The Most Delicious Alignment @waffle-neutral - Tumblr Blog

nephilidae

Excellent news! I’ve found the only two ranking lists that matter

catsbeaversandducks

“No.”

By 魏大葱有木瓜

dankmemeuniversity

hydro-homies

I can relate

cchellacat

A perfectly sound and health reaction to being confronted with such a hellish sight.

stachestachestache

I took an earth literature class last quarter and right before my class was an aerospace engineering class and my prof would always have to erase the board before she could start her lecture because she said it would stress her out just looking at the symbols

porterr-robinson

fuiru

“One of my favourite Steve Jobs stories was the time the engineers working on the iPod brought their finished prototype to him in his office. He said it was too big, they needed to make it smaller. They said it was as small as they could make it, it couldn’t be made any smaller. So he took the prototype over to his aquarium and dropped it in. The iPod sank to the bottom, and as it did, tiny little bubbles came out. ‘See those bubbles,’ he asked. ‘They’re air inside the iPod. Make it smaller.’

“Another story about Steve Jobs was when they brought the prototype for the iPad 2 to his office. The engineers told him it was faster than the first iPad. He took it over to his aquarium and dropped it in. ‘Look how slowly it sank,’ he told them. ‘Make it faster.’

“One time a newly hired intern had been sent out to get Steve a sandwich. When she brought it to him, he looked at it. ‘I thought I ordered the beef on rye,’ he asked. She told him it was indeed beef on rye. He took it over to his fish tank and dropped it in. ‘Does that look like beef on rye?’

“He was always dropping things in that fish tank. We couldn’t stop him. We told him he had to stop, he wouldn’t listen. It was full of stuff that shouldn’t be in an aquarium.

“The fish had all died years ago. One had been crushed under an early generation iMac. The others were all poisoned. He didn’t care.

“It got to the point where there was no room for anything in the fish tank. When we emptied it after he died, we found a body in there. We never found out who it was.”

bunnyreese12

astraldemise

i hope donkey kong becomes known as the ultimate trans ally for eternity now

astraldemise

donkey kong said trans rights !

astraldemise

ifishouldvanish

“why are pillowfort/ao3 asking for money?? Tumblr and LJ are free!!!”

y'all really don’t get how this works, huh?

ifishouldvanish

Look y'all. Bottom line is large websites/web apps are fucking expensive

It’s not like a personal or small business site where you pay $25/mo for a shared hosting package and knock yourself out

You need multiple, dedicated, high-performance servers to handle a service like Tumblr or AO3, or Facebook, or what have you, to keep up with the insane amount of bandwidth and unfathomable amount of data.

Shit cost thousands of dollars a month. And those costs only go up the more users you have. Into the tens of thousands of dollars a month. Someone has to foot the bill for it. And that doesn’t include the salaries of the developers who pour hours of their time into making things function the way they need to.

“but Tumblr used to not have ads!!” you say! “They just got greedy!”

No, they didn’t “just get greedy”. This is how free services work. They aren’t magically able to sustain themselves. At any point. Ever.

Investors see proof of concept during the infancy of a project, and they pour their money– hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars– to 1) help fund the project into maturity. (Maturity = stable performance and a large, growing userbase) and 2) have a seat at the table when big decisions are made

Until that point, you won’t see ads, or be nagged to donate, or forced to pay a fee to access your content. That’s no accident.

Investors eat the cost of running and developing the service, because they know that once that userbase has been established, they can– you guessed it– SELL YOUR DATA TO ADVERTISERS.

They can’t do that until after they have users for advertisers to sell their shit to!

That’s how the investors make their money back, that’s how the service becomes profitable instead of being a giant cash pit.

So for the love of God, can we PLEASE stop slandering sites like AO3, Wikipedia, and now Pillowfort for having the audacity to ask for donations, or for having tiered/paid membership options for additional, non-essential features??

giggleboxx3000-deactivated20190

themanonthecouch

If you’re not paying, you’re the product

gangrelslut

If you’re not paying, you’re the product

lawfulgoodness

I just wanted to make a quick addendum…

If you’re not paying for a commercial platform, you’re the product of the commercial platform.

Wikipedia, mastodon, and other public-use sites are free to use and do not treat their user bases as a product to be sold. But if they fail to collect the donations it takes to run their infrastructure, that may change.