#broken stupid hellsite

[theprogressivesadist]

tumblr be like

[boyd-clowder]

tumblr has "restored full functionality of my blog" but my old posts still don't show up in the tags. i hate it here

[potential-fate]

@staff I will buy your little blue check marks if you take me out of shadow-ban purgatory. I swear to god 😩

[ravenpoefan]

I’m going to personally go to tumblr headquarters and break all of their legs and twist them backwards Oh My GOD

[syntheros-artemidos]

why the fuck does opening a post from a blocked tag now open the post in fucking Samsung internet. which is NOT MY DEFAULT BROWSER.

not only does it do this, it does it regardless of whether I have the stupid Samsung browser app disabled. they used to open just fine in app.

[totally-sapphic-posts]

I have news

My partner and I just broke up after nearly two years of dating. The long distance was getting too much. We’ve both been feeling it, but shit. It’s one of those ones that really suck ass because you both love each other a lot and want to be together, but the distance is just too much, it’s too hard.

With so much unsure right now, the distance just felt like voluntary torture.

You know, people say date your best friend… I dated both of mine, and now have broken up with both of them. I do not recommend, tbh.

I can’t believe one of the first things I did after breaking up was redownload this hellsite (*affectionate) to update you guys 😭 this truly is my safe space.

Anyway, to conclude, I’m never doing long distance again. That shit broke my heart. Twice.

Lastly, I’m deciding something and I don’t know if I’m being stupid. I kinda want to stay single for a long while now and hoe around a bit (after I get over this breakup). Is that stupid?

[amtrak-official]

Also. Your account is one of the reasons I stick around on the stupid, broken hellsite. 

-submitted by @theprogressivesadist

Aww thanks, glad to bring joy to the people

[aj-lenoire]

welcome, twitter refugees!!

here's a quick and friendly tumblr how-to:

DOs & DON'Ts

DO reblog posts!! regardless of whether or not you add a comment, either in the post itself or in the tags, the OP will get notifications of everyone who likes the post via your reblog and who reblogs it from you! comment as much or as little as you like

DON'T repost things! fanart, fanfiction, etc. this is different from reblogging, a repost is when you copy/save the work to your computer and reupload it in a post of your own, rather than reblogging it

DO follow tags as well as other blogs!! really like one specific character from a tv show? a certain ship? search their name and follow the tag, and you'll see posts that mention or tag them even if you don't directly follow the person who made that post

DON'T rely too much on the search function, it's broken. if you want to search someone's blog for a tag, you're better off going to the URL: tumblr.com/[blogname]/tagged/[tag]

DO tag liberally! you can use the tags to add comments that you don't want to directly add to the post, to make it easier for people to search your blog, or to make it easier for yourself to find things later on

DON'T use tiktok censorship speak when tagging things!! it will make it actively more difficult for people seeking to avoid certain topics. instead of "tw: abu$e" just tag "abuse" and anyone who has blacklisted the tag "abuse" will not see your post.

similarly, DON'T tag things like "epilepsy" - instead, tag "flashing lights" so people can still use the epilepsy tag to discuss epilespy without risking seeing triggering flashing lights

DO use the follow and the block buttons liberally! this site has absolutely no algorithm, so it is entirely up to you to curate your space exactly how you want it!

DON'T send hate to people via the askbox on their blog, either anonymously or not. just block people who annoy you or post horrible things

DO participate in polls! tumblr only got them recently, less than a year ago, and people immediately went ham. vote on stupid things like which bug emoji is superior, which ship is the best, and how much vanilla extract should go in a cake! but remember that you cannot edit the original poll after you post it

DON'T use or endorse "AI" generators like chatgpt! don't reblog AI images and or AI endings to unfinished/abandoned fanfictions

DO cite your sources if you want to educate people on something in a post, we all love to learn, and informative posts on everything from current political events to which geodes could be made into useable dildos, but misinformation is prolific, so make sure anyone reading your information can refer to a real source!

jargon

notes - likes, reblogs (with or without comments or tags) and replies to a post are all agregated to give the number of notes, which is basically the number of times a post has been interacted with

OP - the Original Poster of a post, for example, me, aj-lenoire, with this post. i am op.

hellsite - tumblr itself. this website is insane and unprofitable and broken and we wouldn't have it any other way. hellsite can be either (affectionate) or (derogatory) and often both at once

blorbo - your favourite character, your rotten soldier, your sweet cheese, your good time boyy. post about them frequently and with weird, frenzied gusto

squick - something you personally don't like, such as a ship or a character or a trope, but is not actually bad or harmful - it's just not for you. it squicks you out.

blacklisting means you've blocked a specific tag rather than a blog/person. for example, if you don't want to see anything with spiders, blacklist the tag "spiders" so you don't see any! if someone you follow reblogs a post and tags it with "spiders", or the OP of the post tagged it with "spiders" then your dashboard will hide the post from you and tell you it was tagged with "spiders" and you can choose whether or not to view it

passing peer review means you added commentary to a post in the tags, and someone who reblogged that post from you saw your tags and thought they were funny, so decided to screenshot them and add them as a comment so everyone could see them. congratulations!!

breaking containment is when a post about a niche subject and/or from a blog with not many followers gets super popular because it's funny, and often OP despairs at how their notifications become unusable from the sheer number of notes from this one post

KUNGPOWPENIS - if someone posts something bigoted, tumblr will ban together to reblog, one letter at a time, k-u-n-g-p-o-w-p-e-n-i-s. only do this when the bigot is the OP, because only the original poster will get a flood of single-letter reblog notifications from every single branch of the reblog chain

tips & tricks

pornbots and bots in general are not uncommon here. whenever you get followed by someone, check to make sure they're not a bot by visiting their blog. if they only have a few reblogged posts on random topics, or no posts at all, and their profile picture is a beautiful woman, they're a bot, and you should flag and block them

old posts can and do get reblogged and liked all the time, there's no point at which it becomes cringe to interact with a post. we even have some from 10+ years ago that're considered 'tumblr heritage'

long posts will cross your dash from time to time, the most infamous being colour of the sky. you will see it and it will madden you with how far you have to scroll - inflict your followers with the same frustration by reblogging so they can see it too!! if you're on desktop, pressing j will skip to the next post.

read more allows you to shorten a post with a 'click to read more' link that takes the reader to the root post on your blog. this is especially handy if you're publishing fanfiction or a very long analysis of something.

toggling reblogs lets you choose whether a post is rebloggable or not, for example something personal you may want to delete later, turning off reblogs means there won't be any copies floating around after you delete the root post

follower count is not visible! the only way anyone will know how many followers you have is if you tell them. follow blogs based on whether you like what they post, not by whether they're super popular or not

memes are frequent and long-lasting. tumblr plays with jpegs like dolls and there are some memes that have been here for years. a current favourite is the destiel confession meme which has warped into a shorthand for breaking weird news

important dates

tumblr loves a goofy-ass-holiday!! here are some of the standouts:

ides of march - 15th march, celebrate julius caesar getting his shit rocked

pride month - june, tumblr is generally a very pro-queer space, so expect everything to be decked out in rainbows for the entirety of june and most of the rest of the year, too!!

halloween - the entire month of october and also a week in july, this site loves some spooky scary skeletons

destielputinelection - 5th november, reminisce about the absolute chaos that gripped the internet during the 2020 usa presidential election

blog recs for new users

to each their own, and a main draw of tumblr is that there's something for everyone, down to the very, very niche. so, search for stuff that interests you and follow those blogs! however, here are some blogs that are fun for everyone:

heritageposts - your one-stop blog for all the best, weirdest, oldest tumblr posts will all the drama, expect to see a lot of destiel

staffs-secret-blog - (not actually staff)

one-time-i-dreamt - full of weird and wonderful posts, made all the better by the fact that no one reads usernames here, so inevitably there is panicked confusion over what the fuck is going on

biggest-gaudiest-patronuses - one of tumblr's most ubiquitous shit-posters

aj-lenoire - that's me!

that's pretty much the basics, but most people here are really friendly, so if you're unsure, just ask someone! have fun!!

[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.

[tomas-stupidpants-kalnoky]

hey I know this blog hasn't updated in like a year but I saw Streetlight last night and Tomas is still wearing the same Fidel Castro hat, striped tee shirt, and stupid pants. Very comforting that despite the world rapidly changing around us, some things stay the same.

I can't believe I didn't know I had asks and submissions here. What the fuck why is this hellsite so broken.

Anyway yes....he is certainly embodying a sweet, sweet cuffed anchor in our lives (and sometimes now boy scout shorties instead!)

I came out of the dark tonight to this blog because I went to see them tonight and I'm glad people are still buzzing about here

[theprogressivesadist]

Are you ever social on here??

Here? On the social media?

Hard to do more than this with shades. But sure, not always consistently, but if anybody wants to say anything specifically to me... feel free to reach out.

[valistheanshield]

Mutual checker is broken, again. Why can't this stupid hellsite work for more than a day?

[princess-viola]

i mean no offense but this is like the 100th time the dipshit elon musk has done something fucking stupid and broken twitter and everybody reacts with 'THIS IS THE DEATH OF TWITTER' so you'll have to excuse me if i'm skeptical that this fuckup is going to the one that kills the hellsite for good, y'know?

[bisexualchrissycunningham]

I've been mostly MIA around these here parts (self-imposed banishment cause my brain is broken) but I *have* been lurking and it finally made me realize something: my likes are set to private. All this time I thought I was That Mutual who always showed up in notifications for everybody's personal posts as my "I care how you are bestie!!!" message but it turns out... nope.

Feeling very stupid and like I have to re-evaluate the ways I thought I was being perceived on this hellsite.

[kaiowut99]

Me currently as I try to figure out why the fuck Tumblr will not let me save edits to one of my two edit breakdown posts for 102-104 to add a ReadMore, but will let me save edits in HTML mode but without a ReadMore because that code is still fucking broken on this hellsite, all while having removed the ability to post using the legacy post editor and still not adapting its features into the new editor or having removed the stupid block-limit added to it:

[ofgravitation-moved]

i love how t.umblr keeps adding new things & yet they don't fix what's already been broken or improve on editors they already have / their mobile app. everytime i try and format a response on mobile, i put one thing in bold or italics and suddenly the WHOLE post is bold & italics. or better yet, the app freaks out and i cant even finish a paragraph reply. Including writing this.. i hate this hellsite & i also hate having to block those damn n.sfw bots every time i login. smh.

ANYWAY!! enough ranting. i'll try and be here later. <3. <- hey look the stupid bold and italics ... -___-