This was absolutely the biggest April Fools effort I ever witnessed while on staff. I already posted about this in an ask but here’s more of the shit that went down behind the scenes.
- Like all April Fools, this was done entirely through volunteer work on Staff. No one was forced to work on April Fools, it’s always employee-initiated and driven, even if it needs approval from leadership.
- The prank almost didn’t go through because leadership felt that the lizards weren’t relatable enough, so the compromise was to give them hats.
- The video updates on the Decision 2016 blog were greenscreen Fiverr actors that were all recorded months? Weeks? in advance? I wasn’t on creative so I don’t know all the deets about how those were made.
- As mentioned in my post, the victory speech by Mop was one of our designers screaming as loud as she could in a closet near the end of the day. The full audio was never posted but staff kept passing around the scream on slack and laughing about it for months afterwards
- There was a “war room” dedicated to advancing the election narrative as votes came in, posting updates in real time and also pushing changes to code as necessary (for bug fixes and what not)
- The votes were real and the “election” was decided by real users, even if the graphics and whatnot were exaggerated for comical effect. Mop won because Mop won. Democracy at work
- Someone brought in their own lizard to celebrate the proceedings. It was a bearded dragon
- This was the culmination of what was probably the most cohesive and imaginative (and largest) creative team Tumblr ever had. Unfortunately almost all of them are now long gone, and Tumblr Creative is now just a skeleton crew compared to their peak
- Wretched Tooth Doesn’t Like To Talk About Himself
- People drew porn of the lizards and posted it on Tumblr. Staff saw it and were sending it to each other on the company Slack. We thought it was great. I mean, terrifying, but great
- This picture of David Karp is my favorite photo of David Karp I have on my phone
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