The dash is feeling Tennant-y tonight, I see.

i found this ancient post from my blog so if you want to know what tumblr looked like from an ipod in 2010……

WOW

happy 15 years to this post

Why don't they make stained glass fish tanks? Give those fish Catholic guilt

fascinated by the implication that it's the stained glass that gives catholics the guilt

I FOUND THE. FISH CAN’T SIN POST.

Like, yes, people calling for a return to a golden age that never actually existed is a problem, but pushing back against that by insisting that everything has always been exactly as bad as it is right now in every respect for everyone everywhere and dismissing any suggestion to the contrary as reactionary doesn't make you a hard-nosed realist, it just makes you a dipshit.

It never fails to amuse me when I get “hello influencer” emails wanting me to push questionable products to my followers.

Like worstie, I can barely promote my own published book without wanting to curl up and die.

The fuck makes you think I’ll shill your discount wish shit?

Also, it's Tumblr. If I try to tell anyone about your knock-off Wish-quality sex toy there’s going to be a horde of Autistic lesbians doing a power point presentation in the notes about safe sex toy material and correct battery storage.

Which I am 100% down for, but it will not get you any sales.

I was trying to figure out if you were someone important on a other platform, because there's no way in hell anyone actually thinks you can be classified as "Influencer" if you have a big Tumblr blog.

And then also think advertising to this mob would be a good idea

There are actually lots of people who sell stuff successfully on here, usually drop ship stuff.

They’re just not disclosing it as ads, which they are supposed to do, and instead it's marketed in a very Tumblr-esque way which can be summed up as “omg guys look how CUTE this is” followed by a different account underneath going “omg found it!!” and it links to a drop ship site with the item(s).

And the link usually has an affiliate tracker in it, which you may or may not be able to spot unless you’re familiar with them, which is also something you are legally supposed to disclose.

I used to get a lot of offers from around 2016-2020 to sell “moon lamps” on here, y’know those orb lights that look like a moon? Yeah. I was offered a higher kickback to make it look like I wasnt posting an add because these sellers know Tumblrites don’t like ads.

They wanted it to look as organic and hyped up as possible and then I’d just so happen to be like “omg you guys it's on sale” and post a link. Which is skeevy as shit and also illegal af in the US.

It’s like the insta/tiktok girlies saying “link in bio” to get around saying “here’s a product I make money on if you buy it” because they want to sound like your friend because people are more likely to impulse buy stuff if a “friend” is recommending something.

They’re also trusting that everyone knows “link in bio” means “affiliate link” which is technically not enough of a disclosure but whatever.

This is why I tag all my own book promos with “affiliate links” because depending on which storefront you buy Hunger Pangs from, I may get a kickback from the vender which I do to help mediate the fees I lose from distribution. It’s not much—literal pennies in some cases—but I’m still legally required to state it.

It’s also why when I do post products I use or like, I make a point of letting people know I’m not an affiliate and not sponsored because despite the legal ramifications these people are flirting with by not disclosing their affiliate status, I want to be fully transparent with my followers when it comes to me trying to sell them things.

Y’all keep my lights on by reading my work and through my ko-fi and patreon. I am not about to risk that trust for the sake of some shitty vibrator sales from a sketch-ass drop shipper who wants me to pretend I’m not selling you things.

So, yeah. People do successfully sell stuff on here. A lot of us small indie creators sell our own work all the time.

But there are also drop-ship sellers on here who get enough of a kick-back from affiliate links to make selling cutesy kitsch stuff worth their time on here. They’re just making sure you don’t know you’re being marketed to.

those product posts thinly disguised as "omfg look at this cool thing!/I found it online!" seem to come in waves and once you've noticed the pattern they're just annoying - unless they're marine biology/dinosaur plushies of course in which case it's just an opportunity to gawp

The most recent one I can think of is that jellyfish light. That's 100% an ad, just hidden in tumblr-speak.

I find I can generally tell when it's an ad posted by a corp/dropshipper vs someone extremely passionate selling something they made and love, but there's a lot of the former floating around

God, thank you for saying something. I seriously considered making this same post back in July when I started noticing more and more posts of this kind with thousands of notes. Some of them were getting pushed onto my dashboard from a few of the most popular tags I track (like "artists on tumblr") but a few were getting shared by actual people who I follow (omg these ethereal dragon hair clips are perfect for cosplays... 😒)

(Screenshots I took at the time - this particular blog has been thoroughly scrubbed from existence in the meantime.)

There is an extensive interconnected network of blogs with URLs like haha-lol-cute-funny, daily-meme-inspiration, omg-wow-tiktoks, etc. that bulk post vast quantities of stolen memes with broad appeal, spam them in a million popular tags, and then reblog them back and forth from each other. Once any given meme takes off, the OP is edited and the meme replaced with one of these stealth ads. Then, because of the inflated note count, the ad version of the post will get pushed to the dashboards of anyone tracking those tags.

If you go into the notes of any of these, half the reblogs will still be of the original meme. Here's an example: Original meme / the ad it turned into.

(The OP of this one has already been taken down - screenshots because the images in this post are also liable to get scrubbed.)

The note count has the added benefit of making it look like thousands of real people are excited about the item in the post, and, for better or worse, people are strongly motivated by things they think others in their community are doing.

I’m sure someones already said this but I often see Tumblr described as a hellsite. This is fundamentally incorrect.

Tumblr is the faesite. Everybody is super confused and lost, you keep running into random places. Somehow you end up stuck there forever after interacting a couple of times. The people are all strange, everybody simultaneously seems to be from the future and the past as if time is meaningless.

YES

also technology breaks at random, and sometimes you just suddenly feel a thousand years old

Empty, default-avatar blog that apparently followed me all of five minutes ago just DMed me like:

I have to admit, as phishing strategies go it's a novel one.

@lord-haterade replied:

Phishing scams often open with seemingly innocuous overtures about random topics. In the context of Tumblr bots, this frequently takes the form of a tag you've recently used inserted into an otherwise generic template like "I love your opinions about [tag], can I ask you some questions about [tag]". If you bite, the bot hands you off to a human operator to exploit the conversational foot in the door it's created.

The funny part (which I'm jokingly calling novel) is that if this is indeed a phishing bot, it picked religion of all things as the recently used tag to employ. Not exactly safe topic for casual discussion!

Recycled tumblr humor

10k notes

pun

pun repeated in italics

“did you just” added

supernatural gif that fits even though the post was nowhere near related to spn

comment expressing disbelief on how Supernatural has a gif for everything

Comment expressing their uttermost love for Tumblr

comment expressing utter hate for posts like these

Comment that OMG IT’S THE ORIGINAL I’VE ONLY SEEN IT IN SCREENSHOTS

what was old is apparently new again

Someone saying this post is a must reblog

someone mentioning the ops are all deactivated

The @hellsite-hall-of-fame reblog

Reading this in 2024 feels like an immortal returning to their old village after 300 years and finding it’s been converted to a heritage site full of period actors

It’s like visiting colonial Williamsburg!

I like to call this the Oh Brother effect, after the printer.

In a race to the bottom, you win by standing still.

Instagram: if you like anything other than my latest 3 posts I'm gonna assume you're a stalker or a spammer and block you >:(

Twitter: someone private quote retweeted my post, I guess I have a hater now

Tumblr: I have 24 hours to mass spam the notifications of anyone who crosses my sight, and with god as my witness, I will do just that and they will like it

I'm scared

The Best News You’ve Heard All Year

(AKA: the Return of the Reblog Chains)

SO you know how a while back Tumblr took away the feature that allowed you to view the previous reblog in a reblog chain on a post? Remember how we were all terribly upset about it and helplessly screamed our outrage into the void (aka Tumblr @staff)?

Well! Apparently, it wasn’t a void after all, or else it was and the void heard us and adjusted accordingly.

Because I noticed something a couple weeks ago, and didn’t say anything because I assumed I was just oblivious and the last person to have noticed it… but it has since come to my attention that, in fact, others had not noticed. Which makes sense considering how quiet its restoration seems to have been. But should be rectified.

In short, click the three dots at the top of a post:

to open a set of menu options:

And, voila!

Please join me in celebrating, and feel free to reblog to spread the news to those who may not have realized it yet! The voice of the people has prevailed. 🎉

reminder to submit your art to tumblr radar it's like a free blaze + they will usually accept it

link to submit if you're not sure how:

how to find literally any post on a blog in seconds (on desktop)

there are so many posts about ~tumblr is so broken, you can’t find any post on your own blog, it’s impossible, bluhrblub~

I am here to tell you otherwise! it is in fact INCREDIBLY easy to find a post on a blog if you’re on desktop/browser and you know what you’re doing:

the tag system on desktop tumblr is GENUINELY amazing for searching within a specific blog! 

caveat: this assumes a person HAS a desktop theme (or “custom theme”) enabled. a “custom theme” is url.tumblr.com, as opposed to tumblr.com/url. I’ve heard you have to opt-into the former now, when it used to be the default, so not everyone HAS a custom theme where you can use all those neat url tricks. 

if the person doesn’t have a “custom theme” enabled, you’re beholden to the search bar. still, I’ve found the search bar on tumblr.com/url is WAY more reliable than search on mobile. for starters, it tends to bring posts up in a sensible order, instead of dredging up random posts from 2013 before anything else

if you’re on mobile, I’m sorry. godspeed and good luck finding anything. (my one tip is that if you’re able to click ON a tag rather than go through the search bar, you’ll have better luck. if your mutual has recently reblogged a post tagged #croissant, you can click #croissant and it’ll bring up everything tagged #croissant just like /tagged/croissant. but if there’s no readily available tag to click on, you have to rely on the mobile search bar and its weird bizarre whims) 

One caveat, at least in my experience, is that even the desktop search bar gets weird about indexing words that appear in reblogs of a post but not in either your tags or the original post. So for example if I’m searching for this post: OP: What’s your favorite thing to put on hot dogs? 1st reblog: I like them with ketchup tagged: #mustard

The desktop search bar is pretty much guaranteed to find it if I search for “hot dog” or “mustard” but there’s a good chance it will NOT find it if I search for “ketchup”.

If you’re not finding what you’re looking for, you may have better luck doing a google search with as much of the post as you can remember (exact phrasing, key words, author, anything you’ve got) followed by “source:tumblr”

One very easy thing you can do to make Tumblr a safer place for Jews is to NOT REBLOG ANYTHING FROM NATIVENEWS EVER. In addition to sharing virulent antisemitism and "news" that amounts to nothing more than screenshots of factually inaccurate tweets with no source whatsoever, they recently SHARED A HAMAS CALL TO ACTION. They are quite literally promoting terrorism. (Yes, I reported it, but knowing Tumblr, it probably won't go anywhere.)

I don't care if the post you're sharing from them has nothing to do with Israel/Palestine or if it contains information that is correct and important to share. This is a blog that is encouraging terrorism and genocide against my people. Do not give them any platform. Do not put this terrorist blog on my dash.

just discoverd i can block people i find annoying

when u get out of the mindest blocking is only saved for “Bad People” and you can block perfectly fine ppl you just know theyre a little annoying to you, your experience enhances

so fucking true. hitting that block button on people who annoy me like a medieval king ordering his guards to slay the jester for being unfunny

Blocking people is mental health, not weakness.

A new way to navigate Tumblr

If you use Tumblr on a web browser, you might have noticed us testing a brand new navigation on your dashboard in the last month. Now, after some extensive tweaks, we’ve begun rolling out this new dashboard navigation to everyone using a web browser. Welcome to the new world. It’s very like the old world, just in a different layout.

Why are we doing this? We want it to be as easy as possible for everyone to understand and explore what’s happening on Tumblr—newbies and seasoned travelers alike.

Labels over icons: When adding something new to Tumblr in the past, we’d simply add a new icon to our navigation with little further explanation. Turns out no one likes to press a button when they don’t know what it does. So now, where there’s space, the navigation includes text labels. Since adding these, we’ve noticed more of you venturing to previously unexplored corners of Tumblr. Intrepid!

What’s already been fixed? Thanks to feedback from folks during the testing phase, we’ve been able to make some improvements right out of the gate. Those include returning settings subpages (Account, Dashboard, etc.) to the right of the settings page instead of having them in an expandable item in the navigation on the left; fixing some issues with messaging windows on smaller screens; and streamlining the Account section to make it easier to get to your blogs.

What’s next? We’re looking into making a collapsible version of this navigation and improving the use of screen space for those of you with enormous screens. We’re also working on improving access to your account and sideblogs.

That’s all for now, folks. For questions and suggestions, contact Support using the “Feedback” category. Please select the “Report a bug or crash” category on the support form for technical issues. And keep an eye out for more updates here on @changes.

can’t wait until people start claiming to be shadowbanned on this site and we collectively get to inform them that there’s no algorithm and their posts just suck

There absolutely is shadow banning.

It really is real, I had to write to the staff to get un-shadow banned.

If they undid it, that was spaghetti code, not a shadow ban. See: this post

ID - two screen shots.

The first - Does shadowbanning exist on Tumblr?

No, it does not. There's no shadowban mechanism. Tumblr's search function is just abysmal, and any posts with inline links not on Tumblr's trusted domain list in their OP will never show up in search. It's an anti-spam measure implemented years ago and as far as I know, they're still using it.

The second - common occurrences that are mistaken for shadowbanning:

- Group blogs can't send or receive direct messages. This is on purpose.

- Adding inline links to your post will prevent the post from showing up on tags pages and search. It's a crude anti-spam measure to prevent tag spam.

- Only the first five tags on your post are indexed for search/tag pages. Any tages after that don't count.

- Blogs can disable replies on posts.

- People can block you.

- The website is broken.