#waternote

[ominous-signs]

I wish I could find the original notegate tagger. They had a spamton pfp with a rainbow (or non-binary?) flag in the background. If you’re out there I liked your tags btw I’m making this into a bigger bit

[json-derulo]

going through my #muted tag and making all my greatest hits unrebloggable out of spite. if I don’t get user engagement when people reblog my jokes, then neither does @staff (or tumblr’s advertisers)

[discworld-heritage-posts]

in looking for info on what recent news concerning tumblr’s changes (i did the full blackout for a full week), the only such post about the blackouts i reblogged was yours, and i’m looking for news of the outcome with the uproar about tumblr’s changes… i am not seeing anything crossing my dash, though that doesn’t necessarily mean anything (the gods of the algorithm know i want to see bunny pictures first and foremost).

checking your blog, i’m not seeing anything about it, so… did they change it back? is (this one aspect of) tumblr fixed? i’m too much of an incompetent noob to know how to navigate tumblr well enough to seek the information out there in the wild.

Okay, so... The good news is that it was rolled back 24h after the initial announcement due to the avalanche of complaints from users. You can find the announcement here. The bit at the end of the post about them saying they think there is a better version of reblogs possible is worrisome because it means this isn't over. Keep an eye on the tumblr, staff, and changes blogs if you want to be updated on whatever new ideas they eventually come up with.

I know the staff blog reblogged both a post with that advisory board suggestion (and yes, I know who it was that suggested it) and a bunch of bad usermade polls regarding the update. I'm not linking them because frankly I don't think people should engage with them. I won't get into why I despise either of those options because it will just be a long rehash of opinions others have already voiced... but the very short summary would be that I think they are both the wrong move. An advisory board made up of popular users is a bad idea and Tumblristas has never been a thing and should never be a thing and is not even the right word to call anyone here. And don't get me started on boosting the wrong way to gather user feedback, because boosting incomplete usermade polls is a cop out and an atrocious way to gather objective, detailed, and usable data (not to mention the current poll system means users can only choose one option). If you want good data you make the polls yourselves (polls that when needed allow multiple choice or ranked choice!), or send out actual questionaries, or open specific feedback and suggestion channels.

So yeah I dropped the short-lived hiatus when they rolled back the updated, but if Tumblr gives becoming a bad clone of Twitter a second shot ever again and rolls out an update that makes everything worse and more dangerous for everyone and steals and hides engagement away from creators, I won't hesitate to put this blog on pause once again.

[the-falling-eagle]

Guys I really don't think we should be tagging this notegate due to the notegate of 2015 wherein no post had notes for like a day or something. Confusing SEO. Not that the search engine here works anyway but

[ominous-signs]

I saw somebody mention that the reason why staff is so fixated on changing the way that reblogs work is most likely because of server costs. Paraphrasing a little bit so this might be inaccurate but something along the lines of "decoupling reblogs and changing the way notes work helps decrease on server load, and staff wants to save some money and move old data onto newer hardware and the change was mostly designed to help with lessening that load".

Tbqh I'm really not surprised to hear it's money related, tumblr is the biggest money pit on the mainstream web, but it would be nice if they were just honest about Why this was all done in the first place 🙄

I’m confused how adding in more counting statistics (so each reblog version is keeping score of its own notes rather than collectively) would reduce the server load?? Again I do not code and don’t know how running apps or websites work, but off of assumption would that not add more to the load eventually?

However, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still related to costs that’s what it seems to come down to

[folkpen]

Maybe it Is time to move to the indieweb