Hey there! I'm Tails! @just-ask-fox-boy - Tumblr Blog

flneseasonlng

Caine and Kit.

Flappers reminded me of him.

auroranoraart

Hold still! Caine is drawing you ❤️

sedoretu

hater nation rise up

themanfromeire

one-time-i-dreamt

And why did the value plummet, Marissa? Why did it plummet?

red-mercer

Would like to know how exactly she wouldn't fuck up Netflix or Hulu

sreegs

Yahoo thought Tumblr would be the next PDF

They didn't really get it.

noctumsolis

What does that even mean? PDF as in Portable Document Format?

sreegs

i cannot stress enough that i dont think yahoo even knew what a pdf was

virdigrishammer

you left out the best part of that article. the poor yahoo emplyees at those meetings were just as confused as the rest of us.

ralfmaximus

Everyone is right to dunk on Yahoo and "tumblr is the new PDF" because yeah, everything about that era was stupid.

But the PDF thing kinda makes sense. Bear with me.

But first, some context.

See, in the 1990s before PDF files there was almost no way to generate a document on a Mac and read it on a PC. Or vice versa. Businesses struggled with how to email important documents around and guarantee they looked the same on the other end, regardless of what computer & software the recipient had.

Adobe changed all that with PDF.

Since Acrobat Reader was available (and free!) for Windows & Mac, suddenly the problem went away. Everyone knew how to read a PDF. Adobe became a universally recognized brand overnight even if you'd never heard of Photoshop, because everyone had goddamn Adobe Reader installed.

Because of that, every tech company yearned to be just like Adobe: invent something universally desired, used by billions of people.

Fast forward to a Yahoo/tumblr meeting sometime in 2013/2014.

Tumblr development staff demonstrates how the back end of tumblr works, which (honestly) is revolutionary as compared with how any other social media site worked at the time. Each tumblr post is composed of blocks of data, any one of which can be text, sound, an image, a movie... anything. These blocks of data are threaded together into what looks to the user like one cohesive message (a single tumblr post) but under the hood it's magic.

Further, the mechanism for doing this can be standardized. In other words: tumblr could, if they wanted, publish the standard as a way for ANY social media site to manage its data.

If other sites did that, then they could trade messages with tumblr! Imagine posting a message on tumblr and reading it on Instagram. Or see twitter messages natively on your tumblr feed. I mean personally, that's a horror show. But the concept is interesting.

(In fact, that's how Mastodon and the Fediverse work in 2025. Each Mastodon post is a standard chunk of data that any website can read & display, assuming it understands the underlying ActivityPub protocol and plays by its rules.)

So the Yahoo executives attend this technology demonstration and one of them quite visibly has a light bulb wink into existence over their head. The light bulb is an old school incandescent, 300 watts at least, and glows furiously bright.

The Yahoo exec stands up. His chair knocks backwards.

"OH MY GOD," he stammers. "This tumblr thing could revolutionize social media. It'd be like the new PDF!"

Then blood shoots out of his nostrils and his head explodes, but all anyone ever remembers from that meeting is "PDF".

@sreegs or @cyle or @jv can probably explain it better, but that's what I remember hearing at the time. Please feel free to correct me.

cyle

the details here aren't correct, but as i've said many times, yeah, the PDF thing was in direct response to the Neue Post Format, which is how post and reply content is stored on tumblr. it's not as dumb as it sounds. (without that context, it does sound dumb.)

hugtheteadrinkthekitten

Can't believe over a decade later we're finally getting an explanation for the PDF thing.

dipdieddreams

This makes sense, I think.

They saw in tumblr potential for a universally read social media site that could interact across other social media platforms, and potentially becomes the dominant form of interconnectivity between platforms.

Except they fumbled it massively?

That’s my understanding of the above.

People frequently ask me why I’m still on tumblr and one of the things I tell them is the fact you can post anything on here. It’s not limited to one form of media. And yes you can post videos and reels or whatever now. But not back then. And gif sets are still best on tumblr. Sorry.

athelind

Look, at this point, I'm not going to blame Yahoo! or any of this hellsite (affectionate)'s other owners for dropping this ball.

A "universally read social media site that could interact across other social media platforms"? We had that in the 1990s, or the seeds of it, back when the internet was focused on protocols and not platforms. "Web 2.0" was a deliberate move away from that, made possible by some really terrible legislation.

No matter how good Neue Post Format may be, and no matter who was helming the company, that level of interoperability was never going to fly in the face of unified opposition from Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

The other big social media sites don't want interoperability: they want to lock you in to extract value from you while providing you with an increasingly-miserable experience. If you can read their feeds and connect with your friends on their sites from any number of other sites, then they have no hold over you. This is called "switching cost".

Fed up with the ads on Heebee? Tired of the algorithmic bias on Gumpy? Why would you put up with it if you could just go to Poob and get the exact same contact, and stay in touch with all of your friends, relatives, and moots?

If you want a more thorough (and certainly more articulate) discussion of these ideas, check out Cory Doctorow's book, Enshittification -- or just read his Tumblr blog, @mostlysignssomeportents. I've been reading his stuff for 25 years now, and he has thoroughly warped my mind opened my eyes.

quasi-normalcy

I genuinely believe that the colonization of North America is one of the greatest calamities ever to take place in human history, and I say this as someone who wouldn't exist without it.

squeakitties

wikipedia no longer being anywhere near the top of search results when looking up anything feels eviscerating

ichorandpride

#they really said “you can’t use wiki as an academic source-use our garbage AI that’s even less reliable”#and you can’t even opt out of it

no but you can FORCE it away. use ublock origin and copy paste the blacklist i made into the filters to be able to remove the bullshit AI overview that google forces. it also removes youtube's forced ads (at least until they fix it)

you can also use the ublacklist extension and use this blacklist of AI image generation websites to curate your google image results

there are ALWAYS ways around stuff. it's just a matter of looking into it and asking around

nicenice7

I'M FREE

alistairsprayerwarrior

FOR WIKIPEDIA!!!!

hollowtones

?

soundtestmenu

Visit Original Link

catboybeebop

Visit Original Link

westmansion

Visit Original Link

hearthomelesbian

Visit Original Link

lindleland

Visit Original Link

prommytheus

wholeheartedsuggestions

if you’re reading this, i’m wishing for the universe to be kind to you

primordialsoup314

For all my mutuals, this and a grilled cheese cut diagonal

mcflymemes

please don't mistake silence for hatred. please don't mistake unanswered plotting messages as indifference, or a lack of enthusiasm towards you. considering the ages of most roleplayers, many of us have bills to pay, families to take care of, medical conditions to treat, appointments to make, classes to take, homes to clean, and lives to live away from the computer that are far, far more important than writing on tumblr — life has a tendency to get in the way of hobbies and fun things like this. be patient with your fellow writers. if it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. of course you can set your boundaries, keep your space comfortable, and softblock whoever you wish, but do so while recognizing it's probably not hatred or apathy that keeps them from leaping into your dms with message after message. they probably love this hobby just as much as you... but sometimes life gets in the way.

geopsych

View from the upstairs window early. Not going for a walk today.

the-haiku-bot

View from the upstairs

window early. Not going

for a walk today.

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

nohoperadio

Vinyl records are circular because it's an efficient use of space: the grooves that encode the music are laid out in a spiral on the disc, so that the needle only has to move as far as the disc's radius to read the entire thing. Before this clever idea was thought of, the grooves were instead laid out in a straight line, and every LP was a narrow rectangle more than a thousand feet long. To flip an album to side b at least two people were needed, one at each end, coordinating via shouted instructions.