#that sends less of those ads to the dashboard

[darkwood-sleddog]

No offense tumblr, but even without ad-free users should be able to hide potentially triggering material from advertisements pushed to their dashboards.

[changes]

Friday, September 1st, 2023

🌟 New

On web, you can now purchase a new Tumblr Supporter badge that levels up over time, so you can show your support for the platform and help us pay the bills around here more directly. Expect to hear more about this on the @staff blog soon!

In the latest experiment on web that makes changes to the post header, we’ve altered it to re-include the post author’s avatar, based on the feedback we’ve received so far. Thank you to everyone sending in feedback about this!

We’ve released a new major version of the tumblr.js API client, which you can use to access Tumblr content via our public API. Read more about it here!

We’ve also rolled out Tumblr Live to even more countries in the European Union!

🛠 Fixed

For those of you who still see floating avatars on the web, we fixed a bug that was causing them to “hide” a little under the dashboard tab bar. Similarly, we fixed a bug that was causing posts to be in the wrong position when using J and K to navigate post-by-post.

For those of you who see the new dashboard tab configuration button on web, we’ve added a little more space to the left side of it, so tabs have less of a chance to overlap with it. Similarly, sponsored tabs show a “Sponsored” label next to them in this dashboard tab configuration view.

🚧 Ongoing

We’re still experimenting with a big performance improvement for how content is shown on the web, but it broke being able to use Command/Control + F to search for text on the page, for content that’s been hidden after scrolling away from it. We’re working on making this better, and we have a fix in place, so please give it a try again if you’ve been having difficulty with it!

🌱 Upcoming

Nothing new to report here. There’s a lot of fun stuff coming though!

Experiencing an issue? File a Support Request and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can!

Want to share your feedback about something? Check out our Work in Progress blog and start a discussion with the community.

[engineering]

Making GIFs load faster

AKA why are some of my GIFs being turned into videos?

Overview

We’re experimenting with serving GIFs as MP4 videos instead of GIFV (which typically serves animated WebP) on the web to a small subset of folks on Tumblr, not everyone. This does not affect anyone using the mobile apps.

The performance improvements from using MP4s in this way are huge, and will make Tumblr load animated images faster and use less data in almost every circumstance, with no discernible loss in quality.

This conversion only applies to specific types of GIFs, such as ones without transparency in the first frame. We’ve tested this conversion on thousands of GIFs, and we’re still tuning it to be virtually indistinguishable from the original GIF.

XKit’s “Vanilla Videos” extension was causing a bug with this experiment, but a recent new XKit version release has fixed that issue.

If you’re served an MP4 instead of a GIF, clicking on the image will still open it in a lightbox, which you can download as GIFV or GIF, depending on what’s served.

Since this is still just an experiment, there is no way to opt-out yet; adding some kind of opt-out (on the creator and/or consumer side) is a possibility though.

If you’re served a GIF as MP4 and it looks wrong, please contact Support with a link to the image and what looks wrong about the conversion. We need examples to help us improve the experience. Also, please do not send duplicate support requests.

What

As a recent Changes post mentioned, we’re experimenting with transforming GIFs into MP4s on the dashboard on web. Our goal is to get GIFs onto dashboards as fast as possible, while retaining as much of the original quality as possible.

For years now, we’ve delivered GIFs using our GIFV format, which transparently transcodes GIFs to more modern formats, like WebP, supported by the <img> tag. We’ve made improvements to that process over the past year, better supporting large GIFs and increasing the quality of the transformation, but conversion to WebP has limited benefits. A typical conversion only halves the file size and animated WebP isn’t well supported by Safari. Meanwhile, MP4 conversions offer even smaller files, often 8 to 10x smaller than the original GIF, as well as faster loading times and broader browser support.

We’re being picky about which GIFs get converted to MP4. We only apply the transformation to GIFs that pass our criteria for transformation. Currently, that means GIFs that don’t use transparency in the first frame, have constant frame rates, and are under 10 seconds long. 

We’ve tested this new process against thousands of GIFs from Tumblr, ranging from your typical TV show gifset to pixel art to animated text, and are confident the transformation looks good for the vast majority of content. However, we’re still tweaking the algorithm and are open to feedback. This is a subjective process, and if you see an MP4 that looks worse than the GIF, please send it our way!

Currently, the change only affects the experience within Tumblr (www.tumblr.com). The blog network (i.e. your-blog.tumblr.com) is not affected and continues to use GIFV to deliver GIFs.

Why are we doing this?

As mentioned above, GIFs are almost always inefficient compared to modern formats. They’re larger in size, take longer to load, are slower to render, and use more cache space. Whereas our GIFV conversion usually halves the size, the new GIF->MP4 conversion is often 8 to 10 times smaller for film- or TV-like content. We have a lot of that kind of content on Tumblr (go check out #filmedit or #moviegifs) and delivering the content as MP4 makes those tag pages load quite a bit faster, especially on slower connections. 

As an example, here’s an original GIF that’s 3.4 megabytes. Converting it to webp using GIFV gets us down to 2.3 MB, 68% of the original. But converting it to MP4, gets us down to 641K, 19% the size of the original and 5x faster to load. On tag and search pages, where we often show many many GIFs at the same time, this makes a huge difference in the loading and browsing experience. 

However, Creators on Tumblr regularly churn out hand-tuned, pain-stakingly optimized GIFs that really take advantage of the format. We really don’t want to make these look bad – they’re works of art, and they’re natively better than these modern competing formats. For now, since this is still just an experiment, we haven’t determined yet how we’ll handle the ability to opt-out of this change (for creators and/or consumers of GIFs), but we have it in mind. 

In the meantime, if you’d like to download the actual GIF version of any GIF, just replace the extension on the image url with .gif. So https://64.media.tumblr.com/af554ca5b0e60d313e40c8c47e13824b/d422d5f60551ce04-12/s2048x3072/4b5293df9726acfe461f7eaf661f92acd060dd21.mp4 becomes https://64.media.tumblr.com/af554ca5b0e60d313e40c8c47e13824b/d422d5f60551ce04-12/s2048x3072/4b5293df9726acfe461f7eaf661f92acd060dd21.gif

When

We’re rolling out this change on the web in phases over the next month. We’re currently only analyzing newly uploaded GIFs, so existing GIFs won’t be affected for a while. And it’s only rolled out to a percentage of users, so you may or may not see the feature yet today.

Guidelines for GIF creators

Reporting bad conversions

If you found a poor quality conversion on one of your GIFs, we’d love to hear about it. Please contact Support with the URL of the post and let us know which GIFs could be better. Please include what aspect of the transformation is problematic.

How can I preview what my GIF will look like after the transformation?

If you want to see how any GIF would look converted to MP4, just find the media URL for the GIF and replace the extension in the URL from gif or gifv to mp4. This works for any GIF on Tumblr, not just the GIFs that we’ve flagged as good candidates, so that we can see what the results could be like.

As a GIF creator, how can I opt-out?

For the moment, adding a single transparent pixel to the first frame of the GIF will opt that image out of conversion to MP4. It will not opt you out of conversion to WebP or other formats that our GIFV implementation may support. We’re still thinking through what another kind of creator and/or consumer opt-out could look like.

That said, we would love to hear from you! So please send in anything that looks wrong. Also, keep an eye on the Changes blog for more updates about this.

[topgun-imagines]

The One

Requested: yes

Summary: A night of singing at the bar leads Ice to realize something. Maybe you’re the one for him.

Word count: 1.5k

Warnings: drinking.

Pairings: Tom ‘Iceman’ Kazansky x fem!reader

A knock sounded at your door. With a groan you glanced down at the eyeliner pencil that clattered around your sink, having dropped it moments ago. “I’m coming!” You shouted. Anyone listening could tell that you were irritated s. You were supposed to be at the bar with your boyfriend and his friends in under half an hour. And you still had to do your hair, fixing your make-up now added to that list apparently.

Yanking the door open, you were met with the sight of your smirking boyfriend and his grinning RIO. With a roll of your eyes you walked back into your house. They walked through your front door after you. “Thought I was meeting you two there.” Iceman chuckled quietly as the pair sat down at your kitchen table. The boys slipped off their aviators as they watched you attempt to fix your make-up.

“Yea, well, we got off early,” Slider says, popping a grape in his mouth. “Plus someone figured you’d be late if we didn’t come get you.” He grinned as Ice glared at him. Your boyfriend turned to see your displeased face with a shy expression. You rolled your eyes at the small grin he gave you. Slider cackled at his friend's misfortune.

Ice stood from the table and walked over to you. Wrapping his arms around your waist he leaned down and nuzzled his face into your neck. “I love you,” He spoke quietly, enough that Slider couldn’t hear him. “Just wanted to come see you.” It was slightly muffled as your blond boyfriend pressed delicate kisses into the crook of your neck. You smiled gently, bringing a hand up to run it through his frosted tips, hearing him hum softly when you did.

“I know,” Your hand left his hair as you returned to fixing your make-up. “I love you too, Tom.” The use of his first name caused a blush to rise up his cheeks. You were the only one who ever called him by his given name. Even though you used his call sign, he would always find it endearing when you called him Tom. He pulled back. Pressing one last kiss to your cheek he headed back to Slider. The RIO was still grinning slightly, even under his friend's harsh stare.

In less than five minutes, you had finished your make-up. You moved to pull your hair out of the messy bun it was in and began running a brush through it. Behind you, Iceman and Slider were tossing grapes into each other’s mouths. Those two really could act like children sometimes. 10 minutes later you were finished your hair.

You turned to find Ice pulling a spoon out of the drawer before trying to launch a grape into Slider’s mouth. Keyword: Trying. With a small grin, you watched the blond pull back on the spoon before letting go. Sending the grape and the spoon flying. As usual, Ice’s aim was perfect, meaning that the grape went into Slider’s mouth, but so did the spoon. With a snort, you watched as the top of the spoon slid down into his throat. Ice was wheezing on the floor as Slider coughed loudly, rubbing the base of his neck. You moved forward and helped your boyfriend off the floor. He wiped tears of laughter from his eyes as he wrapped an arm around his waist.

Slider glared at his pilot as you made your way from the house and into Ice’s car. The RIO climbed in the back seat as Ice pulled out and began the 15-minute drive to the O club. It was a mostly silent drive, Slider grumbling about Ice making him deep throat a spoon while the two of you chuckled in the front. The blond pilot intertwined your hands and rested them on his thigh as he drove.

After what seemed like no time at all the three of you arrived at the club. You checked the clock on the dashboard before you hoped out. “Ha,” You started, sticking your tongue out at Ice. “I would have been here right on time.” Ice rolled his eyes at your teasing. He slipped his arm around your shoulders and practically dragged you into the club. Your laughter filled the air as the three of you pushed open the doors.

Once inside you headed towards your usual booth, Slider and Ice getting the drinks. They returned with Slider’s regular beer, Ice with vodka and ice water, and a colourful cocktail for you. Your boyfriend pressed a kiss to your forehead as he slid into the bench beside you. The three of you sat at the booth and chatted.

The boys caught you up on their progress at Top Gun while you asked a few questions. It was no secret to anyone around you that you weren’t super into all things aviation. But ever since meeting Tom, you had grown to want to love it. Something that he loved about you. Even though aviation wasn’t your passion, you would do anything you could, learn whatever you could, if it meant you could understand Tom. You would do it just because you loved him. He knew that you would go to the ends of the earth for him.

Multiple drinks later and you were much more carefree than you were when you entered the bar. You had had one more of those fancy cocktails and shared numerous shots with your boys, now sipping on a vodka that Tom ordered you. Slider was sipping on what you assumed was his third beer, although it was hard to tell at this point. Because he was the designated driver tonight, Tom was only nursing his second alcoholic drink of the night. He had drunk many ice waters though, something that made you laugh drunkenly.

He spent the night watching you and Slider, making sure that the two of you left the same way that you came; in one piece. Ice watched out for the both of you whether you were drunk out of your minds or not. He loved Slider like a brother. Slider was his RIO, the man that he trusted with his life and someone that he would always want by his side, in the air and on the ground. And you, you were the woman he loved. The person that he came home to after a long, hard day, and the person that could ebb all his stress and worries away.

When the song changed your boyfriend watched your face instantly light up. He recognized the song, it was one that he often found you singing, begging him to join in on the parts where a man was singing. Ice shook his head, knowing exactly what you had in mind. “Come on.” You wined, tugging gently on his arm. He was firm though, refusing with a grin to go up on the stage with you. You pouted at him, the look quickly being replaced by a malicious grin, one that he knew all too well.

He felt for Slider, he truly did, when you turned to him and gave him puppy dog eyes. A look that the RIO was infamous for not being able to resist. With a huff Slider stood from the table with you. The pair of you headed towards the stage, Ice watching with a small grin. You were practically bouncing on your heels while Slider trudged along behind you.

Material Girl by Madonna was blasting through the club. Many people that were singing quieted down when they saw you and Slider take the stage. Ice chose to ignore the looks of curiosity and judgment that he was receiving. Most of the people in the bar were other aviators and therefore knew that you and Slider arrived with mister ice cold, no mistakes. He watched with a soft smile as you began to sing the song.

He was transfixed by you. Watching the way you moved as you sang, the way you closed your eyes and lost yourself in the music. Another thing he loved about you. As he watched you and his best friend make what could only be described as complete fools of yourselves a thought entered his mind for the first time. He loved you. That he already knew. What he wasn’t expecting was to realize, in that moment with you singing Madonna to a crowded bar, was that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with you. He instantly knew that he wanted to marry you, to wake up next to you every day.

While Slider started on his part of the song, meaning that you were already halfway done with your performance, Tom Kazansky realized that you were the one. You were the one that he loved with every fiber of his being, the one that he wanted to hold you, and be held by you, for the rest of your lives.

You finished and hopped off the stage. Heading over to Tom, the blond pilot immediately wrapped his arms around you. It shocked you, to say the least, but it was a pleasant surprise. “Let’s go home, baby.” He whispered against your lips. Ice could feel you smiling into the kiss making him grin softly. Tom took you home, leaving Slider at the bar. Something that you both got an earful about in the morning.

a/n: Just a short one! Thank you for reading. Requests are open.

[powdermelonkeg]

I’ve seen a lot of lists for “hey, if you’re here from Twitter, here’s what you need to know,” so here's a bit of my own advice.

You’ll learn the culture 100x faster if you follow a few hundred blogs, reblog from them without tacking on anything, and just read what shows up on your dash. Guidelines are great and all, but having to remember a checklist is hard. So, some simple step-by-step instructions:

Personalize your blog Get some picture besides the default as your icon. Doesn’t matter what it is, maybe a meme or something, it just can’t be a geometric shape with a few dots. Also worth noting, you technically CAN use a selfie for your icon, but people will give you weird looks. We more or less don’t do that here (99.99% of the blogs that do this are porn bots). If you can’t decide on an icon/header, etc, then at least put “New here, haven’t figured out the site yet” or something to that effect in your bio. We block blank blogs here, because they’re usually bots.

Pick a fandom and go on a following spree This is the easiest way to fill up your dashboard. Search whatever fandom you want, find artists in that fandom, and follow them. Rinse and repeat as many times as necessary, and your dashboard will be full of things you enjoy. If you’re like me and are constantly refreshing looking for new content at 4am, you’ll need to follow 1000+ blogs. If you’re more interested in searching things than having your dash bring you content, keep it around 100 to 300.

Reblog things without commentary Tumblr is a VERY different culture to Twitter, and if you’ve been on Twitter a long while, you’ll have habits around how you interact with people. The two generally do NOT mix well. I’m sure you’ve seen by now the posts like “reblogs are good, likes are worthless” or “don’t censor things in your tags” or “don’t tag like Twitter.” Genuinely, the best way to speedrun getting used to this place is to reblog things you like without adding onto them, and learning the culture by reading the posts on your dash. Once you’re confident that you know how we do things here, go ahead and sprinkle in some tag rambles or Tumblr memes, but that adjustment time is going to be different for everybody.

Scroll through your dash No, really. If you’re bored, take a tour through the recent posts of the people you’ve followed. You’ll find good artwork, cool stories, funny moments, and everything in between, but most importantly, you’ll start building those habits we regulars on Tumblr learned awhile ago, like which memes are a genuine response (Apollo’s dodgeball and red for color theory, currently) and how people tag things here.

Curate your dash Everyone’s pretty much been screaming it from the top of their lungs, but there is no algorithm here. The dash you have is the one you make from the people you follow. This means that you’re responsible for the company you keep. If you see a post you dislike, unfollow them. If someone’s going on a fandom spree that annoys you, unfollow. Point of view you don’t agree with? Unfollow. You can block for the same reasons, and block liberally. On top of this, you can filter out terms and tags in your settings. This is a link to it on desktop; scroll down and you’ll see an entire section titled “Content you see.” On mobile, you can find it by clicking the little person icon in the bottom right, then the settings wheel in the corner of your blog. From there it’s “General settings,” then scroll down a bit to “Content you see” and click it.

And that’s the easiest way to cozy up in this place.

If you’re worried about things not to do, everyone will give you a different list, but here are a few universal faux pas:

Sending hate Sending hate in the ask box is, unfortunately, something this site is known for, but doing so here tells everyone that can see it that you’re an obsessed child. If you do it on anon, you look even worse, even if you can technically “get away with it.” A mature Tumblr user doesn’t send hate no matter what; they block the user they dislike and move on. If you get hate, block them. Yes, even if they’re on anon. It blocks their IP address from sending you anything on anon, forcing them to use their real username if they actually want anything to get through.

Negative commentary Things along the lines of “I don’t even like this show, but-” are not compliments. They’re very discouraging to artists, and using them makes you look insensitive at best. If you want to convey “I don’t watch this show, but I like this art,” you can start it with “I don’t even go here, but-” instead. And if you want to criticize—don't. Genuinely, do not. It's the easiest way to get people not to like you here; if you don't have something nice to say about an art piece or fanfic, then just don't interact with it.

Censoring sensitive words The “content you see” feature on this site does its job and it does it well! If I, a Tumblr user, dislike the mention of “cleaning supplies,” I will block it. This means any post that contains “cleaning supplies” will be filtered from my dash. What this also means is that if you write it to get around this—for example, “clean*ng suppl*es,” “clea/ning sup/plies,” “cle@n!ng $uppl!es,” and so on, it will not be filtered, and I will have cleaning supplies on my dash despite my precautions. The only time you'll see someone doing this is if they don't want a specific user or term searched: squ/id-ink-per/sonal won't show up if I search my username, ze/lda won't show up in the "zelda" tag for that audience to see, etc. People on this site do not get terminated/shadowbanned for specific words. The closest we have ever gotten to that was when Apple tried to block sensitive content and made it so things like #girl wouldn’t show up on Apple devices. Which was a bug that was then fixed. Believe it or not, our moderation team is actually human, so if you’re terminated, it’s not because of some search-and-destroy program built into the site.

Now, before I go, here are some quality-of-life things to help you more easily use Tumblr’s features.

Only the first five tags on a post are indexed If I tag something #zelda, #loz, #fave mutuals, #ask bee, #worldbuilding, #you have no idea how long i spent on this, #i’m going to bed now then only the bolded tags are going to show up in the search results. Someone searching #i’m going to bed now won’t find my post, because it’s not in those first five tags.

You can change the color scheme of the site You’ll have to do it once on desktop and once on mobile, because the two platforms have different color schemes. On desktop, click the little person icon in the top right, then “Change Palette.” On mobile, tap the person in the bottom right, then settings wheel, “General settings,” “Color palette.” We have a lot more than dark and light mode!

You can insert links without interrupting your text Find whatever link you want to insert first, then highlight the word you want to turn into that link, press the “insert link” button, and paste it in. On desktop, it looks like a little infinity symbol. On mobile, it’s a little chain link icon. It lets you do cool things like this whenever you want.

Text can be colored! On mobile, it’s really, really easy to color text—just highlight what you want and the colors will pop up automatically. On desktop, it’s trickier to do, but we have a lot more options here: In the corner of your post, there’s a little settings wheel. Click that, then change “Rich Text” to “HTML.” Your page is going to look like weird code. This is normal. I recommend coloring text as the LAST thing you do because of this. Go here, type the text you want to color, and pick your colors out, then copy the HTML code at the bottom. Then go here, paste that in the box, and replace the “;” with nothing (I’m serious, nothing; not a blank space, just leave the “with this” box empty). Copy the semicolon-less code, go to the Tumblr post, and paste it in. It’s that easy! Fun fact, you can also do this in your desktop blog description, if you want; that little box is fully HTML-configurable.

And those are my starting tips! Have fun out there!

[cyle]

Hi, how have you been? Flash round. (Sorry)

Has it ever been considered / is there a way to not see your own posts in the dash? Sometimes I go on a reblogging spree and when I reload the dash I might miss any post that came in at that time.

If I block an account, will I stop seeing their posts, or is it only blocking interactions? (There's a couple of accounts that are always in my Recommended tab and I would like them to not be there).

Assuming that their posts won't show up, does the recommended engine take into consideration if a blog is blocked? What's the hierarchy of events going on back there? Could, theoretically, the recommended engine pull all its posts from blocked blogs, which then don't show up because they got blocked, giving an empty tab? (I know it essentially pulls an endless scroll from different sources forever so it would really be empty BUT as a thought experiment)

hello! i'm okay. thanks for asking!

Has it ever been considered / is there a way to not see your own posts in the dash?

funny enough, it used to be a Tumblr Labs experiment setting, to be able to see all of your own posts in the dashboard. we decided to turn it on for everybody a few years ago. there isn't a way to turn it off right now, but that's an interesting idea. i don't like adding more settings, but maybe that's a signal we should use for ranking the feed... generally, this is why the "Best stuff first" setting exists, to resort the feed and make situations like this a little better.

If I block an account, will I stop seeing their posts, or is it only blocking interactions?

blocking a blog should prevent you from seeing it in recommendations everywhere/anywhere. if it isn't, please send in a Support ticket about it so we can fix that!

Assuming that their posts won't show up, does the recommended engine take into consideration if a blog is blocked? What's the hierarchy of events going on back there? Could, theoretically, the recommended engine pull all its posts from blocked blogs, which then don't show up because they got blocked, giving an empty tab?

it depends on the feed. most of our feeds skip blocked blogs as a part of the query to fetch data, in which case you wouldn't have an "empty feed" for that reason. but some of our feeds filter after fetching data, which means that "empty feed" could theoretically happen, if all of the data that was fetched were from blocked blogs.

that's why having a super long list of blocked blogs (as in, thousands or tens of thousands of blocked blogs) could actually make your tumblr experience degrade a bit, if those blogs are highly active. that's still on us engineers to solve and make less of an issue.

[self-loving-vampire]

have you considered turning on tips on your tumblr to see if you can make money from your tumblr popularity? I personally am not rich enough to send money to strangers but others might be

Ah, that suggestion is very kind but even if I felt like that was likely to happen I get the feeling that adding financial incentives to posting would make it less fun for me.

I want to be free to express myself and post about things no one but my friends and I care about without the psychological burden of potentially alienating those inclined to give me money.

It is far more pleasant for me to just do as I please and flood every dashboard with my personal obsessions and abnormal takes without feeling as if I have to conform to the values and preferences of whoever is paying.

[canolaaoil]

what do u mean by "writing new ones on ur webs"

i make those web weaving posts occasionally and i always write my own image descriptions on them but a fair amount of people end up writing their own which annoys me for two reasons. the first being that since my webs tend to be really long adding image descriptions in the reblogs makes the post even longer, and i don't want my posts to be causing unnecessary irritation by clogging up people's dashboards. secondly, to me that means the person isn't bothering to take the time to fully read my caption which is just basic reading comprehension lol. i know some people said that putting ids under read mores is less accessible but when i was learning to write ids i asked a few different blogs and was told it doesn't really matter if i include a sentence saying the id is under a read more in the caption itself.

if my ids are incomplete/inaccurate i would prefer someone send me an ask so that i can edit the original post and make a note that the post was edited so that there aren't a bunch of different, conflicting ids running around on one post. also ids are kind of like commentary because i can let readers know what i personally focus on in the image (subconsciously or not) so they are an extended version of the analysis imo.

[onelungmcclung]

so, as mentioned, as a result of a persistent tumblr error, I've been trying out a private dreamwidth journal for a personal project and... I like it so much more?

my focus isn't constantly assailed by dashboard/blog notifications; the chances of being shown casual antisemitism are nil. I found a mobile-friendly layout in one of the resource communities (tbf the standard layouts may work on mobile, but I didn't like any of them enough). I can still post images and even gif sets. I can post and organise my vast number of research texts. I can cross-reference to my heart's delight. it saves draft posts. you can put multiple cut tags in the same entry. the tags are much better organised and easy to rename. they're all in the sidebar! and there is a tags page! you can pin two posts (more with paid accounts). I can set the default access level (public/friends/private) for the whole journal. there are good comment controls. there is image storage (public/friends/private). there’s also the benefit of the memories feature (public/friends/private) for saving posts. logging in doesn't take me to a feed of updates from my contacts; I have to go to the /reading page to seek them out, which is far better for my concentration. you can send direct messages to other users. there are no ads or algorithms. the faq section is pretty comprehensive and easy to navigate. perhaps most importantly, it doesn't break my fucking posts. I love it, I feel saner already, and I may upgrade to a paid account to help keep them afloat.

(^ photographer tags in my sidebar vs tag page. so tidy.)

(^ leaving notes to myself in the readmore links)

the only thing I miss about tumblr is the archive page and being able to filter that by post type/tag. and having sideblogs is a lot easier than having to switch accounts (ig this is why LJers used to create communities for their fic/graphics and limit them to mod-only posting; you can create as many communities as you like). for whatever reason, the rich text editor on DW is not working for me and I intermittently hit 403 error pages (it works after I hit refresh; irritating, and I hope they fix it, but not a dealbreaker). I don't mind using the html editor; I'm used to them, and frankly they tend to be more reliable. there is no mobile app for DW but that too may be advantageous (fewer distractions). so I can't post on mobile as easily, but I can still access the curated information while on the go if necessary. some things take a little longer to post but that is fine.

I have liked sideblogs as a way to organise research projects, but it is always an uphill battle. pages don't work on the app anymore, trying to access tumblr via mobile web is for stronger people than I, and so I have to pin long posts full of internal links in order to navigate everything I've curated. and now those are more or less un-editable.

(^ from my lovely archive page. RIP.)

I originally ended up on tumblr bc LJ was going dead and tumblr was where everyone was migrating, but there's a very real possibility that the LJ/DW interface is the one I'm conditioned to. apart from being organised and efficient and non-distracting, it's also a more satisfying, slower paced way of interacting with people: it's geared towards writing more than images and so functions more as a journalling/penpal kind of thing; the only way to interact is to write comments or DMs. (I have a friend who is now part of an international friend/meetup group with her old LJ mutuals. the bonds of pseudonymous penpalship are strong.)

obviously we are never ever ever going back to LJ:

but afaik DW seems fine.

I'm resistant to nostalgia but using DW does remind me of when the internet felt more DIY and interesting (good blogs, forums, etc) and less intrusive. ultimately: if it feels more enjoyable, I'll go with it; no need to overthink it.

I set up a (different) DW account a few years back but never quite figured out what to write about so it's been sitting as a backup fic archive. however, I may start using it as more of a journal/commonplace book. (do I use the existing account for this or do I set up a whole new account. to be decided.)

if anyone else is using dreamwidth, or is minded to try it, do let me know <3

[patriciavetinari]

I just saw a post saying 'we just have to let the staff know we're unhappy about the updates and we'll be fine' all non-chalant and honestly, I wished we lived in a world op lives i . Tumblr is barely functioning even now for the purposes it claims to function (blogging moreso than social media). I mean I like this dump, I've made it my own, but they are serious about increasing revenue - the ads, the blazes, the lives, the unblockable emporium and art accounts. It's a company like any other. Come on. Under capitalism corporation has no reason to listen to the users if not doing so increases income, and tumblr is a corporation, however small and poorly planned that corporation is and however cosy we feel here. They're here to make money, from us, not to provide five star experience. Theh will not listen. They have not listened about stuff that threatened people's lives, like nazi blogs, terfs, absolutely vile bigots, death threats. They have not listened on live, on dashboard preferences for new accounts, sex workers, fucking search function. They gave you polls and you think someone there is listening and vibing with the working class? Yes it might suck less than other right now, but tumblr is sure lubing up its throat to reach tbe deepthroating level of sucking.

Consider forums. Learn basic website building. Get emails (not dicsords, that place is also losing any little appeal it might have had) of your mutuals so that once this all will come tumbling down (pun intended and yes it will) so that you stay in touch.

You've got to stop being reliant on poorly run websites to keep you connected. Emails and phone numbers are more useful. Don't lose touch with a person you have no other way of contacting other than tumblr / discord / twitter / reddit. Get at email. Get a phone number if you're comfortable and have enough trust.

Once all of the sites become unusable, yes, you will have to put your shitposts and memed into a letter and make a mailing list if needed, and that might be ridiculous until you feel lonely and the only person you want to talk to is the mutual shitposter and then you send and email and can get an answer and stay in touch.

Yes gmail is a horrible google product, yes look for alternatives, but emails are not going under as soon as social media. And fucking write them down in a notebook in case the situation is so destitute you are locked out of your accounts or even lose reliable access to internet at home.

Emails and address books are your friends.

Also, consider starting forums for your fandoms and discussion topics and roleplays. Yes it's nore finicky and you need accounts for those but tech companies got us where we are today by being so darn convenient we forgot how to live a life without them. Take charge of keeping up your online communities without relying on predatory bloated companies.

[theartbook35]

we have built-in blacklists now and also i think you have to manually flick a switch to make your dashboard 100% chronological (but at least it stays that way once u did that and doesn't change back at some point)

(screenshot courtesy of a post on my dash i wanted to link you but can't send links. still. 🙄)

oh, and you can mark posts as "mature" now and have to go to the settings to set whether or not you want to see these kinda posts by other ppl or not. i think the default is No bc ofc it is. idk how well these posts show up in the (still ineffective) searches tho.

they added lots of stuff in the past couple of months

and the ToS slightly changed a few weeks ago but nothing big. like, tiddies are kind of back but only tiddies and only if they're not shown in too much of a sexual setting or something.

people got very trusting towards staff and way less bitter about the site in general. so some of the vibes changed a little, too.

that's all the new stuff i can think off the top of my head

welcome back :D

Ooh, thank you dear, this is great stuff to know!

I'm gonna go play with those settings!

I did set everything to NO with the mature stuff a little while ago, lololol. The default was actually YES which is super weird to me. Like, don't try to overprotect me tumblr, I'm good, lol.

And thank you for the welcome back as well :D

[seanmonstar]

This Month in hyper: August 2022

Another hot summer month has gone by. Besides many of us convening for RustConf, a lot of wonderful contributors made great progress around hyper.

10,000 stars!

At the beginning of the month, we celebrated hyper reaching 10,000 stars on GitHub! ⭐

Releases

h2 v0.3.14

We released v0.3.14 of h2, the HTTP/2 dependency of hyper. Besides some internal refactoring, the user facing fix is that a server which responds early and wants to ignore the body will now send a NO_ERROR instead of a CANCEL, as the spec recommends, thanks to @erebe!

httparse v1.8.0

A new version of the HTTP/1 parser of hyper came out as well. @nox added an option to ignore invalid header lines, as browsers frequently do. And work from @lucacasonato and @AaronO improved request parsing performance by about ~13%!

hyper 1.0

We cruised on forward towards the stable hyper 1.0. Part of that is pushing the less stable (higher-level, more opinionated) features to hyper-util. So, I removed hyper::client::service, hyper::client::connect, hyper::Client, and hyper::Server. @MrGunflame removed the tcp feature, and it's related code connect and accept code.

The body module is also getting some cleaning. @Michael-J-Ward renamed hyper::Body to hyper::body::Recv temporarily (want to bikeshed the new name?), so that @RajivTS could rename hyper::body::HttpBody to simpler hyper::body::Body. @Xuanwo removed the "full" constructors from Body, and @oddgrd made Body::channel private, since those are now separate types in http-body-util. I wrote a proposal for a forwards-compatible Body trait, and published an article as a preface to the pattern matching compatibility issues being solve in that proposal.

For additions, I added version-specific Connection types for the client, to replace the "either-version" type already there. We also put our governance down in writing.

You can follow along (and join us!) on this dashboard. The goal is to have a release candidate out in September!

HTTP/3

@eagr got a spec compliance report rendered, using s2n-quic's cargo duvet. This lets us track via comments in the code how much of the HTTP/3 spec we are obeying. We still need to fill in a bunch of comments, but there's some in there already!

I created a tower-h3 repository to experiment with a standalone h3 client and server that can use Tower middleware. @kckeiks wrote up a magnificient PR to add experiemental HTTP/3 support to reqwest. The blocker to merging is figuring out the best way to publish "experimental" support to crates.io.

Tower

We've heard from many sources that doing retries correctly is hard. Tower has had a retry middleware, but it clearly wasn't doing enough to get proper retries into people's applications. So, @LucioFranco wrote up an issue outlining the ways we'll make it better. This includes some middleware changes to clarify concepts, and additional utilities so that designing custom retry policies is easy, and pushes the user towards safe defaults.

So far, Lucio has improved the Policy trait, derived a simple rng utility, and added a backoff module with trait and a good default based on exponential backoff.

[moreyouread]

Hacking Growth

Quick Growth Hacks

Growth hacking is a process of quick iterations and A/B testing changes to see what sticks:

• get people to write good reviews to improve downloads

• make sure people are aware of a feature through upsells

• add call to actions in notifications

• make timely upsells

• update the language of the upsells

• requiring people you share something with to also sign up for the product

Establishing PMF

• What percent of users say they would be very disappointed if your product went away? Should be higher than 40-50%

• What does the j curve retention curve look like? Benchmark % on market curves or similar products internally.

Important Early Analysis

• Compare highly engaged users with those who aren’t highly engage for behavior differences. Get the less engaged users to do those behaviors, e.g. editing a chart becomes part of the new experience flow

• Look for users’ latent behavior to build on, and don’t be afraid to pivot your company entirely, e.g. Youtube started as a dating website, and Instagram used to have many other features outside of photo uploading

• Data is impactful when it can debunk common mistaken lore, e.g. more hurdles like training will make less people want a product 

• Look for the aha moment that users need to have in order to retain on your product, i.e. the single most impactful retentive feature.

Steps to Hack Growth

1. Discover your aha moment in the product

2. Create growth levers strategy to identify a targeted way to run experiments and growth hack. Start with the largest impact areas first, not niche optimizations like a button color change.

• Build an overly simplistic growth formula that captures everything leading up to the aha moment. 

• Make sure the aha moment or growth metric Northstar is measured in a sensical way, e.g.:

Using DAU to measure success of Airbnb is weird because nobody is booking a vacation every day. The same could be said about Yelp. There’s a ceiling on how often even the most satisfied users would visit. 

As another example LinkedIn didn’t care about daily active users, just number of people who signed up with a resume profile.

3. Create simple dashboard with the most important cuts (and % changes) for tracking progress against goals

4. Analysis for insights on what makes your more engaged users the best, ideate, prioritize ideas with impact vs. effort trade offs, test, evaluate, start over - this is the growth meeting cadence we should aspire to. 

When in doubt, control group wins when results are mixed

Acquisition

• think about the right advertisement channels for you based on your strengths, low costs, and types of users you have

• use A/B tests to optimize ad copies

• create viral loops where incentives match core product value (e.g. refer friends for $5 to send to friends on Venmo)

Activation

• map the product funnel for drop offs and send surveys at points where it’s either really bad or really good

• look for tipping points in the data that make people stay

• reduce friction, e.g. thru single sign on or allowing users to use it before signing up

• some friction is good, e.g. balancing asking for users to create an account with browsing without it can encourage signing up

• Gamification, eg progress of profile completion on LinkedIn

• Triggers, eg. notifications that rely on authority, scarcity, social proof, commitment, discounts, reminders to complete, new features

Retention

• understand the tipping points for early retention by sign up cohort and usage behavioral cohorts

• get users habitually using it for medium retention by thinking about the trigger, action, reward framework. Rewards include:

- brand ambassador program like Yelp elite

- recognition of achievement

- improved personalization

- more value coming soon

• long term retention involves

- optimizations to product features with A/B tests

- new features introduced slowly over time

- ongoing onboarding slowly over time

- resurrecting zombie customers by asking them questions about why they left

Revenue

Analyze product funnels by surface along the way to ad monetization to find weaker areas

Compare cohorts of different revenue and target the higher revenue cohorts

Learn what new features users want by asking them directly, ranking responses, and incentivizing good responses

Make non-creepy recommendations of similar products using Jaccard Index

Optimize and experiment with your pricing by surveying people of what price point is best (usually it’s a U-shape because people question the quality when it’s too cheap)

Building personas of different revenue cohorts and help build more nuance strategy

Pricing relativity can get users to pay for the more expensive item with a decoy middle priced item

Less is not always more: people will sometimes pay more for perceived quality

Penny gap: people don’t want to pay for mobile apps. You’ll make more money by not asking people to pay

Consumer psychology: reciprocity, consistency of previous actions, social proof, authority, liking, scarcity

[evillordzog]

Making GIFs load faster

@wip reblogged @engineering

Jul 19 2022 · a day ago

engineering

Jul 19 2022 · a day ago

AKA why are some of my GIFs being turned into videos?

Overview

We’re experimenting with serving GIFs as MP4 videos instead of GIFV (which typically serves animated WebP) on the web to a small subset of folks on Tumblr, not everyone. This does not affect anyone using the mobile apps.

The performance improvements from using MP4s in this way are huge, and will make Tumblr load animated images faster and use less data in almost every circumstance, with no discernible loss in quality.

This conversion only applies to specific types of GIFs, such as ones without transparency in the first frame. We’ve tested this conversion on thousands of GIFs, and we’re still tuning it to be virtually indistinguishable from the original GIF.

XKit’s “Vanilla Videos” extension was causing a bug with this experiment, but a recent new XKit version release has fixed that issue.

If you’re served an MP4 instead of a GIF, clicking on the image will still open it in a lightbox, which you can download as GIFV or GIF, depending on what’s served.

Since this is still just an experiment, there is no way to opt-out yet; adding some kind of opt-out (on the creator and/or consumer side) is a possibility though.

If you’re served a GIF as MP4 and it looks wrong, please contact Support with a link to the image and what looks wrong about the conversion. We need examples to help us improve the experience. Also, please do not send duplicate support requests.

What

As a recent Changes post mentioned, we’re experimenting with transforming GIFs into MP4s on the dashboard on web. Our goal is to get GIFs onto dashboards as fast as possible, while retaining as much of the original quality as possible.

For years now, we’ve delivered GIFs using our GIFV format, which transparently transcodes GIFs to more modern formats, like WebP, supported by the <img> tag. We’ve made improvements to that process over the past year, better supporting large GIFs and increasing the quality of the transformation, but conversion to WebP has limited benefits. A typical conversion only halves the file size and animated WebP isn’t well supported by Safari. Meanwhile, MP4 conversions offer even smaller files, often 8 to 10x smaller than the original GIF, as well as faster loading times and broader browser support.

We’re being picky about which GIFs get converted to MP4. We only apply the transformation to GIFs that pass our criteria for transformation. Currently, that means GIFs that don’t use transparency in the first frame, have constant frame rates, and are under 10 seconds long.

We’ve tested this new process against thousands of GIFs from Tumblr, ranging from your typical TV show gifset to pixel art to animated text, and are confident the transformation looks good for the vast majority of content. However, we’re still tweaking the algorithm and are open to feedback. This is a subjective process, and if you see an MP4 that looks worse than the GIF, please send it our way!

Currently, the change only affects the experience within Tumblr (www.tumblr.com). The blog network (i.e. your-blog.tumblr.com) is not affected and continues to use GIFV to deliver GIFs.

Why are we doing this?

As mentioned above, GIFs are almost always inefficient compared to modern formats. They’re larger in size, take longer to load, are slower to render, and use more cache space. Whereas our GIFV conversion usually halves the size, the new GIF->MP4 conversion is often 8 to 10 times smaller for film- or TV-like content. We have a lot of that kind of content on Tumblr (go check out #filmedit or #moviegifs) and delivering the content as MP4 makes those tag pages load quite a bit faster, especially on slower connections.

As an example, here’s an original GIF that’s 3.4 megabytes. Converting it to webp using GIFV gets us down to 2.3 MB, 68% of the original. But converting it to MP4, gets us down to 641K, 19% the size of the original and 5x faster to load. On tag and search pages, where we often show many many GIFs at the same time, this makes a huge difference in the loading and browsing experience.

However, Creators on Tumblr regularly churn out hand-tuned, pain-stakingly optimized GIFs that really take advantage of the format. We really don’t want to make these look bad – they’re works of art, and they’re natively better than these modern competing formats. For now, since this is still just an experiment, we haven’t determined yet how we’ll handle the ability to opt-out of this change (for creators and/or consumers of GIFs), but we have it in mind.

In the meantime, if you’d like to download the actual GIF version of any GIF, just replace the extension on the image url with .gif. So https://64.media.tumblr.com/af554ca5b0e60d313e40c8c47e13824b/d422d5f60551ce04-12/s2048x3072/4b5293df9726acfe461f7eaf661f92acd060dd21.mp4 becomes https://64.media.tumblr.com/af554ca5b0e60d313e40c8c47e13824b/d422d5f60551ce04-12/s2048x3072/4b5293df9726acfe461f7eaf661f92acd060dd21.gif

When

We’re rolling out this change on the web in phases over the next month. We’re currently only analyzing newly uploaded GIFs, so existing GIFs won’t be affected for a while. And it’s only rolled out to a percentage of users, so you may or may not see the feature yet today.

Guidelines for GIF creators

Reporting bad conversions

If you found a poor quality conversion on one of your GIFs, we’d love to hear about it. Please contact Support with the URL of the post and let us know which GIFs could be better. Please include what aspect of the transformation is problematic.

How can I preview what my GIF will look like after the transformation?

If you want to see how any GIF would look converted to MP4, just find the media URL for the GIF and replace the extension in the URL from gif or gifv to mp4. This works for any GIF on Tumblr, not just the GIFs that we’ve flagged as good candidates, so that we can see what the results could be like.

As a GIF creator, how can I opt-out?

For the moment, adding a single transparent pixel to the first frame of the GIF will opt that image out of conversion to MP4. It will not opt you out of conversion to WebP or other formats that our GIFV implementation may support. We’re still thinking through what another kind of creator and/or consumer opt-out could look like.

That said, we would love to hear from you! So please send in anything that looks wrong. Also, keep an eye on the Changes blog for more updates about this.

[juna777]

About Taletecode

Taletecode is an internet based device that conveys a bunch of apparatuses to assist you with composing code better and quicker. It assists you with composing code quicker by entering a code bit from any language and immediately creating another scrap in some other language. It assists you with composing code better by approving your code and bringing up potential blunders. Taletecode likewise permits you to get bits of knowledge into the construction of your code, empowering you to pick the most suitable language and to level up those coding skills. You could have found out about the tremendous advantages of coding with the keyboard.You will likewise decrease your opportunity to commit errors. Yet, coding with your console isn't quite as straightforward as it sounds.

There are a ton of interesting points, such as utilizing the right console, programming dialects, composing styles, and that's only the tip of the iceberg. Computerized tests are an incredible method for guaranteeing that your code is right, however how might you begin with composing mechanized tests?Instead of attempting to robotize each and every test, you can begin with mechanized unit tests. Mechanized unit tests will be tests that sudden spike in demand for your code to guarantee that it's right and that your code acts true to form I will tell you the best way to begin composing robotized tests.

Anybody can code, yet not every person can code well. It takes an interesting ability to have the option to take a gander at the 10,000 foot view and comprehend how a particular piece of code will work with different bits of code. This is where coding ability becomes possibly the most important factor. Many individuals accept that it requires forever and a day to foster coding ability. In any case, there are individuals out there who have created coding ability through ability and difficult work. One such individual is Taletecode. Everybody needs to compose code that isn't simply intelligible yet additionally simple to keep up with.

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assist you with coding can make the whole interaction simpler and quicker. Coding is a fundamental piece of numerous organizations today. Assuming you are a software engineer, you could have caught wind of the instrument that assists you with composing code better and quicker, Taletecode was worked by designers for designers. Our point is to make your coding life simpler by adding and further developing elements that assist you with composing code quicker and with less exertion. We are likewise endeavoring to make Taletecode open to however many designers as could be allowed. We trust that this is valuable and With this information, we realize that you can work on your abilities, and with the assistance of our program, you can compose code better and quicker. So the thing would you say you are hanging tight for? Evaluate Taletecode today.

The Roadmap

Site Development

Whitepaper Documentation

Fabricate Phase - Smart Contract

Fabricate Phase - dApp V1 Dashboard

Sending Phase - Smart Contract - Testnet

Strength Finance Audit

Sending Phase - Smart Contract Deployment - Mainnet

Sending Phase - dApp V1 Dashboard

Start and Promote Discord Community

PR Marketing

Abundance Campaign

Pre-Launch Marketing

Fair Launch on PinkSale

PinkLock Liquidity Locked

Twitter Marketing Campaign

YouTube Marketing Campaign

CoinMarketCap Listing

Certik Application

Certik Listing

Certik Audit

Airdrop Campaign

CoinGecko Listing

Website optimization

follow more:

Website : https://www.taletecode.com/

Whitepaper : https://taletecode.gitbook.io/talete-code-the-best-apy-fixed/the-buy-and-sell-fees

Twitter : https://twitter.com/TaleteCode

Discord : https://discord.com/invite/3rywTwGU

Telegram : https://t.me/+f6huFGe8t1M4OTA8

Medium : https://medium.com/@taletecode

Reddit : https://www.reddit.com/user/leomatey/

Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdvcbBq74j1pIC4JvuleLhA/videos

author:

Bitcointalk Username: juna777

BitcoinTalk Profile URL: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=2826469

Wallet Address: 0x79b91dA4d639279050b1213D3eAFda48738CFDa2

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