#q & a transcriptions

[royalarchivist]

Slimecicle: Oh, hang on, that's actually so cool. Aw man, this is sick.

Ironmouse: A beautiful memorial.

Slimecicle: [Throws flowers in front of the ofrenda] It's actually really cool. I'm glad this is here.

Baghera: Yeah, that's really cool.

[Slimecicle leaves, then goes back to the ofrenda]

Slimecicle: JuanaFlippa, this is- this is Technoblade. You guys never got to meet, but... I only met him a couple of times, but every single time he kicked the sht out of me in Minecraft. You know, we would do mod videos where like, I was supposed to play like a big monster, like a Wither or something, and the whole thing, the whole premise of the video would get upended because he'd hide and destroy me so hard that I needed to be like, "Dude, you're actually popping off too much right now, like– Mods, give me more hearts!" [Laughs] 'cuz he was so fcking good. He was so funny too.

Slimecicle: ...Yeah, but he- he was- he was unbelievable. Still is.

[JuanaFlippa goes up to the ofrenda and throws a blue flower]

Slimecicle: This is cool, all these little things. [Slime looks through his inventory for something to give] Do I have any blood for the Blood God? [He throws some redstone dust in front of the ofrenda] I've got blood for the Blood God.

[felassan]

What's all this about Solas speaking in iambic pentameter? English isn't my first language so I never noticed anything odd about the way he talks, but your blog is the first time I've seen it mentioned by anyone

hello! ◕‿◕ Solas sometimes speaks in a specific pattern or rhythm. It sometimes gets described as or compared by people to iambic pentameter. (which is a type of rhythm common in traditional English poetry. Shakespeare used it in his sonnets and plays.) Though, I'm not sure that it's actually literally that or always that. The main point is that at those times, he's speaking particularly poetically, with a specific poetic rhythm in his speech. (Like where the stress on syllables is and the 'beats' in his speech.) Occasionally, the Inquisitor's dialogue line[s] in response to him are the same.

When Trick Weekes wrote Solas in DA:I, they wrote some of his key scenes to KD Lang's cover of the song Hallelujah on a loop. They talked about some of their process and the reasons for the use of this technique in terms of Solas' characterization in this DA:I-era blog post:

Trick Weekes: "When Solas talks about things that he saw in the Fade, things that speak to a distant past, I needed him to sound ever so slightly otherworldly and wistful – someone remembering a dream with a sense of both sadness and inevitability. If you follow [that link] and look at some of Solas’s lines, you may notice a familiar rhythm come out. It would have been forcing it to give lines the same rhyme scheme, but giving the words the meter captured some of that wistfulness and made Solas sound ever so slightly otherworldly. (In the rare cases the player got into the same rhythm, there was always an approval bump from Solas. For that brief period, it was like the player was thinking like he did.) I used this a few times over the game, and I love what it did to his voice. Also, Cori (who edited Solas) is exceedingly kind for putting up with my request that changes to those lines keep this surreptitious rhythm."

[source]

An example of when it happens in DA:I is:

"I've journeyed deep into the Fade // in ancient ruins and battlefields // to see the dreams of lost civilizations. I've watched as hosts of spirits clash // to reenact the bloody past // in ancient wars both famous and forgotten. Every great war // has its heroes. // I'm just curious // what kind you'll be."

Compare this with the song's lyrics:

"I heard there was a secret chord // That David played, and it pleased the Lord // You don't really care for music, do ya? Well it goes like this: The fourth, the fifth // The minor fall, the major lift // The baffled king composing Hallelujah Hallelujah // Hallelujah // Hallelujah // Hallelujah"

An example from Trespasser is:

"I lay in dark and dreaming sleep [I heard there was a secret chord] while countless wars and ages passed [That David played, and it pleased the Lord] I woke still weak a year before I joined you. [You don't really care for music, do ya?]" etc.

Recent mentions of this are:

Q. Will Solas still occasionally or dramatically speak in iambic pentameter? A. “Massive kudos to Patrick, who always writes Solas so well. Again, Solas is a returning character. It’s the same Solas you know and love (or hate depending on who you are). The same writer. So I think the answer is yeah, it’s Solas.” – John Epler

[source: BioWare dev Discord Q&A on June 14th]

User: "you really went off with solas. but the iambic pentameter makes writing fanfic dialogue for him so treacherous..." Trick Weekes: "It doesn't always have to be in the cadence! Just when he's deeply feeling The Old Days! He's written in standard prose 99% of the time!"

[source]

I think he does it a bit in the gameplay reveal video [Veil ripping scene with Varric] too. hope this helps :>

[msg refs this post]

[For the developer Q&A from June 14th on Discord: Notes are here, re-watch link is here]

[cellberry]

Dear Cellbit, you must have finished the Mickey Mouse club by now. I told you that you would get 1000 coins, but I didn't say which one, it's Ratackity coins, that are worth 0.0001 in dollars. But I understand that you worked hard, so I got you a loan, I will give it to you tomorrow. I cannot believe that we are neighbors now! I made a grownup man work for me, this is unbelievable, Ratackity!

[transmutationisms]

…so can you expand on the psychological ramifications of stewy being in private equity? that has definitely been lost on me given that i barely understand what private equity is

ok this is an underrated funny aspect of the show imo, and also good insight into stewy and kendall. i'm trying to spare you a bunch of stupid business jargon but basically, maesbury capital (which stewy represents but sandy/sandi ultimately own) is a private equity fund, meaning it's a big pile of a bunch of rich people's money, and stewy's job is to take that money and invest in private companies. a PE fund can invest at a few different points: at the very beginning of a startup's life (venture or angel investing), at a point where the company is trying to grow or restructure (growth investing), or when a company is struggling financially, in which case the fund is usually planning to either dismantle it and sell it for scrap, restructure and go public, or sell it for cash to another company. PE firms like to present themselves as doing a lot of growth or venture investing, but in truth many/most are primarily engaging in this third category of investment strategies, because they're lucrative (and because many startups are stupid, and only good for generating investor payouts).

so, when kendall went and dismantled vaulter in season 2 because logan decided that selling most of it for scrap would be more profitable? that's basically a dramatisation of what stewy does routinely, except of course the exact financial instruments and strategies will differ because stewy represents a PE firm. like, if kendall's venture capitalist schemes tell us about his delusions of creating cool new products and services, stewy is sort of the opposite because his structural goal is usually to dismantle companies and liquidate them however is best for maesbury's backers. it's a total destruction of all use-value and a conversion of it into pure exchange-value in the form of capital (which goes into his pockets and maesbury's). stewy generates money by destroying utility, which is perverse if you think capitalism is supposed to create and sustain human life, but actually completely comprehensible if you understand that capitalism is an insatiable growth machine with inherently contradictory internal tendencies and no raison d'être beyond the endless accumulation of pure capital itself.

many viewers think stewy is insane because he is friends with kendall roy. this is true, but on a deeper level stewy is insane because his job is to participate in the inexorable tendency to more and more abstraction in the capitalist mode of production. it literally does not matter at all to someone like stewy whether people are fed or clothed or happy, or have any of their needs met. the point is solely to create money, to turn all social forms and values into numbers on a balance sheet. this is why, when kendall tries to threaten him on axos at the end of season 2, stewy is able to casually tell him that "it doesn't matter; it doesn't mean anything." he and sandy are convincing shareholders that their offer will be able to make them more money, "and that's all that this is." stewy speaks the language of business differently than logan, because stewy doesn't care about dick-swinging competitions or demonstrating dominance in logan's cringey old catholic military way. which makes stewy more rational in certain ways, but also more insane, in that he operates in a way totally detached from this type of social value system and solely motivated by cold hard numbers.

the irony is that, whilst being detached and disembodied in his business practices, stewy is also better than the roys at appreciating the material fruits of wealth. he eats; he dresses well; he enjoys the "several houses" he owns. kendall is always trying to come up with some grand moral bullshit masculinity reason that what he's doing is noble or whatever, and he's alienated from his body and afflicted with severe catholic martyr disease. stewy just bypasses all that shit, measures his success by his payouts, and enjoys wealth because he sees it as an end in itself and not a means to logan roy's respect.

this is also why kendall's line in 'living+' about "it's enough to make you lose your faith in capitalism" is so funny. kendall can't just accept that business is a bunch of meaningless bullshit confidence games played by coked-up assholes who like to win; he always has to try to convince himself he's making cool new tech shit, or saving the world from the spectre of death itself or some shit. it's like, insane that he made it to literally 40 years old, growing up in a media conglomerate of all things, and still thinks that what he's doing requires actual skill or creates actual social value—but of course, part of the reason he still thinks this is because he deified logan and was therefore incapable of ever seeing logan or waystar for what they really were. stewy would never say that line because he can't be disillusioned this way on account of he already knows the whole thing is bullshit. it's just that to him it doesn't matter, because being bullshit does not preclude it from paying well.

[luminouslotuses]

juanaflippa rap 2!! (MIGHTVE BEEN POSTED ALREADY BUT TAKE IT ANYWAY👍)

transcript/lyrics:

charlie:

yeah! ooh! get down, juanaflippa, get down! woo!

my egg, she’s finally back

thought it was over, thought i faded to black

[zooms in on flippa’s sign, which reads, mus1c!!!!!]

she’s back, and she’s completely normal

she’s back, there’s nothing– abnormal! [chuckles]

my egg, i’d give up my leg to see my egg

my huev, give up everything to see my huev

my egg, give up my legs to see my egg

my yolk, my only one and only folk

i love you flippa, even if it makes me look like a creepa

flippa, hiding in the grass

slimecicle, throwing back some ass!

flippa, sit down, takin’ a big rest

‘cause she knows she’s not just a huevo, she’s the best!

flippa, got a new prescription

[laughs] what the fuck– what the fuck rhymes with prescription??

flippa, got 20/20 vision

doin’ surgery, gotta make an incision

i reach inside; what do i find?

where the heart is, an egg hides! woo!

[reads flippa’s sign in response to his previous question: subsCr1pt10n]

yeah… subscription? oh, flippa, oh, you’re so good! okay, we’re gonna do it– we’re gonna do it again. yes, yes, yes!

juanaflippa, she’s got a new prescription

it’s 2020 so you better ready up a subscription

to three, we’re finally free

we got juanaflippa in the casa, con mi, yeahh!

oh… i missed you so much, juanaflippa.

[tsukana]

stop phil wtf. wtf phil u cant just do this to me

[rain-is-cool]

help me… i can’t… get them… out of my head….

(Transcript under the cut)

Transcript-

Tina - “she’s so cool i’ve never felt so shy in my entire life, jesus fucking christ i don’t think i said a worddddd!!!! 😭😭😭”

Foolish - “Well you disappeared- wait you literally disappeared-”

Tina - “I LITERALLY WAS HERE I JUST COULDN’T SAY ANYTHINGGGG!!!!!!”

*Foolish laughing*

Tina - “IDK I WAS LIKE STUNNED 😭😭 I JUST- oh my god i was just like stun locked the entire fucking timeee 😭😭😭”

*Foolish continues laughing*

Tina - “I- oh my- that’s so upsetting, jesus fucking christttt, oh my goddd 😭😭😭 I- I feel like i just fumbleddd 😭😭😭😭😭”

[nevermoorsource]

Here's the full Silverborn Q&A from July 2024! [Transcript]

[generalpalacefishgoop]

Transcript of the conversation between qBad and Pomme at Baghera's castle

Bad :Hi, Pomme! Good morning! How are you?

*sees the messages on the black concrete* Ah.....

Pomme :Hi Dad :'3

Bad :Oh no, what's wrong, Pomme? You ok?

Pomme :I wanted to leave a little gift for when she would come back

and... yeah... I discovered this

Bad :Ah, you saw the black concrete and the messages you had left?

Pomme :I didn't' see it before :(

Bad :While you were away, Pomme, all of the parents found black concrete appear in different places that were significant to their kid and, yeah...um well, as you can see, this is where we found your message, and I guess, since we went to purgatory, you know, no one's been by here to clean up or maybe before...maybe Baghera just didn't want to clean. You know, I didn't clean up Dapper's message, I don't think at all...someone else did...

Pomme :It's terrible because... they left messages for me too

I'm not sure if we received them, I don't remember well still

But one of them, it literally says they're coming to find me...

And... yeah I guess you all went there to find us, heh :(

Bad :Yeah, no we did. We did, Pomme. But um... you know we found you but we weren't necessarily able to take you guys back with us.

Pomme :Yeah... the earthquake happened, right?

Bad :A big explosion went off and yeah caused that... *sigh* Look, I'm sure Baghera is fine, Pomme, and I'm sure she's going to make it back here, at some point.

Pomme :I remembered recently

She was there, when the earthquake happened

Bad :Oh, you saw her? Yeah, she was I remember you were all in the little cages

Pomme :Yeah... she "was"...

Bad :But look, I'm sure she's fine, a little bit worse for wear, but I'm sure she's alright, and um...you know right now, I think it's just to...you know, wait.

Pomme :Do you think she's alive still...?

Bad :Yeah, I do. I've got some good reasons to think she was alive. What I would do, Pomme, maybe leave a message here, another one, just for her, because if your messages where somehow able to get to us, there's a good chance, they'll be able to get to her.

*Pomme goes up and places down a sign on the black concrete and places down a pot of crocus*

Pomme :Dad... I'm sorry we ran away

It was useless anyway, we couldn't protect you in the end :(

Bad :I think you guys running away, I think it was important to you at the time. You guys did it to protect us and you just want to keep your family safe. I understand that. I don't think you guys could have known anything that was gonna happen so, I wouldn't blame yourself, Pomme. I don't think you should.

Pomme :It was... a panic move. mostly

Bad :Hmm maybe but it also may have seen like the right move but Pomme, even if you want to view as a mistake, which I'm not sure it was, the important things is Pomme, is to not let our mistake drag us down, the only time we have ever truly made a mistake is when we can't learn from it Pomme. So I think in this situation, while maybe it wasn't a good idea to run off, I think you can learn something from it. Just think about what can I take from this situation and what should I do in the future, you can't change the past Pomme, but you can look forward.

Pomme :I do feel guilty but... your words are truly comforting :(

I'm glad you're not... upset, that much :')

Bad :*chuckles* I don't think I could be upset with you, Pomme, especially not when the reason you guys were doing it was to keep us safe, I wished you guys would have talked to us but, you guys did what you thought was right, and in the end, I'm just happy that we got you guys back.

Pomme :There was kinda... no time really

They were all very... panicked about the situation

Bad :You guys were caught in a bad situation, when someone is threatening people who are close to us, it's like a fight or flight response kicks in, (...) we often times don't think, we just act. Sometimes, the decision we make ends up not being the best one. But who knows, Pomme, maybe if you guys had stayed, something worse would have even happened you know. We don't know, we just dont know at this point. We never know what would have happened Pomme, I wouldn't beat yourself up over it. I think you guys did the best you could, with what you knew. *sigh* So, in the future, maybe tell me at least? Hopefully something like this never happens again.

Pomme :Thank you, Dad :') <3

Bad :Aw you're welcome, you're the apple of my eye, Pomme, and I wouldn't want anything to happen to you.

Pomme :I don't want anything to happen to you either

I love you, you're important to me okay? :') <3

Bad :Aw, thank you, Pomme, that's very sweet! I love you, too. I'm sure everything is gonna work out, Pomme. We just can't give up hope. Baghera will return to us, someday, I just know it.

Pomme :I hope so, I can only hope

Bad :Yeah, sometimes that's all we can do, Pomme, is hope.

Pomme :Like you did for us during all this time, I imagine :(

Bad :Yeah, that's a great point, Pomme, I never gave up hope that you guys were still alive somewhere, and look! You're back! So I guess my hope paid off after all.

Pomme :yeah, you were right to hope :D

Bad :Yeah! I was right, to hope. Everything works out in the end.

Pomme :You know what, I won't lose hope either

I know she's strong, there's no way she wouldn't

have survived it :')

Bad :I'm sure she did. This is Baghera, I mean, I'm sure she's probably tearing that island apart looking for you right now, something tells me that's the case. I'm sure she's fine.

*Pomme puts down another 2 signs on the black concrete*

Bad :I'm sure she'll get it, Pomme. Just don't give up! Just don't give up hope, everything's gonna be ok.

Pomme :I won't :') I will never

Bad :Nice! Good! No matter what, you just can't give up hope. Sometimes it's all we have.

Pomme : There's a reason I named by raccoon like that, after all

That's why you should, yk, not eat it

(shenanigan ensues...)

[ghostsgrazing]

This part made me really realise just how suspicious tubbo would be to other members, especially the whole "found frozen in a federation facility"

-

Tubbo: why maybe? Was it the fact that I was the first person to stumble across the maze with the archive where we learned about the 12 new eggs

Bad: that's a little weird

Tubbo: or is it perhaps that I'm the only one that's regularly been going to the federation office since when I learned that publicly for the first time,

Tubbo: or is that perhaps I'm the only one to not get penalised for breaking the rules?

Bad: mmhm maybe because you were frozen in a federation facility?

[royalarchivist]

[A sad violin song plays over an image of a sad hamster]

Pac: This doesn't have anything to do with me – I wear a blue sweatshirt, you're crazy, this mouse doesn't even have a sweatshirt, this hamster! [Reading chat] Am I a depressed hamster?

[ Transcript continued ↓ ]*

–

Pac: Actually– that's fine! I embrace that idea – of course I'm going to be depressed, are you crazy? [He hits his desk, then starts counting off people on his fingers] Fit is gone, Richarlyson is gone, Ramon is gone, Bagi and Empanada who were always there when we were there are also gone, I haven't seen them! It's just me and Tubbo, and sometimes Philza shows up.

Pac: I lost Chume Labs, I lost the Favela, I lost Murder Mystery, I lost Ilha Chume Labs, it's crazy! Look at how much I've lost, and I've gained nothing! Of course I'm going to be depressed, are you crazy?! How am I supposed to be happy?!

Pac: [Reading chat] "You have us Pac," that's true, thank you. No, that's true, sorry.

* NOTE: Please note that this is an incomplete transcript, as I was primarily relying on Aypierre's translation mod at the time and if I am not confident of the translation, I do not include it. As always, please feel free to add on translations or message me corrections.

[wundrousarts]

Today is 6 years of being a Nevermoor fan and fittingly I've reached 300 followers, so thank you and also shoutout Nevermoor fans everywhere 🫶 may have a surprise in the next few days to celebrate this anniversary

[cellberry]

“Where is Cellbit and Roier? When are they coming back? Do they want us to be depressed? We've already suffered enough! Tell them to come back! No one can take the wait anymore! I've already suffered too much! I suffered too!"

[codecurucho]

Me: Pac just got kidnapped again

My friend, who hears QSMP trivia second hand: IRL??

Me:

[text transcript: Oh no in lore I understand the confusion considering it's pac😭😭 /End.]

[xccentriktigress]

Below the cut is a clean verbatim transcript of the StaffCon2023 “Live With the CEO” stream. Featuring the CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg [@photomatt], and the Tumblr COO, Zandy Ring [@zingring].

Built from the videos by @secondbeatsongs [x] and @chainswordcs [x]. Additional thanks to my fellow archivists, @eiimblr, @sharksfood, and @fokron.

The stream was about an hour, so there's a lot of dialogue. There are timestamps next to the questions and important statements if you want to skim. 

A true verbatim transcript is available by request.

[archive 1]|[archive 2]

PhotoMatt: This is Zandy Ring. Zandy’s the Chief Operating Officer of Tumblr and I’m the CEO of Automattic. We’re here, trying out this experiment where we’ll do a live broadcast and take questions from users and talk about it.  And I'm here in the room, actually. This is like the, kinda first ever, in a really long time since… What year was the last big Tumblr meet-up?

*inaudible, off-screen*

PhotoMatt: 2018? *chuckle* Yeah.

ZingRing: Yeah.

PhotoMatt: So, since 2018. So, basically in five years, the first time the vast majority of the Tumblr team is together and so you got a lot of us here in this room. And so pretty much everything there is to know about Tumblr is known in this room. *laugh* So, hopefully, we can answer pretty much anything. Any questions coming in so far?

ZingRing: We have some questions from earlier, and one of the big questions has been one that we just did during our trial run which was uh-

PhotoMatt: I can try this one, the one- what was that, FantastiCait?

ZingRing: Ok, great

[1:08] PhotoMatt: Says, “Why are we making changes right after people left Reddit and Twitter because of their changes?”

PM: *chuckles* I totally get why change is scary. *chuckle* Right? But also if things don’t change, if services don’t evolve I’m certain it’ll die. 

ZR: Right.

PM: Now, if we change it, we could mess it up or we could make it better. The good news is that as we change things we’re listening to users, we’re looking at usage, we’re learning. And so we’re learning by doing.

[1:42] PM: Says, “Are you planning any drastic changes to come?”

PM: I mean, kind of? You know. A hundred and something people working on Tumblr *laughs* that’s their job *chuckles* is to change it and make it better. You know, we try to make changes that you all ask for, we try to do changes we think you'll like and we get it right sometimes we get it wrong sometimes, but we just always learn.

ZR: Thank you for the pizza.

PM: Thank you for the piz- ? Oh yeah. Nice *chuckles*

[2:08] PM: “We asked for a better search function.”

PM: Yeah. I agree.

ZR: That’s being worked on.

PM: Search is being worked on, right?

ZR: Yup.

PM: Actually, who is working on Search here?

ZR: There they are.

PM: Okay, we got two people here *laughs* How’s it going?

*inaudible, off-screen*

PM: It’s going well.

ZR: It’s going good.

PM: Is there anything that’s launching soon that we could preview for folks?

*inaudible, off-screen*

PM: Oh, oh yeah. Getting reblogs in search. Ought to be a pretty big one.

ZR: Yeah.

PM: But a good way, if you have ideas for Search, a great thing to do is post it to your Tumblr. *chuckles. Send us a link. We'll check it out. You know, we definitely read a lot of that stuff, and we share it in our Slack channel and things like that. So, we’re always reading Tumblr and listening to users. 

ZR: Yeah. It’s a great job, we just get to use Tumblr all day long. 

[3:09] PM: “Have you seen the 44 thousand note poll about the algorithm changes?”

PM: Yes. *laughs* I don’t know what it’s about though because we haven’t really changed anything. *laughs*

ZR: Yeah, we’re not getting rid of the chronological feed.

PM: Yeah, chronological feed will always be an option for people. So just, tell your friends. *chuckles* Because there seems to be a lot of misinformation. There’s things people get mad at us that we do and there’s things people get mad at us that we’re actually not doing. *chuckles* And have no plans to do, so figure that out.

PM: How many people do we have on the stream so far? Kind of curious.

[3:52] PM: “Allow us to snooze Tumblr Live indefinitely.”

PM: But then you wouldn’t be here right now.

ZR: Hmm *chuckles*

[3:57] PM: “Can we add stories to our blogs like Instagram?”

PM: Yeah. And we actually developed a story feature over on the WordPress side of things, Jetpack side. I was kinda wondering why we did it there instead of on Tumblr. *chuckles* It does seem to be like a social primitive that users expect from different networks. So yeah, would love to support something like Stories. It’s not currently on the roadmap though, so, I should be *indistinct*

ZR: We have a question that I think already scrolled by. It’s actually from one of the people we talked to yesterday when we did our trial run.  BirdRhetorics.

[4:32] ZR: “How do you know that Tumblr is hard to use as discussed in the product direction post?”

ZR: *to Matt* How do we know Tumblr is hard to use?

PM: Oh! *laughs*

ZR: Because it is. It’s something that is-

PM: Thank you for the crab *laughs*

ZR: Oh! *laughs* Thank you. 

ZR: We talk with a lot of users and we talk with users that have returned, people who left the site. The reason they’re leaving the site is because they couldn’t find the communities they wanted. They couldn’t figure out Search, they don’t understand trying to follow people or blogs so that their following feed actually will fill up with great stuff. So we’re just trying to make that process much easier for them so that they can have the experience that long-time users have as well.

ZR: I love these crabs. 

*laughter*

[5:28] ZR: Thank you Tumblr for giving me crabs.

*laughter*

[5:33] PM: Someone says, “Would you make Live more accessible? I would stream my art but I can’t.”

PM: We’re trying to. We’ve got the OBS stuff now and you can do it from desktop. 

PM: I saw kind of a bug report there go by. Did anyone catch that? Something about links to audio posts? Did someone see that go by? Do we know what this bug is?

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: What was that?

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Oh, no no no. This was about links to audio posts or something. He just reposted it? Oh, go to the bottom maybe. He just reposted- 

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: I don’t know if I understand that one. Who was that? Tyote? If you could do a post about that and just tag Staff in it. And tag PhotoMatt *chuckles* as well, we’ll take a look at that.

PM: Oh yeah, we should say our Tumblr usernames by the way.

ZR: We should.

PM: I’m PhotoMatt. P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T

ZR: I am ZingRing. Z-I-N-G-R-I-N-G

PM: Cool.

[6:46] PM: Someone says “If you don’t like Tumblr Live, click around on people. Find people you vibe with”

PM: I agree. 

[6:51] ZR: We have one here. “Is Tumblr Live gonna be going international?”

ZR: Yeah, that’s part of our plan. We just recently put into place some of the steps we need in order to roll it out in other countries so…more people will be able to have access to it if they want.

[7:11] PM: Someone says “Does Tumblr Live support OBS?”

PM: Yes, it does.

ZR: Yes, it does.

PM: Woohoo.

[7:15] ZR: Here's one. “Will you be fixing the fact that you can't zoom in on images?” Who can answer that? *inaudible, off-screen* It's already fixed.

7:32 PM: What platform’s the chip on? 

[7:38] *off-screen staff member* Sorry they're probably talking about the new Lightbox feature where some zoom capabilities were different and they should now be able to pinch to zoom, tap to zoom, just as they're used to. It just rolled out, so update the app. 

PM: Awesome, so if you update your app, hopefully, zoom might be working. 

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: And definitely run your app updates. I do it every morning, it's the first thing I do.

ZR: *chuckles*

PM: Like, I look at how I slept on WHOOP, because obviously, I don't know how I slept, I just woke up. Then I update my apps. Ah, these are going by kind of fast.

[8:12] PM: “Will there be a filter to determine bot Lives from real users”

PM: Yeah, hopefully, there's no bots. So the moderation team should pick that up if there's bots.

[8:24] PM: “Could you say why 18+ content is not allowed on the site when it does so well on other platforms?”

PM: Actually, since November of last year, we updated our guidelines so a lot more artistic presentations of the human form are allowed now. So, check out the updated guidelines. They’re a lot more in line with other services 

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: It's still not everything, so there's definitely other sites if you want a particular type of more hardcore content. That's probably still going to be on Twitter or Reddit or PornHub or whatever but yeah. Because Tumblr, we want to be about art and artists and stuff like for Arts. More artistic stuff, we definitely want to allow that. 

[9:08]ZR: Yep. Here's one. “Is it difficult to handle a lot of incoming users, such as the ones from Reddit or Twitter?”

ZR: No, because we don't get huge influxes. People have this perception that we have massive growth right now and we really don't.  So we welcome everyone with open arms. I think the thing that we need to do is improve our onboarding experience so that those new users find traction right away which is part of what that very long core product post on Staff was talking about but no. That is not an issue we currently face. What a great problem to have. 

PM: By the way, I do want to recognize there was the penguin person who said Tumblr staff are heroes so…

ZR: Aw.

PM: Yay. Thank you. 

ZR: *to audience* That’s you all.

*Applause*

[10:02] PM: One thing I hope you all get from this, who are watching. One, we want to correct some misinformation. For example, chronological feed is staying. It's not going away. And two, also just show that, like, there's real people behind the screen, building Tumblr, with families and feelings and dreams and ambitions and all sorts of things. 

PM: And so yeah. We're trying to do more stuff in public. It's been a little challenging because a lot of it's getting misinterpreted and stuff, but we're just gonna keep trying to make things more public. We even just open-sourced our stream builder so like, how the main feed gets built. So hopefully we can open-source a lot more in the future. We want to engage with the developer community, third-party people doing things around Tumblr, and yeah, make it better and better.

ZR: I haven't been saying usernames as I've read some of the questions that are being sent to me from the feed so I'm really sorry about that. I'm gonna try to say the usernames.

[11:01] ZR: Tyote said “Could a grid view for the dashboard be implemented on desktop Tumblr like the search page has? I have all this extra screen space.”

ZR: We are doing some experiments with the different *chuckles* Better resourced, I guess, view of the dashboard that looks pretty great which I guess is not out to users yet. But more to come there for sure.

PM: Let's see, how many people do we have now? I can't see the number.  

*off-screen* 302.

PM: 302, cool. Okay. 

[11:45] PM: “We need hardware-level encryption.”

PM: I don't know what that means *laughs* But, okay. *laughs* Maybe we need it too, wow.

[12:02] PM: “How do you intend to help users trust the Lives, if we are keeping them?”

PM: I'm not sure if I know what that means.

ZR: I think it's a question about feeling safe using Tumblr Live. Perhaps? With data? 

*chuckles at crab*

[12:23] PM: “Let's toggle off Live without a timer”

PM: Well, Live is…we're trying it out. *laughs* And in theory, this could be something that- You know, when people send gifts, we get a portion of that revenue and so it's something we're trying to help make Tumblr sustainable and allow us to invest more into the site. For, you know, getting servers, making things faster, having staff to fix bugs.

[12:51] PM: By the way, I want to address another thing that people always say whenever we do a post.

[12:56] PM: I forget what the username was but they said “Ban the Nazis.”

PM: *chuckles* Yeah. Nazi-like hate speech is definitely against the terms of service so if you see a Nazi tell us *chuckles* and we'll ban it. The Trust and Safety team on Tumblr has done a really monumental effort over the past few years to clean things up quite a bit. There is some backlog, always, but like yeah. Please report sites if you see hate speech or anything that would be against our terms of service. Which I think literal Nazism is. *chuckles*

ZR: Yeah.

[13:36] ZR: Yep, we got another question about the algorithm style Post Feed so probably bears repeating that we're not getting rid of the chronological feed. It will be its own tab, so do not worry about that. 

[13: 57] ZR: Then we had another one about moderation, more transparent. And I've seen another question about this previously, too. Posts that should be fine under the new policies are still being tagged. That's from Yansie.

ZR: Yeah, and that shouldn't be happening. But humans do make mistakes so we try to fix them. It does take time, we do have a backlog, so bear with us. Stick with us, we'll try to do right by everybody. 

[14:27] PM: There's a question being asked a lot about LGBT content being flagged? 

PM: Yeah, Tumblr is super pro-LGBT. I think it's actually like 25 or 30 percent of our user base. So if there's a mistake in the flagging… You know, again, this is humans. So, definitely mistakes are made. Please let us know, specifically, and have to take a look at it. I wonder what the flag could have been there. 

ZR: Not sure. 

PM: Yeah.

[15:02] PM: So people are asking to mute Tumblr Live permanently. 

PM: How much would you pay for that? *chuckles* Maybe-

*laughter*

PM: Maybe we'll make it an upgrade. Twenty dollars? Fifty dollars? Like, make me an offer. We might launch that in the Tumblr mods.

*more laughter*

PM: Okay, we got 25 there. 

ZR: Going once…

PM: 500, wow! We could definitely make it giftable too. You can gift people. *chuckles* It's like an auction. 500 going once, going twice, yeah, wow.

[15:38] PM: They say “Pay streamers” 

PM: Streamers can get paid actually, yeah. So, you can make money by streaming on Tumblr Live. So, that's part of the reason we were excited to try out this feature. Yeah, we launched Post Plus and other things. We're very interested in things that can get creators paid. In fact, even as we initially acquired Tumblr and during the turnaround, we actually prioritized the features that got users paid above the features that just got us paid.

[16:06] PM: Let’s see “Why can't we take usernames from older inactive accounts?” 

PM: Anyone have an answer there? *silence* Sometimes we recycle usernames. 

ZR: Yeah, there is a process to recycle usernames. We just need a request or we don't know that you're trying to use that username.

PM: You're “going to request Karen.” Okay, good luck.

 *Laughter*

[16:40] PM: “Let Live direct stream from OBS.” 

PM:  OBS is supported for Live so maybe- Do we just need to like-? 

ZR: On web.

PM: On web. Yes, so you can use OBS. Again hopefully, this system gets a lot more people knowing what actually is the reality.

[17:00] PM: “Why is Live stuck in portrait mode?” 

PM:  I think that's just how it's designed. It's a portrait experience, right? 

ZR: Yeah, that's right.

[17:15] PM: “You can only use OBS for your virtual webcam on the web, not directly.” 

PM: Does anyone know about that? Yes.

*Gary, offscreen* OBS can set up a virtual webcam but then you tell Live to use that webcam. But… the better way to do it through OBS is through using RTMP which I think- *indistinct* 

PM: Yeah, so this is Gary. He was saying RTMP would be better and I think that's on the roadmap. 

Gary: I think it's on the roadmap. Somebody who works on Live would perhaps know better when it's coming but they're working on it. 

PM: Cool, and in the meantime, use the virtual webcam feature.

17:51 

PM: You want the pretty-haired lady on screen, all right. That’s you, Zandy.

*Applause, Laughter*

ZR: Thank you. Thank you. Oh my God, I love it, I love flowers. Thank you.

PM: And you do have great hair. 

ZR: Yeah I do. 

PM: Thank you for the compliments. Thank you.

ZR: I didn't mean to say ‘I do,’ I meant to say ‘thank you.’ Here's a good one from VampSprite.

[18:26] “Can you make merch like a normal company?” 

ZR: No, because we're not.

*Matt laughs*

ZR: We can make merch like Tumblr.

PM: I think we're definitely leaning into the weird, 

ZR: Yeah. For sure. 

PM: We're trying to be even weirder than we have been.

ZR: Let's see, uh… 

[18:44] PM: People are saying “Can we keep custom themes?” 

PM: Yes, custom themes are staying, so don't worry about that.

[18:53] PM: Someone's saying “Don't touch the chronological dashboard” so we'll just say it again, chronological will always be an option for y'all.

ZR: Yep.

PM: Yeah.

[19:05] ZR: Here's one, StormBlessed-Fool “It seems really difficult to appeal staff decisions such as shadowbans, content removal, etcetera. Can that be improved?” 

ZR: Yeah, definitely. We are working really hard to make sure that people's content is not removed if it's not violative but we do make mistakes and we have a backlog so it takes us a while, sometimes, to realize that we have made a mistake. That's on us and we're getting better. We have a really amazing Trust and Safety team that's been working really, really hard over the last couple of years to operationalize and improve and make this a better place for Tumblr users so bear with us. I am sorry.

[19:52] PM: I don't know who Peggy is. *laughs* I guess a lot of people don't like- Peggy seems very polarizing but we don't know who she is or who they are. It's a spam account? “Peg is a troll. It keeps coming back on here on Live.” Oh. 

ZR: Oh. 

PM: Well I bet we can fix that. 

ZR: I bet we could fix that. 

PM: *chuckles* Watch out, Peggy.

*Laughter*

PM: By the way, I think I'm gonna just move my chair closer to yours then they don't have to pan the camera as much. 

ZR: Okay 

PM: The pretty-haired lady can be in everything.

ZR: Ooh

[20:33] ZR: “Mind if I ask” This is from WarriorPrincess666 which is a really great username “Mind if I ask why the group chat room was deleted two years ago?” 

ZR: And you all have really great usernames. I am sorry for singling one person out.

PM: Just own it, that's a cool username.

ZR: It's a good username.  I do not remember why we unwound- 

PM: Because no one was using it. *chuckles* I think we had really high expectations for that feature and it was used a lot less. We do try to deprecate things that aren't used a lot to just, like lower the technical debt so… Yeah, now we're both in there. 

ZR: Hooray

PM: High five.

ZR: We moved a chair. 

PM: We moved a chair. 

ZR: We can move mountains.

PM: *chuckles* Yeah. So, one thing about products and code is that every bit of code you have kind of requires maintenance and updating and, you know, sometimes things break. Or interacts in different ways. So the more complex the code base is, the harder it is to maintain. We're not great about this but- Yeah, streamlining the product you know… Someone always uses something but if something's used by just a really really really small percentage we sometimes streamline it. But I think Group is really the only thing we've done that for in a while, right? 

ZR: Mm-hmm.

PM: Can y'all think of anything else we've turned off or gotten rid of? Mostly we add things. 

ZR: Yeah 

PM: That's why the Tumblr code base is so big.

ZR: And complex.

[22:06] ZR: Re-bee-key asked about merch. “Is there any way Tumblr could team up with more artists? I'm sure people would be more open to buying merch.” 

ZR: Yeah, absolutely, and not everybody knows about this but we have this program called Creatrs. There's no O at the end, it's T-R-S at the end, Creatrs. That is where we look to artists within the Tumblr Community when brands want to work with us. We try to find people within our own Community who would like to work directly with that brand, get their work out there, build a relationship, and then we try to foster that connection. So, that is a program that not very many people know about and it's been kind of small running over the last couple years, and we want to build it back up and connect artists with brands, those who want to work with them. So, definitely want to amplify the artists on our site in ways that will work for them.

PM: Yeah. People are asking about search and we addressed that a little bit earlier. We do have some folks working on search and there's fixes coming. 

[23:23] PM: There was someone named Anon that's, you know, saying that we're missing LGB tags or something like that so could someone message Anon? Like, DM them? Raise your hand if you could do that.

PM: Yes? Okay, over there? Thank you. 

ZR: Thanks, Josh. 

PM: Thanks, Josh. So Josh is gonna reach out to Anon and we'll try to get some more details there so we can yeah see what's going on. 

ZR: That- that might be coming from the Humans account. It may, just so you know. 

PM: Maybe also message TittyInfinity *chuckles* who's also reporting this. I can't believe you all just got me to say that. *laughs* I hope my mom’s not watching.

ZR: Here’s one from WormPool. Another very good username.

[24:14] “How much is coming in the way of future monetization and how will it affect the average user.”

ZR:  Well, we must monetize Tumblr in some way. We have to either get to revenue neutral, where we make enough to just pay for itself. It would be nice if it made money but we're gonna do what we need to do. We don't want to do things like sell user data or make the site unusable with tons and tons of ads. So, we're going to keep experimenting with different ways to provide value to users. Matt mentioned earlier that we're trying to do more in terms of getting artists paid on the site, like Post Plus. And you know, you can give people gifts through Tumblr Live if you like what they're doing with it. So we're trying to do more things that sort of fall into that area where we can have a revenue share sort of thing. But we're also doing merch and we're selling domains. We have an ad-free subscription, we sell badges, other digital goods. We'll kind of look at everything but there's some rivers we just won't cross because we don't agree with them.

PM: And, to be honest, it has been a little tricky. A lot of the upgrades we launched, just not as many people have subscribed as we were hoping to.

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: Like, we thought the no-ads upgrade, which is 30 bucks per year, would do pretty well but how many subscribers do we have for no-ads?

*offscreen* Almost 25 thousand.

PM: About 25 thousand so when you think of the millions of people that use Tumblr only 25 thousand buying the upgrade is pretty low. You can buy it for yourself, you can gift it to people. That definitely helps. To be transparent about the financial gap I think maybe David knows this. Like, what's our current- What would get us to break even? It's like 20, 25 million or-

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Yeah, so right now, we're burning. Which means spending more than we make. About 30 million per year more than we make. 

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: So, that's a lot. We can't do that forever and so that's why we're really trying to figure out things that y'all would value. Whether that's merch or upgrades or badges or gifts or Blaze or other things. Every little bit helps, so please if you really enjoy Tumblr and want it to stay a thriving service buy things, and ask your friends to buy things.

ZR: Yeah, we've got one here that I really like.

[27:12] Somebody write it down, from VForVincente. “Re: merch. Make socks that come in trios instead of pairs.” 

*audience enthusiasm*

ZR: Let's do that.

PM: *laughs* Triple socks. Oh, that is- that's an idea. 

ZR: It is. It is an idea.

*off-screen* It’s a backup sock.

PM: It's a backup sock. 

ZR: It’s a backup, you always lose one.

[27:38] Anonymous asked, “Any plans for next April the 1st?” 

ZR: Yes, but we won't know until, like, February.

PM: *chuckles* Someone registered PhotoMattsMom and said “I heard what you said.” That's funny. Y'all are funny. I can't believe you just created an account. Thank you for helping our registration numbers.

[28:01] ZR: *chuckles* Well, people are asking if the Live stream can be recorded. 

ZR: You actually can't do that, they're totally ephemeral. That might be something that we can work on in the future but it actually isn't even possible for us right now. We don't store them they're just- 

PM: Are we recording this one though? No? So this is- yeah. 

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: This is ephemeral.

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: So it's just for y’all. Just for the 500-ish people here. Whoa, what's that say? Boujee? 

ZR: Oh.

PM: Ooh. Bling bling. 

ZR: *chuckles* That’s a weird gift to give. 

PM: We probably just should have had someone record this on their phone or something *chuckles* Next time. This was just an experiment. Well, we might do this again.

[28:54] ZR: ArialErendeair asked “Is your plan to remain as open about future decisions that you're making for the Tumblr experience so we can provide feedback?”

ZR: Yeah, we do, we want to work in public a lot more. The core strategy post that went out yesterday is a step in that direction. In retrospect, we see how we could have improved on that messaging so it wasn't terrifying to everybody. Because we're not getting rid of the chronological feed. And could have made it a little bit more, like, punchy and maybe short. But, yeah, we're gonna try to keep doing this and do it more in public because Tumblr only exists because of the users. That's it, so we want to be in this journey with you.

PM: Yeah. Please tell your friends that chronological feed will always be an option. So yes, a lot of people- Oh thank you for the kiss there *Matt smooch sound*

ZR: I think it was for me. 

PM: Oh. *laughs* Yeah, probably.

[30:03] PM: “How much are we paying the boys that come here and post emojis?” 

PM: Nothing. 

ZR: No.

PM: Unless they use Post Plus or something. Then they can get paid.

[30:14] ZR: DimensionalAbyss. I'm really sorry for butchering all these “How long is this going on? Please do a sleep stream.”

ZR: Absolutely not.

*laughter*

PM: What's a sleep stream?

ZR: It sounds like you stream yourself sleeping. 

PM: Huh.

ZR: You can do it. I'm not doing it. 

PM: I actually talk a lot in my sleep. That would be weird. 

[30: 38] ZR: I'm not gonna choose this one just for the username but IntergalacticBoner asked “Any plans to expand the Help Desk? It can take more than a week to get a response from support.”

ZR: We are working all of the time to improve our processes. We have an amazing customer support team. We have amazing folks from within Automattic that help us with public support so we are trying to cut those SLAs down. An SLA is a Service Level Agreement. That's like what we promise to users as a response time. So we try to cut those response times down as much as we can. A week does seem like a long time. We can improve on that. Yeah, thank you IntergalacticBoner.

[31:34] PM: “Can we keep reblogs as they are and not condense them?” 

PM: We're gonna just do some experiments with the different reblog formats and everything like that. I know that sounds scary but we also use Tumblr so if it doesn't work we'll roll it back or try something new. Everything's always a process, everything's always an experiment. Yay, Pride. 

ZR: Yay.

[32:02] ZR: Trydianth asks “I buy the ad-free subscription. Can that also include other options like turning off features not like�� which I think is ‘that I don't like.’

PM: Maybe, yeah. I mean, one thing that's tricky is when you add options for things it can add a lot of complexity to the app but, if you notice, a lot of the things that we've launched, we have given toggles for settings for so, in general, we're trying to be the most sort of user-controllable social network out there. And just, if we can, yeah. We'll keep trying that but, like we said, our previous approach is not working. *chuckles* I mean that Tumblr’s growth isn't where we want it to be and the revenue is not, you know. Like I said, we're 30 million below where the revenue needs to be so that's why we're trying different things to see what works.

ZR: Mm-hmm.

[32:58] ZR: “Re: Custom domains.” This is from transientURL “Do we expect to be able to host a Tumblr blog on the same domain as non-Tumblr site content?”

ZR: Salty. 

*Matt chuckles*

ZR:  I'm not sure I'm parsing that question.

PM:  Can you embed a Tumblr blog and something with other stuff probably? Or maybe it's custom domains um-

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Second-level domains? What would be a second-level domain? Like a sub- like a subdomain? *indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Like blog dot M-A dot T-V or something? Yeah, yeah. Um yeah, definitely domain features are something we're working on and investing in. 

ZR: Mm-hmm.

 PM: It’s probably gonna be paid. Just so you all know. 

ZR: Mm-hmm.

PM: We charge for domain mapping everything on WordPress dot com and I think we have like 300 thousand map domains so we definitely think that's going to be a good revenue stream.

[34:09] PM: “Tumblr Live is banned in Europe” 

PM: It's actually not banned in Europe. We just haven't launched support in Europe yet so it's not banned that's misinformation 

ZR: Yeah. And to be clear we collect the absolute minimum amount of information. We collect birth date, because you need to be over 18. And location, so that we know if you're in the US or not. And I think that's it. That's the only thing that we collect in terms of Live. We let you stream from the back camera so you never have to show your face. All the streams are ephemeral, so we don't save them. There's a lot that we try to do in the best possible way for our users' safety and health rather than just collect tons of things that get stored or that we might have to delete or be worried about.

PM: Whoa. Eagle thing, cool 

PM: Very patriotic.

ZR: It's very something. 

[35:18] PM: Someone’s asked why we need location.

PM: Zandy just said it. We need location because right now it's restricted to the United States so we need the location to tell between the United States.

ZR: Yeah.

PM: But hopefully that should be broader in the future. Also, sometimes that data that we collect helps us fight spammers and bots so that's another reason you sort of have some of that. 

[35:43] ZR: WormPool, repeat question asker. “Would there be a way to directly donate occasionally, similar to AO3 or Wikipedia, rather than buy merch?” 

ZR: We have talked about this, yeah. I thought for a while we couldn't legally because we're not a non-profit but we can, legally. So that's an option that we may look into in the future.

PM: In the meantime though, like buy the no-ads upgrade, yeah. Probably a good one.

ZR: And you can, if you really like the ads, you can turn off the no-ads upgrade 

PM: Yeah. 

ZR: After you buy it.

PM: That's how much we believe in user control, you can buy the no-ads upgrade and then turn the ads back on. Or you could just turn Blaze post on, which I really like.  So I have the no ads upgrade but I actually turn ads on because I want to test them. *chuckles* Make sure they're good.

[36:36] ZR: Here's another one that's interesting. This is transientURL again “I've seen a lot of people worrying that, like Reddit, Tumblr has external investor pressure to monetize. Want to refute or talk about that?”

PM: Yeah, of course, we have investors. We’re a company and if we didn't have investors we wouldn't be able to spend 30 million a year *chuckles* on Tumblr. It's not just about the investors though. When we work on something we want to see the returns on it, and we want to make sure it's sustainable so that we can make sure that Tumblr’s around for many years to come. So, that's really our main focus.

[37:19] ZR: Mm-hmm. ShadowGirl7, this is one for our ads team “Can you please not have ads be super vibrant? It's really an eyesore for epileptics like me especially when there's no way to stop it” So take note, yeah. 

PM: And maybe buy the no-ads upgrade. *chuckles* Because then you won't see them at all.

ZR: Or ask someone to gift you. 

[37:40] PM: A lot of people are asking about multiple dashboards. And I do think account switching, which I guess would give you multiple dashboards, different following, being able to do actions with different accounts is definitely pretty high on my personal list for things I'd love to see Tumblr support. Pretty big feature, pretty complicated. But yeah. We just need to bite the elephant there. Was that a metaphor? Maybe I just made that up. 

ZR: I don't think you should bite an elephant.

PM: *laughs* Would they notice?

ZR: Probably not.

[38:13] ZR: Oh, FeetAreUnderrated asked, “How large is the Tumblr staff?”

ZR: We have nearly everybody here with us this week and we have 192 people here this week so it's about 200. That's it, yeah. 

PM: Yeah, that's a much better answer. I was going to say, you know, it ranges from extra small to extra extra large. 

ZR: *laughs* You literally posted, like, yesterday about how many people we have. 

PM: Yeah. Oh, that's true. Yeah, wow. Yeah, so I think we have 192 people here together in person, which is pretty exciting.  For 59 percent of the people that are here, they've never been to a large meet-up like this so it's our first time getting to see each other. 

For those who don't know, Automattic, which is the parent company of Tumblr, and Tumblr are fully distributed so people work from wherever they are in the world. And we mostly coordinate online. But getting together a few times a year is really key to sort of working, knowing each other better, developing our culture, making plans, learning from each other.

You can actually be hired at Automattic with never actually talking to someone. Actually who here was hired purely on text? *chuckles* Yeah, so that's a good chunk. It was like about a quarter of the audience was just chatting on text. 

ZR: Mm-hmm

PM: Which is pretty interesting and I actually did kind of the first thousand final interviews. We called them MattChats. But then we were hiring a lot of people and I became a *indistinct* so I had to stop doing that. 

Although, I had an idea the other day actually inspired by a donut shed I had for… missing the name but who was it? Well, he was telling me that, I guess he read about the MattChat and he was really disappointed he didn't get one. So I thought that for existing Automatticians we put up something in announcements. You could leave an emoji if you want to MattChat. *laughs* Don't worry, doesn't actually- *chuckles* You're already hired, so it doesn't change that. But I thought we could do two options. It could just be, like, more of a donut where we just hang out and, um. Or if you want a classic-style text one, I still have all the questions I ask and everything. I kind of had a little bit of a format. I would vary it but I had some sort of standard questions I like to ask people.

One of my favorites was ‘If you could require all of Automattic to read a single book what would that be?’ And they got so many different answers and I actually used it to read a bunch. So the books that people would recommend, I would often check out, and really led me down some really interesting things I never would have read otherwise. That's how I read the ‘Bhagavad Gita.’ There was a sort of an interpretation called ‘My Gita,’ which I really learned a lot from that. And, so yeah. It's been kind of a fun thing. It's always been on my to-do to, like, actually collate all the answers. There were some common ones. What was it ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ was a really common one. Who's that guy, the author? David Allen or something or- 

ZR: Yeah.

PM: Covey. Yeah, Stephen Covey.

[41:54] ZR: Here's a question. JasmineFlowers or maybe Yasmin Flowers “Are all of you new to Tumblr?” 

ZR: No. 

PM: No, I was actually a super early Tumblr user.

ZR: Yeah, we have a lot of people here in the audience, that you can't see, who have been users of Tumblr for as long as there's been a Tumblr. 

PM: Yeah. Can someone look up my user ID, actually? I'm kind of curious. David, of course, is user id1 *chuckles*

ZR: Right. 

PM: David Karp, the illustrious founder of Tumblr, yeah. 

*offscreen* Today it's five.

PM: My user number is five?

*indistinct, offscreen*

PM: Yeah, yeah, my WordPress user ID is five. 

ZR: That makes more sense. 

PM: I think Danica is number one. But yeah, look me up in the Tumblr panel. 

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: What was that? 

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: So I was the 2007th user of Tumblr. *chuckles*

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Oh year 2007. 72078. Yeah, so seventy-two thousand. Yeah, so one of the first that was definitely pretty early. Because Tumblr launched in 2007, right? Yeah. Actually, interesting fact. Tumblr used to have a blog on WordPress. Which I thought was pretty cool for its first X number of years. Even though Tumblr and WordPress used to be competitors, we always had a lot of respect for each other. I always took a lot of inspiration from Tumblr and I'm really glad to be able to work on it now.

[43:33] ZR: There's one addressed directly to you. UnadulteratedPenguinCreation says, “Hey Matt do you read fanfiction?”

PM: Oh no. Sorry. Sometimes, I've been linked things and I'll browse it and sometimes there's memes and I'm always trying to figure out what they are. You know I only get so much time to read books so I definitely have a pretty huge backlog. Right now I'm reading Alain de Botton’s uh ‘School of Life’ which is really nice. Probably next I'm gonna read the next book in the ‘Silo’ series, Hugh Howey’s. 

ZR: I read fanfiction, not that anyone asked me. 

PM: Any favorites? Anything you want to suggest? 

ZR: No. No, I'm not gonna suggest anything. That is for me, on my time 

[44:37] ZR: From Maiosx “What is the best blog on Tumblr?”

ZR: Oh, there's so many good ones. 

PM: I really like @everythingfox. 

ZR: Oh yeah, that's so cute. 

PM: Yeah, cute animals. 

ZR: Yep. 

PM: I don't know if it's the best one but yeah. I actually would love to have, like, folders or ways I could have different lists of things I follow because my feed is a little schizo. It definitely bounces around a lot and I do really appreciate some new features. Like, ‘Things You Might Have Missed’ or other things because I would find I would actually miss a post from my friends who might only post once every week or two or something and so I really appreciated that I-

*indistinct, off-screen*

PM: Sorry, what was that? How much money am I willing to pay for not missing my-? Well, 30 million so far *laughs* per year. Paying a lot for it. *chuckles*

[45:33] ZR: We've been getting a question here that's surfaced “Can we talk about the reblog chain thing?” “Can the removal of reblog chains be an optional feature rather than a permanent one?” 

ZR: We made some changes to the reblog chain so that things were more consistent across all platforms and would work more like you would expect them to work. Unless you have used Tumblr for a really long time. So, everything we do is an experiment. We try things, we see how well they work, functionally, if people actually will use them. And then we make changes and adjustments and some you can see right away and some you can't see right away. Some we have to put on the shelf and revisit later, as other priorities come up. But any change that we make, I wouldn't consider 100 percent set in stone. Except that we are not getting rid of the chronological feed. As a reminder. 

PM: I'm gonna actually open Tumblr. I'm kind of curious what the banner looks like for this. Live with the Tumblr CEO, cool. Oh, joining stream. 

ZR: Uh-oh

PM: Inception

[47:03] ZR: LMFAO said, “Do you see streaming to become the main part of Tumblr going forward?”

ZR: I don't know, it's another experiment. If it was insanely popular and people were doing really cool things with it very consistently at a high quality, sure. But it doesn't have high usage right now so it's probably just gonna be something that we continue to play with and experiment with until it either clicks or we go a different way.

PM: By the way, I saw someone said I casually used a slur.  Was that schizo? 

ZR: Oh, I bet it was.

PM: I apologize, I mess up sometimes. So I won’t do that again. 

ZR: Thank you.

PM: Thank you for pointing that out to me.

[47:50] PM: “Are there any LGBT people or neurodivergent folks helping make decisions”

PM: Oh yeah *laughs* We have a ton.

ZR: Yeah.

[48:02] ZR: The-Trans-Fiendling. “Are you going to fix your algorithms so they don't disproportionately target trans users to flag them as mature?” 

ZR: We will check into it, make sure that isn’t happening. Or, if it is, that we’ll make changes.  We definitely do not want to marginalize trans people, push them off the site, make them feel like this is not the place for them. That's not what Tumblr is about so wherever we have screwed up we'll try to fix it and make sure that perception matches reality as well.

[48:50] PM: “It's basically a stockholder update, it's not going to be entertaining.” 

PM: Huh, that's funny.

[49:00] PM: So, I saw someone ask an interesting question. Sorry, I missed the username, but “How do we balance attracting new users versus supporting features that other social network sites support?”

PM: This is actually a really interesting product to design because I do think that there is an expectation. Like, obviously y’all probably also have or have used Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snap, all the other social networks. And I do think there is an expectation around certain things, like maybe messaging or following, liking, whatever that we need to support. Tumblr has always been sort of on the forefront of innovating, actually, for social networks. So a lot of things that we launched first are later adopted by other social networks. So, I think that's just kind of how technology works, right? Sometimes, we come up with a cool new idea and other people copy us. Sometimes, other people come up with cool ideas, and we can be inspired by that. Maybe we implement it like they did or maybe we riff on it and sort of do our own take on it. It's part of the fun.

[50:05] PM: “What's your favorite XKit feature?” 

PM:  Do we have April here, actually? 

*off-screen* No.

ZR: No. 

PM: No? Aw, she couldn’t make it. Yeah, April, one of the XKit-  there's multiple versions of XKit, right? Which one does she do? I forget the name but, yeah, actually one of the developers of XKit now works on Tumblr. So I think that's pretty cool.

[50:30] ZR: HomemadeMonsterPants, killing it. “What's the best method of sending feedback?” 

ZR: If you have an actual like you found a bug or something is broken, which is the same as a bug, uh send a ticket to Support. If there's things that you just want to give us feedback on you can ping our Work in Progress, WIP group. There's our Humans- @humans blog. You can send me stuff, you can send Matt stuff.  When I get stuff that's particularly hateful, I do ignore it. So, if you have a point you really want to make, try not to skew too heavily into how much you hate me personally, and then I'll try to address it publicly. 

PM: You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, is that the saying?

ZR: That's- I don't know why you want to catch flies at all.

PM: “Can you remind us of your usernames?” Sure PhotoMatt P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T 

ZR: And I'm ZingRing, Z-I-N-G-R-I-N-G

[51: 47] ZR: LiveThrowaway, “Have you considered improving the way you orient new users to Tumblr's unique features.” 

ZR: Yes, that's something we want to do. We want to keep what's special about Tumblr and what makes it so great, enhance those things. Which is not code for making Tumblr like every other social media site. Enhance those things, but also make it super easy and obvious for new users to get going really quickly with the communities that they care about and the content they care about.

[52:20] PM: Someone said why we're focusing on new users versus existing users? 

PM: We focus on both. 

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: Retention is just as important as new user acquisition. Anyone will tell you that.

ZR: Yeah. Yeah, we look at churn, we look at how many users are coming back, you know, at two days, three days, seven days, thirty days. We want the experience to be really good for both those groups, including the people who have been here with us since the very beginning. I don't think that improving things for new users is mutually exclusive. Like, we can make things good for existing users too, and improve that experience as well. Or give them more options to enjoy Tumblr the way that they would like to.

[53:07] PM: “…be a badge for people who've been here for a certain amount of time?” 

PM: Yeah, I think we'll definitely do badges for tenure. I think that's pretty cool.

ZR: Actually I think that's, well…

PM: What's that? 

ZR: More to come. 

PM: More to come, yeah. Excited for more badges, yeah.

[53:23] PM: “Are custom themes staying around?” 

PM: Yes, they are. Chronological feeds and custom themes are staying around. Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. *chuckles*

[53:35] ZR: Karennnnn said, three, four Ns at the end of that “I would like to have music play in the background of my blog, kind of like Myspace.” 

ZR: Right on.

PM: You can do that on a custom theme, right? If you do some HTML, you could autoplay some music.

*offscreen* Yes

ZR: Yes. 

PM: Yeah.

[53:58] ZR: WolvesAndVisions, “Have you all considered going to conventions to advertise in the host booths?” 

ZR: We have.

PM: Yeah, weren’t we just-? Didn’t we do one?

ZR: We were just somewhere. We were at Vidcon. I think we’re going to ComicCon

PM: Ooh.

ZR: New York ComicCon, we'll be there. 

PM: Nice, I saw some thumbs up over there. Yeah.

ZR: Our amazing team. 

PM: You “would love to host a Tumblr con?” Cool, I'll go to it. 

ZR: Yeah, what's your address? *Laughter* We'll be right there.

PM: I do want to do more events in our office space in New York City. Yeah, try to host happy hours, Tumblr meet and greets. There's also a really cool coffee shop downstairs called Cafe Lyria and I think that I want to do some sort of integration with them. Or, like, if you've posted to your Tumblr the past day you get a 10 percent discount or something. 

[54:54] ZR: SpectralVulture asks “Where is the ball pit?” 

ZR: You can't see it, it's in a room just off stage that way. 

PM: Oh, really? It was on stage a minute ago. It's kind of small though. It was kind of a-

ZR: It was a nod. It's a nod to a ball pit. 

PM: It was a nod to the ball pit, yeah. I think Gary might be getting it. Someone maybe hold the door for him.

[55:18] ZR: Catboy-Dysphoria. “Are there any changes being considered for side blogs? Ideas for improving them or just changes.”

ZR: We know that side blogs and that whole experience is really uneven and not that great so that is something we would like to improve. Make them more like first-class citizens on the site rather than-

PM: You asked for it. Tada!

ZR: There it is. 

*Applause, laughter*

PM: That's a ball bucket. Yeah, it honestly is. Maybe I can juggle. 

ZR: This is making me very uncomfortable. 

PM: Not so much. Sorry, we're not real entertainers. We just make software. 

ZR: Yeah, we are not good at this. 

PM: We should also show them the Tumblr blankets. Can someone grab me one of those or hold it up? We have some super cool swag just for people who are here at the meet-up. They're out? There's some in here. But I don't wanna- then the balls might fall down. Anyone have a spare blanket on them? No. We'll get one. 

ZR: Oh there's some, if you look at the #staffcon2023 tag, some people have posted their blankets that they got here.  We're at time, but I want to do one more. 

PM: Sure, yeah, and then we'll wrap it up there. By the way, thank you everyone for joining. Oh gosh, I guess we're up to 765 now. Wow, so cool. 

[56:56] ZR: That is really cool. It's a streamer, Tumblr Live question from Tyote. Sorry if I'm saying it wrong. “Could it ever be possible for streamers to share one Tumblr Live instance to collaborate?”

ZR: Maybe not the way you're thinking. I'm not sure. We do have an option for two streamers to be on screen at the same time so that does exist. If that's what you're looking for, yes, we have that. And, if you're thinking of something else, then you might need to send in a more detailed request. 

PM: Cool, well thank you all. Also, thank you for all these gifts. 

ZR: Yeah, they’re very fun.

PM: Okay wow, UFOs now.

ZR: Yeah

PM: Was that a- wow! We just abducted a fox or something. 

ZR: More crabs. 

PM: *chuckles*

ZR: *gasps* Oh

PM: A turkey- 

ZR: That's dark. 

PM: -In the oven *laughs* I guess it’s escaping, yeah.

ZR: Yay, I like that one.

PM: Thank you all for joining. This was an experiment.

ZR: Yeah. 

PM: We might do it again, I don't know. We’ll see. We'll talk about it afterward. What do you all think? Should we do one of these again?

*applause*

ZR: Alright, sounds good.

PM: And also, we'll figure out how to record it so we can post it for people who couldn’t be here and other things that are-

ZR: Not in this country 

PM: Cool, yeah. Thank you all for using Tumblr. Thank you for believing in us. Thank you for being passionate about it. Thank you for the feedback and we will do our darndest to make the best possible product for y'all. 

ZR: Yeah. Keep caring.

PM: Alright, bye-bye.

*applause*

[luminouslotuses]

tina demon lore vs “hi honey🥰😍”. FIGHT!

transcript:

tina: what do you think you’re doing? don’t think– don’t think– don’t think– don’t think i won’t beat you up. don’t think i will ruin you. i’ll peel, i’ll peel your flesh off. i’ll do it! i swear to god. [chuckles]

[clip briefly cuts to empanada on screen]

tina: hi honey! okay, alright, let’s, um– let’s continue!

[end of clip one]

tina [chuckling, before her tone switches to an echoing voice effect]: leave me alone! now. i– ah, i’ll skin you. i’ll skin you, i swear to god. i’ll wear your flesh like a suit.

[tina, breathing quickly and heavily, turns to look at empanada]

tina: hi honey! it’s gonna be okay!

[end of clip two]