :

poohsources , rpclefairy , soulrph , & plenty more are here ! just search some tags like rp resources , rph , carrd templates , ect ! you're bound to find the help ur looking for !

anyway this isn't a single thing !!!!!!! i just went off !!!!! i event trimmed some of the advice cause it was repeating what other ppl said but oops lol hope this helps !!!

[aceofwhump]

Question is the legacy editor any good? I've never used it because I'm paranoid about it messing my posts up lmao but I'm curious

The short answer is yes. Legacy editor, the older way tumblr did posting, is in my opinion, the superior editor. I love the legacy editor. A lot. It is definitely superior and I'm sad staff has decided to slowly get rid of it.

However! With that said I've been pretty much exclusively using the beta post editor for the last like year when staff announced that they'd be eliminating the legacy editor eventually so I thought it'd be a good idea to get used to the beta editor. Which I suppose I did. I've gotten used to it and don't use legacy much at all anymore. I also wanted to use it because I got really tired of not being able to edit in mobile the posts I made on web using the legacy editor. With the beta editor you can edit across platforms which is soooo nice. (although it appears that in one of the apps many updates I can now edit a gifset I made today via legacy editor but not the posts I've made in the past using the legacy editor so who knows what's going with that).

But there's a lot of annoying things about the new beta editor that make it inferior to the legacy editor and I'm praying that staff will improve it. For starters, and probably my biggest complaint, is how awful it is to upload and rearrange images. It's so much easier in legacy editor to move images around. In beta the page moves when you start to move the image and it drives me CRAZY!!! I always end up putting the image in the wrong place because the page won't stop moving! Legacy is wonderful to arrange images. I do think the upload is slightly better in beta purely because it uploads multiple images in the order I select them where the legacy just puts them in whatever order it wants to and I have to remember what order I wanted my gifs in.

Legacy is also better because it actually differentiates between an image post and a text post. With the beta editor everything is technically a test post. So my gifsets are not considered an "image post". Some people have noted that the beta, since it's not an image post, it resizes the images a little and sometimes decreases the quality of the gif by doing that. I haven't really noticed that myself with my own gifs but doesn't mean it isnt happening.

The legacy editor also allows me to upload my gifs without stupid errors for no reason. Lately any time I upload more than 6 gifs at once I get an error message and have to upload them one by one. Its not because of size because they're always under 7mbs so I don't know why I can't upload them all at once. I hate it actually. And sometimes my gif will be under 10mbs (like 9.7mbs) and it'll tell me that the gif is too big. Excuse me tumblr but 9.7 is smaller than 10! I never had this problem in legacy.

The legacy editor is also better when it comes to using html, inserting links as text and not the stupid thing beta does where you paste the link and it becomes that stupid post preview thing that I hate, and oh my god is it awful for text blocks! When it first came out you couldnt select multiple texts blocks at all. You can now but it isn't the easiest. And it like expands when you do and makes it weird. Idk it's hard to describe. In legacy you can just...select all the text with no problems. Text blocks are treated like individual sections in the beta and make editing a major pain in the ass.

I also don't like thst apparently new xkit won't work in beta and you have to use xkit rewritten because fuck I don't want to learn how to use that one when I've been using new xkit for years but I guess I'm gonna have to now. I haven't been having any problems with xkit yet but who knows....

So yeah I think overall legacy is better. Beta Post Editor has some good things (I like the increased image upload limit, the editing tags is good) about it but there's so many problems. Unfortunately we're stuck with it so I've been sticking to using it exclusively to make the transition easier on myself. I do suggest becoming used to how it works and to just continue to provide feedback to staff about features we dislike or bugs we come across. Hopefully they'll listen and improve it.

[pippenpaddlopsicopolisthethird]

Watching the new @staff and @changes on tumblr who actually listen and respond to their userbase is so bizarre to see, because I feel like I've come full circle on the site.

I joined 10ish years ago (shortly post-Reichenbach, if that dates me) and that time was still solidly in the era of David Karp. Staff communicated but were overall seen as lovingly incompetent. Everyone used Missing E to fix all the problems, and then Xkit when Missing E stopped working, but nobody thought twice about it. We mostly just joked about how often they fiddled with the shade of background blue.

I remember the sale to Yahoo, and how it took a while to notice, but the site kind of just got worse. We got ads, which everyone hated. Changes were passed down from above with little to no fanfare. But staff was still there and making some effort to reach out to users; we got some of the best April Fools jokes in that era, like Coppy and Decision 2016 that showed that someone in there knew what users liked. Features like direct messaging and rebloggable asks and stacked posts were still coming through, even if the communication with users was opaque. Bots invaded every inch of the site. And then we got the porn ban, which snapped the site like a twig.

After Verizon bought tumblr, there were a few years where staff almost seemed to vanish, or did their best to hide what they were doing. I can't even remember the last few years of April Fools jokes, if they happened at all. Ads got bigger. Changes just happened and there was no way to tell if it was intentional or glitches. If they were intentional, they seemed almost malicious. Users started talking about shadowbans and tags getting wiped out and some posts not showing up in tags or searches and user deletions happening behind the scenes. Bots got worse and worse and less was done about them. If anything went wrong, there was no confidence that reaching out to support would do a thing. Staff was spoken about in posts with the same tone as Bezos or Google, just another tech giant slowly making our lives worse for the sake of squeezing another buck out of us and then selling us to the highest bidder. If nothing else, we could be proud of squeezing the resale value out of the site for them.

I don't know exactly what happened over the last year, if it was because of the sale to Automattic or other internal changes. But all of a sudden, staff started talking to us again. And we didn't fuckin trust em an inch, and rightly so. Changes got rolled out again, and we started complaining again, because we may have no power to make any web experience better so the least we can do is go down complaining.

But the things they started changing were... stuff we wanted? We got tag viewers, timestamps, dash customization, filtering that actually worked. Most new features get toggles so you can turn it off if you don't want it. Huh, we thought, that doesn't seem right. Ideas flopped like Post+, and god did we complain. But after we did... the features... changed? Staff started testing out the ideas that the users endorsed? Like tipping posts on a per-post basis to avoid copyright issues with fanworks and an ad-free subscription model? Huh, we said.

And the final nail in the coffin was that new iOS tag-copying "feature" that we all complained about to no end... that was actually a glitch. Not some coder's whim that got passed down and we just had to deal with it forever. Sorry, staff said, we'll get that fixed right away.

Huh, we said. Huh.

Aside from being an unexpected change for tumblr, it's making me realize how weird it feels in the internet as a whole to have some transparency and communication between site developers and the userbase. When I joined tumblr, forum culture and the heyday of the early creator-run internet were fresh memories. Staff who posted like users were common, and popular demand was the actual goal of web design. But now there is no social media where the developers speak directly to the users and incorporate real feedback into the changes they make. Algorithms drive everything, moderation happens silently, and it's impossible to tell what a human has laid eyes on. Decisions are made based on what can get the most eyes on sponsored ads and drive clicks. Social media is now Big Tech, driven by Big Money Decisions and ad space.

Having a staff who talks and listens to the userbase is a direct return to tumblr's roots and also the most jarring and noticeable jump back to Classic Internet that the rest of social media has long since abandoned.

[savefrog]

Update: MYSTERY SOLVED apparently it may be a glitch I wasn't aware of? :O yeah that sounds like tumblr...

Ok...Tumblr etiquette discussion in the face of new-ish(?) Tumblr features: No offense, I understand if this is automated and out of ppls control and I'm not upset about it...just confused??

I previously found it kinda weird when people copied my tags that were just personal commentary (it's fine to copy like. Organization tags and trigger tags or maybe even just a dumb joke tho it feels like taking someone's joke...But im not gonna fight someone over that lol) this has been happening for a while...BUT MY PERSONAL STORY ABOUT MY DAD GETTING ME A POKEMON CARD THAT I CHERISHED??? 😵‍💫

Why...I assume its an automatic thing, setting or habit? and I mean it's no big deal, but for anyone reading this who is new to Tumblr since the big influx: if it was a comment I added to the post thats one thing to just reblog, but when it's in the tags it looks like you're the one writing it bc theres no source for them. That's why ppl started using "#prev tags", which...also isn't ideal tbh the traditional tumblr thing is to screenshot the tags and post and be like "WHYD YOU LEAVE THIS IN THE TAGS!!" (But a "lol/aww/wow look what ____ added" would suffice) but also I know I personally avoid adding to a post unless it's really important but honestly...YOLO amirite??? But anyway, i feel for most ppl tags are intended to be personal commentary when not used for organization, rather than like a shareable addition to a post. Theyre meant to be like secret lil messages without interrupting the flow of a post?

...Unless your dad also got you an entei card off ebay in which I apologize 🙏

(also hi if you read this I'm not mad lol I was just caught a little off guard lol! Ive been on tumblr over...ten years? So the feature of copying tags is weirdly new to me except outside of Xkit and I've been seeing it happen a lot so it's not even just you. I'm sure it was unintentional and im sure youre a cool person!!)

[utilitycaster]

[image description: a screenshot of a reply from @tanely which reads "I also think because of the video nature of this, the intent or lack there of, can be read as something different. it builds this weird disconnect because like. yes that facial expression COULD mean something or that tone COULD mean something. but....is it in character? is it not? it's such a fine line that can be used to account for anyone's headcanons/opinions if you try hard enough."]

(this was in reply to this post about how I like not just disproving theories that I think are wrong but also trying to figure out similarities and motivations)

(also everyone be warned this is a sideblog and xkit's one-click reply has been broken for a long time due to the major update last year so if you don't want me mentioning you when I respond to replies just let me know and I'll take it out)

This is a really good point and one I've been thinking about a lot lately. I think the fandoms for podcast actual play are, if not smaller, at least quieter, and the fandoms for scripted podcasts are a lot more justified in making wild theories because the works are scripted and deliberate. The fact that Critical Role is usually livestreamed or live-to-tape vs. edited, and that it all takes place in the same material plane (vs. TAZ or NADDPod which have not reused the same main setting), probably also contributes in that we see basically everything and there is a chance, however faint/unlikely/bad storytelling it may be, that everything really is connected.

Anyway, you're right. For every Taliesin or Liam quietly reacting when their PC's mortal enemy shows up, there's a hundred glances that literally just are just like...people making eye contact because they are speaking to each other, that someone has interpreted to be evidence for their pet theories. I've mentioned this before in passing but there are ships I stopped being able to enjoy and this was a major factor; it made me genuinely uncomfortable that someone's friendly facial expressions were being so widely interpreted as explicitly romantic (and, referencing the post this came from, the implications were that theory to be true were also not great). And it just so happens that obviously while I don't have a huge sample size, when I started avoiding people who were into the more nonsensical/baseless other theories suddenly I was getting far fewer of those "but the microexpressions" arguments/gifsets as well. In a way that was what really got me into starting to (very informally and entirely in my head) track poorly thought-out theories.

Which is to say that reading into things a little too much can be fun! When the implications aren't as troubling and hypocritical as "someone making a vaguely positive expression towards someone else must always be explicitly romantic unless I don't ship it in which case it's not" I don't mind it! But it needs to be weighted accordingly when we're talking about actual evidence for the theories vs just like, correlations that might not be causative.

This makes me want to look at current NADDPod and TAZ theories though if I can find them and see how people back up their wishful thinking there, because I think the desire to have evidence for the things you want, even if it doesn't really exist in canon, would still be a thing for fans of an audio-only medium - they just wouldn't have that particular source to work with.

[beardedmrbean]

I do wonder what staff was thinking about restricting the archive function. Is this a way to prevent cyberbullying? Heard people can dig deep for callouts, even tho the person could've changed by then. The big selling point today, was the "gifting Ad-free" on mobile, and do people do that? Ad-blockers and all, but part of the charm is seeing the nonsense that pops up, like that Pikachu man that's kinda creepy. I hope they reverse that decision like the ads in blogs from 2016, but I doubt it...

The archive search being nerfed is totally weird to me, I can't really see the logic in it unless it's for what you'd said there.

Gotta say I didn't know they did the gift ad free, that's kinda cool I've got xkit so I don't see them anyhow unless I'm on mobile.

Saved me from the initial flurry of the nightmare pikachu man. Funny thing with him is it seems like it's just links that lead to tumblr which is odd by itself but we the tumblr users have managed to export the nightmare pikachu man to other websites as a meme.

Which means tumblr played all of us and got us to advertise for them off site.

and I do remember the whole thing with the picking up a % of adverts from your blog, not really any good way to make that work I don't think

[song-of-the-rune]

In case someone's gonna ask for proof, yes, I've been on timblr for a long time. No, you can't have my old urls, unless I recognize yours.

Moreos guy, fishingboatproceeds, I remember when people still liked sixpencee and none of us knew who pukicho or gaud or humgwy were. Egberts was popular and Redglarestuck was infamous and I remember drama about oddnose and buttereggs (the "secret" otherkin tags) leaking (because otherkin seemed to just leak everywhere in general - or was that a homestuck thing). Speaking of otherkin, kinfoods had some great recipes but they also started posting about how to replicate the taste of human flesh. NASA and pizza were accounts that found keywords regardless of tags but then pizza turned out to be a racist? How you say a slur on a nlog that simply reblogs all posts with the word "pizza" is beyond me. The Tumblr community scared off the first xkit guy with some kind of false accusations, I don't remember what exactly it was at this point, I used TumblrSavior anyway. I remember the suicide attempt from an artist being harassed by the SU or Undertale fandom (probably both, tbh). People didn't really know the difference between reddit and 4chan (though maybe that's still a thing in some corner of this site) and sometimes Anonymous. We got fun top hats for april fool's one year! But there was discourse over this somehow. There were comics with personified fandoms where Homestuck was portrayed as a spoiled brat (not that it wasn't!) because other people's hiatuses were longer (that's not the reason!). Also liking things wasn't treated as some kind of sin but liking them the wrong way sure as hell was. I was around before dashcon and there was this weird silence about it during and right after before everything really started circulating - or maybe I just thought the ball pit piss thing was a joke. I remember the site being bought by Yahoo. I remember the launch of flightrising despite not using the site or even really knowing what it was (turns out it's neopets but dragons). Please do not bring it up, it was terrible. Do you love the color of the sky? was always the original, I didn't get tricked all the time. The dalek girl getting reblogged by hipster blogs and then them getting mad that it wasn't just some cute aesthetic because how dare you make me like something popular. You could edit other people's posts because the reblog system stored everything as text. Discourse was unreadable because the OP's text was one character per row. Comments weren't a thing for way too long. There were no direct messages, just fanmail. You could find out an anon's url by blocking them. You couldn't attach a picture normally to a reblog, you had to use the markup syntax.

[queerofcups]

why do u think tumblr is trash for fandom? not that i disagree lol, i've just never noticed u talking about it and would be interested in hearing your thoughts

 terrible for fanfic writers - i’m biased obviously but tumblr is a really terrible format for any kind of text based art. 

formatting - theme fonts are really variable and i’ve seen countless writers blogs (usually younger/newer writers who need the attention) with fics that I won’t read because I *can’t* read them. 

getting people to read your fic - Also, if you’re posting to tumblr only and not to the Ao3 (which I totally understand especially for drabbles) there’s a strong chance only your followers will see those as opposed to posting in a community where, if its a central fandom comm you’ll probably get decent traffic from folks who’ve never heard of you. and if you want more people to see something you have to keep reblogging it because it gets pushed down by your other blogging because you can’t have pinned posts (which is way easier than creating a separate masterlist page). also tags work like 60% of the time

feedback - if you get feedback on fic on tumblr its either a. a reply that you may or may not be able to reply to easily depending on if tumblr/xkit is freaking out or b. in a reblog that you then have to reblog to reply to cluttering your/your followers dash further

 terrible for building community

If I go to someone’s tumblr and they don’t have an intricate tagging system, chances are pretty good I don’t know shit about them other than their name/age/maybe pronouns. Y’all don’t know shit about me as an actual person unless you happen to catch the one post or hell, the one tag where I talk about being from the American southeast or the weirdness of planning a wedding while feminist, or how I’m working up to weightlifting. Meanwhile, I have a friend that I friended in 2007/8 when I was in bandom who just graduated with her PhD! She was just starting her program when we met. She also just proposed to her boyfriend whom she’d just met when I started following her. I know her, as a person, not just a fic producing machine.

Which brings me to my next point. Tumblr’s great for being a lil bitch without accountability. Don’t get me wrong. Wank is as old as fandom. Where there is fandom there will be wank, bet on that. And its not like the journal-based websites and forums didn’t often have an anonymous function. But anon hate on tumblr is so normalized and so easy-- you don’t even have to log out to ask a question on anonymous on my blog! And even if you aren’t leaving hate. I talk to 2.5 people regularly via tumblr chat regularly. I think of them as my friends. I know their names. They know mine. They call me by my name. You could be the same anon that’s asked me an anon question since I started this blog. We could be well on our way to fandom besties and I would have no idea. To be a lurker on tumblr is to be anonymous, whereas to be a lurker on your livejournals and dreamwidths still came with some name recognition. 

Also tumblr is great for BNFs. Which like. Whatever, I don’t think there’s any one unifying quality I can place on everyone who’s The Most Popular in a fandom (...and I’m not sharing my phandom bnf opinions with an anon) but I do think that tumblr makes it feel like you either have many thousand followers and a constant stream of anons or you’re Nothing and that’s some ol’ bullshit. 

Livejournal and Dreamwidth (the ones I’m most familiar with) had community functions where one person created a blog to which lots of people could submit fanworks. The bandom one I was most familiar with was called bandslashmania (go check it out!), there was minimal modding and it was on you to post your fic, post it with the correct formatting, tag it so people could find it later, etc. And it was a hub that everyone could go to. It could be your daily stop, congrats now you have a selection of the fic that got posted that day. And if you miss a day, or you read a fic and want to go back to it weeks (or even years) later, you can just go to the tag. I’m having very strong feelings about how much fic we’re going to lose because of fucking tumblr (seriously. post your shit to Ao3. Also if you have a favorite fic? C/p that shit and save it to your computer. That’s the only way to (sort of) guarentee you’ll always have it) and the fact that you can accidentally delete your blog.

You ever made friends in the replies or reblogs of a tumblr post? If you did you’re a rarity. That shit happened every day in forum/journal based 

And I love IDB, I think its a really cool space to have more extended conversations, but I still don’t think its a great place to get to know people unless you have time to be really active on there and pay a lot of attention to peoples usernames, lol.

This is. A delicate one. I’m not going to shit on the tumblr’s contributions to people’s growth in awareness of social justice and the experiences of marginalized folks. Its been a really integral piece to amplifying the voices and communities of people who, previously, would have been shut down and made to talk about their issues only on their blog. That’s a statement. And I think tumblr likes to get on a high horse. There’s some shit fandom does that I have real problems with (the fact that I have to block extreme underage on Ao3 is A Problem for me. The blatant racism of who fandom chooses to write about over and over again is A Problem for me. I could go on). But I do think that there’s a subset of fandom that’s like oh, I don’t like this thing, lets use social justice language to talk about why its Bad and Morally Wrong, rather than just not reading it. And that gets extra annoying because they then sound like people who are trying to point out some real ass problems and so people lump these groups together and I have to ask myself before I follow someone if they’re disagreeing with the idea that fandom’s collective love affair with whitecock is problematic, or if they just want to write their fucking otayuri fic.

This is probably way more than you were expecting! I don’t hate tumblr (...mostly). I just find it really frustrating that we’ve decided that this (and a little bit twitter and a little bit instagram which i’m just flummoxed by) is our fannish home when its actually The Worst for a hobby of which one of the main tenants is community building. Like we’ve glued and stapled shit together, we’ve adapted like fandom always does but like Dreamwidth is right there. We could have it all, we just don’t take it. 

Lol, other Fandom Olds that follow me, feel free to hop on this post, I’m sure you have other shit about fandom on tumblr that you hate.