My friend (Rowl’s writer) went “hey, au where Nym is a taur-” and the idea had my brain in a chokehold until it was canon. Other than four legs and other more obvious biological factors they’re unchanged :3
I watched the live with the CEO, here is the tl;dr
The good news:
Chronological dash is here to stay! Whether you have to toggle it weekly or new users default to “For you” was not elaborated on but at least that’s confirmed.
Custom themes are here to stay! Once again, may be buried for all I know but, for sure will remain an option.
Search updates are in the works!!!!
The neutral news:
Tumblr is seriously in the red financially and needs more support, Ad-free for example is not widely used
They would not comment on the suggestion to bring back NSFW behind a paywall (which we all know would get them a boatload of money)
They’re possibly going to add a donation system like Ao3 and Wikipedia.
They would “rather not” sell data to make up the costs
Most of staff are pre-2010 tumblr users including the CEO who joined in 2007, so they do actually use the site and have for a long time
The bad news:
Condensed reblogs/removing reblog chains is going forward. The reason cited was to meet “certain expectations” of users coming from other social media, which isn’t good.
Disability features (specifically turning off flashing ads for epileptics) was met with a request to purchase Ad-free
Overall it was more chill than I expected, @photomatt and @zingring seem to be far more in tune with the userbase than u/spez.
Under the bad news column:
I did ask our ads team to investigate any kind of vibrancy or flashing on ads – we do not want to accidentally trigger seizures or cause distress with flashing etc. Buying ad-free (or gifting ad-free to someone else) is always an option, but that is not the solution (and of course, some folks simply can’t afford it). Sorry that it sounded dismissive in the session! That was not my intent.
Condensed reblogs/removing reblog chains is going forward.
Depending on how that looks/if it can be turned off, that could kill the site as surely as removing chronological following only feeds would…
We want reblogs, not rooted posts with comments under them. At that point you are just Facebook…
reblog chains where users iteratively produce something funny or informative are practically this site’s main cultural export i don’t know what kind of tepid soup is sloshing around in your skull that you’d even consider getting rid of that
(Notes: This is a short TF scene combining writing with illustrations, set in a Stardew Valley AU with my character Gaius Caster as the farmer. The family farm is intrinsically linked with a ‘blessing of nature’ that manifests in whoever claims the land.
I was reminded of the old transformation RPs from the Dr. Moreau GaiaOnline forums, and one of the elements I missed was the long transformation write-ups. So I decided to ‘be the visceral TF write-ups I want to see in the world’ and finally get some of this AU out of my head and down in writing/art.)
it really is sad that algorithmic feeds have broken peoples’ brains so badly. people really do come here and go “wait, i have to CHOOSE who i follow to get posts on my dashboard???” because a social media site working the way they were always supposed to work is so alien now. people will assume the site is a ghost town because they don’t follow enough active users. there has to be a constant stream of New Content every time you refresh, regardless of whether or not said Content is any good
you can never just get caught up on your feed and put the phone down, because that’s not what tiktok and insta and twitter and facebook have conditioned users to expect. putting the phone down means you’re not looking at more ads and generating revenue for the site. when you venture off of the following feed twitter’s algorithm is very transparently designed to show you bait tweets and other things that will make you angry, because getting people to argue is one of the easiest ways to drive engagement. it’s no wonder threads just launched with no following feed whatsoever, just an infinite stream of algorithmic slop. these sites don’t want you to curate your own experience because then you might develop a healthier relationship with them. that’s not what they want. they want addiction
ALT