Creators I love you but it's time to wake up
Among rumors about our tumblr user data being sold off to Midjourney/Generative AI, recent Extremely transphobic events (that have been ongoing) coming to a head, another extremely concerning internet censorship bill being pushed in upper levels of government, and a general air of frustration over how the site belongs to and is operated by perhaps the second stupidest CEO (second only to twitters own) of our age, I'm very done with the last few vestiges of what the old internet held for artists.
And if you're reading this, you probably are too.
I know we're tired. We are all tired. It is not always viable to pack up shop and move, again and again and again.
From tumblr to twitter to anywhere else we've ever grown up posting, things no longer work. Our audiences are kneecapped by aggressive and hostile algorithms, our reach is abysmal - if we aren't shadow-banned or silenced for one (transphobic) reason or another, we're thrust into an ever growing pit of hostility where the only thing that drives clicks is fighting and contention.
We're tired. We're so fucking tired. We aren't businesses, we aren't content mills, we cannot keep this pace that modern social media has set for us, to wring every ounce of creativity out of us to profit from and leave us rotting.
The key to staying afloat here, and I cannot stress this enough, is to stay connected to your peers.
Pack up and move as units if you must. Exodus from the sites that are killing us. Push your entire friend group of artists to move from one site to the next that promises you a kinder experience.
Art drives movements, it drives change, it is all that encompasses being human. If you take that away from the shitty places, they will be left with nothing but a cesspit of inhumanity and the people who follow you will be more incentivized than ever to move with you.
Yes, this is terrifying. There are no guarantees. There never was, and never are, and never will be.
But stay connected. Stay human.
Support each other and be willing to hold hands and jump when we all - as a group - need to jump from the flames we're all trying to convince ourselves wont kill us before rescue comes.
Rescue isn't coming, rescue will be found hand in hand with each other. I'm offering you my hand, please take it. There's always a new start, there are always helping hands reaching for you. You have to look up from the doom-scroll long enough to see and take them.
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I haven’t been here long. What irritating changes have been made?
Credit where it's due, some changes have been good, like polls and stuff! But the big recent changes thus far that I would classify as irritating are:
- The UI change. This one may be less irritating for newcomers because it's basically the same layout as twitter and instagram, but for a lot of folks who've been here a long time, it feels cramped and like a loss of identity for the site. For many, the appeal of tumblr is that it ISN'T an algorithm hell like twitter or insta. Also, there's the annoyance of having to relearn where everything is, because it all got moved around.
- The users being lab rats for various tests the devs wanna pull out of nowhere without consenting to beta testing new site features- like the one that took away user icons on the dash for like half the site. They finally put them back after getting enough feedback that said NO, but users were so used to their feedback being disregarded that they were half expecting the change to be pushed through anyway.
- The Netflix tie-in advertising being pushed even to people who had PAID tumblr for a no-ads experience. Complete with them somehow thinking it would be a good idea to put an unescapable-by-scrolling spooky clown on peoples' dashboards that u had to use ublock to get rid of. While I'm not scared of clowns and often find them quite charming, it sucks that staff didn't take coulrophobia being a common fear into account.
- A wave of fully sfw trans posts being wrongfully marked Mature and staff doing little to nothing about it. Not sure if this is still ongoing, but it destroyed a lot of trust and good will. (LGBT+ users have been having to fight a constant war against censorship ever since the adult content ban on tumblr, so yeah... Nevar 4get the list of banned search words that would bring back no results, like 'girl')
- The site gradually moving away from customization. Tumblr is a BLOGGING site. But it seems to have lost sight of that fact, because most new users don't even know you can fully customize your blogs with css and stuff (an option that is now off by default for new accounts!), because of the in-dash viewer giving you only how blogs look on mobile, which is a lot more uniform. There, it's more like every other site- you get a banner and icon. Oh, but you can change colors and fonts from a drop-down list too, that's cool I guess. Though they recently took away custom color schemes on Message windows, just another little bit of personalization taken away.
- TUMBLR. LIVE. Basically tumblr teamed up with a skeevy dating app partner to allow for livestreams- but not the cool kinda livestreams like on twitch where you can draw or play games, no- to a site full of people who value anonymity, they decided to push phone cam only livestreams. Not only that but by agreeing to the terms, you're giving out tons of personal data including your location to said skeevy dating app partner and all of THEIR third-party ad partners. Needless to say, most people didn't wanna use it, so instead of users it's flooded by p*rn bots (which is ANOTHER issue we've been dealing with for a long time and have been getting an even bigger influx of FROM tumblr live) and scammers. And thus, since tumblr likes to put a carousel of current streams on people's dashes, you often get softcore p*rn thumbnails from the bot streams with no way to avoid it except for toggling off tumblr live entirely.
- Oh wait. That's right. You CAN'T toggle it off. Because you can only snooze it for a while until BAM, you're jumpscared by a carousel of ladies licking your screen again! But hey, at least they made the snooze 30 days instead of the 7 it used to be, right? Yeah, except for the fact that you can't get rid of the tumblr live button itself on the app anymore, and now it's front and center with a NEW notification tag on it, overlapping your dash and cramming useful stuff like the search button out of the way.
NOW- A lot of this stuff CAN be at least mostly fixed on desktop by installing ublock and xkit and tampermonkey + dashboard unfucker... But that's a lot of stuff just to make the site usable, you know?
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reminder that my totk rants are me just rambling about my thoughts, ideas and complaints, im not trying to analyze anything, be smart, be right, debate or convince anyone who likes it that its bad just bc i think its bad or simply dont like the choices made, im literally just spilling out my brain so it doesnt keep haunting me
if you think something makes sense that i think doesnt i, and forgive me for being so blunt about it, do not care why you think it works, my opinion of this game will not change and i am okay with that
you are free to disagree with anything i say of course but i really dont care why, sorry
(sth i said only in the tags before but added now in this edit bc i think its important: its not bc i dont want to hear other peoples opinions and live in ignorance or something, but bc im tired and i PROMISE you i have seen 99.9% of those arguments already)
im not trying to be mean, aggressive or dismissive, but again, these rants are just me rambling with no intention of arguing with anyone, the only reason im still posting whenever i think of something thats bothering me (even if it might be dumb or be disproven in game bc i am not all-knowing and might be possibly misremembering something), and letting those posts be rebloggable/interactable is bc i have been told by quite a few people that they like reading them or that they feel validated in their own disappointment
thats it.
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You know, I've been seeing a lot of posts about Wilbur coming back to the qsmp, and I'm conflicted.
Obviously, Wilbur coming back would be great in most aspects. It would be awesome to see him interacting with the lore, the new members and the new dynamics the server created.
The one problem I see with him coming back is, funny enough, also the main reason people want him to return so badly: tallulah.
Tallulah. His daughter. The reason Wilbur logged on more than twice and pretty much the only reason he is still semi present in the lore despite not having logged on for months.
On the surface, it seems like Wilbur returning would be great for tallulah, wouldn't it?
Wilbur has not logged on for months. Tallulah has been alive for over 100 days, and Wilbur has been there for 8 of them.*
Tallulah sees chayanne as her brother. She calls philza papa. She sleeps in the basement she and chayanne decorated every night, her bed next to his. She has her own projects with phil. She hangs out with him (or bad) practically every day.
Philza can recognize all of her mannerisms and quirks, he knows how to properly accommodate her, he can tell whenever her admin plays any character and whenever any other admin plays her.
If Wilbur came back, what would happen to all of that?
Would she return to her room in the tower? Would chayanne have to sleep alone in their Garden of Hope and Music? Would she have to start calling phil "abuelito" again, after getting used to calling him papa?
In addition, Wilbur doesn't know tallulah the way she is now. He doesn't know the island the way it is now.
One thing I've seen other people point out and still haunts me is: if Wilbur had returned for the election dinner, would he have recognised the fake tallulah as fake? It breaks my heart to say this, but... I don't think he would.
The only way I can see his return not completely disrupting tallulah's existing dynamics is if Wilbur moved in with phil and let her keep calling him papa. I doubt that would happen, but fingers crossed
*not counting appearance on other people's streams because I have no way to count that
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