Even in its prime, Tumblr was never profitable. It was sold and resold to several companies who never had a clear vision for what to do with it, other than run ads to generate revenue. Its main draw was its users. For several years it was the social media platform for LGBTQ and fandoms, along with many niche interests.
Like Reddit, many users had a love-hate relationship with it, and as its policies grew more and more at odds with its power users, the communities which existed fell apart. Banning NSFW content and the heavy-handed automated moderation meant to enforce it was the final straw for me. AI was used to try to detect images of nudes, but tagged a huge amount of false positives such as pictures of animals or even sand dunes. I had my main blog incorrectly tagged as NSFW which made it harder to keep in contact or be discoverable by other users, so I quit. Reddit’s over-reactions to large subs being set to NSFW shows this is a pain point for them. u/spez has made it clear that he will push through whatever policies he wants, regardless of vocal feedback for the actual users of the site.
Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self. I check in every so often. Only a handful of the blogs I followed are still active, mostly ones that didn’t interact much with others to begin with. Trending content is incredibly generic, even moreso than /all. Very few of these posts hit more than a few thousand “notes” (for comparison I, a fairly obscure blogger, had about 80,000 notes on my most viral post). When July 1 rolls around I expect Reddit will start to follow a similar pattern. The power users who haven’t left already will drop off the grid one by one until Reddit loses its center of gravity.
Further reading, first one with NSFW-ish photos
https://boingboing.net/2018/12/03/the-death-of-tumblr.html
No one knows what it will look like this is an entirely new shift but I do have this feeling that things are at a real turning point right now. The massive rise of AI, the monetization and enshitification of social media and entertainment reaching a peak, bizzare economic conditions, a feverish culture war in the west. I’m sure I’m missing something but there is a strange cocktail of factors mixing right now and the changes happening with Reddit seem like just another piece. I’m optimistic about what it means. I think a lot of people feel like the status quo as it has been is not infinitely sustainable.
My hope is that this is a shift back to a more decentralized internet.
I want small personal home pages back.
Except the midi and custom cursor elements.
what’s wrong with MIDIs? :)
Imagine visiting a random site and some cutesy midi music starts playing on your cheap desktop speakers or earphones, you look for the controls to mute it but the site owner didn’t make one so you’re forced to turn off the entire volume. It was just annoying.
Luckily browsers can mute tabs now!
And don’t forget under construction gifs.
I got you covered: http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/
TEXTFILES! WOW! What a blast from the past! I can’t remember the last time I saw that site! Isn’t that the site that just outright hosts a copy of the anarchist’s cookbook and other similar stuff?
I remember it was all blue and I would visit it on the School computers thinking I was so edgy, but then school shootings weren’t common at all yet, and when they started, I sort of moved away from visiting sites like that entirely.
But man. MAN… I kind of want to see if it’s still there, just for the old times, but… I feel like the fbi takes stuff like that a LOT more seriously now :|
What to do, what to do…
Edit: Jfc yeah that’s the one - annnnd I’m on a list now, great :/
Ugh, my childhood. That gritty, black and white one just under the huge batch of roadsigns has to be from 2004. That seems to have been a very era-specific font that I’ve just never seen since.
I don’t know if it was common in the west but in Japan you’d see sites that required you to read and agree to a term before entering the site. Just the usual “don’t be an asshole” type of netiquette. However when you clicked on “Enter/Agree”, you’d be redirected to Yahoo. Reading the terms more carefully you’d see it says, about 2/3 in, “if you agree, click here”. It was mildly annoying.
Mildly, but honestly that feels like a good thing.
Reminds me of those paper tests or quizzes in school where there’d be a paragraph of instructions in the beginning, and halfway through, it would say if you wrote your name on it and turned it in after ten minutes and wrote “potato” as the answer to #4 and just turned it in, you would get 100%, or if you just did something specific you’d get some extra credit.
The number of people that don’t read instructions is insane. Teachers were complaining about students not writing dates on stuff or some other aspect of laziness and would use this to incentivize kids to read instructions.
I started messing around with gemini a while back, it’s a little involved to set up, and intentionally-limited feature-wise (it’s heavily inspired by Gopher). Very fun messing around with it though, and customizing my HTTP proxy was pretty satisfying. You could access my site either through a gemini browser or a normal one, and the normal site had a few extra bells and whistles that made browsing it a little better
It is for some people like us. But most user don’t care.
That was well said. I think it is a sign of a larger shift in attitude for many facets of modern day life, that many of us have struggled to really come to terms with. Social media is just more in our control to do something about and I hope to see it shift to other things as well, as we all realize we control our own fate.
Perhaps the end of the long September?
I don’t think eternal September will ever end, outside of platforms that are small enough not to attract those sorts of users.
Once you hit a certain level of popularity, it’s going to be September no matter what unless you’re very strict with moderation to keep things from going off the rails.