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took these screenshots for people like me who would rather just know how to opt out than read several paragraphs on corporate greed

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yeah bro it's a character study. the 2 thousand words of blowjob is vital to the study of the character

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We’re all goin here right

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jesus fucking christ

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It’s that simple.

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FYI, for anyone who wants to donate!

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Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Retain and grow our creator base.

Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up. 

We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.

Actions & Next Steps

Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.

Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.

Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.

The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.

Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant. 

Actions & Next Steps

Deliver great content each time the app is opened.

Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are. 

Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. 

Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.

Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.

Actions & Next Steps

Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.

Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs. 

Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.

Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread. 

Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads. 

Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed. 

Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.

Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.  

Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.

The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.

It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.

Actions & Next Steps

Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it. 

Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.

Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.

Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.

Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.

Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.  

Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.  

Actions & Next Steps

Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.

Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.  

Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages. 

Test what the right daily push notification limit is. 

Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.

Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.

The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.

Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.

Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users. 

Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.

Conclusion

Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.

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that truck-driving life

I've had some wonderful cognitive dissonance playing American Truck Simulator, and I thought I would share some of the funny thoughts I've had in my first two days of gameplay, in the form of "live tweets", a stream-of-consciousness thread of short blurps that have nothing to do with each other, other than context.

Hehehe, window wipers go brrr.

Nonono, slow dow--AHH, I sideswiped the stop sign. Someone'll have to fix that later.

Huh, I've driven through this particular town twice now, and the same cop cars and news crew are stopped at the same gas station. I think I'll get gas elsewhere.

Oh look, a scenic viewpoint, that'll look great in this nighttime gnarly rain and fog combo we have going on at the moment.

Is… is that some goober driving a convertible with the top down in the rain? No one drives that way in the Pacific Northwest.

I used to live in this particular small town, and I'm pretty sure the harbor doesn't actually have those shipping cranes that major shipping ports have.

Ooh, my old hometown is 5 miles away according to that sign. Aaand suddenly I'm vaguely an hour's drive south of it. Neat trick.

I'm suddenly imagining other games using this exact game engine, like Regular Guy Driving Simulator, or Vanlife Simulator. I already have a whole game mapped out in my head. I wonder if there's a series of mods for that… looks

OH GOD WHERE ARE THE HEADLIGHTS, it's dark out. hits button repeatedly Oh, same button, just hit it muliple times. Well that's intuitive.

That'll buff out. And that. And--oopsie.

I swear, this Diablo Lake is cursed, I've been on this job for four hours, I was due two hours ago, and the GPS is literally sending me in very large, convoluted circles. I can't be sure because it's dark out but exactly how many times am I going to see this same stretch of highway? I guess the GPS is glitching because cell signal is spotty in this mountain pass.

I love how at higher elevations when the tree cover becomes more sparce, the highway becomes less maintained, older, sunbleached, and full of those filled-in cracks that the departments in charge of road maintenance do in order to not have to resurface the entire stretch of road.

"Rocks," the sign says. Yes, yes there are. And road. And trees. And holy crap look at that sky!

Listen, Subaru owner, you're the one who pulled out in front of a loaded semi. Now we both get to sit for a moment and consider our life's choices.

HAHAHA, I passed you, you brake-checking sumbitch--dang it, another weigh station. CURSE YOU DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION!

This game is completely unrealistic--there's always gridlock on this stretch of road in real life, they've rendered no potholes, and there should definitely be more roadkill here.

You know, if I wasn't working, I could go joyriding and pull off the side of the road to really enjoy the rendered scenery. Ah well, the life of a truck driver.

I wish my computer chair bounced so that I could more realistically capture the feeling of the incredible shocks a big rig has.

I do wish steering with keyboard wasn't /quite/ so janky. Having to tap my way left/right is pretty jarring on curvy roads, and lord help everyone else on the road if I have to scratch my nose or whatever.

I just noticed at the trees only look good at freeway speeds, they turn to observe you as you're driving past. I know that's just to minimize polygons and rendered surfaces and all that, but still, it's creepy.

The speed is 60mph, why are you only going 35, braking repeatedly, and have a dozen cars behind you? PULL OVER, some of us have to make a living.

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I'm terrible about updating multiple socials very often but I do exist!

Reblog if your an FFXIV blog!

Help the lost Twitter spirits find us all.

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🎵 Sung to the tune of "Be Our Guest" from Disney's Beauty and the Beast, dedicated to the one roommate who, once more, has danked the bathroom for the rest of us.

Waaaaashh… youuuurrr…. cooch, wash your cooch No one wants to smell your gooch You need more than monthly showers To denastify your bush

It's not mean, to be clean Surely you know what I mean That infection you got going Means that you're too alkaline

Don't get mad, use a pad There's no reason to smell bad Surely you are self-aware about your tuuuuush Use cider vinegar Or douche if you prefer, but Wash your cooch, wash your cooch, wash your cooch!

🤢

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Another point for why it’s important to own your own copies of music and media, and not use streaming services, is because the copy you own can’t be taken back.

(This is also a good time to remind people that yout*be to mp3 converters still exist).

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tumblr live is creeping in so heres a thing to paste into ur ublock filter to make it fuck off

||tumblr-live.com www.tumblr.com##.ADlDx www.tumblr.com##div.KTRcB:nth-of-type(3)

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I also haven't done laundry, dishes, paid bills, or showered all year. *snickers*

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don't use "ftm" it's outdated and offensive. it implies that the trans person was their agab, which we never were. i was always a boy, never a girl who became a boy.

i'm 35 years old. i've been IDing as trans or something similar to trans for nearly 20 years. i was probably calling myself FTM while you were playing tag during recess, anon.

i WAS a girl. i IDed as a girl early in my life. i recognized myself as a girl, called myself a girl, lived as a girl, and was a girl. who then IDed as a man. hence, F t M.

spend more time worrying about yourself instead of strangers on the internet, anon.

sorry not sorry if this comes off as needlessly hostile, but i've been getting a lot of shit from a lot of teenage trans kids about the language i use to describe my own goddamn experience, and i'm growing real fuckin weary of it.

i have elder trans friends who call themselves transsexuals and transvestites and trannies. are you going to seriously go to a 60-year-old trans person who survived the reagan years and tell her she's not allowed to use certain language to describe herself because it might offend the delicate sensibilities of some teenager on the internet?

do yourself a favor and log off, find some real-life trans people who are over the age of 20 or 25, and spend time talking to them instead of getting all holier-than-thou at random strangers on tumblr.

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The way they phrase this is so weird to me.  It’s the “safely.”  Like… what, is there a chance my digital character can get into an accident en route to a different server?