Maria - 25, I'm a massive loser - who loves science fiction & history, I'm into vintage anime/manga mostly, fandom-wise, but this is primarily my personal blog. North Scotland. (about me) (she/her)
BTW not a slight at all but it’s very funny seeing tumblr users say “tumblr should just do ao3-style fundraising!!” when xkit users don’t even pay the xkit girl (me) enough to pay her home utility bills
shots have been fired 👀
no, but seriously this is an excellent point since a large majority of tumblr users use xkit.
lol nah. xkit users are in the low hundreds of thousands. the Chrome Web Store reported New XKit to have 300k+ users at its peak (it’s down to 200k+ now since it’s mostly broken), and the stats i have on XKit Rewritten put its userbase at less than 30k, although it is growing.
tumblr has millions of daily users. the majority of people on the internet as a whole don’t use their desktop computer or laptop as their main device. the majority of tumblr users? are using the mobile apps. of course, i don’t have the stats on how many desktop tumblr users there are, but i would be seriously surprised if even 10% of them used xkit in some form.
it’s easy to lose sight of tumblr’s scale when it allows you to so carefully curate the content that it shows you, but it is there.
As the staff post about ad-free tumblr continues to get thousands of notes telling staff to fuck off in the tags, I wanna remind you that this website’s days are numbered. Tumblr is still unprofitable and by some modern-day miracle none of its acquiring companies pulled the plug on this money pit. But it will happen if it continues its trajectory.
Whether you like it or not, Tumblr needs to make money off you somehow in order to stay up. It either serves ads or asks for money to use it. This has been a paradigm on the web longer than many of you have been alive. It’s Tumblr’s job to make money right now because it’s well past its grace period of being a black hole for cash. This has actually always been Tumblr’s job, since it is a corporation, but that’s capitalism for ya.
If you want Tumblr to be here for free and you want to continue to use it, you do yourself a disservice by opposing any changes Tumblr makes in order to pay for its costs. When this site finally goes belly-up then you’re gonna be Tumblr-less until whatever startup takes its place and the cycle repeats itself.
If you think it should just ask for donations Wikipedia-style, remember that if and when that happens, there will be users repeating the same tired bullshit about giving Tumblr any money.
just a reminder in case you missed it directly from the current CEO of Tumblr:
alright let’s talk about Apple and Tumblr’s current predicament.
If you don’t know already, I used to work at Tumblr as an iOS engineer. Though I keep in touch with current staff at Tumblr (what little that are left that I know) I do not have picture of what’s going on internally. The banned word list is absolutely perplexing and I can only theorize why tags like ‘long post’ are banned from appearing on iOS. What I can do is give you a peek into how the Apple App Store review process works, so you have an idea of the hell that Tumblr staff is dealing with right now.
not to be overly serious (lol) but if you’re mad about these stupid new “"safe mode”“ changes on tumblr’s iOS app you need to be directing your energy towards apple because, realistically speaking, there is literally nothing tumblr staff can do about this lol. they’ve either gotta follow apple’s rules or get their app removed from the app store.
but also this is just part of a way bigger and longstanding issue with apple’s walled-garden approach to software where you can only get shit that meets their very specific standards and doesn’t compete with their own proprietary apps AND if users make an in-app transaction apple gets like, a 30% cut or something insane. this is why epic games had that whole thing where they took fortnite off the app store in protest (and which iirc is still part of a big pending legal case that’ll have some serious precedent based on its outcome…..?) so like. this is actually just one tiny battle being waged in a full-scale war of online content and access and censorship and yelling at a bunch of ragtag mobile devs on tumblr’s staff will fix exactly nothing, I promise. so go complain about it to apple!!!!
actually, extremely relevant example because I just saw someone mention discord as an example of an app with nsfw content that apple does allow in their app store (which means clearly tumblr’s just doing this on purpose), but here’s the thing: discord got fucked by apple too!!! on this exact same issue!!!!
earlier this year discord announced that iOS users would no longer be able to access "mature” servers from the discord mobile app due to apple’s content rules. it was a whole thing. apple walked back the restrictions ever so slightly (so you can still visit servers with “incidental” nsfw content as long as you opt in to a certain setting, although I don’t an iphone so idk exactly what that looks like) but you definitely cannot access Big Jack’s Bareback Shack on your iphone anymore and it is unequivocally apple’s fault. discord was gonna get banned entirely on iOS devices if they didn’t comply.
The wildest thing about last night’s episode of Riverdale wasn’t that Archie was ritualistically sacrificed, it was that the costume department went with “Neon Genesis Evangelion cosplay” for Cheryl’s girls’ school uniforms.
I’m not dead I’m ‘alive’, I guess- I just found myself incapable of being social on social media, & that incapability lasted FAR longer than I expected it to. It hasn’t been a very tumblr year for me in general. It seems like I’ve got far worse social anxiety than I thought it did- it’s been affecting me really badly in the flesh world & in the screen zone, posting anything, even a few sentences, knocks me out - I had to go eat a chocolate bar after I posted anything in the last year, bc lol it felt like the anxiety burned up all the calories in my body.
I miss everyone & I miss being on here- I dunno I how it’ll be for what remains of 2021 but I’d like be more active, & write more on here in the new year. I honestly like posting, I think it’s given me skill in articulating my thoughts in writing- & like feeling that skill atrophy has sucked.
“Geryon sat on his bed in the hotel room pondering the cracks and fissures of his inner life. It may happen that the exit of the volcanic vent is blocked by a plug of rock, forcing molten matter sideways along latter all fissures called fire lips by volcanologists. Yet Geryon didn’t want to become one of those people who think of nothing but their stores of pain. He bent over the book on his knees. Philosophic Problems ’… I will never know how you see red and you will never know how I see it. But this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us…’”
