#important blue checkmark

[pyralart]

@staff You should be able to give the double useless checkmark to someone. And they can't refuse it. Enable pvp. Forced verification** **not actual verification

[the-irreverend]

Oh, Tumblr.

You may be broken as hell, but at least you're not falling apart.

P.S. Also, I can't help but love what they're doing with the blue checkmarks.

[janky]

janky emojis: tumblr starter pack

by @superchlorine free for non-commercial use

:janky-horse: :janky-heart: :janky-unverified: :janky-fieri: :janky-tumblr: :janky-thumbs-up: :janky-pizza: :janky-crab: :janky-rocket:

[distinguished-papyrus-simp]

Web Tumblr

vs

Mobile Tumblr

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

Do the reddit refugees know that the Important Blue Checkmarks™ mean that someone paid £7 because it was really funny?

I'd hate people to think that they Mean Something and /or that we care

[aparrotandaqrow]

Quick @staff you gotta start selling us rainbow checkmarks before Musk rolls this out

[butterflysist3r]

We might get them gift able!! And earrings!!!! I need this

[this-user-name-is-unique]

FEAR ME TWITTER!!! For I have not one, but twenty checkmarks!! One checkmark alone cannot contain my levels of verification!! Mwah ha ha ha! *inhales deeply* MWAH HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!

[ninjamonkeyqueen]

So committed to the bit, i won’t buy the shoelaces (not a proper way to acquire them), but i will absofuckinglutely let people know how important i am.

[cacodaemonia]

I saw that one of my blue checkmarks had turned green so I went to see if the same thing had happened with other accounts. And now I realize that Tumblr staff are evil geniuses. I want a rainbow gdi

[gen-is-gone]

having some Weird Thoughts currently about tumblr's place in the modern internet ecosystem, vis a vis twitter melting down, macebook/feta losing its shit, and a bunch of folks joining up here either for the first time in years or the first time at all.

namely, I really do believe that automattic/tumblr's current leadership is very very slowly and very very carefully implementing a bunch of changes in preparation to bring back adult content in its entirety, as part of a larger scheme to try to monetize without resorting to data scraping (which is basically impossible to do here the way it is on other sites anyway). it certainly seems like that's what they're doing, between post+, the tip jar, community labels, and the ability to make posts non-rebloggable. obviously these features have plenty of use outside of adult content (except maybe post+, which makes literally no sense outside of sex work), but what they seem to be doing is building up a logistical means by which to allow adult content, and allow it to be monetizable.

and like, no, I don't think tumblr the company is Our Best Friend; yes it is a company that needs to profit under capitalism to survive, but so is everything, and there is genuinely something funny and weird (in a very stupid, ironic way) about tumblr as a social media site operating in the 2020s. It just legitimately doesn't have the capacity to scrape data and sell targeted ads the way the giants of the modern internet do, both because it is a product of an earlier age when that wasn't yet a standard profit mechanism, and also just 'cause like. tumblr's fucking code is shit. I'm sure it's a lot better than it was circa 2012, but jokes about tumblr's legendary goof goof dildo spaghetti code used to be really common, and anyone who's been here longer than a couple months either remembers or at least has heard of just how weird and fucked up and bad the site's basic functionality used to be. Legitimately, the reason why tumblr feels so nice rn compared to the heyday is as much because it's just so genuinely more functional than it was ten years ago as it is because there's so comparatively few people.

but point being: if tumblr under yahoo had been handled with any semblance of basic competence, they might've seen which way the wind was blowing w/r/t targeted ads and data sales and we might have an entirely different, much worse hellsite than we actually have. or it probably would've died because yahoo would've actually fully ran it into the ground, more likely. but also it probably wouldn't have worked because the assumption of anonymity is so much more baked into the incredibly weird, broken, decade and half's worth of layered bullshit code that even if anyone previously could've realized that the smartest way to make money would be to scrape and sell data, they'd never have been able to implement it.

and so we have the tumblr of today: weird, unmarketable, ungovernable, proudly cringe, and deeply resistant to the mainstream. so not actually that much different to tumblr circa 2012, if a lot smaller and more battle-hardened.

but like. by the standards of what's available on the modern internet, tumblr is honestly one of the best, most versatile spaces still standing with any amount of a userbase? straight up, the dominance of twitter and instagram has made a lot of people really oddly perplexed by the concept of being able to write detailed essays in the body of a post, let alone the idea of dozens of images per post, or audio like, at all. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things about tumblr that I wish were different or better that just aren't compatible with how tumblr is set up at a base level as an LJ user every day I miss threaded comments and LJ-style cuts I LAMENT them I tell you, but of the options out there, tumblr is fucking wild in what it can offer. but I don't just mean for artists and fandom and weird little gremlins like those of us who've been here this whole time, I mean like. fuck. like.

watching the White House's twitter account try to lay out complex policy initiatives in 280-characters is fucking painful sometimes, and yet we've all gotten used to it in the past decade plus. leaving aside the fact that it's bonkers and deeply unsettling and generally bad that world leaders are beholden to usamerican for-profit corporations to communicate in general, of all of the socmed sites out there, it's kind of insane that twitter is the one that got big in the official political scene. (don't get me wrong: twitter is genuinely quite useful for disseminating quick bursts of information in crisis, and it's been fucking brilliant for coordinating in both natural disasters and evolving political/social disruption. but it's terrible at detailed, nuanced information sharing)

I don't know where I'm going with all of this necessarily, and I think twitter eating shit and going down in flames is pretty terrible for global democracy even as it is also on a surface level funny as shit. I don't want tumblr to replace twitter, or facebook, or insta, or tiktok, in being the place where everyone lives online. I want tumblr to stay as the little gremlin art ho fandom clown car, and lbr, it probably will. It'll probably never be what twitter is, for better or for worse. who knows if it'll ever be what it was in 2012 again. I like the ecosystem the way it is these days, with way fewer users, most of whom have been around the block more times than we can count, and are too jaded to start shit anymore. but tumblr needs money to survive, and as much as we're all enjoying posting cringe, tumblr's twitter is pulling off a masterwork balancing act luring twitter users over here, and it's working.

tumblr needs to do what it can to survive. we still don't know if all of this effort staff has been putting in these past ~10 months or so will be enough; the writing has been on the wall for years now that if tumblr doesn't find a way to financially justify itself, it won't survive another sale. automattic took a maybe unprecedented (and extremely positive, imo) risk this past year, and has been trusting current staff to listen to user input and implement positive changes, including finding ways to monetize without invading users' privacy, which who knows if the site even has the capability of doing anyway, even now. if we are all very lucky, and are willing to pitch in and treat this place like our community, we might even collectively succeed, and prove to the wider internet that it is possible to run a popular, high-traffic website without compromising user security. if tumblr is doing what I think they're doing, and very carefully building up a secure, socially, financially, and legally defensible way to support adult content on a site with american servers and a place on the app store in the 2020s, then we're off to the races and who knows where we'll go. if twitter does actually implode beyond salvaging, a huge chunk of the world will feel its loss, and many people, including all the normies and politicians and your mom, could very well cast their gaze to the website people wrote off as in its death throes four years ago. they probably won't, but as I was just vividly reminded earlier today, the White House did, in fact, have a tumblr once upon a time. who knows what the future holds.

but John Green deserves an apology, you weeaboo shits.

[claudethered]

Tumblr users after seeing they can stack verifications.

[baronfulmen]

Place Your Bets!

How long until the new checkmarks break Tumblr?

How will they break Tumblr?  Will it be like the Rat Post, for example?

Will Staff fix it?  How soon?  How successfully?

Will people have to spend money, or will there be some free exploit?

[janky]

janky emojis: social media 2022

by @superchlorine free for non-commercial use

top row, left to right:

:janky-crab-verified: :janky-tumblr: :janky-unverified:

bottom row, left to right:

:janky-verified: :janky-twitter: :janky-no-verified:

[wip]

Hi 👋🏻 is it going to be possible to allow users to select the colour of the check marks? I think this would be really cool and allow people to customise their blogs even more 😊

Answer: Hello, @joeelsmiller!

We love this idea, and we’re glad you like the checkmarks as much as we do. That said, there are no current plans to introduce this. But as we say, this is a tantalizing possibility, so never say never here.

Thanks also to @curiouslyeccentric and @joels-ellie for getting in touch with similar.

Best,

—Bohdan (Tumblr Engineering)

[godofstory]

he's very important