#make a website you literally cannot search for or tag why dont you

[beabaseball]

If elon musk was really a genius he should've immediately contacted disney for a partnership and started making Toot Sweets: The Eatable, Tweetable Treat.

44 billion, easy.

[haootia]

i mentioned this in the tags of a post the other day but i want to share more of my vintage tumblr memories for those who werent there to experience them (you lucked out)

the block button didnt do anything except hide that blog from your notifications. they could still follow you and interact with all your posts you just wouldnt see it in your activity.

pursuant to that, if someone violated your DNFI (blog rules were called DNFIs before they were called BYFs before they were called DNIs) and you wanted them off your blog the only option was to send them an ask saying "unfollow me" and hope on the honor system they did.

this is probably why callouts were such a massive part of the blogging ecosystem , if someone annoyed you or was mildly problematic the only sure way to get them to stop was to run them off the site completely.

you probably remember that being able to actually disable reblogs on a post is a pretty new feature, before that it was part of the same honor system as DNFIs. in the old days there were roving gangs of troll blogs solely dedicated to finding vent posts tagged "dont reblog" and reblogging them, including copying over text that was in the tags / readmore.

to evade the troll blogs people had to start tagging their posts with increasingly obtuse typing quirks like "d0%t r38l09". speaking of tags,

the habit of adding slashes to the end of trigger tags is because tumblrs search feature and url parsing used to be Even More Dogshit than it is now and if a tag had certain characters in it (hyphens and i believe asterisks also worked) you couldnt browse it on the blog. this was considered good etiquette to show you cared about your followers wellbeing by not letting them doomscroll the trigger tags, and also made it harder for trolls to find triggering pics to spam your inbox with when you had a controversial take on steven universe ship dynamics. sometimes people just added a bunch of random numbers to the end of a tag like "blood 363820" which had the same effect of making it unsearchable but still worked for the blacklist because

blacklisting was a browser extension. you couldnt blacklist on the app for YEARS. old school users remember when xkit was an actual necessity to interact with the site. ancient school users remember tumblr savior.

this post is already too long so lets do a lightning round: having your blog index page automatically redirect to your aesthetic tag. custom cursors with particle effects. everyones blog being an unreadable pastel-on-white 8pt text nightmare. alternatively, everyones blog being a garish red-on-black knife emoji nightmare. follow forevers. i hear promo hour still survives as a relic population in some circles. kin pages with 75 grid icons sorted into literally me / primary / secondary / tertiary with discrete DNFI rules. every personal post being tagged "lms if read". post limit blogs. hunger games simulator and xyzzy and rabb.it and drawpile and skype groupchats. if you remember tanburu honestly you should be getting paid survivors benefits. i could list a bunch of big name callouts that would overtake some of you with a precipitous feeling of dread but i wont because i know some of them are still on this website Right Now. im not even a real Tumblr Old i was 11 years old in 2014 and i know the true elders have secrets i cannot comprehend. its so dark in here. i remember when DMs were new.

[cryptvokeeper]

I will say this the one difference between the homestuck fandom at its height and the dream smp fandom now is in the way they defend themselves. like how dream smp fans react to hate and how homestuck fans reacted to hate are very....different. Depending on the social media you use dream smp fans either very smug and weird or super over-analytically defensive. Like you say "____ sucks" and you either get a response of "dont hate us cuz you aint us sweetie 😘 *weird sparkly fancam of your fave*" or "Um actually here is a six page cited thesis on why this character is actually extremely interesting and the creator is brilliant and talented and good and all the reasons im deeply emotionally invested so you shouldn't make fun of me for this or you literally hate mentally ill people"

Meanwhile someone says "Homestuck sucks" and the response is just "yeah its trash" and a bunch of homestucks will share it. and im pretty sure like half the fandom unironically thinks Hussie sucks. Its an interesting difference.

not to mention the new movement that seems to have arisen of dream smp fans trying to be unobtrusive because people on twitter complain that stuff trends too much and say that its taking attention away from more important social issues (because clearly you cannot care about important things and also have fun) and like trying to prevent things from trending by censoring creators' names so they won't show up in searches and scrambling to change '[character] appreciation day' so that it won't be too annoying for outsiders.

And like, I cant even say its bad cuz yknow, being considerate of other people is a good quality. Its just such a departure from homestuck who consistently crashed websites and trended here on Tumblr and dragged other fandoms into their aus and tags (I literally used to play a game with myself when I scrolled through fandom tags of 'how long until I see a homestuck au?') with zero hesitation. Homestucks wore that stuff like a badge of honor. 'we broke new grounds' was a brag. 'heatwaves broke ao3' feels more like a sheepish admission.

[h4xx0r666]

The Apocalypse Will Not be A/B Tested: Don’t Track Me Google - Firefox Add-on Review

The extension does what is advertised, it removes the encoded link, but as another reviewer said, this is far from enough to stop them from tracking you. The encoded link is actually a fallback option for when javascript is disabled. It's definitely annoying when you're trying to copy a link to a pdf into an email from the phone browser. Without going into a ton of details about how javascript works, just know that when you click a link between that click and the load of the next page, a bunch of functions often called event listeners run provided they are attached to the clicked element.

And, yes, they are attached... on every site that has google analytics. So... pretty much every site. Unless it's part of their corporate image to be non-tracking, the website has google analytics. (As far as project managers are concerned, it's more important you have analytics working on a site than it is for the site itself to be working - their managers rate their performance based almost entirely on how that graph looks.)

If you want to get rid of all that tracking, it's best to nip it at the source. Block all google analytics entirely using a plugin like uMatrix (watch a video how to use it, it's a little more complex than the average addon - but even a boomer should be able to master it in 15 minutes.). Now if you're on google running javascript, that's still not going to be enough to ensure you're not tracked, but on other sites it will provided that site doesn't make use of any of the other free google products [1]. And why do they make them? The idea is that they can follow you everywhere you go on the internet and collect the data. It's difficult to imagine a data set this large and complex. We probably cannot.

Now I could speculate all day long on what evil plans google has for this data. They could use it to evolve artificial intelligence to replace us. [2] But that's not their main money machine is it? No it's totally used for advertisement delivery. come on, you know that. and google doesn't have a dept dedicated to calling the police on people who look at drug stuff, so you don't really need to worry about that. [3]

Nope just ad delivery. And at leat they give you something for it. free photo storage forever -- when forever is 20 years -- i mean, free email, free better than ms office office software. It's a lot better than facebook, now that's a company with evil plans for your data. Their main function is a simple AI that uses a variable-ratio reinforcement schedule [4] to get people addicted to scrolling facebook. They show you a bunch of nothing and then as your about to set the phone down, and there's and article about that thing that you've been so excited to read about... or blah blah... don't care... blah blah... oh look another one of your childhood friends is dead in their 30s, I bet you'll pay attention to that. Don't delete facebook, you'll lose touch with the ones that are left.

Well, look at the bright side, what are the odds you would have been born into the generation that got to see the extinction level event that ended humanity? 500 thousand years is a pretty good run. What's really wild is that we managed to burn up half the oil that took 600 million years of plants and animals living and dying and decomposing into it to create. In 150 years? 150/600,000,000 reduce 1.5/6,000,000... 1/4,500,000 oh right half... 1/2,250,000. It took 2.25 million years to form all the oil we use in an average year. wow. pretty impressive. those kids with the 1 gram dabs on youtube don't seem so obscene when you put it in that context. well, we gotta drive and air condition the tropics. i mean, how could we live otherwise?

[1] Recaptcha, fonts, maps, tag manager, people, perspective comment analyzer, proximity beacon, knowledge graph search api... the list goes on there's like 100 of them.

[2] Given the state of our planet, isn't it near 420ppm CO2 now?... blaze it? - or like take your last puff of air and watch the atmosphere literally blow off into space when the heat energy distrupts the balance that holds it there - that's probably how most of us are going out. I give it 10-20 years, but that's another discussion. my point is, the robots will survive, so if we want to at least preserve all the art and science and stuff we made, then we should probably let google train their ai with our data.

[3] Although, they do seem to have a department of move the harm reduction stuff way way down in the rankings though - we don't want iv drug users learning to use in a way that won't give them infections and diseases now. and we certainly don't want people learning how to check for fentanyl in their drugs. there's nothing like unprecedented death rates for my generation to bring back that drug war fighting spirit. it almost looked like that was gonna turn vietnam and lose public support, but then out of nowhere drug dealers started just killing their customers... I guess for the thrill of it. Right.

[4] There are 4 reinforcement schedules defined by Behaviorism. Fixed Interval(FI), Fixed Ratio (FR), Variable Interval (VI) and Variable Ratio (VR). Variable schedules tend to perform better than fixed. "Pigeons' pecks on one key produced a stimulus correlated with a mixed‐ratio schedule of food reinforcement. Pecks on a second key produced a stimulus correlated with a fixed‐ratio schedule. When the arithmetic mean of the mixed ratios equaled the fixed ratio, the former stimulus maintained a higher rate of pecking." (Fantino, 1957) And ratio schedules tend to perform better than interval schedules "It was found that when rates of reinforcement were equal in the two components, the rate of response in the variable‐ratio component was nearly twice that in the variable‐interval component. Furthermore, for three of the four subjects, the function relating response rate to relative rate of reinforcement in the variable‐ratio component had a slope 2.5 to 3 times the slope of the corresponding function for the variable‐interval component." (Zuriff, 1970)

inspired by: # Don't track me Google

[samwiselastname]

anyway you know that relatable feel when you see a post and you go to reblog it and in the tags u make a joke about how u were abused but it’s like oblique and not something that would be obvious as being sourced from an abuse experience to an outsider and you dont know how to tag it beyond that and then you realize you need to just stop and delete everythin

sometimes i want to make jokes about how i was sheltered from the internet and like “lmao im weird enough already i can only imagine if id like Seen This Shit As A Kid” but whenever i feel like making those jokes im feeling like im, idfk endorsing putting a keylogger on your childs computer and reading their keystrokes and threatening them if they go to any “bad websites” without telling them why theyre bad so they’re afraid to go to any website other than like Fucking Neopets and then yelling at them for only ever being on neopets and not knowing how to use a computer or search for information

rly glad i had that Healthy Normal Experience and don’t still have lasting issues with hypervigilance and psychosis related to using the internet and being afraid my computer will do things it literally cannot do because there are Evil Websites, really saved me from some embarrassing viral videos huh