#algorithms exist on social media | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

rigaudon · 2 years ago

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You know what, actually, I'm gonna comment on the original post rather than just venting my annoyance in my own blog. Holy shit guys, the entire community needs to collectively chill out and stop jumping to conclusions and regurgitating them until half the site is parroting back misinformation that takes months (or, realistically, never) to correct.

there's already half a dozen optional dashboard tabs in tumblr labs. In addition to the normal following/for you/tracked tags at the top of your dash. The keyword here being optional. You can use as many of them as you want, or none! If you want them, they're in a new tab that has no effect on your chronological dash. If you don't want them, keep them off and they won't even show up at the top to annoy you!

Like c'mon guys. I get that it's on brand for tumblr to push back against any changes @staff make to the site, but we really need to be better about not assuming the worst possible scenario and dog piling on it until the whole site is in a frenzy over something that isn't even true.

Please, I'm begging you, exercise your critical thinking skills and look into how the site already functions before writing 2k word essays on how staff is 100% For Real Taking away the chronological dashboard. You're just making yourselves mad over literally nothing.

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.

#so many comments in the notes are making my brain rot.#the amount of people jumping to write thesis papers worth of outrage over a situation that Does Not Exist. With EXTREME leaps of logic #and these are AFTER staff already made an update. take 30 seconds to make sure your assumption is true before you lose your mind about it #idk. it bugs me how petulant and ungrateful tumblr users are towards the staff. I get it's always been a haha funny meme but holy shit #some of you are BEYOND entitled on this webbed site that turns no profit and is a giant money sink.#for tumblr to continue to exist staff needs to find a way to draw new people to the platform. AND to pay the bills.#would you rather there be optional algorithmic social media things that YOU DO NOT NEED TO USE IF YOU DON'T WANT TO #or would you rather tumblr go down because staff can't keep paying for the servers?#have some goddamn flexibility

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getvalentined · 2 years ago

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An open letter to @staff

I already submitted this to Support under "Feedback," but I'm sharing it here too as I don't expect it to get a response, and I feel like putting in out in public may be more effective than sending it off into the void.

The recent post on the Staff blog about changing tumblr to an algorithmic feed features a large amount of misinformation that I feel staff needs to address, openly and honestly, with information on where this data was sourced at the very least.

Claim 1: Algorithms help small creators.

This is false, as algorithms are designed to push content that gets engagement in order to get it more engagement, thereby assuring that the popular remain popular and the small remain small except in instances of extreme luck.

This can already be seen on the tumblr radar, which is a combination of staff picks (usually the same half-dozen fandoms or niche special interests like Lego photography) which already have a ton of engagement, or posts that are getting enough engagement to hit the radar organically. Tumblr has an algorithm that runs like every other socmed algorithm on the planet, and it will decimate the reach of small creators just like every other platform before it.

Claim 2: Only a small portion of users utilize the chronological feed.

You can find a poll by user @darkwood-sleddog here that at the time of writing this, sits at over 40 THOUSAND responses showing that over 96 percent of them use the chronological feed*. Claiming otherwise isn't just a misstatement, it's a lie. You are lying to your core userbase and expecting them to accept it as fact. It's not just unethical, it's insulting to people who have been supporting your platform for over a decade.

Claim 3: Tumblr is not easy to use.

This is also 100% false and you ABSOLUTELY know it. Tumblr is EXTREMELY easy to use, the issue is that the documentation, the explanations of features, and often even the stability of the service is subpar. All of this would be very easy for staff to fix, if they would invest in the creation of walkthroughs and clear explanations of how various site features work, as well as finally fixing the search function. Your inability to explain how your service works should not result in completely ignoring the needs and wants of your core long-term userbase. The fact that you're more willing to invest in the very systems that have made every other form of social media so horrifically toxic than in trying to make it easier for people to use the service AS IT WORKS NOW and fixing the parts that don't work as well speaks volumes toward what tumblr staff actually cares about.

You will not get a paycheck if your platform becomes defunct, and the thing that makes it special right now is that it is the ONLY large-scale socmed platform on THE ENTIRE INTERNET with a true chronological feed and no aggressive algorithmic content serving. The recent post from staff indicates that you are going to kill that, and are insisting that it's what we want. It is not. I'd hazard to guess that most of the dev team knows it isn't what we want, but I assume the money people don't care. The user base isn't relevant, just how much money they can bring in.

The CEO stated he wanted this to remain as sort of the last bastion of the Old Internet, and yet here we are, watching you declare you intend to burn it to the ground.

You can do so much better than this.

Response to the Update

Under the cut for readability, because everything said above still applies.

I already said this in a reblog on the post itself, but I'm adding it to this one for easy access: people read it that way because that's what you said.

Staff considers the main feed as it exists to be "outdated," to the point that you literally used that word to describe it, and the main goals expressed in this announcement is to figure out what makes "high-quality content" and serve that to users moving forward.

People read it that way because that is what you said.

*The final results of the poll, after 24 hours:

136,635 votes breaks down thusly:

An algorithm based feed where I get "the best of tumblr." @ 1.3% (roughly 1,776 votes)

Chronological feed that only features blogs I follow. @ 95.2% (roughly 130,077 votes)

This doesn't affect me personally. @ 3.5% (roughly 4,782 votes)

#tumblr dot com #tumblr staff

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letteredlettered · 6 months ago

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feedback and fic in fandom (3 f's of our own)

This conversation about feedback on fic says everything I’ve been wanting to say better than I could say it. But I’ll go ahead and try anyway.

Over the last five years or so there have been some great discussions around the rise of commodification of fanworks and decline of fandom community. This commodification looks a bit like enshittification of the internet: a cool site exists; its popularity makes someone realize they can get money from it; it has more and more ads; the site adds features to drive engagement, including The Algorithm; the things that made the site cool start to fall away. The site exists now as a vehicle purely to get clicks, and the people on it are on it solely to get clicks—to make money, to be successful, for some kind of social cachet.

AO3 doesn’t have advertisements. It’s not making money. But what is happening to fandom is proof of concept that enshittification changes the way we as humans engage. A cool website in 2004 was often a community space where you could meet people, have conversations, find cool things, and make cool things. A cool website in 2024 is either a content farm that will continually feed you enough content to hold your attention, or a social media site where your participation will come with stats to show you whether you are holding the attention of others.

AO3 wasn’t built to be a community space. It doesn’t have great functions for meeting people and having conversations. The idea was that, because fandom community spaces already existed, AO3 would serve the part of that community where you can find the cool things and store the cool things you made. It was meant to be a library in a city, not the whole city itself.

But it was also never meant to be a website in 2024, a content farm constantly generating content solely for your clicks and eyeballs and ad revenue, or a social media site where the content creators themselves vie for your clicks and eyeballs.

The most common talking point when people discuss the enshittification of fandom is the folks out there who are treating AO3 as that first kind of enshittified website: the content farm. This discussion is about how people treat fanfic as a product for consumption.

The post that kicked off the discussion on @sitp-recs’s blog was about someone who wasn’t getting very many kudos or comments on their fic, and was feeling pretty demoralized about it, then joined a discord server and found an entire channel dedicated to people loving their fic. But those on that server had never come to share that love with the author, which the author found really discouraging.

There are more and more stories like this. Someone on tiktok pulls a quote from a fic on AO3 and makes a 10-second video with them staring at a wall, the quote pasted at the bottom, music playing over it. It has 100,000 hearts, and 100 comments with people gushing over the fic, which has 80 kudos on AO3. Overall, people notice more and more hits on their fics, but fewer and fewer comments or even kudos. Fewer and fewer people seem to feel the need to interact with the author, instead treating the fic like a product to be used and discarded—which the enshittified internet (a stunning feature of late-stage capitalism!) encourages. The fandom community is dying, these stories conclude.

I agree. 100%. Both of the stories above have happened to me—viral tiktoks about my fic, secret discord channels to follow and discuss my fic—and let me tell you, it fucking sucks.

But from these observations about fandom enshittification, the discussion continues in a very odd direction. The solution to the death of fandom community is our favorite enshittification buzzword: engagement. We should engage the authors. They’re producing these products for free. We consume them at no cost. We must demonstrate our gratitude by paying them back.

It’s as though the capitalist consumption that the enshittified web encourages is so ingrained within us that we must think in terms of payment, in terms of exchange, transaction. Or as though, by forgoing payment, authors are some kind of martyrs defying capitalism, and the only way to honor their great sacrifice is comments and kudos.

Indeed, the discourse around this sometimes does veer away from capitalist rhetoric into something that smells almost religious in desperation. Authors are gods who bestow us mere mortals with the fruits of their labor benevolently, through love; the least we can do is worship them. Meanwhile the authors adopt the groveling sentiment of starving artists: I produce great art; I only humbly ask that you feed me in return.

These kinds of entreaties make my skin crawl for a number of reasons. I’m not a god. I’m not writing because I love you. I don’t expect your worship or even your praise.

I think the thing that disturbs me the most about it is that it suggests that authors (or, if the OP is feeling generous fan work creators) are the most important people in fandom. I’ve even seen posts stating that without creators, fandom wouldn’t exist—as though readers aren’t just as important. As though conversations where people discuss characterizations and plot points and randomly spin out interpretations and ideas and thoughts related to canon are meaningless. I’ve even seen people scramble to include folks having these discussions as “creators,” as though realizing that these people are necessary and integral to fandom communities but unable to drop the idea that the producers are the ones who are important. As though that person who just lurks can never count.

Is this what community is? When you join the queer community, are you expected to produce a product of your queerness? If not, must you actively participate and give back to the queer community in order to be considered a part of it? Or is it enough that you are queer, that you exist as a queer person and want to be around others who are queer, you want to be a part of something? What is community, anyway?

The problem with people raising the authors above everyone else in the community and demanding that tribute be paid is that they are decrying the “content farm” style of 2024 website out of one side of their mouth, but out of the other side are instead demanding that AO3 become a 2024-style social media website. Authors are influencers. “Engagement” and clicks are the things that really matter. They are in fact suggesting that the way to solve the commodification of fanfic is by “paying authors back” with stats.

Before anyone comes at me with the idea that comments aren’t just “stats,” I will clarify what I mean. There are literally hundreds of posts on tumblr alone claiming that any comment “helps” the author. Someone replies that they are shy to comment. Someone else replies that incoherent keyboard smashes, a single emoji, or the comment “kudos” are all that is required to satisfy the author, all that is required as tribute—all that is required as payment to keep this economy healthy.

I’m not condemning the comments that are keyboard smashes or emojis or a single kind word. I receive them. They make me happy. If anyone wants to leave such a comment on my fics, I’m really grateful for it. But this is not community-building. This is a transaction. In @yiiiiiiiikes25’s excellent response in the post linked at the beginning, they point out that “you have a cool hat” is something that is “perfectly nice” to hear from someone—and it is! We all want to be told we have a cool hat! But as they go on to say, what builds community is interactions that are deep and specific, interactions that are rich in quality, not in quantity. A kudos or a comment that says only ❤️are lovely things to receive, but they don’t build community.

My reaction, when I see people begging for kudos and comments as the only means by which to keep fandom community alive, is very close to @eleadore's. I want to say, “No. Readers do not need to comment or kudos. Believe not these hucksters who claim to know the appropriate method of fandom participation. Participate as you feel able, or not at all; nothing is required of you.”

I’ve been told before (several times) that I’m not qualified to participate in such discussions because I am an established author who has some fics with very high stats. It doesn’t matter that I have also been a new writer with almost no one reading my fics. It doesn’t matter that I still write in new fandoms where no one in that fandom knows me. It doesn’t matter that I, like any human being, still care about receiving recognition and attention and praise.

And maybe that’s correct. I personally don’t think that billionaires have a place in deciding the direction of the economy, and--if we're really going to consider fandom an economy--in fandom terms, if I’m not a billionaire, or even a millionaire, I’m definitely in the infamous “one percent.” So, just as no one wants to hear Elon Musk say “money isn’t everything,” maybe it’s not my place to say “kudos isn’t required, actually.”

That said, I’m not the only one who has a problem with the stats-based discourse around fandom community. However, the main counter-response to this discussion I see goes something like this: you shouldn’t be writing fic for validation. If you’re writing for attention, you’re doing it for the wrong reason. Authors should write fic because they love it without any expectation of return.

This is, in my opinion, missing the point of what is meant by fandom community.

I wrote fanfic before I knew that fanfic, as a concept, existed. I read books; I wanted them to be different; I wrote little stories for myself with new endings, with self-inserts, with cross-overs, with alternate universes. I did it for myself in the 90s. It never occurred to me that anyone else would do this, much less that people would share.

As @faiell points out—creating and sharing are two different things. I created fics for myself, but I decided to share them in the early 2000s because other people might like them, too. And of course, I wanted to hear whether other people liked them. How could I not? I might decorate my home just for me and not for anyone else’s preferences, but when people come over and say my house is nice, how can I not enjoy that? And if a lot of people think my house is nice, which encourages me to post pictures of it online, isn’t it understandable I might do so with the hope that more people will say my house is nice? And, honestly, if no one is appreciating my pictures, I probably won’t continue to go through the trouble of taking them and posting them. I’ll just enjoy my house that I decorated without sharing, the end.

When I found out there were whole fannish communities where people discussed canon and tossed ideas around about it, made theories and prompts and insights into the characters, fics they had written and recs for other fics and analyses of fics and art based on fics and fics based on art—I wanted to be a part of that, too. Now, sometimes, I write fic not out of an internal need to do so but out of a desire to participate in that community.

The idea that we write fic only for the love of it, then post it only because we possess it, is a process entirely centered on the self. It’s fandom in a vacuum. The idea that we share this thing, that we feel pleasure if someone likes it but feel nothing at all if no one says anything about it, that it’s completely okay to be ignored and unseen—that’s not what a community is either. That’s some weird sort of self-aggrandizement through self-effacement—because yes, there is often a weird kind of virtue-signaling in this kind of discourse.

I say this as someone who has virtue-signaled in that way: “some people write for stats, but I write for myself.” It’s bullshit. Sure, I write for myself, but why post it on the internet? Honestly, said virtue has a whiff of the capitalist machine, which would like you to produce for the sake of production, work for the sake of work. The noblest among us expect no recompense for that which they give!

The reason that I’m bringing this back around to capitalism is that capitalism actively works to dismantle community. The reason that folks are out here pleading for “engagement” in order to “pay back” authors for the products they give us “for free” is because people no longer even have the language to discuss how to participate in meaningful community. And frankly, how to build back fandom community, in the face of enshittification, is getting harder and harder to see.

But I do think that if we value fanfic and the fanfic community, it’s really, really not constructive to judge whether someone’s reasons for writing fanfic are valid. It’s also weird to me that it would be considered wrong that someone’s reason for sharing fanfic is because they would like to receive some recognition for it, when in fact that seems to be the most natural reason in the world for sharing something so private and vulnerable with the world.

Let’s go back to that idea of how hurtful it is to find out your fanfic is trending on tiktok without anyone from tiktok saying anything to you about your fic, or how it can be painful to find out there’s a secret discord channel dedicated to your fic. The people who respond to that with, “Ah, but you shouldn’t be writing to get attention!” are missing the point. The fic did get attention. It got lots. Attention obviously wasn't why the writer was writing--they were writing to participate, and they didn't get to. At all.

However, if your conclusion is that the author was upset because these particular stats were not accruing under this author’s profile, thereby preventing them from achieving the vaunted status of BNF and influencer—I don’t know, maybe you’re right. But I don’t think that’s why I, personally, have been hurt by these things, and I doubt it’s what hurt the people in these posts either. They’re hurt because they want to participate, and they have been systematically excluded by the very people they thought were part of the community they thought they could participate in.

Sure, if those folks from tiktok and the discord server all came and showered the author with kudos and comments that said “kudos,” the author might have felt satisfied enough with the quantity of this recognition that they would continue writing. But in the end, this still does nothing to address the problem of fandom community, in which the deep, meaningful recognition, interactions, and relationships in fandom are getting harder and harder to have and to build, as a result of how people now expect to engage in online spaces.

So, how to address the problem of fandom community? You probably read this long, long post hoping that I had an answer, and for that I must apologize. I don’t have solutions. My intent was to be descriptive, rather than prescriptive. I wished to outline the problems that I’m seeing in what was hopefully a slightly new or at least thought-provoking way, rather than offer solutions.

But, now that I’m talking about being prescriptive, maybe I can offer one suggestion, which is—maybe the solution to this isn’t about prescribing behavior. I do understand the irony in writing a prescription saying we shouldn’t prescribe people, but I’m going to write it anyway:

Maybe we shouldn’t be telling anyone the appropriate reasons for writing fanfic or for sharing it. Maybe we shouldn’t be telling readers they need to kudos or need to comment. If we’re going to go pointing fingers, we should be pointing at the institutions of capitalism that have made the internet what it is today—but I don’t think that’s going to solve the problem either.

But I do think that describing this problem, understanding what it actually is, not blaming readers for it and not blaming authors for it—I do think that helps. The discussion I linked at the beginning of this post is what I think of as the fandom I miss, the fandom that's now harder and harder to access, the fandom that is dying. That fandom was a social space where people had opinions and disagreed and went back and forth and gazed at their navels and then talked about Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In the words of @yiiiiiiiikes25, it was a fuckin’ discussion about hats. And we’re hungry for it.

#fandom #long post #fic #feedback #comment culture

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fortunately-bi · 2 years ago

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God after that rant in the tags I really do miss old Tumblr. Like not just for the nsfw stuff but also like, I miss all of the people I used to follow who disappeared and I never found. I miss the stuff I can't find anymore because it got unfairly nuked during the ban, I miss not having ads, I miss not having weird layouts and random blogs pushed on me and Tumblr live giving me heart attacks every time I think I accidentally clicked one. Like for a long while this site was just left alone with the occasional update and different color of blue and we all just kinda existed(at least that's how my dash looked). Tumblr feels like walking into a house I used to live in but now someone else lives there and they painted the walls a different color they changed a bunch of things. Like it's still the same layout, there's still things that pop up sometimes that poke at the nostalgia but it just feels weird.

#change is good im not saying tumblr needs to stay the same forever #but i worry the influx of users is going to get in their heads and staff is going to think they need to add more things no one asked for #people like tumblr for being tumblr dont make it like Instagram or Twitter or tiktok #i hope they keep it unique and #i say this lightly at the moment because the new photo viewer is... disgusting #but easy to use and understand #i don't want algorithm doom scrolling like Twitter #i don't want a bunch of live video and influencers pushing shit on me #i don't want corpos rubbing their greedy hands at us #like yeah tumblr isn't perfect and lately especially theyve pushed some not good updates #but even now i still feel like they are a last bastion of old social media that hasnt been bastardized by capitalism #they opened the tumblr store because the site DOES need money to exist and i can understand that #i can respect that they didn't immediately jump to getting major corpos to advertise here and make blogs to bug us ever 3 swipes #i can respect that they do seem to be trying to cater to us and not make this an ad blasted experience #and i hope it stays that way #because legitimately we haven't had a social media blow up in popularity simce tiktok #and tiktok isnt for everyone i am not a quick video person its overstimulating and tiktok is uh #clickbaity in however you could explain that in how it works if that makes sense #if tumblr goes under like what next #i feel like the internet is literally seeing its downfall in real time #no one decent can make a decent website because its expensive and getting advertising is the best way to deal with that #except ads already engulf the whole internet people are getting sick of them and stupid algorithms #bah were getting into a whole different rant now #i hope the internet can recover because its really been an amazing thing for people to connect and help each other #AND i think the internet gained mass popularity very quickly and no one cared to learn internet courtesy and its failing us big time #i think tumblr has survived for so long because our unwritten rules that MOSTLY everyone agrees on and its kept the peace #and its not like we have tumblr police or anything we all just agree thats how its works and function like so #i havent seen that anywhere else

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enigmatic-feral-being · 2 years ago

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Anyone else getting overtly hateful ads across social media? Like I’m Jewish, Black, and Queer…why am I getting ads from the GDL, Conversion Camps and the NRA?

#none of the content I view would cater to ads like these #algorithms are trash and should have never existed #social media #sponsored ads

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junajunajunajuna · 5 hours ago

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This is a great resource! I've been going off about the state of the modern media for a while now but I never had a sourced how, why and when of it all!

Who broke the internet?

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.

"Who Broke the Internet?" is a new podcast from CBC Understood that I host and co-wrote – it's a four-part series that explains how the enshitternet came about, and, more importantly, what we can do about it. Episode one is out this week:

https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/1353-the-naked-emperor/episode/16144078-dont-be-evil

The thesis of the series – and indeed, of my life's work – is that the internet didn't turn to shit because of the "great forces of history," or "network effects," or "returns to scale." Rather, the Great Enshittening is the result of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned at the time that this would happen, and they did it anyway. These wreckers are the largely forgotten authors of our misery, and they mingle with impunity in polite society, never fearing that someone might be sizing them up for a pitchfork.

"Who Broke the Internet?" aims to change that. But the series isn't just about holding these named people accountable for their enshittificatory deeds: it's about understanding the policies that created the enshittocene, so that we can dismantle them and build a new, good internet that is fit for purpose, namely, helping us overcome and survive environmental collapse, oligarchic control, fascism and genocide.

The crux of enshittification theory is this: tech bosses made their products and services so much worse in order to extract more rents from end-users and business customers. The reason they did this is because they could. Over 20+ years, our policymakers created an environment of impunity for enshittifying companies, sitting idly by (or even helping out) as tech companies bought or destroyed their competitors; captured their regulators; neutered tech workers' power; and expanded IP laws to ensure that technology could only ever be used to attack us, but never to defend us.

These four forces – competition, regulation, labor power and interoperability – once acted as constraints, because they punished enshittifying gambits. Make your product worse and users, workers and suppliers would defect to a competitor; or a regulator would fine you or even bring criminal charges; or your irreplaceable workers would down tools and refuse to obey your orders; or another technologist would come up with an alternative client, an ad-blocker, a scraper, or compatible spare parts, plugins or mods that would permanently sever your relationship with whomever you were tormenting.

As these constraints fell away, the environment became enshittogenic: rather than punishing enshittification, it rewarded it. Individual enshittifiers within companies triumphed in their factional struggles with corporate rivals, like the Google revenue czar who vanquished the Search czar, deliberately worsening search results so we'd have to repeatedly search to get the answers we seek, creating more opportunities to show us ads:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

An enshittogenic environment meant that individuals within companies who embraced plans to worsen things to juice profits were promoted, displacing workers and managers who felt an ethical or professional obligation to make good and useful things. Top tech bosses – the C-suite – went from being surrounded by "adult supervision" who checked their worst impulses with dire warnings about competition, government punishments, or worker revolt to being encysted in a casing of enthusiastic enshittifiers who competed to see who could come up with the most outrageously enshittificatory gambits.

"Who Broke the Internet?" covers the collapse of all of these constraints, but its main focus is on IP law – specifically, anticircumvention law, which bans technologists from reverse-engineering and modifying the technologies we own and use (AKA "interoperability" or "adversarial interoperability").

Interoperability is at the center of the enshittification story because interop is an unavoidable characteristic of anything built out of computers. Computers are, above all else, flexible. Formally speaking, our computers are "Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines," which is to say that every one of our computers is capable of running every valid program.

That flexibility is why we call computers a "general purpose" technology. The same computer that helps your optometrist analyze your retina can also control your car's anti-lock braking system, and it can also play Doom.

Enshittification runs on that flexibility. It's that flexibility that allows a digital products or service to offer different prices, search rankings, recommendations, and costs to every user, every time they interact with it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

It's that flexibility that lets tech companies send over-the-air "updates" to your property that takes away functionality you paid for and valued, and then sell it back to you as an "upgrade" or worse, a monthly subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

But that flexibility cuts both ways. The fact that every computer can run every valid program means that every enshittificatory app and update, there's a disenshittificatory program you could install that would reverse the damage. For every program that tells your HP printer to reject third-party ink, forcing you to buy HP's own colored water at $10,000/gallon, there's another program that tells your HP printer to enthusiastically accept third-party ink that costs mere pennies:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

In other worse, show me a 10-foot enshittifying wall, and I'll show you an 11-foot disenshittifying ladder.

Interoperability has long been technology's most important disenshittifier. Interop harnesses the rapaciousness of tech bros and puts it in service to making things better. Someone who hacks Instagram to take out the ads and recommendations and just show you posts from people you follow need not be motivated by the desire to make your life better – they can be motivated by the desire to poach Instagram users and build a rival business, and still make life better for you:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/the-og-app-instagram-alternative-ad-free/

And if they succeed and then recapitulate the sins of Instagram's bosses, turning the screws on users with ads, suggestions and slop? That just invites more disenshittifying interoperators to do unto them as they did unto Zuck.

That's the way it used to work: the 10-foot piles of shit deployed by tech bosses conjured up 11-foot ladders. This is what disruption is, when it is at its best. There's nothing wrong with moving fast and breaking things – provided the things you're breaking belong to billionaire enshittifiers. Those things need to be broken.

Enter IP law. For the past 25+ years, IP law has been relentlessly expanded in ways that ensure that disruption is always for thee, never me. "IP" has come to mean, "Any law that lets a dominant company reach out and exert control over its critics, competitors and customers":

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

The most pernicious IP law is far and away "anticircumvention." Under anticircumvention, it is illegal to "break a digital lock" that controls access to a copyrighted work, including software (and digital locks are software, so any digital lock automatically gets this protection).

This is mind-bending, particularly because it's one of those things that's so unreasonable, so very, very stupid that it's easy to think you're misunderstanding it, because surely it can't be that stupid.

But oh, it is.

One of the best ways to grasp this point is to start with what you might do in a world without digital locks. Take your printer: if HP raises the price of ink, you might start to refill your cartridges or buy third-party cartridges. Obviously, this is not a copyright violation. Ink is not a copyrighted work. But once HP puts a digital lock on the printer that checks to see if you've done an end-run around the HP ink ripoff, then refilling your cartridge becomes illegal, because you have to break that digital lock to get your printer to use the ink you've chosen.

Or think about cars: taking your car to your mechanic does not violate anyone's copyright. If your car, you decide who fixes it. But all car makers use digital locks to prevent mechanics from reading out the diagnostic information they need to access to fix your car. If a mechanic wants to know why your check engine light has turned on, they have to buy a tool – spending 5-figure sums every year for every manufacturer – in order to decode that error. Now, it's your car, and error messages aren't copyrighted works, but bypassing the lock that prevents independent diagnosis is a crime, thanks to anticircumvention law.

Then there's app stores. You bought your console. You bought your phone. These devices are your property. If I want to sell you some software I've written so you can run it on your device, that's not a copyright violations. It is the literal opposite of a copyright violation: an author selling their copyrighted works to a customer who gets to enjoy those works using their own property. But the digital lock on your iPhone, Xbox, Playstation and Switch all prevent your device from running software unless it is delivered by the manufacturer's app store, which takes 30 cents out of every dollar you spend. Installing software without going through the manufacturer's app store requires that you break the device's digital lock, and that's a crime, which means that buying a copyrighted work from its author becomes a copyright violation!

This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model." We created laws – again, in living memory, thanks to known individuals – that had the foreseeable, explicit intent of making it illegal to disenshittify the products and services you rely on. We created this enshittogenic environment, and we got the enshittocene.

That's where "Who Broke the Internet?" comes in. We tell the story of Bruce Lehman, who was Bill Clinton's IP czar. Anticircumvention was really Lehman's brainchild, and he had a plan to make it the law of the land. When Al Gore was overseeing the demilitarization of the internet (the "Information Superhighway" proceedings), Lehman pitched this idea to him as the new rules of the road for the internet. To Gore's eternal credit, he flatly rejected Lehman's proposal as the batshit nonsense it plainly was.

So Lehman scuttled to Switzerland, where a UN agency, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) was crafting a pair of new treaties to create a global system of internet regulation. Lehman lobbied the national delegations to WIPO to put anticircumvention in their treaties, and he succeeded – partially. WIPO is a very bad agency, since the majority of delegations that are sent to Geneva by the world's nations come from poor countries in the global south, and they're made up of experts in things like water, agriculture and child health. The vast majority of national reps at WIPO are not experts in IP, and they are often easy prey for fast-talking lobbyists from US-based media, pharma and tech companies, as well as the US government reps who carry their water.

But even at WIPO, Lehman's proposal was viewed as far too extreme. In the end, the anticircumvention rules embedded in the WIPO treaties are much more reasonable than Lehman's demands. Under the WIPO treaty, signatories must pass laws that make copyright infringement extra illegal if you have to break a digital lock on the way. But if you break a lock and you don't infringe copyright (say, because you refilled a printer cartridge, took your car to an independent mechanic, or got some software without using an app store), then you're fine.

Lehman's next move was to convince Congress that they needed to pass a version of the anticircumvention rule that went far beyond the obligations in the WIPO treaties. In this, he was joined by powerful, deep-pocketed lobbyists from Big Content, and later, Big Tech. They successfully pressured Congress into passing Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998 – a law that protects digital locks, at the expense of copyright and the creative workers whom copyright is said to serve.

Lehman has repeatedly, publicly described this maneuver as "doing an end-run around Congress." Once America adopted this extreme anticircumvention rule, the US Trade Representative made it America's top priority to ram identical laws through the legislatures of all of America's trading partners, under the explicit or tacit threat of tariffs on any country that refused (the information minister of a Central American country once told me that the USTR threatened them, saying that if they didn't accept anticircumvention as a clause in the Central American Free Trade Agreement – CAFTA – they would lose their ability to export soybeans to America).

Canada took more than a decade to enact its own version of the anticircumvention rule, which was the source of public outrage by the USTR and US industry lobbyists. These neocolonialists found plenty of Parliamentary sellouts willing to introduce laws on their behalf, but every time this happened, the Canadian people reacted with a kind of mass outrage that had never been seen in response to highly technical proposals for internet regulation. For example, the Liberal MP Sam Bulte was challenged on her support of the rule by her Parkdale constituents at a public meeting, and had a screeching meltdown, screaming that she would not be "bullied by user-rights zealots and EFF members." Voters put "User-Rights Zealot" signs on their lawns and voted her out of office.

Anticircumvention remained a priority for the US, and they found new MPs to do their dirty work. Stephen Harper's Conservatives made multiple tries at this. After Jim Prentice utterly failed to get the rule through Parliament, the brief was picked up by Heritage Minister James Moore (who liked to call himself "the iPad Minister") and now-disgraced Industry minister Tony Clement. Clement and Moore tried to diffuse the opposition to the proposal by conducting a public consultation on it.

This backfired horribly. Over 6,000 Canadians wrote into the consultation with individual, detailed, personal critiques of anticircumvention, explaining how the rule would hurt them at work and at home. Only 53 submissions supported the rule. Moore threw away these 6,130 negative responses, justifying it by publicly calling them the "babyish" views of "radical extremists":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/15/radical-extremists/#sex-pest

Named individuals created policies in living memory. They were warned about the foreseeable outcomes of those proposals. They passed them anyway – and then no one held them accountable.

Until now.

The point of remembering where these policies came from isn't (merely) to ensure that these people are forever remembered as the monsters they showed themselves to be. Rather, it is to recover the true history of enshittification, the choices we made that led to enshittification, so that we can reverse those policies, disenshittify our tech, and give rise to a new, good internet that's fit for the purpose of being the global digital nervous system for a species facing a polycrisis of climate catastrophe, oligarchy, fascism and genocide.

There's never been a more urgent moment to reconsider those enshittificatory policies – and there's never been a more auspicious moment, either. After all, Canada's anticircumvention law exists because it was supposed to guarantee tariff-free access to American markets. That promise has been shattered, permanently. It's time to get rid of that law, and make it legal for Canadian technologists to give the Canadian public the tools they need to escape from America's Big Tech bullies, who pick our pockets with junk-fees and lock-in, and who attack our social, legal and civil lives with social media walled gardens:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/15/beauty-eh/#its-the-only-war-the-yankees-lost-except-for-vietnam-and-also-the-alamo-and-the-bay-of-ham

"Understood: Who Broke the Internet" is streaming now. We've got three more episodes to go – part two drops on Monday (and it's a banger). You can subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts, and here's the RSS feed:

https://www.cbc.ca/podcasting/includes/nakedemperor.xml

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/#bruce-lehman

#algorithmic social media #social media #internet companies #enshittification #I'm glad this exists

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