Where Is That Renaissance Painting With Those Two Fellers And A Giant Fucking Random Skull On The Floor

I think one of the biggest obstacles to getting a social media platform off the ground in 2023 is that big sites like Twitter and YouTube have created an expectation that registering an account should automatically come with effectively unlimited storage and bandwidth for whatever media you care to post, which creates a hard entry barrier for any platform without major financial backing. Like, we can wax rhapsodic about early 2000s forum culture all we like, but one of the main unwritten rules that allowed smaller forums to survive was never turning image hosting on for free accounts – either you made people figure out their own solutions for hosting images, or you charged a fee. If you were lucky, a forum with free registration might have let you host a banner for your signature on their servers, but that was it! Unless someone manages to convince large numbers of folks that a text-only social media platform is worth participating in, I'm not sure there's any good way forward for smaller outfits at this point.

附近 14

Nearby 14

Translated by Guandi Wu

OFFICIAL TUMBLR PRESS RELEASE

For Hellsite Eyes only…,

Hello again, Tumblr. Now that our dashboards are back to normal (‘normal’ doing some heavy lifting here), the crabs are back in tropical paradise (for now), and Mr. Brick Whartley is back with them, we felt it was time for reflection.

In his opening statement on April 1, Mr. Whartley, our now-former Head of Viral Marketing and Exponential Growth and Front End Software Developer, outlined his ambition to “...increase clicks across the platform by any means necessary”. Quite the lofty ambition. And this got us thinking—how did we do? And by we, of course, we mean you. Well, you didn’t disappoint, and if you like unnecessarily large numbers, you’re in for a real treat.

By 12:49 pm (PDT)/3:49 pm (EDT), the community had summoned 7.5 million crabs at a rate of 1.07 million crabs per hour. 

By the end of the day, there were 20,000 posts by 14,000 of you with the tag “time for crab.” Time indeed.

The community’s April Fools prank was a resounding success, with more than 52,000 posts from Tumblr users attempting to “crash” this Hellsite by scheduling posts all at the same time. 

Mr. Brick Wharley’s blog accumulated more than 3,000 followers and 12,000 notes, while @staff received nearly 50,000 notes across the day.

Perhaps Mr. Whartley didn’t do such a lousy job. Finally, the most important statistic of the day, the community summoned 25 million crabs across Tumblr on April 1, 2022.

Credit where credit’s due, folks. You did us proud, you did Mr. Whartley proud, and most importantly, you did yourselves proud. So give those index fingers a little rest—they deserve it. And you will need all your strength for April 1, 2023.

Novembre

now why is THIS godforesaken site running so slow

Another idea: Communities on Tumblr

For a while now folks have asked us for better ways to connect with other people who share similar interests. We’re listening, and at Labs we’ve been looking into fulfilling that need, Tumblr style.

Introducing Communities, a new place to connect with others on Tumblr:

Here in Labs, we’re working on big ideas that could transform how Tumblr is used, while keeping that Tumblr vibe alive. You can see one of those ideas above. We’re calling it “Communities”, a new dedicated space on Tumblr for people to share and discuss all the content they love. Communities can cover topics like your favorite show, artist, movie, video game, your school, your board game group, friend group, big or small, whatever you want.

Each Community has their own semi-private safer space away from the regular dashboard where you can interact with other Tumblr users who share the same interests and passions as you. There are moderators and members (you!), rules, and privacy settings. Each community has its own feed of posts from members, separate from your Following and For You feeds. Interactions within community spaces stay there and replies will work more like a traditional comment section. Folks will be able to reblog posts into a community, but not out — at least not yet.

We’re very excited for you to try it, and help define the best path forward. What we have is a prototype to help us validate the idea, but there’s still plenty of questions that need answering. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be reaching out to people across Tumblr, and the internet at large, to try our prototype. Based on the feedback we get, we’ll iterate on the idea to see what resonates best with all of you on Tumblr.

If this sounds interesting, please like, reblog, or reply to this post, and we’ll invite you to beta test this feature when we roll it out to a wider Tumblr audience, as a little perk for following the Labs blog.

Stay tuned for more!