the ability to say "i dont have a tiktok" in social situations makes me feel so powerful. like the general reaction is "shock, confusion, then this weird 'thats probably a good thing' response" its so fun

i think we all need to be careful of concluding "the average teenager is more self-centered/mean/uninformed than ever before" rather than "the peaks of the self-centeredness/meanness/lack of awareness of teenagers is now digitally documented, usually with their faces attached + drives hundreds of thousands of outrage clicks per day".

imagine your fandom blog from age 15 included videos of you reading your posts out loud

I enjoy long informative threads on social media but I also think they should be taken with a grain of salt. Because as soon as you see one on a topic YOU'RE an expert in, the anatomy tends to break down like this:

This is the version that got traction so actually every reblog contains all of these pieces.

3rd person is the most common perspective style…

https://cohost.org/MysLooni?page=0

Here's mine!! I only really post there now :]

This is insane

the podcast ‘endless thread’ did an episode on this called ‘catfish for dinner’ where they investigated the origin of the story! tl;dr a tiktoker who posts fake drama stories made it up for clout and it’s based on nothing.

Since Elon bought twitter I ran away from that shithole, but it's really sad to see many artists that sold commissions there lose their main source of income.

I also want to inform my international mutuals that this is entirely Musk's fault. It is illegal for social platforms to run in Brazil without a representative, and Elon fired all Brazilian representatives after our minister required the app to regulate their users, fake news etc. So instead of deleting nazi accounts, Elon Musk decided it was better to lose their 4th biggest user base lol

I don't know what will happen now, but yeah, the app is down. If you can support Brazilian artists here it would already mean so much.

A lot of Brazilians who were using Twitter have decamped to Blue Sky! I've been using Blue Sky for a couple of weeks and I like it. Not as a replacement for Tumblr, but as a different thing, and I'm not saying don't support artists here, of course we should

HELP

concept: utilitarian social media platform for stoic uncles which has an acknowledgement button instead of a like button

if ur dealing to the people on the left you’d just say “$45 a gram” and theyd be like “yeah bro sure dude i gotchu thats legitness ur the man” but the ppl on the right u gotta finesse like “my normal price is $15 a g but this stuff is called Cosmic Throat Cum Squirt Haze so the lowest i can go is $50″ and theyd b like “wow… so cultured… i cant wait to smoke this out of my native american themed bong…”

: 0 !!!

Do y'all not remember the russian spies that plagued tumblr??

this site has been on a noticeable decline from the moment they expunged the russian chaos agents

Tumblr had what

I like how the consensus on this site was that despite being a constant dumpster fire of failure, the one thing the admins were able to successfully figure out was an international espionage ring orchestrated from the kremlin as opposed to thinking maybe, just maybe, they banned a bunch of funny black people because hillary ate shit in 2016

uhhhhh no this really happened and it was not a conspiracy to ban a bunch of funny black people, unless you mean the fake black people the troll accounts posed (source: npr) as 

additional sources: https://www.wired.com/story/tumblr-russia-trolls-propaganda/  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/24/tumblr-says-russia-used-it-for-fake-news-during-2016-election

It’s really fucking weird that people are pretending this didn’t happen.

I can specifically speak about lagonegirl as I was a follower. They never spoke to their followers. Their posts all had a similar format to Vox posts at the time. They would leave a written funny comment on their posts turns out those were taken from Twitter users and written out like it was their own words. The many popular Black tumblr users rebloged the posts and added more funny comments and post would get widely shared.

I’m starting to wonder if this is a new Russian scam. Get people to belief it didn’t happen so they can do it again.

having sorted through the replies on this post, there are two camps:

1. people saying yes, russian psyops on social media accounts were totally a thing. they copied real content (which could be traced back to their original sources) but edited and modified in ways that helped them shape the conversation in the direction that served their purpose.  source: here are 5 sources documenting it

2. people saying no, russian psyops was never a thing.  uhhhh, duh! pfff, you believed that? cringe. OBVIOUSly fake. 

I gotta add they were on *all* the damn socials, it’s just that Tumblr hoards its old junk whereas all the others only want new content front and centre. If we didn’t sift through our ashes so much we’d have forgotten, too.

Oh yeah I forgot to add before this fell out of the queue, obviously no one thinks staff figured that out on their own. It was a massive international intelligence operation that also included facebook, reddit, twitter, instagram, youtube, buzzfeed somehow, and teams of competent professional intelligence analysts.

Afterwards the inquiry concluded that the russian trolls (of whom several were in fact indicted) specifically targeted Black voters to divide and undermine their vote

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49987657

They piggybacked on BLM

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/russian-trolls-went-attack-during-key-election-moments-n827176

And they focused on Black Americans as prospective assets

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/17/tech/russia-2016-election-social-media-report/index.html

op was purpose-designed to alienate and disenfranchise Black Americans, “a bunch of funny black people” try a bunch of digital blackface, just a wholeass online minstrel show

We’ve lived through such interesting times, haven’t we?

And you know it’s basically certain that this is happening again

Yep! And this time around it’s also got a huge Israel/Palestine component, since Israel has massive internet psyop capability. Also Russia/Ukraine.

Be careful out there.

said this before but facebook is a parallel social media world where everyone's IQ is 20 points lower

i made a pinterest and it like, suggests things for you based on your activity and interests, so i dutifully told pinterest a few general categories of things i like, like home decor and DIY projects

but i opened it for the first time and for some fucking reason it was like toucans??? you want toucans????? you want to look at and see some fucking toucans??????????

previously facebook marketplace did this to me with giraffes and i have to say i would actually like all social media sites to assign me an animal from here on out

update: i bought a shirt with toucans on it

here it is: my Pinterest-assigned hyperfixation

i have accepted my new algorithmically-assigned personality trait (toucan-liker) and made a toucan-themed pinterest board, which has now thoroughly fucked my algorithm up to the point where pinterest almost exclusively shows me toucans despite the fact that i also have several other pinterest boards that have nothing to do with toucans at all

i love the toucan website, which is for looking at and seeing toucans

https://nerdbot.com/2021/01/09/new-pill-bottles-for-shaky-hands-will-help-people-with-parkinsons/

This makes me cry, actually.

Just to add on. Libraries in many cities have 3d printers you can use that charge you only the price of materials. So if you can't wait for the shipping from the engineers, try your local library.

I do not want to sound like... You should have known better/I told you so/etc, but as... not that, as I can sound, I really hope artists take stock of what's going on at twitter. Things that have happened to artists in recent years:

There is no single platform that won't throw you under the bus if the people running it think they can make more money elsewhere. It doesn't matter if they'll find out they're wrong later. They'll gamble with your livelihood, and when their platform collapses, they'll sell it off afterwards and move onto the next thing to ruin for a buck.

Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Tumblr allows nudity again, but it's run by clowns, and it won't be but a few years before they find some new parent company or investors that want to ruin it again. No platform is safe because this is how this game is supposed to be played. Growth, growth, growth, tear it down for scrap, and sell it.

I don't pretend to know the answer to this problem, but at least diversify, make your own website, and make back ups.

Worth reblogging in light of twitter announcing it's going to scrape it's own site for AI training and now artists are feeling forced to jump ship.

Extrapolate everything you've seen in the past year and take an educated guess if twitter is going to get better or worse moving forward. That site is only going to get worse, and it shouldn't be a surprise at this point. This website is only going to get worse. Every website is only going to get worse. You don't need'em!

Move, network, make a website, a youtube channel, a blog, make friends, build relationships, diversify, grow. You won't get serotonin, notifications, and good boy points for good posts™ on the terf website, but the people who matter will follow you.

i’ve got a follow-up that’s going to feel like it runs counter to this, but i promise it doesn’t. pay attention to the professional actions of the people at the top of any site you’re on. we can’t all keep track of board members or what bought what from who, but as we all slink back to tumblr we need to remember they banned porn, and we need to remember they did that to appease people at the top who want to do much worse.

conversely, when someone has the opportunity to make their site more money and they don’t take it? that’s absofuckinglutely worth remembering.

newgrounds is the big, weird, messy jumble of content that could only come from being around for 20 years, but it has no investors to appease. pillowfort has a publicly-available breakdown of their budget on their donation page. cohost has regular breakdowns of their finances. if you assume they’re acting in good faith, then even when things get really scary for them, they hold true to their word of not seeking VC money that will eventually ruin the site.

all this to basically say when people show you who they are believe them. there’s a good handful of sites out there right now who are doing the things everyone says they actually want behind the scenes, and a lot of them are living hand-to-mouth. i know we’re all broke, and i promise i’m not here to scold, but at a certain point we have an obligation to notice when someone is putting in the work we say we want to see.

I'm fascinated by how the formatting of different social media sites affect how text is read.

For instance, a line break on Tumblr indicates a new idea.

But a reblog break indicates that time has passed.

Tumblr users have the same energy as Gotham citizens who refuse to move away after the fifth supervillain attack in a week.

At some point, staying becomes a weird badge of pride.

Look, I stay on Tumblr the same reason people stay in Gotham: at any given moment I could be blessed with a vision of Nightwing’s ass.