sixth house brainrot
Anonymous
sent a message

Hey, I found a beanie boo that I liked the design of but I can't stand those giant uguu eyes. Do you think it would be possible to replace them with smaller safety eyes akin to the old beanie babies? If yes, do you have any advice?

  • I was gonna answer this in a normal way, but then I got curious about trying it for myself and thought I might as well demonstrate!

    So, I went and picked up a guy from the supermarket. The selection there was pretty barren today but I found a decent test subject:

    image

    Eye replacement procedure below!

    Keep reading

  • 'can i copy your homework?'

    'yeah just don't make it obvious'

    image
    image
  • Reminder that this is an experiment as per their official announcement (screenshot below).

    image

    Since this is an experiment, give your feedback to staff!

    And remember to be specific on how this new navigation layout they are experimenting with is not working for you; hating it is one thing, but usability on different devices with different screen orientations, operating system, etc., would be much more impactful and meaningful.

  • image

    Image description: it's a drawing of Mace Windu from Star Wars. It's from the torso up. He's facing forward with a serious expression. There's lines that criss cross around his face and the drawing, cutting it in sections like tine breaks on glass. On the bottom center there's "Mace Windu Shatter point" written over my signature. The drawing is painted mainly in purples and greens. End of description.

  • sent a message

    Hi! I'm wondering if you can offer any insight into something that's been bugging me with all of the changes. This is genuinely not a hostile ask - I know first-hand how hard (necessary) change management is. I don't envy the position y'all are in.

    That being said - I'm having a hard time making sense of the strategy around the roll out for the last few big changes/"experiments"). It seems like the folks doing the messaging vs the actual feature management are not on the same page.

    It has been stated several times that:

    "We’ll be testing [our new] ideas in an opt-in basis with people who’ve been using Tumblr for years, and more especially with people who’ve never even heard of Tumblr (a difficult group to find)."

    We've also seen, repeatedly, that

    "Tumblr is a place where you can tailor and customize your experience to individual preferences."

    With those statements in mind, the choice to roll these new features out to folks who *didn't* volunteer - and not offer any way to "customize our experience" seems like a strange one.

    An expectation (which was positive) was established only to be directly violated within a few weeks. It makes it challenging to get a read on what y'all actually mean -- and to extend good faith or trust when communications do come out.

    If you say you're going to do something, then do it, it builds trust. If you don't, it erodes trust. And that just makes your already difficult jobs harder - and the userbase even more reactive and knee-jerk resistant.

    Can you give us a sense of what's going on here? Or can you at least pass this feedback on to whoever is handling the messaging around this stuff? We can see that y'all are striving for transparency, but that's only effective if it's honest/consistent.

    [TL;DR: Tumblr's messaging emphasizes testing changes with volunteers, and offering the ability to customize - but that doesn't seem to be what's actually happening. What's up?]

  • this is a really great question, thank you for asking it. you’ve accurately pointed out some glaring holes in our communication strategy – some of that is even my fault, to be honest, as someone who tries to help shape our public communications.

    the easiest answer is that there’s a lot of work happening on the internal tumblr side, and not all of it is the same kind of work, and therefore not all of it is being communicated consistently. that’s a huge problem if you’re not inside of it, as you point out; the contradictions seem weird for anyone paying attention.

    i’m currently a part of the @labs group and we’re trying to come up with radical ideas for reshaping tumblr, prototype them quickly, show them to people, and iterate on them, and reject them quickly if they don’t make sense. the Tumblr Mini thing recently is an unfortunate example of that – something leaked way too early, before we even got a chance to really understand how the thing we prototyped would be received. that may never go beyond the thing people saw, for good reason: it doesn’t make sense. we’re learning from it, but it’s unfinished.

    in that Labs group, we do want volunteer-based feedback, and we’re actually starting that very soon with targeted user research. you may see some surveys soliciting that feedback soon, or invites to be a part of the testing. i’m extremely excited by that, because some other ideas we have feel like they should’ve been a part of tumblr since the beginning.

    but…….

    there’s a whole different group at tumblr that are making “core product” improvements, and a lot of their work is reflected in the recent staff post about product strategy. their aim is to alleviate a lot of common points of confusion and frustration, some of which will seem counter-intuitive to people who have been on tumblr for many years and learned (what i call) “the hard way”.

    a lot of that core improvement work will be rolled out, experimented with, and iterated on, the traditional way: involuntary A/B tests, rather than volunteers. that is standard industry practice, because when you’re trying to understand the behavior of millions of people, just asking for volunteers introduces too much selection bias.

    however, it’s important to note that even today’s rollout of the new desktop navigation was released to some XKit devs beforehand, so we could get early feedback. so sometimes we do roll these core things out for feedback first, before “regular users”, before we A/B test it. usually those small initial experiments are hyper-targeted though… in this case, because we do actually care about XKit and third party developers. you don’t see that though!

    so full transparency: not everything we do is going to be volunteer-based, not everything we do can be communicated adequately before we test it, not everything during testing will be customizable, because how much we want to customize is dependent on the outcome of these tests. it’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem.

    and furthermore, this is kind of how it’s always been, for better or worse, since around 2016 when tumblr started believing in A/B tests and experiments, rather than just “ship it and we’ll see”… the common denominator, though, is that we want your feedback. we don’t do a good enough job soliciting that feedback, but we do want it. (i kinda wish we had an easy feedback button for the new layout.) we do make decisions based on feedback, but we augment that decision-making process with hard data from experiments.

    i hope that makes sense? there’s too much to cover to provide you with the full context. i could write a book about it. all i can confidently say is that we’re trying as best as we can to balance the ideas of keeping tumblr special and unique, while trying weird/bad/good/uncomfortable new directions to help the platform grow and thrive. status quo and complacency aren’t acceptable; tumblr needs to change to survive. i am just as uncomfortable and upset by that fact as anyone, and i worry every day and night about it, whether the price of survival is worth it.

    we’ll see, hopefully together.

  • While we’re all still on the note of “this new tumblr update fucking sucks,” here’s your non-regular reminder to download XKit Rewritten. It has settings to restore header links (you can once again “prev tags”!), and also has features like mass-replacing tags, hiding recommended posts and more

  • How to tell tumblr @staff how you feel about their changes to the platform

    Go to: The Help Center's Support Form

    image

    Select 'Feedback' from the 'Choose a category for support' dropdown menu

    image

    Fill in the textbox below this, try to word your complaints in a clear and firm manner

    image

    Complete the captcha and click 'Next'

    image

    The next section will have this header, followed by potential advice, ignore this and scroll down

    image

    Click 'No, send my thing'

    Congrats! You've submitted feedback!

  • @staff this UI update is terrible and unwanted by your community. Why are you catering to twitter users who don’t want to put the smallest bit of effort into learning how tumblr’s site and culture works, instead of your existing userbase who like tumblr for being tumblr and want the site to actually improve and become nicer to use with really useful suggestions!!

    The new UI is ugly and difficult to use, there’s a reason nobody uses twitter on desktop!

  • this website's moderation sucks ass and it has a terrible bot problem and there are an enormous amount of bugs but thankfully we have a staff team hard at work not addressing any of these but instead making shitty ui changes that nobody wants

  • &. zinnia theme by seyche