Aren’t you glad covid didn’t happen in 2005 like all the scene kids would be calling the new variant the omnomnomicron with a cartoon dinosaur or something
I made you a vaccine but I eated it
@six-of-ravens
that one definitely deserves elevation from the tags
ok i might be the most humorless bitch on this planet but i actually unironically love Tumblr’s Shorten Long Posts feature because on the desktop where I don’t have xkit installed it just collapses basically everything and I am almost always glad it collapsed the thing, because the thing was, say, a set of stills from a movie i’ve never seen and won’t watch, or fifteen photos of a celebrity i don’t know, or an extremely long essay that sort of anthropomorphizes things that shouldn’t be, or a lengthy incorrect explanation of something that then gets lengthily refuted only semi-correctly.
yes i am following too many people, yes it is because i have too many mutuals who i individually like but collectively they all just reblog each other and postblock can’t get everything.
what i really wish is that you could follow someone without subscribing to their posts, or that you could customize your dashboard to just read things within a certain filter. but there is no point yearning for classic livejournal, as those days are behind us.
in the meantime i’ll settle for having a vague idea of who’s on about what, with your tags prominently displayed so i know what you think about the thing i’ve seen fifteen times by now, with the option to display it if it’s a thing i haven’t actually seen before.
it’s always an internal debate over what to tag any character on the hellsite but when they have one name (Phlox, Nami, etc.) you see a lot more variation (especially if their name is also a common word like Blaze). Usually you see them tagged as just Blorbo but some people put a title i.e. Commodore Blorbo or Blorbo the Mad Titan or Blorbo, Son of Mogh, or they add the name of the show (best example of this is “Sans Undertale”, which I personally find hilarious) or sometimes everybody calls him Blorbo but there’s one episode or a tie-in book or something that reveals his full name is Blorbo Mitsubishi-Gutenberg or whatever and people use that (example: S'chn T'gai Spock) but my absolute favourite thing is when people take a blorbo who already has a surname and name them after the show anyway. I saw someone on here refer to Roronoa Zoro as “Zoro One Piece” and I was never the same
It’s happened! The first Blaze post has haunted my dash, and it’s the fucking 95 theses.
When I say hellsite (affectionate) this wasn’t the context I was thinking
you wanna know something even funnier? the metrics report i got on the post at the end of the weekend showed absolutely garbageengagement. the post that inspired me to do it got thousands of notes. the post where i said i was going to do it got several hundred as my followers and mutuals cheered me on.
the post i paid an entire crisp and refreshing hamilton for got blasted out to more than 13 thousand dashboards… and then netted exactly 92 reblogs, because it’s a genuinely awful post and no one sane wanted to touch it. it’s a total flop… except this is like the fourth or fifth post i’ve seen about it.
I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021.
Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting the art of targeted ads. I am a wallet of flesh and blood which must be stripped bare and profiled and picked apart for the maximally efficient way to squeeze profit from my presence. Every other site will fold and morph itself to a shape of my liking - like a fairy tale trickster stealing memories and taking their mold - to lull me into compliance and loosen my coin purse.
Facebook sees me searching fitness equipment and injects my timeline with athletic wear ads. Reddit profiles the subreddits I follow and eagerly promotes a new coding bootcamp or cloud service at every turn. Google overhears me lamenting over my moving to-do list on voice call and fills in my “how much to tip movers” query before I’ve gotten the third word typed out.
Tumblr never even tried.
Theycouldhave. The information is there. The basic infrastructure, presumably, exists. Tumblr can recommend me tags based on tags I follow, blogs based on blogs I follow, even posts that for one reason or another may strike my fancy. Tumblr could be - SHOULD be - funneling this framework into advertising, as the only means that free-to-use social media platforms can turn a profit in our capitalistic hellscape.
They just don’t.
Today I saw an ad for treating Hyperhidrosis - a condition, I think, in which a person sweats too much - and I saw it twice, four posts apart, and it is so incredibly benignly impersonally ineptly untargeted toward me compared to all other pinpoint-aimed advertising that I’m endeared to it. Tumblr knows NOTHING about me. 8 years, 51,000 likes, and tumblr has not learned a THING about me.
Advertisements for a mattress? Shitty mobile game ads that don’t make even the slightest pretense at being anything other than a candy crush rip-off? Choose-your-own adventure games either about Royal Espionage or Choosing The Wrong Dress For Your Date with ZERO in-between.
And then this. This here. The culmination, the crown-jewelof tumblr’s nihilistic non-compliance with the state of social media advertising. Any pretense of capitalistic exchange is abandoned at the gas station by the side of the road. This is not a company. This is not a product. This is not anything that fulfills the contract of consumer and seller.
THIS. THIS IS WHAT TUMBLR HAS TO OFFER INSTEAD.
“Pour vinegar on your bread, fuck you.”
“Put it in the garbage, fuck you.”
“Your wife says you’re a fucking dumbass, fuck you.”
That’s it. That’s the advertisement. You vinegar-breadless cuck. You virgin extraordinaire bereft of bread and garbage can. I am fucking your wife right now in our vinegar-soaked motel bed. She puffs a cigarette which I pulled from the trashcan and we both laugh heartily at her recounts of your immasculine ineptitude. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you. Fuck you.
Amazing. Amazing. What a state of things to ring in 2021. What a great platform we all collectively choose to be on.
I started screenshotting my favorite ads
Just fucking take a bite out of your soap you piece of shit. Sleep with it and eat it
I don’t even know what this is trying to sell me. Tumblr doesn’t either. The ad doesn’t know either. Did I click on the link? Fucking absolutely. I think it was broken
Beautiful a+ 10/10
Ok, so before working on Tumblr, even before working for Automattic, I worked for the empire an ad network. We were the middle men that took money for advertisers and bought ad space from apps and sites to place their ads. What you need to understand is this is a totally automated process. Sites like this don’t sell space to every advertiser individually. They use another layer of middlemen called “ad exchanges”. Think about them like eBay for ads, but where the users are just computers.
Long story short, it works like this:
An advertiser (let’s say, Cornetto) wants to show some ads (of ice cream!) on the web, so they book an ad network for some cash.
The ad network goes to an ad exchange and tell them “hey, we need to print 50k Cornetto Soft ads, with this format, can you tell me when you have some space, please?
You are just chilling with your Tumblr app, which decides it’s time to show you an ad. So the app pings the ad exchange and tells them: “hey, we have one spot for an ad of this size”
The ad exchange sends the info to all the ad networks who were interested on this type of ads, and every one of them sends a bid and the ad to print. The bigger bidder gets the spot and prints their ad on your app.
Now, the price for those ad spaces increases exponentially when they include segmentation info. So the bare minimum you get for an ad space is something like “a space of this size, in this app/site, for a system using this language”. From there, a lot of crap about you can be added: with the exception of your name, everything else is fair game: where you are, which sites you have seen, your age, your gender, your friends, the apps you have installed… Facebook options are like a fucked up catalog of human behaviors you can micro-target your ads towards. Of course, if you are advertising something, it’s much more valuable for you an ad spot that can tell you is going to be seen by someone you think is the target of the campaign. So including personal info can make an ad easily 100x or 1000x more expensive.
Everything described happens, literally, in milliseconds, so no human intervention is possible, everything is programmed by folks like me. Folks like me that need to test what they are doing to make sure it actually works in a real life environment.
So we used to have some small real money budget to test things worked as expected. Basically you put a test ad, program it to bid the minimum amount possible (you don’t want to waste your budget and you can get impressions for something as low as 0.001€ if you don’t mind to get the spaces no one wants) and then open an app you know is using the same ad exchange you are using, and start to doomscroll until you get to see your testing ad showing up in the app. Until you get to see it and stop the automatic bidding, another few hundred or thousand totally unrelated folks would have seen it too. And it would have cost your company maybe 0.1€.
Since this is dirt cheap, you launch literally shitposts as an ad. My testing ad to go was a picture of a pony with a button that said “Ride now!” and a link to google.com. if you have seen an ad like that between 2013 to 2015, that’s on me, you are welcome.
Now, of course, the cheaper the ad space, the bigger the chance to get a testing ad from a bored chap that just needs to test the ads their company sells will still be shown after whatever chances they have just done.
So what happens if you have a (hell)site that generates A LOT of traffic, a lot of empty ad spaces, but shares no premium “personal info” segmentation data? The cost of those spaces is going to be the bare bottom, and since there are so many of them, every bid will probably have very few bidders and the price won’t go up. So… Testing shitpost galore!
So every time you see a weird ad on Tumblr, especially when they have broken links or the like… You are seeing a live proof that Tumblr is not selling any info about you (and we are getting almost nothing for every ad we show)
i feel like tumblr is doing something kind of revolutionary with its advertising rn? like… if they’re doing what I suspect they’re doing, it’s almost impressive?
tumblr: hey, we need money to keep the lights on so here’s an ad for ball shaving devices
me: i am not the target market but okay! thanks!
tumblr: hey, sorry, but you scrolled down past two posts so now it’s ad time. how about you shave your balls, huh?
tumblr: hey you need anything for that ball shaving thing, orrrr..?
me: you like. you HAVE to know that i do not. in fact, based on a real rough read of the demographics of my followers, it seems like you have massively misjudged your audience for these ads? like, ball-havers seem to be a pretty small subset of users here?
tumblr: no, no, got it.
me:squints
me: okay, i’m gonna scroll down ag-
tumblr: hey, how about you shave your balls for once, huh????!!!
me:… is this the only ad you’re running now? like, not only are all my ads for ball shaving tools, you’re running them so close to each othet it that feels 50% of my dash is ball shaving tool ads?
tumblr: hey we’re sorry but we need money, and we only get money when someone clicks on an ad, so-
me: BUT WHO IS ACTUALLY DOING THAT???! BECAUSE MOST OF US? WE DO NOT HAVE BALLS?!!!?? Like, why not just diversify your ad sponsors to buy something that we can actually use? just like… maybe plug one! other! product! or! service! IDEALLY UNRELATED TO SHAVING BALLS!
tumblr: we actually were just about to drop a new ad for a totally different product! totally unrelated to balls!
me: awesome, thanks man, that’s progress. what’s the new ad camp-
tumblr:
tumblr: gimme 40 bucks and it stops. 40 bucks and i’ll cool it for a whole year year.
me: does…. does manscaped know you’re doing this? like, do they know their ads are now enforcing an extortion attempt or-
tumblr: LALALALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF ALL YOUR BALLS THAT NEED SHAVING unless you have 40 bucks that is. 40 bucks and this can end right here.
Everyone has been pulling this racket for years (youtube premium and suchlike) but Tumblr are forgiven because they wisely chose to do it in the funniest way possible.
all the new fuckers: don’t censor words in ur post with numbers, @ and punctuation signs, different letters, shit like that. not just cuz it’s absolutely fine to say weird shit and things that other places generally censor on tumblr, but also cuz there are people with screen readers, and when u unnecessarily censor things like that, it really fucks with screen readers and makes it very difficult to read.
this isn’t just a “you don’t have to” thing, it’s a “you shouldn’t”.
hello. it’s been a while but some things need to be addressed, i think.
about a month ago, i made a post saying: “hot girl summer? no, dummy it’s anguished woman autumn so are you coming to wander the moors with a lantern and a nightgown in the pouring rain or not because we leave at 8.”
for whatever reason, maybe timing or just it being october, the post completely blew up, which i have to admit, was very fun. it’s sitting now at 41k. but apparently, and very recently, that was suddenly not the case.
i began to receive a multitude of reblogs and comments accusing me of stealing from the black community, racism, and quite honestly the most outrageous of all, accusing me of faking my race. that i was actually a white woman pretending.
i don’t think i need to tell you how frustrating and anxiety enduring this was and still is. but apparently it needs to be said: i’m a black woman. i have a multitude of people on here who can attest to it. along with this, just because i am black, doesn’t mean that i’m into or know about everything within black communities, and the media that becomes part of the culture. i’m not on twitter or tik tok or whatever.
to play it fair, and to actually see what the problem was, i simply googled “hot girl summer” and to directly quote meghan’s interview with the root she did earlier this year:
“It’s just basically about women — and men — just being unapologetically them, just having a good-ass time, hyping up your friends, doing you, not giving a damn about what nobody got to say about it. You definitely have to be a person that can be the life of the party, and, y’know, just a bad bitch.”
so basically entirely what i thought. just having fun.
but apparently by making such a post about autumn in autumn, i slandered the holy name of meghan thee stallion. i’m not a fan of hers. i don’t listen to her music. but i’m fairly certain most people will agree with me that, fan or not, she isn’t christ.
to add insult to injury, the dozens and dozens of blackpeople i’ve had to block in the past days accusing me of being white because “there’s nothing on your blog that says you’re black” is staggering and extremely painful. maybe y’all enjoy putting every facet of your lives into the internet, but i don’t. and just because i don’t doesn’t mean i’m faking my race. even a blog who attested that i am a black woman answered an ask replying that “people jumped the gun, yeah, but there’s nothing on her blog saying that she is black and it’s white behavior” (in reference to my post). i immediately blocked this person who believes in such disgusting ideology. there’s no behavior that is attributed to a specific race, period.
case in point: this person acknowledging and then…refusing to accept?
and then things took another turn, because it always does:
i don’t think i have to explain how deplorable this kind of behavior is, but as someone who has dealt with this in real life, it’s terrible and (*gasp*) triggering as hell. sincerely, i don’t feel safe anymore during the day anymore. i’m going to bed at 5pm because i don’t want to be awake. i wake up panicked. my hands start shaking at random times. i can’t talk to my family about this. it’s not as simple as “log off” when it’s hundreds of people spreading misinformation and accusations. again, i’ve dealt with this in real life it’s come back with a frustrating intensity.
for any of those who follow these folks, i suggest you keep your distance, considering they find suicide and suicide baiting to be justified, the funniest thing in the world, as well their #FAVE, i suggest blocking, and quite honestly, if needed, reporting.
if you want to reblog, it’s completely fine. if anything, i encourage you to because i’m probably not the only person who has dealt with this.
that’s all.
Holy shit, OP. I’m sorry that people are being terrible.
Nobody owes random people on the internet their personal information - including their race, sexuality, gender, or anything else. And it’s frankly bizarre to say that someone should have to disclose that they’re a member of a marginalized group in order to not be brutally harassed. (And a lot of work has gone into trying to convey that white ISN’T the default, so what the fuck.)
It’s clear that some people just want an excuse to be awful and hurt other people, while getting to pat themselves on the back for it.
Everyone needs to read this post.
Then read it again.
Then everyone needs to spend a good long time thinking about how malicious and honestly outright evil you have to be to “decide” a black woman is “white” and harass her to kill herself for…making a light-hearted joke…about autumn………..
also: adding “white” in front of “women” does not actually make your misogyny okay
