#platform-specific limitations | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

staff · 11 months

Text

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.

#tumblr #engineering #core product strategy

65K notes · View notes

antirepurp · 18 days

Text

help minecraft unfiction is seducing me it wants me to make some myself even though im mediocre at best at video editing and also have no particular story to tell with such medium

#soda offers you a can #im not entirely unfamiliar with mc as a storytelling platform but the stuff i've done before has been Incredibly Specific #and done for Incredibly Specific purposes in general #i do think there's a lot of potential unfiction told through minecraft but the niches it's suited for are a bit limited #and a lot of them have already been explored by people who've done cool stuff with them #and if im going to fuck with this beast i'd want to do something different. and idk what that could be #i have little interest in the idea of Secret Societies and Malicious Entities #and i don't really have enough of a personal connection to the beta era to do anything Meaningful with that #i do not need any more food for the brain worms. but i think i would like to hand them a treat like this #if i can figure out something for them to chew on

1 note · View note

faithfromanewperspective · 3 months

Text

seeing criticisms of taylor being like. no, this is true and this is valid. she's not perfect. but then also, i feel like i'm gonna have to keep saying it because people can't ever get their heads around it: there are ways her brain works that are gonna impact her activism if/when she does it?? the same brain that brings us all these songs that made her famous to begin with. that tells her story in ways that people do sometimes criticise. i don't know who (if anyone) people are trying to compare her with. she's also not obligated to share what her limits and boundaries are and why. but the concept of not everyone living up to whatever your neuronormative standards are, especially everyone who is famous or successful--don't you see the harm that could do if we don't ever realise that? activism is an interconnected ecosystem of people each with their own limits, even if we don't all fit into (or we do fit, but we don't want to disclose it) some box of neurodivergent and thus exempt from certain things because of our disability. it works best when we show up as ourselves and don't have to perform it--and that includes being non-neurotypical if that's what we are. in ways that people like to moralise sometimes too. and deciding each of us for ourselves what our own limits are--and sometimes that does mean that someone could be drastically helped by something and yet we're still unable to do it. so judge imperfection all you like, but if you think it's actually helping towards the causes you care about--it might be doing the opposite

#taylor swift #and i'm also gonna tag #neurodivergence #neurodivergent liberation #celebrities are people #and before people come at me. i'm not hc'ing taylor as a neurodivergence specifically in this post. but i'm using it in a broad sense #so things like anxiety and depression which do present differently for everyone and have different triggers count!! they do impact ppl #some of these things taylor has talked about impacting her #you can see it if you look for it. and i hope we're past invalidating that #but also. there are forms of neurodivergence and this applies more broadly than taylor that do impact the kinds of things we moralise #like changing sense of self. not knowing what we want. fears for actual safety whether they're founded or not; worth the risk or not #and i'm sick of people conveniently not talking about them in order to judge people basically #having said all this. we desperately need to restructure systems that make fame such a platform to begin with and overconsumption #and redesign ways to survive things like public image in order to achieve the greatest good through everyone's unique limitations #trust me you're gonna be a lot happier when you stop just blaming people and start brainstorming; what ways can we improve this?#anyway leaving you with this rant. rb's appreciated bc i like my thoughts being heard and i like neurodivergent liberation #heck even disagree and chat about that i'm cool with that

1 note · View note

punkitt-is-here · 9 months

Text

LIFE UPDATE!!!! RAGHHH!!!

Okay, so, as some of y'all know, I was fired from my job a couple of months ago. I reapplied, and unfortunately, despite getting an interview, I was turned down. Because of that, I'm going full-time as a self-employed artist. This means I'll be focusing on making fun stuff for my shop, learning better how to ship out items, and doubling down on doing more commissions.

As some of my wonderful commissioners know, I struggle a lot with deadlines and motivation. I have ADHD and even though I'm medicated, it still often gets in my way and kicks my ass often. It's part of why I have such a big struggle when doing commissions; they're hard to motivate myself to do and sometimes require a lot of communication back and forth that I'm just not the best at right now. I would like to say thanks to everyone that's put up with my inability to figure out a decent schedule for commission work, and hopefully everyone who's tried to get art from me will get their stuff very soon!

SO, uh, now that I don't really have a job, what's that mean? Well, I'm going to set a goal to actually make good on my promises for commissionwork. I tend to actually get a lot done in bursts, but they come and go, so I'm going to try and do weekly commissions but with much smaller slots. What I'll be doing is upping the frequency while also limiting the amount I get per-week so I can have a form of consistency with my output. That way, both parties are satisfied and I don't have to keep beating myself up for taking my time because I kept convincing myself I had a big-ass workload I couldn't chip away at.

Part of how I'll be doing this is acting like I still have a job. I'm gonna set aside work hours in the week to specifically work on commissions and shipping and interfacing with clients. I depend on the kindness and goodwill of my incredible followers, so the last thing I really want to do is tarnish that (at least any more than I have; apologies to everyone who's put up with me learning how to run a shop!). I think I'm at a point where I understand a lot of my limitations and abilities, and so I hope going forward I can begin to create a routine for myself and be able to make this something I can do far into the future! If you'd like to support me while I do this wacky lil thing, i've got a ko-fi and now a Patreon! (which I will link in my reblog since I heard Patreon links are weird here on tumblr.) I'm really excited to be launching a patreon. I can't guarantee any specific type of content, but the plan is just to show tiny little previews of stuff early if you're a supporter and stuff like this. I've never had anything of this kind, so I ask for your patience as I work stuff out, but if you feel like supporting me on either platform it'd mean the world to me. Thanks :)

2K notes · View notes

helloyellow17 · 1 year

Text

Idk man I might get torn to shreds for saying this, but I simply cannot understand the new trend, particularly among younger internet users, where people write a laundry list of their triggers in their bio and then expect everyone to read and cater to said list on a PUBLIC PLATFORM.

This is the same mentality that drives people to attack appropriately tagged fics on AO3 for having x y or z content because “How dare you post this when I have trauma about this???” Obviously if someone is going to write a super heavy and highly sensitive fic and NOT tag it properly, they ought to be called out on it. But this isn’t about that, it’s about the people who don’t curate their own content, it’s about the people who enter public spaces and demand that the general public cater to THEM specifically.

Additionally: Listing out your triggers for everyone to see is just ASKING for trolls to come into your inbox and flood you with triggering content. (Unfortunately, as much as we would like to believe otherwise, the internet is full of selfish jerks who don’t give a crap about anybody’s trauma.) Not only this, but the algorithm does not read your bio. The algorithm does not care about your triggers unless YOU make sure to block specific tags and content.

YOU are responsible for curating your own content, and nobody else.

Obviously this is not to say people shouldn’t try to tag their posts for common triggers, because that’s the common courtesy thing to do. But if Becky has a phobia of bees, it is on her to block that tag and curate her feed around it, and she does not get the exclusive right to suddenly demand that nobody talk about bees within a ten mile radius of her. If Alec has a phobia of dogs, then it is well within his right to avoid contact with them, but he doesn’t get to go to a public park and yell at anybody who brings their dog there. It is his responsibility to know his own limits and seek out parks that are dog-free. (If someone brings a dog to a dog-free area, that’s a whole different issue that I won’t be getting into rn but yes, the person who does that is in the wrong there.)

The internet is widely a public space. If you want to create a safe space completely and utterly free of your specific triggers, you have to put the work in to make that space for yourself. You don’t get to ask other internet strangers to do it for you.

I’m saying this out of genuine concern (and admittedly, frustration) because there are so many young teens in fandom nowadays who don’t understand this, and they end up putting themselves in extremely vulnerable and even downright dangerous situations because they don’t understand that putting your well-being in the hands of a stranger is a terrible idea.

Please be safe, and for the love of all that is holy, be reasonable. Curating your content yourself is just as much a protection for you as it is a vital key that allows public communities to function.

#hyramblings #fandom culture #internet discourse #trauma triggers #anxiety triggers #safe space #if I get one person saying “BUT WHAT IF SOMEONE IGNORES X AND DOES IT ANYWAY #we literally went over this #they’re a jerk and have responsibility too #but this ain’t about them rn #ya feel?#internet communities #fandom community

5K notes · View notes

nc-vb · 1 year

Note

DONT FORGET ROT FOR THE MALE MOANING AUDIOS

My dear, I'm going to use this ask of yours as a catalyst... All of my personal favourite ASMRs, vids, etcetera... beneath the cut. Not all of them are only male moaning! Literally just all my faves I've collected LOL.

Links will not only be audios; a majority of them are videos.

Links will be from any of the following: Twitter, the Hub, Audiomack, Soundgasm, and likely other sites, so be prepared because they're not labeled, lol. And sorry if any of the links are repeated; my bad.

BUT YES, THE MALE MOANING AUDIOS UGH 😮‍💨

BLUE TEXT MEANS NEW LINKS HAVE BEEN ADDED.

Links with sparkles are my personal faves.

Edited, more added July 21, 2023

CerberosVA Now, if y'all like your man extremely vocal, if you like whimpering, or lowkey, you like the whole subby bf thing, PLEASE, THIS MAN, I cannot recommend his shit enough. He's on twt, the hub, probably the mack; please support his official work on Patreon, if you can.

x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x | x

softxwarm (hub) This guy does both asmr and stuff with his girlfriend, but his solo ASMRs are pretty coo'. I'll just share my top three since you can just sift through his videos, anyway.

one (video; solo) | two (video; solo) | three (video; solo)

moonxx911 (twt) ANYTHING by this man. I won't even both being specific; I listen to his shit on repeat, rotated.

Akiradubs (hub) He mostly does character dub audios, but he has some simpler ones that I enjoy, like this one.

one (audio, gn!; sub male, ig?)

RedactedASMR I haven't gotten so deep into the lore of it, but Redacted has a whole series of ASMRs that tell long ass stories, so if you have the time, I recommend searching him out. I believe most of them are on YouTube? Personally, Lasko is my favourite (he's so cute with the stuttering, ughhhh). I'm just going to link my personal Redacted playlist I've started, rather than link specific ones. You can find him on more platforms, but I don't think his n/sfw ASMRs are on Youtube... idk.

ncvb RedactedASMR playlist (the mack)

SeikyuuVA (hub; also on the mack) Look, Seikyuu isn't everyone's flavour... there's only a couple specific ones I enjoy, just because he really goes over the top with the sounds and aggression sometimes, LMAO, and it gives me second hand embarrassment...

Lxvesickk (twt) Just found him, hehe. Just listen…

WickLuvsU (twt) His audios are... immaculate.

X | X (play these both at the same time... you're welcome.)

Video Links, general

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 ✨ | 19 | 20

21 | 22 ✨ | 23 ✨ | 24 | 25 ✨ | 26 | 27 | 28 ✨ | 29 ✨| 30 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 ✨| 36 ✨| 37 | 38 | 39 ✨| 40 ✨

41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 (mmf✨)| 46 (aud✨)|

Video Links, mlm

I had to put these links in a separate post because I reached Tumblr's 100 link-per-post limit? Didn't know that was a thing. So, please find them here! There's about 80+ links.

Video Links, wlw

1 | 2 | 3

Characters Like, the fake dubs. I dunno what they're called.

Hanma Shuji (hub, audio; Akiradubs) Zhongli (hub, audio; Akiradubs) Akira/Joker (hub, audio; Seikyuu) Take this Audiomack link, too; it's my other personal playlist that has a shit ton of character ASMR dubs on it, and then some...

I'll have more to add along the way; keep an eye on the update date!

#twt links #asmr #n/sft asmr #n/sfw asmr #idk what else to tag this?#male moan #voice kink #✦ nice chats.#priya<333 #✦ nc vb.

3K notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 21 hours

Text

UK publishers suing Google for $17.4b over rigged ad markets

THIS WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Look, no one wants to kick Big Tech to the curb more than I do, but, also: it's good that Google indexes the news so people can find it, and it's good that Facebook provides forums where people can talk about the news.

It's not news if you can't find it. It's not news if you can't talk about it. We don't call information you can't find or discuss "news" – we call it "secrets."

And yet, the most popular – and widely deployed – anti-Big Tech tactic promulgated by the news industry and supported by many of my fellow trustbusters is premised on making Big Tech pay to index the news and/or provide a forum to discuss news articles. These "news bargaining codes" (or, less charitably, "link taxes") have been mooted or introduced in the EU, France, Spain, Australia, and Canada. There are proposals to introduce these in the US (through the JCPA) and in California (the CJPA).

These US bills are probably dead on arrival, for reasons that can be easily understood by the Canadian experience with them. After Canada introduced Bill C-18 – its own news bargaining code – Meta did exactly what it had done in many other places where this had been tried: blocked all news from Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and other Meta properties.

This has been a disaster for the news industry and a disaster for Canadians' ability to discuss the news. Oh, it makes Meta look like assholes, too, but Meta is the poster child for "too big to care" and is palpably indifferent to the PR costs of this boycott.

Frustrated lawmakers are now trying to figure out what to do next. The most common proposal is to order Meta to carry the news. Canadians should be worried about this, because the next government will almost certainly be helmed by the far-right conspiratorialist culture warrior Pierre Poilievre, who will doubtless use this power to order Facebook to platform "news sites" to give prominence to Canada's rotten bushel of crypto-fascist (and openly fascist) "news" sites.

Americans should worry about this too. A Donald Trump 2028 presidency combined with a must-carry rule for news would see Trump's cabinet appointees deciding what is (and is not) news, and ordering large social media platforms to cram the Daily Caller (or, you know, the Daily Stormer) into our eyeballs.

But there's another, more fundamental reason that must-carry is incompatible with the American system: the First Amendment. The government simply can't issue a blanket legal order to platforms requiring them to carry certain speech. They can strongly encourage it. A court can order limited compelled speech (say, a retraction following a finding of libel). Under emergency conditions, the government might be able to compel the transmission of urgent messages. But there's just no way the First Amendment can be squared with a blanket, ongoing order issued by the government to communications platforms requiring them to reproduce, and make available, everything published by some collection of their favorite news outlets.

This might also be illegal in Canada, but it's harder to be definitive. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enshrined in 1982, and Canada's Supreme Court is still figuring out what it means. Section Two of the Charter enshrines a free expression right, but it's worded in less absolute terms than the First Amendment, and that's deliberate. During the debate over the wording of the Charter, Canadian scholars and policymakers specifically invoked problems with First Amendment absolutism and tried to chart a middle course between strong protections for free expression and problems with the First Amendment's brook-no-exceptions language.

So maybe Canada's Supreme Court would find a must-carry order to Meta to be a violation of the Charter, but it's hard to say for sure. The Charter is both young and ambiguous, so it's harder to be definitive about what it would say about this hypothetical. But when it comes to the US and the First Amendment, that's categorically untrue. The US Constitution is centuries older than the Canadian Charter, and the First Amendment is extremely definitive, and there are reams of precedent interpreting it. The JPCA and CJPA are totally incompatible with the US Constitution. Passing them isn't as silly as passing a law declaring that Pi equals three or that water isn't wet, but it's in the neighborhood.

But all that isn't to say that the news industry shouldn't be attacking Big Tech. Far from it. Big Tech compulsively steals from the news!

But what Big Tech steals from the news isn't content.

It's money.

Big Tech steals money from the news. Take social media: when a news outlet invests in building a subscriber base on a social media platform, they're giving that platform a stick to beat them with. The more subscribers you have on social media, the more you'll be willing to pay to reach those subscribers, and the more incentive there is for the platform to suppress the reach of your articles unless you pay to "boost" your content.

This is plainly fraudulent. When I sign up to follow a news outlet on a social media site, I'm telling the platform to show me the things the news outlet publishes. When the platform uses that subscription as the basis for a blackmail plot, holding my desire to read the news to ransom, they are breaking their implied promise to me to show me the things I asked to see:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

This is stealing money from the news. It's the definition of an "unfair method of competition." Article 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act gives the FTC the power to step in and ban this practice, and they should:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

Big Tech also steals money from the news via the App Tax: the 30% rake that the mobile OS duopoly (Apple/Google) requires for every in-app purchase (Apple/Google also have policies that punish app vendors who take you to the web to make payments without paying the App Tax). 30% out of every subscriber dollar sent via an app is highway robbery! By contrast, the hyperconcentrated, price-gouging payment processing cartel charges 2-5% – about a tenth of the Big Tech tax. This is Big Tech stealing money from the news:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-must-open-app-stores

Finally, Big Tech steals money by monopolizing the ad market. The Google-Meta ad duopoly takes 51% out of every ad-dollar spent. The historic share going to advertising "intermediaries" is 10-15%. In other words, Google/Meta cornered the market on ads and then tripled the bite they were taking out of publishers' advertising revenue. They even have an illegal, collusive arrangement to rig this market, codenamed "Jedi Blue":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

There's two ways to unrig the ad market, and we should do both of them.

First, we should trustbust both Google and Meta and force them to sell off parts of their advertising businesses. Currently, both Google and Meta operate a "full stack" of ad services. They have an arm that represents advertisers buying space for ads. Another arm represents publishers selling space to advertisers. A third arm operates the marketplace where these sales take place. All three arms collect fees. On top of that: Google/Meta are both publishers and advertisers, competing with their own customers!

This is as if you were in court for a divorce and you discovered that the same lawyer representing your soon-to-be ex was also representing you…while serving as the judge…and trying to match with you both on Tinder. It shouldn't surprise you if at the end of that divorce, the court ruled that the family home should go to the lawyer.

So yeah, we should break up ad-tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-shatter-ad-tech

Also: we should ban surveillance advertising. Surveillance advertising gives ad-tech companies a permanent advantage over publishers. Ad-tech will always know more about readers' behavior than publishers do, because Big Tech engages in continuous, highly invasive surveillance of every internet user in the world. Surveillance ads perform a little better than "content-based ads" (ads sold based on the content of a web-page, not the behavior of the person looking at the page), but publishers will always know more about their content than ad-tech does. That means that even if content-based ads command a slightly lower price than surveillance ads, a much larger share of that payment will go to publishers:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

Banning surveillance advertising isn't just good business, it's good politics. The potential coalition for banning surveillance ads is everyone who is harmed by commercial surveillance. That's a coalition that's orders of magnitude larger than the pool of people who merely care about fairness in the ad/news industries. It's everyone who's worried about their grandparents being brainwashed on Facebook, or their teens becoming anorexic because of Instagram. It includes people angry about deepfake porn, and people angry about Black Lives Matter protesters' identities being handed to the cops by Google (see also: Jan 6 insurrectionists).

It also includes everyone who discovers that they're paying higher prices because a vendor is using surveillance data to determine how much they'll pay – like when McDonald's raises the price of your "meal deal" on your payday, based on the assumption that you will spend more when your bank account is at its highest monthly level:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Attacking Big Tech for stealing money is much smarter than pretending that the problem is Big Tech stealing content. We want Big Tech to make the news easy to find and discuss. We just want them to stop pocketing 30 cents out of every subscriber dollar and 51 cents out of ever ad dollar, and ransoming subscribers' social media subscriptions to extort publishers.

And there's amazing news on this front: a consortium of UK web-publishers called Ad Tech Collective Action has just triumphed in a high-stakes proceeding, and can now go ahead with a suit against Google, seeking damages of GBP13.6b ($17.4b) for the rigged ad-tech market:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/17-bln-uk-adtech-lawsuit-against-google-can-go-ahead-tribunal-rules-2024-06-05/

The ruling, from the Competition Appeal Tribunal, paves the way for a frontal assault on the thing Big Tech actually steals from publishers: money, not content.

This is exactly what publishing should be doing. Targeting the method by which tech steals from the news is a benefit to all kinds of news organizations, including the independent, journalist-owned publishers that are doing the best news work today. These independents do not have the same interests as corporate news, which is dominated by hedge funds and private equity raiders, who have spent decades buying up and hollowing out news outlets, and blaming the resulting decline in readership and profits on Craiglist.

You can read more about Big Finance's raid on the news in Margot Susca's Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy:

https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/?id=p087561

You can also watch/listen to Adam Conover's excellent interview with Susca:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N21YfWy0-bA

Frankly, the looters and billionaires who bought and gutted our great papers are no more interested in the health of the news industry or democracy than Big Tech is. We should care about the news and the workers who produce the news, not the profits of the hedge-funds that own the news. An assault on Big Tech's monetary theft levels the playing field, making it easier for news workers and indies to compete directly with financialized news outlets and billionaire playthings, by letting indies keep more of every ad-dollar and more of every subscriber-dollar – and to reach their subscribers without paying ransom to social media.

Ending monetary theft – rather than licensing news search and discussion – is something that workers are far more interested in than their bosses. Any time you see workers and their bosses on the same side as a fight against Big Tech, you should look more closely. Bosses are not on their workers' side. If bosses get more money out of Big Tech, they will not share those gains with workers unless someone forces them to.

That's where antitrust comes in. Antitrust is designed to strike at power, and enforcers have broad authority to blunt the power of corporate juggernauts. Remember Article 5 of the FTC Act, the one that lets the FTC block "unfair methods of competition?" FTC Chair Lina Khan has proposed using it to regulate training AI, specifically to craft rules that address the labor and privacy issues with AI:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg

This is an approach that can put creative workers where they belong, in a coalition with other workers, rather than with their bosses. The copyright approach to curbing AI training is beloved of the same media companies that are eagerly screwing their workers. If we manage to make copyright – a transferrable right that a worker can be forced to turn over their employer – into the system that regulates AI training, it won't stop training. It'll just trigger every entertainment company changing their boilerplate contract so that creative workers have to sign over their AI rights or be shown the door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

Then those same entertainment and news companies will train AI models and try to fire most of their workers and slash the pay of the remainder using those models' output. Using copyright to regulate AI training makes changes to who gets to benefit from workers' misery, shifting some of our stolen wages from AI companies to entertainment companies. But it won't stop them from ruining our lives.

By contrast, focusing on actual labor rights – say, through an FTCA 5 rulemaking – has the potential to protect those rights from all parties, and puts us on the same side as call-center workers, train drivers, radiologists and anyone else whose wages are being targeted by AI companies and their customers.

Policy fights are a recurring monkey's paw nightmare in which we try to do something to fight corruption and bullying, only to be outmaneuvered by corrupt bullies. Making good policy is no guarantee of a good outcome, but it sure helps – and good policy starts with targeting the thing you want to fix. If we're worried that news is being financially starved by Big Tech, then we should go after the money, not the links.

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/2024/06/06/stealing-money-not-content/#content-free

#pluralistic #competition #advertising #surveillance advertising #saving the news from big tech #link taxes #trustbusting #competition and markets authority #uk #ukpoli #Ad Tech Collective Action #digital markets unit #Competition Appeal Tribunal

436 notes · View notes

81folklore · 8 months

Text

dress - SV5

pairings: sebastian vettel x famous!reader (fc: taylor swift)

summary: its known that seb has been married for a few years now despite the public never seeing is wife, its also known that yn is in a committed relationship and has been since she disappeared from public eye. maybe they are more connected than people realise

authors note: i have had this idea on my mind for SO LONG so im very pleased to finally be writing it. essentially in this, yn is taylor and seb is joe but no one has ever seen him nor know his name, if that makes sense? honestly i have no clue how this will turn out but i needed to write it

authors note 2: this is set in the midnights era however i switched the songs a bit so ‘dress’ is on midnights instead of ‘sweet nothing’ and vice versa!! also ‘dress’ is going to be a single. i also apologize for how all over the place this is, especially the tweets

authors note 3: just pretend whatever says taylor swift says your name and the photos with her hands have a wedding ring!! i also got so confused when trying to screenshot the twitter stuff so the timeline ones are backwards

authors note 4??: haha didnt realise there was a 30 pic limit... pt 2 here :)

masterlist

ynupdates

liked by user3, user18 and 10,628 others

yn on her story today, possibly posting song lyrics! thoughts?

view comments

user3: NEW ERA INCOMING

user18: OH I AM SO READY FOR THIS

user13: NEW MUSIC NEW MUSIC

user66: is this hinting at her reputation era?

user13: i was just thinking this, more specifically the time just before reputation

user72: MUSIC ABOUT LOVER?? OH I AM SO HERE FOR IT

user55: if it is about lover and the time before reputation this will BREAK ME like,, HE SAW THE BEST IN HER EVEN IN HER WORST TIMES😭😭

yourusername

liked by gracieabrams, ynupdates, olliebearman and 7,277,739 others

everyone thinks that they know us, but they know nothing about…

this album has been such a rewarding piece to create and im so glad that soon enough you will all be able to listen and enjoy it with me! one thing i love in particular about this album is the song ‘dress’

dress was originally a piece i started to write when making reputation however i felt it was right to keep it to myself, to keep it between my partner and i for a little while longer. however recently our lives have been changing for the better, and while that lid of privacy will still be on, i want to share more with you guys

you have all been on this journey with me and you have treated my partner and i with the upmost respect and for that i thank you. for me dress is a letter, its statement, its a declaration of my love for him and im very grateful to be able to give this to you all

this song is one im very proud of, i really enjoyed writing this the first time, and getting to revist and polish it up felt very special to do.

dress out now on all platforms🖤

comments on this post have been limited

sebupdates

liked by user34, user5, user88 and 23,683 others

seb in suzuka with the grid at his turn 2 bee (insect) hotels,, we've missed seeing him at the track :(

view comments

user3: of course the grid come together for him :’)

user5: im not crying!! just hay fever!!

user5: oh i have missed him SO MUCH

user7: NO BECAUSE YOU DONT GET IT HES BACK

user88: DID YOU GUYS SEE THE VIDEO OF HIM HUGGING CHARLES😭😭

user34: the way he was like a teacher throughout the whole thing😭

user18: does anyone know if hes staying the whole weekend or is it like monaco??

sebupdates: we believe hes staying the whole weekend but unsure if hes with a team or not!

user18: ok thank you :)

user77: the way the first thing lewis asked him was if his wife was okay, oh what if i cry😭😭

user66: im kind of new here, have the grid met sebs wife?

user77: i know they all at least know about her and know who she is, i dont think everyone has met her but i know lewis has met her quite a bit!!

part 2!

#f1 x reader #f1 instagram au #f1 smau #f1 social media au #social media au #formula 1 insta au #formula 1 social media au #sebastian vettel x reader #sebastian vettel fanfic #sebastian vettel #famous!swift!yn

1K notes · View notes

zacht1nker · 2 years

Text

you know what i really don’t like? people being like “i’m super approachable” and then they’re not

#this isn't aimed at anyone specifically #and not limited to this platform #that being said if anyone wants to approach me pls do i'm actually approachable

0 notes

harveyguillensource · 2 months

Text

Harvey's photoshoot with Mike Ruiz for Photobook Magazine has been published, along with a short interview covering his career and ambitions! Read a few of his responses below:

You have become somewhat of a trailblazer for what is possible for queer, Latinx actors. Who are your biggest role models and inspirations when it comes to performing? My on-screen role models were pretty limited. I found inspiration in watching Cantinflas, a Latino comedian, with my dad. Watching people like Salma Hayek and Antonio Banderas represent Latinos on the big screen helped keep me hopeful. I’m happy to report that I’ve worked with both of them. From “What We Do in the Shadows,” to “The Magicians,” there is a slight recurring theme of supernatural or fantasy. What draws you to these types of projects and roles? In both 'The Magicians' and 'Shadows,' anything is possible. I love the idea that there are no limitations on where our characters can go, so I’ve always been drawn to that. I was never specifically seeking to be in these particular genres, but I’m so happy to be a part of them. In addition to on the screen, you have an extensive portfolio of voice acting credits. How does working behind a microphone compare to working on the camera? Doing voice-over has been such a wonderful experience. I didn’t really start doing V.O. work until the pandemic. It’s a tough door to get through. The pandemic brought these opportunities to me. It was the only work that I was able to do safely at the time. Since then, my portfolio has doubled in voice-over work. All the characters I get to play are so different from each other. I get so excited when people come up to me and mention they're fans of a character I voice. Either voice acting, on camera, or on the stage, are there any dream roles you would love to play? As a musical theatre kid, I’d obviously love to do Broadway. I’d also really love to host SNL one day. In addition to acting, you're also involved in advocacy work, particularly in the LGBTQ+ field. What inspires you to use your voice and platform for good? I try to use my platform to help anyone that I can, especially those in the LGBTQ+ and Latino community. For so long, I didn’t see anyone advocating for someone like me so I do the best I can to amplify their voices while bringing awareness to those communities. With “What We Do in the Shadows” heading into its sixth and final season, what’s next for you? Anything fans should look forward to? We’re about to wrap in two weeks from the time this interview is published. That being said, it’s bittersweet. We recently said goodbye to our exterior set, and it was really emotional. I committed to this character for half a decade, which is no small task. It’s become such a big part of my life, and I’m thankful for all the lives we’ve touched through comedy. Season 6 will air later this year. I’ll have projects like “Companion” and “Garfield” out this year as well as a couple others. I’m excited to see what’s next!

#harvey guillén #harvey guillen #wwdits #guillermo de la cruz #photoshoots #plus size model #fashion #mike ruiz #photobook magazine #what we do in the shadows #wwdits cast #april 2024

255 notes · View notes

dapg-otmebytheballs · 3 months

Text

All or Nothing and lowave records

Strap in because this is gonna be a long one. This post will try to shed some light on how the whole lowave records thing works, how you can use this music, how it is being distributed, and what all a contract with lowave would include. All this and more below the cut!

Let us start with the basics: What is lowave records?

Quite succinctly summed up on their website as follows:

They make and distribute royalty-free music for content creators - specifically video-format content creators like Youtubers and streamers - they share some streaming revenue (30%, we'll get into that) with the creators who are labelled 'co-artists' and get promotion of their music through the content creators.

So, that brings us to the next big question: What is royalty-free music?

This is music that is free to use. Yes, by anyone, by Dan and Phil, by other creators, by you and me, any of us. This is by no means a new thing of course, anyone who has created content online would have come across other such services. just as an example, bensound.com hosts a large library of royalty-free music which you can use in any video by simply crediting the site in your description. Lowave works in a similar fashion. The music is not copyrighted. However, the rights to the music are held by lowave records and there are limitations on its use, which we will get into ahead.

How is the money working (preliminary edition)?

I will add details to this later when I discuss the contract, but let's see the info we get straight away from the FAQs: You do not have to pay them anything to make music for you

The money is coming in from the streaming platforms, depends completely on amount of streams, and is shared between lowave and the creators

Also from the FAQs: how can this music be used?

Anyone can freely use any of the music from lowave records, which means that yes, you can use any music from All or Nothing for your purposes with credit, it will not be taken down

Is this the only music we will hear on dapg now? Will there be more albums?

Not necessarily! This isn't an exclusive deal, DnP can use any music they want on the channel. As for new albums, seems like it depends on how this one does (and it seems to be doing quite well!) which will unlock future avenues for more collabs with lowave

Okay BASICS DONE if you're still reading you're probably here for the real meat so let us get into it

How is the money working (director's cut)?

Let us start with the terms on the partner agreement:

Content Creators get 30% of the 'remaining income'. This basically means any costs that streaming platforms are deducting, any processing fees, taxes etc will be deducted before the 30% share is calculated. The second point there basically means that the deductions here do not include business expenses of the label itself, ie when the label calculates its own profit production costs and various other expenses are deducted from the income, but these costs will not affect the revenue received by the content creators (You are probably already thinking 'how is this company earning enough to keep going?' and I will touch on that later as well)

Payment installments are simple enough but here we see a third party enter the chat: DistroKid. Who is DistroKid and why are payments going through them, Hazel? I hear you ask. Well I'll tell you dear readers:

It is basically a service that takes a yearly fee for putting your music on streaming platforms efficiently and then pockets 0% of the royalties. The royalties go from the streaming services (eg Spotify) to DistroKid who then send it to the rights-holders (in this case, lowave records). lowave records is using this service for a yearly fee to upload all their music through.

But wait! If DistroKid is working with lowave, and lowave owns all the rights, why is DistroKid making direct payments to the content creators?

Well, over the years they have offered a bunch of services:

I am guessing lowave is making use of the teams feature to send royalties owed to content creators ("collaborators") directly from Diskworld, which makes sense, the less people money goes through the less chances of mishandling.

People have of course been talking about what percentage Spotify even pays for many many years. The short answer: we don't know for sure because it is confidential, Spotify won't tell and artists aren't allowed to. The longer answer: people have estimated from a bunch of publically available data that the share seems to be 70-30 (rights-holders- spotify).

However spotify is not paying per stream anymore so that makes these figures harder to pin down. they are using a 'streamshare' system which is much more convoluted:

That was all about the money, now let's talk Licensing

Creators can use this music in any capacity, and do not have to share any of the revenue from their own content with lowave. They have put a stipulation that it may not be used in a way that is "illegal, immoral, discriminatory or derogatory to [lowave]" but what constitutes 'immoral' and 'discriminatory' is not really defined.

The other limitation applies to the contracted Content Creators only as far as I can tell: they are not allowed to remix, sample, or edit these songs without prior permission. This probably only applies to altering the songs and playing under the same name, so fan remixes should not run into issues here, as long as they are not monetised. (thanks kate @goldenpinof for making me think about this part a bit more, I think it should be safe, but even royalty free music cannot be transformed without permission at least in a commercial capacity)

They will also make more music free of cost if the streaming targets they set are being met by the albums produced. The process:

Other services they provide will be handling the creator's account which they set up (DanAndPhilBeats in this case) on streaming platforms and making changes as required, so the Cheeky Banter -> Project X thing was probably done from their end, possibly an older change that they forgot to update?

Also below are promotional obligations:

The promotion wasn't a one-time thing, it is expected to be ongoing, so we will probably be hearing about this in future videos as well. However, later in the partner agreement it is added that this has to be done as often as possible in a way that is "natural and appealing to their audience" which again, is pretty vague wording

Also the licensing goes both ways, so lowave can also use segments of the content DnP make that has the music in the background to promote their music:

Additional stuff from the contract:

lowave takes the guarantee of creating original works that it has the rights to and which do not infringe on copyrights, and the creators likewise take the guarantee not use the songs in content which infringes copyright. If there are any disputes regarding such infringement in the future the record and the creators have to back each other up (including sharing legal fees)

I mentioned before some parts of the agreement being written in vague language. There is also a clause that says if any provision ends up being illegal/not possible to enforce by a court (eg if a court were to it's impossible to say whether content featuring the songs was 'immoral') then only that provision will be removed, the rest of the contract stands.

The waiver part basically means that if any of the parties decide to not sue or forgo a complaint about breach of contract, that does not mean that those provisions are now unavailable, they can still sue later on or for some other breach if they wish.

That's the contracts done. Some of the framing there makes it seem to me like it's a pretty small company. The revenue they hope to generate does not seem to be very sustainable, especially since the revenue is being shared with content creators but the cost is not and they are additionally paying for other services like DistroKid.

So I looked more into this record label: they started business in 2022. If you go to their socials though, twitter and instagram they have followers in double digits and post very sparsely. Their tiktok seems to have nothing on it at all (thanks @lesbiandanhowell for the screenshot) and you may have noticed, Dan did not tag the lowave account at all when he announced the album on twitter

The agreement never mentions creators promoting lowave's social channels or tagging them either (and it is quite odd, I have worked with a bunch of organisations in their infancy and this is, now more than ever, a common requirement from collaborators). lowave records does not seem to be actively working towards promoting themselves on social media or building an online presence, even though they have been operational two years producing music throughout.

There are three people involved with the company on public record:

Benjamin Johnson listed as 'Head of Production' is probably the 'Ben' Dan has been talking about who made the songs. Seems like their scale of operations is not very big and possibly not a lot of producers in the records at all (despite the spotify page saying they have 'producers' plural, but that doesn't have to mean a lot many lol). Anyway, that would solve the mystery of 'how are they playing their employees?' if there aren't many employees to begin with (not even an intern to manage their social media it seems).

Look at the last person in the screenshots though: Robin. I looked at what other companies Robin is associated with and several of them - yeah several different operations that he's involved in - have the same correspondence address of '60 Thorpe Road...', so probably operating out of a ghost office (just to have a registered address and receive mail at etc). And one of these businesses that Robin is associated with is RWD, the business that made lowave records' website for them:

The no-cost production of royalty-free music, little attention to social media presence, vaguely written contract, seemingly small scale of operations with technical assistance like website design coming from an affiliated organisation makes me think that lowave records might be a side project. A labour of love, possibly, hoping to sustain itself enough to keep putting out royalty-free music in a time of extreme crackdown on copyrighted music use.

It makes sense to use content creators for promotion, gets you way more streaming than making your own music and putting it out. And the incentive of unique but guaranteed royalty free music at no cost is great for content creators of all sizes. It is far from sustainable on its own though, especially with streaming revenue being basically peanuts, and I do not think there's much interest in gaining a following or putting in that effort either, so it's probably a very small business by a few people. How long it manages to sustain itself as a project I am not sure, but it certainly isn't looking like something particularly geared towards profit and growth in its current state.

We are at an end! If you read this far, leave me like an A+ or a star for my essay so I can have academic validation from this please. Of course I probably have not covered everything possible in connection to this so if anyone has more info feel free to add on! And if this was all very long and there's something particular you wanted to know you can drop an ask into the inbox about it!

Thank you for coming with me on this journey! Back to the important things, which was your favourite song from the album? I think mine is Arcade Admission

#dnp #dan and phil #dnpgames #dan and phil games #meta #?#all or nothing #lowave records #dan howell #phil lester

261 notes · View notes