TinyEnderman

I’m cringe

[escuerzoresucitado]

[beardedmrbean]

[preludes-and-prufrock]

[myjetpack]

My latest cartoon for New Scientist

[s-lycopersicum]

[snailsthoughts]

Idk where that post is that said “anybody who tells you other trans people are the enemy is a Fed” but yeah, can we bring back that energy please?

Trans woman are not trans men’s oppressors, trans men are not trans women’s oppressors, nonbinary people are not responsible for transphobes not taking trans people seriously.

Talking about transmysogyny is not oppressive to trans men. Using the word transandrophobia is not inherently transmysogynistic. Talking about exorsexism is not erasing binary trans peoples struggles.

Like comon guys this is really basic stuff can we all agree on these things before moving on?

[txttletale]

excuse me, United Nations, please send 10000 armed peacekeepers to Get this trans woman. she said she hoped an anvil fell on me anda big pink lump popped out of my head and i stumbled about while birds flew around my head tweeting and i had to reach up and push my head lump back in and shoo the birds away.and i feel threatened for my life,

[cheddar-baby]

[sapropel]

Staff nuked the Ferguson and Palestine tags. They lied about Black tumblr users being Russian agents for being upset about US electoral politics. They nuked blogs frustrated with staff's transmisogyny. They let literal Nazis and pedophiles run rampant on this website. Tumblr staff is so unbelievably conservative and reactionary. Shame on each and every one of you who encourages this.

[cryptotheism]

As a trans person who pays the bills hawking my Patreon on this site, Photomatt's behavior has been disappointing to say the least. I hope staff can come to a more reasonable conclusion.

[cryptotheism]

I think I speak for everyone when I say we would appreciate some insight and transparency into the content moderation systems.

Having a blog you've run for 7+ years nuked out of nowhere, with no communication, reason, or recourse beyond navigating a maze of broken automated systems, is pretty frustrating. I can't really blame users for saying some TOS-breaking shit, because sometimes it feels like the only way to communicate with staff here is publicly.

[cryptotheism]

Matt for the love of God stop fucking posting and talk to your PR team.

[tinystepsforward]

matt is supposed to be on fucking sabbatical rn. the last time he refused to log off and caused problems swinging his dick around was on the wordpress.org twitter hawking a fundraiser for his birthday and claiming that as founder he didn't need to get permission fr marketing or otherwise worry about not offending people. this time he promised everyone at automattic he'd actually take a break (and become a chess grandmaster in 3 months, which, whatever, dumb techbro ego bs). instead he logged back in almost immediately, berated one of the apps teams publicly, refused to log off, then did a bunch of blog posts and interviews saying shit ranging from "Capitalism is, as Nicholas Stern says, the best way to take care of people we don’t know." through "essentially [queer or Black groups are] tribes or identities that separate us. And so part of me really identifies with Martin Luther King being, I want my children judged on the content of their character, not the color of their skin."

i am, thank fucking everything, no longer working for him, and yet. i quit before leadership could force my lead to fire me. a disproportionate amount of queer people have been fired or forced to leave in the last year, bc he has personally been sending messages pressuring all leads to pick a "weak link" and going on about culture fit in ways that are fucking loaded. and then there's the exodus of ex-leads who have been saying clearly that they quit instead of being forced to fire people, and the whole team of quality engineers that was axed late last year (oh but it's not a layoff, they all magically had bad performance despite great individual performance reviews, one of them being on parental leave, and all of them being blindsided), and so on and so on...

honestly it fucking sucks bc for a long time i was able to say, despite matt personally being behind half the bad ideas that have plagued tumblr in the last few years, that i think automattic was still doing a better job than most other companies who could afford to take on a liability like tumblr would do. and i thought that about wordpress.com too, and kept recommending it bc automattic's ethics were at least marginally better than most companies in the same space not built on open source. there were people i knew who were working on the transmisogynist moderation issue, but [gestures] decisionmakers have decided they're selling tumblr data (including private data!) to midjourney instead of doing anything but doubling down i guess. now that matt's weighed in it's not gonna get better. the queer staff remaining have used what leverage they had in every way possible and stopped being listened to a long time ago. support staff are paid far too little for what they deal with. i get messages from my ex-colleagues regularly because they're all trying desperately to jump ship. anyway usually i think people are misguided in putting the blame for corporate decisions directly at the feet of the figurehead ceo but in this case he is genuinely detested and keeps personally making the worst decisions and doubling down on them

[tinystepsforward]

#Well it comforts me not at all#the thing yall should be doing is STRIKING#Quit your fucking job like tinystep here or withold your fucking labor ok since you namedropped me i gotta reply to just this one i think.

automattic hires around the world. i personally was on a contract that was not actually legal under nz law, but that i knew full well my government would not take any action about. (and yes, i consulted union organisers about it.) this makes striking or withholding labour very difficult.

everyone i personally am close to who still works there is someone who cannot afford to quit or risk getting fired for attempting to unionize at a workplace whose structure makes that functionally impossible. many are south and south-east asian workers supporting entire families. i was a survival sex worker with zero job experience before i got hired, and the kindness i received from my colleagues won my loyalty for many years.

tech work is a sector where each person does have to decide where their personal moral line is. i agree with that, and i am very clear about where my personal lines are. that's why we all started looking. i was very fortunate in my recent job search. i would have stayed until i hit breaking point or was fired otherwise; automattic, for all its failings, was one of the few places i'd ever even interviewed which used my pronouns and accommodated my ptsd. staff include people with trans kids stuck in increasingly transphobic states, people who themselves are trans sex workers like i am, people who have disabilities which would not be accommodated at any workplace in their region which is hiring and won't autoreject their resume, and more.

don't be a fucking dick to staff or at least keep my url out of your mouth if you're going to make blanket judgements like this.

[jv]

yeah, before I was fired, I was adjacent (as in "in the room, listening and cheering at them") to a group of people trying to organize Automattic workers with unionization as the goal, and the distributed nature of the company was the biggest obstacle to overcome.

Automattic will tell you it has employees in 60+ countries, but the reality is that it has employees in 5 countries, and hires contractors everywhere else. Those contractors are about 1/3rd of the company and have no legal protections* from being fired, etc, so it's hard to actually do anything like a strike. And then, the labor legal framework is so different in the different countries where automattic operates in that it's hard to come up with a coherent strategy. And the company actively uses this against its workers (for example, the number of people automattic has fired during 2023 would made them fall under the California Layoff protection laws, or under the Spanish ERE laws, but since a significant number of those who had been laid-off were contractors, the company can avoid declaring an actual lay-off).

So yeah, Automattic employees have been seeing the company worsening both their job conditions and its public stance on multiple issues since 2020, but the very way the company is set up makes it very difficult to push back.

_* and as @tinystepsforward mentions, Automattic contracting contracts are pretty much illegal in most of the EU too: They force you to commit to not working for anyone else while you work for automattic, which is a big no-no in most european countries because it's a way the companies used to use to avoid paying taxes for their employees. But since Automattic doesn't have a legal entity in those countries, those labor laws are really not enforceable, letting the contractors in a pretty crappy position.

[picsthatmakeyougohmm]

[duckatali]

[3liza]

[lizardsfromspace]

ELON MUSK'S GRAND PLAN FOR TWITTER

Buy it for billions of dollars

Be so surrounded by crypto and NFT shills and yes men that you start to see Twitter's ordinary users as the real bots

Scrap the site's pre-existing bot programs bc you were mad a report showed that the site didn't have as much of a bot problem as you thought

Make impersonation trivial, and let everyone who pays you $5 have all their tweets boosted no matter what

Make the site a barely functional husk run by a skeleton crew and reduce moderation in the name of free speech

Have your site flooded with bots, impersonators, and spam

???

Make them pay you $1 as a effort to fix spam, even though most of them already paid $5 for the checkmark that incentivized them to spam

Genius. The real Tony Stark. A pioneer on par with the Wright brothers and Zefram Cochrane. Where do I sign up for my One-Way Ticket to Mars NFT

[lizardsfromspace]

I love how he's obsessed with fixing bots on Twitter, but not just fixing it, he has to fix it.

A normal person buying a company would react to a report saying the site's bot problem isn't as bad as expected with "oh, great, that frees up resources we don't have to allocate there". He reacted by firing the staff responsible in anger, bc if there weren't millions of bots for him to ban, spending all that money would be a waste. This is the management style of a guy who demands a rescue team ditch their equipment to use his sub midway through, and who said he could fix world hunger then rejected an itemized list of what he could spend money on to end some world hunger bc it wouldn't fix all of it

[lizardsfromspace]

When Elon bought Twitter, he was given a report saying the bot problem wasn't as bad as he thought. He fired the people responsible and started declaring that he would solve the bot problem

Today, the majority of traffic on Twitter is now bots

It all makes sense, though, when you realize Elon is not only really stupid and bad at everything, but also he didn't even realize the bots on Twitter were bots, bc of course someone who surrounds himself with crypto shills was going to end up seeing the site's normal users as the suspect ones

He literally ran the site into the ground due to an obsessive need to "fix the bot problem", and he ended up creating the worst bot problem in the history of social media, over 73% worse than the next-worst site. And that's before you consider the possibility that big brain genius Elon Musk is trying to fix Twitter's ad revenue problem by making bots that engage with ads. Incredible

[lizardsfromspace]

Fave part of this, from the story itself, is that the cybersecurity firm monitoring this almost refused to publish the data, bc they didn't believe it could really be that bad

Apparently, before he did all this, the number of bots last year at the same time was...2.81%. That was the number Elon was desperate to fix, and he turned 2% into 75%

[alwek]

Remember all you. THIS is the post that triggered Rita's ban.

[scoutsmoocrew]

It’s so weird when people on social media comment negatively about reintroducing wolves. Like were you born in 1837 what’s the matter with you

[scoutsmoocrew]

You’re really going to go on about how wolves are going to kill all the cows and deer as if Lincoln is still president

[thedeliaishere]

ENCYCLOPEDIA [Medium: Success] - Ah, a fumo. Derived from the otomatopeia of touching something soft, mofumofu. They are particularly famous among fans of Touhou, a Japanese multimedia franchise, for being particularly rare and hard to find. Lucky you! This fumo depicts the character, "Patchouli."

INLAND EMPIRE - Keep her close. Her softness and disaffected stare will ward against the coming darkness.

SAVOIRE FAIRE - Wait, did you say rare? I bet we can pawn it for a quick réal. Think of all the cool stuff we could get.

SHIVERS - Numbness creeps up from your fingertips, crawling into your spine. Across the bay, young man mourns the loss of the crown jewel of his collection.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY - Yes. This will do. You know what must be done.

RHETORIC [Legendary: Failure] - Uh, do we? Maybe its one of these political things. They haven't failed us yet.

1. Feed the bloodsucking landlords to the meat grinder?

2. Feed the ungrateful workers to the meat grinder?

3. Feed the ungrateful workers *and* foreigners to the meat grinder?

4. Let the meat grinder starve?

ELECTROCHEMISTRY - No, you communard. Do you really not remember? Dig deep and recall what it is that must be done.

VOLITION - Don't. It will only cause you more pain.

1. Do I have to?

2. I don't like the sound of this...

3. Does this have to do with the ex-something?

4. [ELECTROCHEMISTRY - GODLY 16]

Low

25%

+1 Something about rainbows...

+1 Saw preserved jams.

-1 It's better to forget this.

This is a Red Check.

It cannot be retried.

⚅⚅

Check Success!

YOU - Your neurons fire in tandem, dredging through every scrap of information left in your hungover, burnt out mind, until you unearth something truly terrible.

VOLITION - I warned you.

TASK GAINED: ACQUIRE A MASON JAR

[cutecipher]

no, actually, trying to position your disgust/annoyance with "stereotypical" trans women as political righteousness doesnt make me want to abandon them it makes me suspicious of you

[cutecipher]

i love harsh noise girls i love blahaj girls i love video game dev girls i love trans girls and i refuse to tear them down

[cutecipher]

More important than ever, love us before they erase us

[valtsv]

btw if you're going to go down the route of "everyone lives happily ever after, by which i mean gets married and settles down and plenty of kids" at the end of your story then the ONLY right way to do it is to give the villain character a kid as well and have these descendants meet and become best friends before the sins of their fathers inevitably come back to haunt them and turn their innocent childhood friendship into a nightmare psychosexual rivalry in which people are killed