#like. is my popularity growing dependent on the bigger blogs that used to reblog me

[justapalspal]

On the topic of wanting to share my art though. Am I just making hella niche things for me and my dedicated interaction group whom I love and cherish or are the vast majority of strangers just not interacting with posts anymore. Or is my art not as popular as it once was because of my repeated art blog absences. Or is ygo just not as popular as it was when I first started using my art blog. Or am I doing something wrong with my stuff. Or

[we-are-so-close]

Dude! Monica! I am so with you on this! I have NO IDEA honestly. Like, I'm over here getting excited when my posts hit 100 haha like a flop for me is when I don't hit 30. But I mean, I guess it depends on the post itself. Writing is if it doesn't hit 30. Headcanons if it doesn't hit 20 and like me just writing stupid stuff is if it doesn't hit 10 haha But I don't think you should feel bad if your idea of a flop is different! Like one thing I realized is that people will like and reblog almost anything if it's from someone they like or if they have a moot that they want to impress but that's another story

Something I always tell myself when I'm feeling bad about how many notes I'm getting is that some of these 500+ note writing posts actually aren't that great. Honestly, the way Tumblr is set up sort of sucks and makes it SO EASY for bigger blogs to get bigger while little guys like us just stay small (or take forever to grow). It's literally a popularity game which is so discouraging when you're working hard on writing or art. You just have to keep reminding yourself that the people that follow you really do support you and when you're a smaller blog, the likes and reblogs you get are genuine.

I very much used to be a ghost follower to a lot of people and when I started writing, I realized how dumb that was because people were working so hard and getting nothing in return for it. So I think that's also something you should think about. There are literally SO MANY people reading and loving your stuff that you don't even know about because they are too nervous to say anything.

The level of ramble I am on right now 🤦🏻‍♀️ This is why I can't be given a microphone haha

Anyway, I hope you're doing well!

Joey! Thank you! I can always count on you for words of encouragement 😊

I'm by no means bashing on anyone who considers their 500+ notes a flop. I understand everyone has a different opinion on the matter. And I do understand that people with a higher follower count would expect more interactions from those followers.

I for sure appreciate all of the genuine feedback I get on my works from the people who've read my stuff. People don't have to, but it's little things like talking in the tags or leaving a nice comment that makes it worth it, in my opinion.

You also bring up an excellent point of the "silent" readers. It's 2021, people. Blog aesthetics are dead. I kid, I kid lol

I was really just curious to see other people's input 🤷‍♀️

[corpus-chorus]

A dev’s insight to tumblr’s updates

Alright guys. I’m sorry to make this long-ass discourse post when I’d really much rather just be doing my art reblogs and basking in my warm community, but I feel this needs to happen, because a lot of you may not be aware of what goes into updates like this.

To be clear - I’m not making any comment about the color change itself. It doesn’t actually bother me, seems kind of silly to flip a lid about when there’s plenty of extensions to fix it if you don’t like it, but I get the annoyance of having something familiar change into something that makes you uncomfortable, especially with no warning.

But then I started to see a bunch of rants on how shitty this update is when there were so many bugs that needed to be fixed instead, and I just need to take a moment to address app development in general, because y’all seem fairly misinformed about the whole thing.

So let’s get one thing straight - bug fixing is not easy.

Yeah, that sounds like a copout, doesn’t it?

But let’s talk about how bug fixing works, alright? Because there’s a couple of things we gotta look at when considering changes like this.

How much code is needed to fix the bug? Yeah, this one’s pretty straight forward, right? How many lines of code do the devs have to write to fix whatever’s broken? Except you’re forgetting the time it takes to find the bug in the first place. And this isn’t about popping into one file and looking through the lines until you see what’s broken. Bugs aren’t just typos. Bugs are NOT easy to find. Generally, if I’m working on a bug, and it takes me 4 days to fix, 3 of those days were probably spent just defining exactly where the bug came from and the places it exists. And that’s with me being super familiar with the codebase. If I didn’t already know that the core value displayed on the groupings page was coming from the hciReplacements inspector (out of 30-some inspectors), which is pulling data from the hagi, which is pulling and calculating data from the clip model, of which I know the exact layout, it probably would have taken me double or triple that time. And now, on top of that, what if the bug is an extreme edge case no one thought about when they built the core code? I might have to rewrite the entire functionality of the thing that pulls all that data, and holy hot hell is that gonna take some time.

How much QA effort is required? Contrary to popular belief, no, developers don’t just make bug fixes and immediately push them out to the app. It’s gotta be tested, usually by some sort of QA/QC team. And, fun fact, QA can take longer than the development did. Because the QA team is looking for EVERY POSSIBLE USE CASE of the exact thing you’re working on. Every single possible way a user might interact with that. That takes a skilled worker to think of all of those possible use cases (and spoiler alert, they’re human, so they still fuck up sometimes), and it takes them time to find them all.

But ON TOP of that, you also have a LOT of unexpected consequences to code changes. Maybe you just needed to update to cores count so that it’s the total cores on a node instead of total cores per processor, but you didn’t realize that another part of the code was assuming that value was cores per processor, and congrats, you’ve screwed the values all through the rest of the app.

And that’s just a data example. You can make critical errors if, say, you rename a value, and miss one of the places that value’s used, so now that value doesn’t exist in that specific scenario, and congratulations, you’ve actually caused your app to crash if the user follows a specific series of actions, and oops, looks like that set of actions wasn’t one QA thought of, so now users get to find it instead. You were just trying to fix a little data bug, and you’ve now broken the entire app. Good job.

How old is the codebase? Why is this important, you ask? Well, if you’re not in the industry, you may have never been introduced to the idea of “legacy code”. Legacy code is, to over-simplify, old code. It’s code that’s been around for a while. It’s code that dozens of people have had their hands in and is therefor a bit of a mess, no matter how hard you try to keep it clean, or how well organized your team is. Because maybe Eric built that one file really well to start with, and Suzy made some great additions to it, and Tom just made a few bug fixes, but he names variables a little differently, so Jason didn’t realize that the function he needed already existed when he went to build it a few months down the line, so now there’s two versions of the same thing, one used in one place, one used in another, and when Meredith goes to fix a bug related to it, she doesn’t realize she has to fix it both places, and wow, that is a bit of a mess, isn’t it?

The codebase I’m working in currently is about a year and a half old now, maybe a little more. When our first version was released, our codebase was 51,714 lines of code long. As of today, it is 357,932 lines long. With new features on the horizon, it will continue to grow, and the web of dependencies tangled through the codebase will get bigger and more complex. This is just a fact.

So keep in mind that that’s an app that’s about 1.5 years old. Tumblr was launched in, what, 2007 or something? That’s 11 years. 11 fucking years of coding, of dozens, if not hundreds, of people contributing to the codebase, in their own coding style, with their own knowledge levels. This is like if a team of 100 writers was working on a fic series for 11 years, and they didn’t all get to work together, and not everyone took notes. You’re gonna have plot holes. You’re gonna have inconsistencies. Shit’s gonna be messy.

And then there’s the pinnacle question. 

How much do the devs care? How much you wanna bet a lot of the devs on this site started out with a genuine passion for it? How many do you think worked long past the hours they were getting paid for just to make sure they were making something they could be proud of? How excited do you think it used to make them to release new features, and get to see it make people’s lives better?

When you care about a project, you think beyond the exact task you were given. You think about the impact every line of code you write is going to have. on the users. Because you want the users to enjoy the app. You want them to be happy with it. You want all the work you put into it to mean something.

When you care, you make less bugs. When you care, you don’t get lazy and just make temporary fixes. When you care, you put your heart and soul into your work.

How much heart and soul do you think the Tumblr devs want to put into this site at this point? When every single update, every single effort they put in, is met with criticism and hatred? When they’re told that nothing they do is ever good enough? How much do you think the devs care about getting everything perfect and on time and working themselves to tears on this site when they know damn well that the second they release an update, it’s going to be met with nothing but hatred and ignorant people treating them as if their hundred of hours of effort were stupid?

If I was a dev for this site, I’d hate my fucking job.

So let’s review. When you ask for bug fixes, I promise, there is someone on that team very concerned about addressing that bug fix. When you complain that tags are borked, or searching is shit, or whatever you get frustrated with that day, I promise, some dev is already working their tits off trying to find exactly what it’s going to take to fix that for you.

But understand that, that ask? That ask that might seem super simple and straight-forward to you from your comfortable couch? But it might take a team of devs working ungodly hours for months to be able to do. It might carry risks as high as accidentally deleting posts or banning blogs or breaking the entire bloody site. So they wanna spend some time and get that shit right so that you’re not stuck with something even worse than the bug they were fixing.

The people working on these bug fixes are human beings. We seem to remember that about everyone else in the goddamn world, but not the people who work tirelessly to give us the very site that we’re having these conversations on right now.

This update? Yeah, it might seem trivial to you. It might seem like they’re “wasting their time” with “stupid bullshit” when they could be fixing bugs.

But let me make it very clear. They’re trying to fix the bugs. They’re trying to stop the porn bots (and oh, fucking boy, I could make an entire post just about how insanely difficult that is, because some of you people seem to think the devs are fucking GODS or something). And maybe this update is stupid to you, but I can tell you right now, having this update right here is not the reason these things are not going to be fixed tomorrow. This is the frontend team making an aesthetic change - I promise it didn’t stop the backend team from their tireless work to fix the tags.

so tl;dr Fixing Tumblr’s bugs is not some simple, do-it-in-a-month, just-get-more-devs fix. And tearing into this release is doing nothing but reminding the probably very tired dev team that their work means absolutely dick to a large portion of ungrateful fucks on this site.

Complain about bugs. Tell Tumblr about their bugs. Make sure they know. And then sit the fuck down and wait - they’re fucking trying.

[some-teeth-in-a-trench-coat]

The second you got a minor following you started making super politically focused comments and reblogging politically focused content. Honestly, I liked your blog. But now it seems like you joined the gonlin bandwagon to become popular just so you could have a bigger platform to push trans focused content. That's your right, of course, but it's also misleading and underhanded, which is why I'm unfollowing you after watching this blog grow from the beginning. I came for low stress goblin content.

I’m very sorry, and I’m not gonna stop you, but I want you to know that the current diversity of content was always what I had in mind for this blog, it’s just that a lot of it depends on what crosses my dash and at first I wasn’t following blogs with much political content yet. I try to tag political content because I know it can be stressful, but I could probably do a better job of that.

I never “joined the gonlin bandwagon to become popular just so you could have a bigger platform to push trans focused content” (and how is my content “trans focused”?? I’m trans and sometimes I share things I relate to??). I genuinely enjoy goblincore and I did decide to use it to replace personal information and build myself a nice online persona as “the weird eldrich goblin dude,” but never to lure people in. It just happens to not be my only interest.

I never meant to mislead anyone, and I hope you’re not mad at me. If there’s anything I can do to be more clear in the future, please tell me?