Automattician / Meme connoisseur

In your Tumblr’s feeding the Tumbeasts spam and other bad content to keep things clean and civil

[sabertoothwalrus]

for those who don’t remember, “mole interest” was an experiment I did 2 years ago because I wanted to test what causes tags to go trending on tumblr. My hypothesis was that all it takes is one (1) post blowing up in an established tag to make the entire tag trend.

I had randomly generated 2 words, which is where “mole interest” came from. I failed to consider that by generating a new tag, it wouldn’t have had enough posts already in it to prove what I now call “the mole interest effect”.

But now it does.

In 2023, we said “fuck it” a la mythbusters and ended up doing whatever it took to get #mole interest to trend. And it did. And it happened to be September 11th that day, and we managed to get #mole interest to trend ABOVE #9/11.

So, in the name of science, I ask you to reblog just this post. Let’s put the mole interest effect to the test.

[westi]

Living the dual citizenship life

[lilboreddev-blog]

reblog if your name isn't Amanda.

[thatblackwatchdouche-blog-blog]

2,121,566 people are not Amanda and counting!

We’ll find you Amanda.

[iceslushii]

this has almost 11 million notes what is this

[yiffmaster]

I’ve never seen this post once in 10 years on this site

[westi]

Wonder Woman Colorado Halloween Style @reallyndacarter

[westi]

"I just ship, the incident team tests for me"

[westi]

Today this seems prescient

[westi]

"I just ship, the incident team tests for me"

[westi]

Reassuring to see that football still knows how to get lost on the way home.

[westi]

Living the dual citizenship life

[staffs-secret-blog]

I think a lot of us choose to believe tumblr eats asks so we don't have to think that people don't want to answer them

[westi]

Well we have to feed the Tumbeasts somehow. #shrug

[westi]

Vacation within a vacation

[memories]

#santa fe and Other Things That Ruined My Life: An Autobiography by westi

[westi]

I guess I should get back to writing this ….

[zingring]

Why is the crossdressing tag blocked? A search tells me the tag could contain content in violation of Tumblr’s community guidelines but what’s the reasoning there?

I don't know! I don't think it should be. My guess is that it is sort of collaterally caught in the 2018 over-correction on adult material. One of the (very blunt) tools available to us at that time was to blacklist hundreds of terms that had been used in the past to spread legitimately forbidden content. I wasn't with Tumblr at that time, so I can't give particulars for this exact term, but I can say I think it's long overdue for a comeback. It also sounds like folks can find content with the "cross dressing" tag, which is at least something until we can get this sorted.

[zingring]

Ok, at least "crossdressing" is fixed (along with some other associated tags that are similar).

Fixing these tags is a manual process and not exactly trivial. We do want to fix the ones that are not vectors for abuse (though bad actors will always come along and abuse whatever they can), but it will take us time. We want to do this in a unified way, rather than one-offs, so we can be thoughtful about it.

[jubs]

me, changing a legacy code:

me when no test fails:

[cyle]

one does not simply walk into the legacy codebase

[westi]

One enters it exceptionally

[april]

gotta wonder where twitter will be in another 9 months

[westi]

For some reason I read this as moths as was like Huh, interesting

[writergeekrhw]

I made another thing.

With apologies to Neil Gaiman.

[neil-gaiman]

No apologies needed.

[westi]

Living the dual citizenship life

[westi]

Gecko