[Image ID: Tweet from Maoist Anton Chigurh (@/ The_Wub_) reading: Sorry that I implied mental illness is often contingent upon class relations and cultural values of dominant modes of production. You're right. It's much more polite to insist its a metaphysical plague that is usually terminal & incurable & never anyone's fault /End ID]
Hello, Tumblr. Labs division here!
Back in June, we announced our comeback as a new team that would imagine big ideas for Tumblr—and would build them in public (aka with you).
Today we're very excited to announce our first failure. The first experiment we want to loudly, publicly admit didn’t work. We’re pretty excited about this because trying and failing are a big part of learning.
A few months ago, we ran interviews with lots of people on Tumblr to get a better sense of what works and what needs to be better.
Among other things, we heard that people discovering (or rediscovering) Tumblr really struggle to understand how to make it work for them. They sometimes don't know how to follow the right blogs to curate their dashboard, or how to use likes, replies and reblogs to interact with a particular fandom.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg, really! Some might be lucky and have friends to teach them, but many come here to find friends in the first place, and leave feeling lost and overwhelmed.
So here at Labs we're working on ideas to help people discover what makes Tumblr a unique corner of the internet, making it easier for them to find belonging here.
Our first idea was to simplify certain parts of our interface, thinking through each element and putting what is important to you front and center. We called it "Mini"—mostly because it was a cute name.
We started work on the post interface first, because that's the most important part of your experience on Tumblr, and we wanted to improve some of the problems there.
Our goal was to make labels and actions on posts easier to differentiate, and make each post the same height, so diving into a long post is a choice. To achieve that, we designed a new header, a new footer with separate actions, and a mini version of the post:
As we started to build it, we realized that scrolling through the dashboard after the changes… didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like Tumblr anymore. But we didn’t want to make a decision based solely on our own gut feelings… we needed to ask the Tumblr community.
An essential part of how we're working in Labs is speaking to people who use Tumblr (and those who don't use it, but could love it) pretty much on a daily basis. So we showed them this idea, and their response was indifferent at best, and confused at worst.
We learned that it's hard to limit the height of a post without sacrificing the magic of reblogs, and that loss was too meaningful for us to pursue this any further. So we're putting it in the trash.
So Mini didn’t work out! That’s okay. We’ve learned a lot. While minifying posts might not be the answer, there were parts of the idea that worked, and you might even start to see some improvements being tested from what we learned. We’ll see where that goes!
We're working on other ideas at the same time, and some of them are getting a lot of love from people in research. So the next time you hear from us, we'll hopefully have something more successful to share—stay tuned!
With love,
Labs division
Glad you admit it was a fail, really appreciate that! Now do the same with the "new” (acc just stolen from twitter) dashboard. Please. It’s SO bad. Cluttered and confusing. I don’t want installing extensions on every device I use just to be able to use tumbrl normally.
Motivation: I see a lot of misinformation circulating on the dash re the proposed crab day and I wanted to offer a simplified and judgement free perspective using core principles of finance.
Q: We keep being told that tumblr's been making nothing but a loss for years, and yet, if it is so unprofitable, then why is no one is shutting the website down? Is it really in need of our money if it's already owned by a multi-billion dollar corporation?
This is in fact not as much of a paradox as it appears to be because "value" in corporate finance terms is a function of present and expected future profits (adjusting for the fact that profits you expect to be earn in the near future are worth a lot more than equivalent profits expected to be earned much later in time).
This means that you can have a company or a product that is currently making a loss (i.e. costing a lot more to run than the income it generates) and it might still be worth some (or a lot of) money as long as you expect it to generate enough profits going forward. Uber for example has been making a loss for years and is still valued at billions of dollars because people think it will eventually generate a lot of profit.
Q: What does all of that mean for tumblr, specifically?
Given how unprofitable tumblr has been historically it's actually a pretty good sign that management has a plan to try and make it profitable because it means they haven't thrown in the towel yet!
But if they fail or if they decide that no matter what they do tumblr will remain unprofitable, then they wouldn't have much business incentive to keep running it. This is why participating in crab day or spending some money on tumblr in general is a good idea, if you can afford it and if tumblr is a service you would like to keep enjoying into the future. And if the answer is no to either of those questions, that's ok too--don't let anyone guilt you on this.
Even more questions-and-answers under the cut! My inbox is also open for any (good faith) questions you might have.
Oh I will gladly participate! I really want to! But can’t really do this when a trans person gets their selfies labelled as mature content even after the appeal or the flickering ads issue is not resolved!
Screw the knock-off twitter dashboard, I hate it but whatever, I can get used to it. Fix the transphobia and albeism so that I can throw money at you! I even saved up for this exact reason!
LET ME LOVE YOU TUMBRL
Literally cannot stop thinking about this tweet btw
It's good this is getting preserved on here since twitter is exploding constantly. Much love to all the friends who gesture excitedly at me when it resurfaces also
Artists.
You do not need your Twitter.
Twitter is not the boost you think it is anymore.
I have seen at least 6 people I follow on BlueSky saying they have looked into their numbers and compared to Twitter? BSky gives them over double the exposure and follow through for outside links (probably because Twitter kills your tweet if you have links).
Twitter is testing a feature to allow other users to click a button attached to your posts to put your art into their Grok ai and make ai art with it without your permission automatically.
It is marking non-ai art as being made with Grok (probably to promote it).
You do not need Twitter.
Twitter needs you.
Starve the fuckin thing.
twitter is hell but i really hope it doesn’t actually die because this is in contention for the funniest thing i’ve ever read in my life
this post fails to show the original tweet that this was in reply to, which is not as jarring but certainly should be included:
further evidence toward my thesis that a big part of fromsoft's games is that the devs are all massive trolls and masters of physical comedy
(i wanted to add this elden ring video from twitter to a reblog of another post but i forgot you cant do that so im making a post about it)
Tony Hawk’s Twitter is a gold mine honestly
We Stan this San Diego Man
this
C o m e d yy
Some recent gems:
And of course there’s
i’m wheezgJmf stoP
Honestly every time this thread just makes me laugh. And new additions…excellent.
jk rowling calling nigel farage “woke” is beyond parody at this point what is WRONG with her. i’m giving it another few months before she legitimately tweets out that hitler had a point.
While it wouldn't surprise me if she said that, the article doesn't link to her tweet where she actually says that, and Twitter won't let me explore the replies without logging in.
Does anybody have a link (either archived on archive.org or directly from twitter) of the exact tweet where she says this?
Good point, here’s the tweet itself:
And the link to it for anyone who has Twitter and wants to see the full conversation (I don’t, so that’s the only screenshot I can get).
She tweeted it on the 12th September 2025, four days ago as of making this post.
Found the full conversation, and for context, she was defending Charlie Kirk.
So now that JK Rowling has defended a Nazi by quoting Adolf fucking Hitler, can we maybe give up those books now? Can we maybe stop yaoifying her characters and pretending that they can be reclaimed now? Pretty please? 🥺
[Image ID: First image shows a headline from a Yahoo article that reads “JK Rowling invokes Hitler while weighing in on Charlie Kirk assassination and free speech” with a picture of JK Rowling underneath. End ID]
[Image ID: Second image shows a paragraph of text from the same article that reads “The conversation surrounding Rowling's viral thread took an even sharper turn when a follower asked if her stance on free speech and extremism extended to figures like Adolf Hitler. Rowling responded by arguing that many people who hurl the label "fascist" at their opponents often end up endorsing fascist tactics themselves. To drive the point home, she quoted directly from Hitler's "Mein Kampf," writing, "The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence."” End ID]
[Image ID: Third image shows a tweet by JK Rowling that reads “Many who scream ‘fascist’ at opponents fully endorse their methods.
"The very first essential for success is a perpetually constant and regular employment of violence." Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.” End ID]
[Image ID: Fourth image shows a Twitter thread; the first tweet is by JK Rowling and reads “If you believe free speech is for you but not your political opponents, you’re illiberal. If no contrary evidence could change your beliefs, you’re a fundamentalist. If you believe the state should punish those with contrary views, you’re a totalitarian. If you believe…” the tweet is then cut off by a link to the tweet she is quoting, which is not shown.
The second tweet is from @/tzippylavi and reads “Do you include Hitler in that?”
The third tweet is the original tweet that Rowling wrote, quoting Hitler. End ID]
Reblog this version, please.
Woman who's "very concerned about the rights.of women" is desperately sad over the death of a millionaire with lobbying power who believed female children had a moral duty to be forced to carry resulting offspring from being raped.
Better raped than trans I guess.
This shitpost actually got me thinking about the presumptiveness of privilege. Because. Like.
In the message chain at the end with the Dr. Pepper rep? They said this.
"I would be happy to connect you with our head of in-house counsel if you would like to speak about this further."
And that's a wild thing to say. Because. Like. I would not like to speak about this further. You're the one contacting me to take down a Tweet. You're the one who wants to speak about this further.
The default outcome of this conversation is that the Tweet remains up and OP just keeps on keeping on. But the representative here speaks as if the default outcome is that the Tweet comes down, and offers OP the opportunity to discuss with their legal counsel why it can't stay up.
The outcome of this is, of course, the flippant screenshotted Tweet blowing them off that OP made.
But the level of presumption of control over what a rando does with her Twitter account that this representative entered the conversation with is honestly wild when you step back and think about it.
