#tumblr staff

[purrtylilthings]

According to Tumblr, bikini shots are "porn", while nude naked women showing their vag are suitable for all audiences including for display at religious edifices. lol ok! The second photo comes from a well-known, well-followed blog, not some obscure little unknown one.

Can you explain this tumblr? Please - what exactly are your pathetic moronic "standards"? Do you have one?

[xthunderbolt]

Look I know this might look tiny but I've spent the entire day adjusting and remaking it and my eyes burn so take it as it is.

[hypersfixation]

Loving this tumblr glitch that is just giving me a frozen gif of Danny Pudi instead of an ad.

[tblrtwt]

[nice-fecken-lady]

Tumblr staff must be so excited to finally roll out a feature that Tumblr users like and aren't bullying them for

[staffs-secret-blog]

We actually have been trying to sell your info but it's all shit and no one wants it

[otterandterrier]

Tumblr and the No Good, Very Bad Idea

So. You might have heard the news that, as of July 12, Tumblr is testing out converting GIFs into looping MP4 videos to help pages load faster:

This is bad. Tumblr is the only mainstream site left where you can post GIFs and they’ll continue to be GIFs - well, sort of, as Tumblr previously tested and implemented turning GIF into GIFV with the same purpose, and it decreases the quality of the original GIF file. Turning them into MP4 videos is even worse.

GIFs are GIFs. They’re not videos. Creators spend hours making a GIF that will look good as a GIF, not as a video.

I hope I don’t need to explain to anyone why continuing to screw over creators is bad for a site like Tumblr, whose continued existence depends on creators not giving up on it, and why gif-making is important to fandom existence.

I for one will not continue to make any more gifsets if I know they’ll just be turned into MP4 files. It’s disappointing to spend my time making something and watch it become ugly once it’s uploaded - and that’s what is already happening without the MP4 conversion.

WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?

Don’t bother sending a support ticket! They will tell you to do what I’m about to tell you:

Send an ask or submission to @wip​ - the official “work in progress” blog of Tumblr where people can send in suggestions.

Their ask box is open every Monday from 6AM to 6PM EST.

The conversation isn’t over, guys, but it’s important to be a part of it. If you’re a creator or support creators (and you should), then set an alarm on Monday and go send them a message.

[podcastwizard]

*taps a microphone* hey, uh, anyone see that new tumblr update where long posts are partially hidden? but when you click “expand” the posts aren’t even that long? yeah, heh, it looks like tumblr’s got the same definition of “long” that my ex-boyfriend did. *two drums and a cymbal fall from the ceiling and i am instantly killed*

[jv]

I would love people here to understand that @staff is really about 200 different people, divided in multiple teams and groups, that sometimes work together, sometimes barely knows what each other do. All that people have a high degree of autonomy and there is little centralisation, beyond sharing some general goals: make Tumblr grow, make the tumblrinas happy, and over everything else, make this site profitable so it's survival is assured. So not only every one of us is far from knowing what everyone else is doing or why, but it's not that there is a centralised decision making procedure: each group works towards the shared goals in the best possible way they can think of. On top of that, Automattic, the parent company, always have been a very decentralised organisation. The employee manual, quite literally, tell you it's better to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission: you are supposed to go forward with what you think it's a good move and not get blocked by bureaucracy, and the worst thing it can happen is that you may be asked to rollback what you did.

That means that everything "staff" do is actually the work of individual teams, or even persons. And not always everything is supported by everyone else. If I, let's say, hated color blue, I would only need to convince a couple of people on my team and, maybe, a designer ("for all the seven hells, Javi, remove whatever you want but shut the fuck up already") and bam, no blue text anymore. Would that mean "staff" is doing some 4D chess by removing a color? No, it only would mean I'm a little weird dude who hates blue and can be a pest to his co-workers is very convincing

And people sometimes see something and go "wtf, staff, you are horrible!", but it's not "staff being evil", it's usually someone screwing things up. I have been reckless and broken things a hundred times (hell, I've leaked by mistake the biggest change in years a month before it was going to actually was going to happen) and people reaction always had been "staff is incompetent"... But the fair thing to say in that case would be "Javi is incompetent", since my very competent coworkers are the ones who fix my fuckery.

My favorite example of this is people saying things like "now you can see people who work on Tumblr actually using Tumblr! Staff is trying hard to look more human to us". My brothers in Christ, do you really think me, or any of my coworkers who identify as staff here, do it because the company encourages us to do so?? I personally do it because, you know, I spend a third of my life at work, so yeah, I like to talk about what I do and about what it happens at "the office". And yeah, most of the people working for automattic actually does it for open source projects, so it's not the company has a solid culture of censoring any of us when talking about work in public.

So when something happens, we release this, or screw something up, or do whatever, there is always people saying "staff is trying to do this or that", or "staff pretends to be doing this but what they are trying to do is that"... And for all the fucks, "staff" is far from being able to be sneaky or try to trick you. Staff is a being whose left hand doesn't know what their right hand is doing: the left hand just trust it's something good for everyone, and viceversa.

So when someone says "staff is not your friend"... No shit: staff is not only not a person, it's barely an entity with a unified agency at all beyond "let's keep tumblr alive". Staff is not your friend. People in staff can be, though. And they can do things you agree with, things you don't, and everything in between... But "Staff", at large, is not trying to play 4D chess with y'all, folks, we at just trying to make this place, believe it or not, the best it could be.

[samaspic31]

This is why we’ve been telling people not to stan staff and this website, Just because they’ve gotten better at making the same jokes as the users doesn’t make it « one of us ». Tumblr is a corporation, an exploitative one. @staff pls have a crumb of respect for artists and do not expect free labor, custom art AND all exploitation rights for MERCH. Exposure does not pay bills. This is extremely insulting.

@libbyframe i am so sorry they would even disrespect your time and your craft like that.

[arsonwizard]

[melenae]

[bubblewrap-joints]

sometimes I forget that tumblr is an actual legitimate company with a bunch of employees and not like ten slightly inebriated people huddled over a pc at 1 am in a basement discussing how many ways they can say fuck you to twitter

[themonstersmistresss]

Its on Tumblr so it's different

[rocketsandstuff]

holy shit guys they're here and i have never had fewer regrets

[pikaman-fan]