Let's all go back to Tumblr - <AUTHOR> https://theoutline.com/post/5811/why-tumblr-is-better-than-twitter-and-we-should-bring-it-back <comment><USER2> A radical idea, lets all go back to blogs, hosted and owned by ourselves, on our own sites, which will enrich only us, and where you can write as long and as short as you want, and link to whatever you want.

<comment><USER3> Is there a good way to get my blog onto the fediverse? It sort of seems like the protocol (ActivityPub) is built in a way that it can support blog-style content as well as toot-style content, and it would solve many of the problems people have with discoverability, RSS dying, shared private posts, etc. I'd be interested in getting my blog (which is self-hosted and using a static site generator) publishing in a way that fediverse users can follow.

I guess IndieWeb is also in this space, but ActivityPub probably has the critical mass thanks to Mastodon.

<comment><USER4> If you're running a WordPress blog, then the [OStatus]([https://wordpress.org/plugins/ostatus-for- wordpress/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/ostatus-for-wordpress/)) plugin connects your site to the fediverse. I don't know if there's such a thing for your static generator, though...

<comment> vertex-four OStatus is currently implemented by Mastodon but essentially none of the rest of the post-Activitypub fediverse - we've more-or-less standardised on Activitypub as a protocol which solves many of OStatus's problems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Main takeaways, in my view:

\- Longer form allows for less heated conversation

\- Allowing randos to emplace their screeds immediately below your post encourages fighting

That second point I think bears more exploration. Maybe we _shouldn 't_ allow trolls to inject themselves into every conversation, eh?

My favorite format for post/discussion is still the blog format, where comments are moderated by the author of the post. You want to post something the author wouldn't allow on their post? Do it on your own blog. (Dreamwidth, main successor to Livejournal, has this property as well.)

<comment><USER6> I run a few blogs for a couple of pretty big Authors (not GRRM big, but still top 5 in Amazon for their categories).

For years now, I've been suggesting to not have comments on the blog, and just have a link to their email saying something like "Want to discuss this? Send me an Email, I'd love to chat!". Every single one of them prefers this method, and has said it creates a much more valuable conversation 1-on-1 with the person, rather than the exposed public sharing of an open comment section. One of the authors actually came up with the idea, and I now love it too.

A few others ask for comments as normal, but want people to sign up, and be approved. WP has a nice feature for this where people can sign up + comment in a single go, then the admin can approve that comment, which also approves them to post in the future. Settings > Discussion > "Comment author must have a previously approved comment."

<comment><USER7> I find it really interesting (and even exciting) that Instagram stories (which have rapidly taken over Instagram) work like this: you respond by sending a private message to the poster, not by leaving a public comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article utterly misrepresents Tumblr as some kind of paradise. It's definitely not. It's as good and bad as Twitter or Facebook or whatever else. I used Tumblr for years, from probably 2008 until 2017.

The real problem as I see it is there's a large, vocal, vicious echo-chamber effect at play. A lot of its userbase are quite radical and aggressive in their beliefs, and the reblogging system makes it easy to use the platform for bully. It's not entirely optional to interact with radicalised elements on Tumblr. The tagging system lets them find you, and then they can brigade you if you fall foul of whatever pet cause they have.

This happened to me when I'd posted a photo of my dog. She's my pride and joy, and it was a harmless and cute photo of her jumping to catch a ball in the air. My mistake was using the caption "Good girl!" and tag #goodgirl. (I also tagged #dog, #fetch, #springerspaniel, #spaniel.)

I was flooded with follows from people, mostly men but also some young-ish girls, in the "daddy dom" community (their main tag seems to be #ddlg, but #goodgirl was enough for them to find me). That was a pretty disturbing subculture with definitely uncomfortable elements of abuse built right into the foundation of it.

I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. They mercilessly harrassed me. They flooded my inbox with abusive message: "dirty cis scum, kill yourself", things like that. They reblogged my photo saying some pretty vile things about me and my poor dog. In their reblogs they utterly misrepresented what I'd said, reposted it endlessly, called me transphobic, a bigot, threatened to dox me.

In the end I abandoned my entire blog there and deleted it. As far as I know, there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful reblogs taken down. I reported them all for abuse and harassment, but Tumblr did nothing. Tumblr's staff don't care. They would never respond on Twitter or by email or to my reports through the form on the site. Just radio silence.

This is purely anecdotal of course. I know someone else who also accidentally drew the ire of Tumblr and ended up having to delete their blog and leave the platform to escape a sustained campaign of harassment and threats from a similar group of people. Again, Tumblr-the-company did nothing to stop it.

<comment><USER9> > I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that > by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot.

Ah, you've run into an anti-trans false flag operation. Obviously they need to be banned for posting death threats, but they will be a hydra since their main organisation is not organic and is outside the platform.

<comment><USER10> What basis do you have for concluding it was an anti-trans false-flag operation in this poster's case? Nothing in their post would lead me to naturally reach that conclusion. Downplaying or instantly dismissing this kind of anecdata as the result of a "false flag" is naive at best and dangerous at worst.

Speaking from my own experience, I've seen a _lot_ of stuff on Tumblr that leads me to think there's a very active, very angry, very threatening trans lobby on the platform. I've seen repeated threats of violence and worse from trans-identified individuals directed at feminists who want maintain female- only safe-spaces. These posts are rarely taken down and the community will often rally against the "TERFs" being threatened ("Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists").

I know one woman who'd posted about keeping changing rooms for females separated on a sex basis. Her employer and college were contacted repeatedly by a pair of people who said she was spreading hate-speech online. Their goal seems to have been to have her fired. These same people had been making threats of violence against her, culminating in a rape threat. At this point the police became involved and I'm not sure how it's since been resolved.

Obviously this is a tiny minority of people but it's a tiny minority that often aren't actively censured or disowned by the larger community, and whose extreme views are reinforced by a sympathetic echo-chamber of like-minded people. Some may be "false-flags", but I don't think they're in the majority by any means.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This walled garden isn't working! Quick, let's get back to the last one!

Seriously though, blogs and RSS - communication on the internet has been solved. It just doesn't seem to be easily monetizable, so a big commercial entity isn't pushing it.

This is quite interesting though:

"Everyone I knew aged out of it, lost interest in chronicling their personal lives <b> or got jobs writing the kinds of blogs they used to write for free." </b>

So does this mean there is money out there for the kind of tumblr/blog weirdness people like to read?

<comment><USER12> > It just doesn't seem to be easily monetizable, so a big commercial entity > isn't pushing it.

The existence of Wordpress would argue otherwise.

<comment><USER11> Isn't wordpress more the technology? Or do you mean otherwise?

Who would you see as pushing it? Or do you mean it's monetizable?

It's definitely an excellent piece of software.

<comment><USER13> [https://wordpress.com/pricing/](https://wordpress.com/pricing/)

wordpress.com (not .org) is a platform for blogs.

<comment><USER11> That's what I was missing. Cheers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Some of the longer posts about social justice that I would read on Tumblr when I was regularly using the app offered some insight into the minds and feelings of marginalized groups that were able to voice their opinions vehemently due to the anonymity that Tumblr provided. It was a safe space and an echo chamber, in that widely unaccepted opinions were harshly criticized as bigotry and removed from the discourse. I think it gave a lot of people the opportunity to vent to a group of generally caring, considerate, sometimes single-minded, and occasionally misguided teenagers and young adults when these people felt that they had no other outlet. It might not have produced the most inspired arguments or conversations, but at the very least Tumblr provided a cohesive community.

</comment><comment><USER15> Politics aside, tumblr is impossible to have long-form conversation on. Sure, it has longer posts than say, twitter, but replying to a chain makes makes things almost impossible to read. [0] Furthermore, instead of following content per se, you follow blogs that are likely going to be insular. Tumblr is just as much of an echo-chamber as Twitter is, if not even moreso.

This is quite different from reddit or hn where you see a plethora of topics and submissions from different people related to a topic, and which are upvoted/downvoted. Both reddit and hn's UX allow for long replies and discussion, at least until the thread becomes too nested.

You can see the difference in any reddit sub that is geared towards text content instead of link submissions, but _especially_ in /r/AskHistorians and similar. Not that reddit and its ilk don't have any issues, but at least its possible to have longer discussion there.

Mastodon is a semi-decent alternative to twitter, but 500 characters is still a tad too short. I suspect they'll make this configurable in future updates. Pleroma [1] has a 5,000 character limit by default, which is configurable. However both of these still suffer from subscribing to people, not content aggregates where anyone can post.

So for social networks, Mastodon looks promising if you don't care about the popular culture of pathologically blocking other instances. If you aren't on an instance that doesn't block other ones, you can end up being in an echo chamber easily too.

For actual discussion though, I don't know what's better than reddit or hn, even with the problems that they do have. Centralization isn't always bad, although reddit is slowly making itself unappealing, especially once they finally kill off the old design.

[0]: [http://i.imgur.com/PvO3Hcu.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/PvO3Hcu.jpg)

[1]: Pleroma is another decentralized, federated network that interfaces with Mastodon, GNU Social, and other Fediverse networks.

<comment><USER16> It's been literally years since reply chains stopped to be indented like in your screenshot.

<comment><USER17> Wrong, that change only happened in the dashboard, not on the actual blogs.

<comment><USER16> It depends on the theme of a blog. The themes are customizable, so blogs which set their theme were not changed when the new default theme (without indentation) was rolled out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > _But a great many serious things cannot be articulated in 140 or 280 > characters, and so_ [on Twitter] _you get the most easily reducible — and > therefore least accurate — version of the feeling or idea. Either that, or > you get lengthy Twitter threads, which are ponderous and boring._

This is quite similar to Noam Chomsky's idea of the media requiring "concision"¹, and therefore the media can only express mainstream ideas, since non-mainstream ideas require a little bit of explanation and so cannot be expressed concisely.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_(media_studies)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_\(media_studies\))

</comment><comment><USER19> Yes, let's go to tumblr because text-wrapping is awesome.

Seriously, tumblr has a problem with basic text layout. Responses get indented, heavily on an already narrow column. And next thing you know, any text is basically wrapped to single characters on the right side of the page.

Edit: It's so bad, trying to intentionally reproduce it is more trouble than it is worth.

<comment><USER20> Didn't they change that quite a while back?

<comment><USER19> Possibly it's been changed since then. I've some friends on tumblr but after a while I've just given up on going to any tumblr link because reading it became annoying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Have you seen the last mobile app? You are forced to see 3-4 ads without seeing the post in question. Actually tumblr is dying because of this.

</comment><comment><USER22> Tumblr is guaranteed one-upmanship. The reblogging feature causes escalation.

We need to look at the brain, and figure out how neurons work together in networks to produce truth. Then use that model for our social networks.

<comment><USER23> What makes you think that neurons produce truth? Neurons mostly produce actionable thoughts.

<comment><USER24> > Neurons mostly produce actionable thoughts.

I suppose you think this is true.

<comment><USER23> Well, no. I thought about editing this after the fact, but couldn't come up with a succinct summary of what neurons do on a high level. So I let this first impulse stand.

<comment><USER9> I think you missed a joke, but I'm not sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Here's the deal with replacing Twitter: first realise it is (under a sane interpretation) a really badly designed product, because it doesn't know what it is. Let's say that roughly it comprises:

1\. A way to hear about news from people or organisations you like (Elon, Yankees, WTO, Lady Gaga, whatever)

2\. A way to microblog and share with your friends or (more usefully) with colleagues or interest communities.

3\. A discussion medium where there is no hierarchy of competence, and everyone's opinion is given the same weight.

(1) and (2) are generally positive and useful things. In (2) you might get a flamewar in a gardening community or whatever, so you need moderators to prevent outbursts over how best to deal with greenfly, but generally these kinda things are pretty peaceful. See HN.

It is not at all clear that (3) is a good idea at all. Most people know nothing about most topics, so giving equal weight to their voice is a bad idea.

The reasons that (3) has come about, persisted, become central to Twitter, is that it's a very good way to engage people. Enragement is engagement. It sells advertising, but it doesn't do much for humanity or its user base.

I'd say using Twitter for (1), leaving (2) to better platforms, and realising we don't need (3) is a sensible solution. The only reason we don't have that is Jack knows full well that (3) makes money, and to hell with the terrible problems that causes.

tl;dr - before looking for alternatives, ask yourself if you need anything at all.

<comment><USER5> It's good for short-form humor. Does that fall under (2)?

<comment><USER26> (1) and (2) I guess - depending on the status of the person sharing the joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Any public social platform that wants to be the new thing needs to add a discoverability component for new users. I signed up for mastodon.social a while back, and had no idea who to follow. So I stopped using it.

I notice all the commercial ones have a discoverability component when you join to solve this problem.

<comment><USER28> You can usually search for hashtags that interest you, and take it from there, engaging people talking about them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Really miss the early image-blog days of Tumblr, the reblog functionality causing work to be attributed and sort of collective consciousness made it a fascinating internet art site to browse and contribute to.

Pretty much all been replaced by Instagram now which although has most of the same functionality the fact it's a locked in system with only the most basic form of linking and attribution makes it a completely different place for artists. People stealing work and claiming it's their own is a lot more common on IG, on Tumblr the ease of re-blogging and focus on curating allows users to flourish as either curators or creators without any bad blood between the two.

(Purely talking about the art side of Tumblr here, I wasn't involved in the other areas)

</comment><comment><USER30> > Maybe you're familiar with the many reasons why people hate Twitter. It's a > time sink, it enables the spread of fake news and bigotry,

Yup. Tumblr totally doesn't do any of that. I guess we are supposed to pretend it doesn't because it's a platform for the right kind of lies and hate?

</comment><comment><USER31> I don't think that there is a solution as easy as moving to $SOCIAL_NETWORK or $ACTIVITY_PUB_SITE.

I feel currently that the issue with social media is it's hyper stimulating. Speaking from a recovering social media addict point of view, the modern web latches onto human tendencies too well. We can be outraged, surrounded by people like us, 24/7\. That's immensely fulfilling to most people, including me.

I don't use social media anymore because it's awful for me. And I don't think the echo chamber issue can be solved, at all. It's not a technology issue, it's an issue with how humans respond to these networks and the Internet in general.

<comment><USER32> I think this view ignores differences in systems that do actively shape the way we communicate and how communities grow. I don't think that social media fits your description, just that sites like Twitter do.

Examples of less-toxic social media:

\- Messaging: SMS, Email, GroupMe, Messenger, Skype, Snapchat

\- Micro Communities: Discord

\- Small purpose-driven communities, small subreddits, Discord

\- Collaborative: DeviantArt, GitHub

\- Long form discussion: Blog circles, Blogger, Tumblr sometimes

\- Non-discussion: Pinterest, Flickr, Instagram, StumbleUpon

<comment><USER31> Admittedly this is a more relaxed definition of social media than I have accepted, but I see your point!

I still use Discord and Github, and the social interaction there doesn't cause the same feeling that Facebook or Twitter do.

However, I might argue a select few of these sites or technologies can still be polarizing or unhealthy, particularly Instagram and Pinterest.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I use to like Tumblr but a significant part of the content creators I was following (photographers) moved to either Instagram or Patron. It's not the same as it used to be and the platform is quickly losing ground.

</comment><comment><USER34> -self-harm glorification

-bad porn

-signal boosting for political rants

-faux moral intellectualism by social justice warriors

-cyber bullying

Let's not?

<comment><USER5> Those are all content issues, not format/platform issues. Don't like those? Don't make your social circle out of the people who do them.

<comment><USER35> The medium is the message. Twitter is designed like a platform for harassment, so a lot of the content on Twitter is harassing. Tumblr is designed like a platform for radicalization, so a lot of the content on Tumblr is radicalized.

It turns out that your very advice ("don't make your social circle out of the people who [create weird and distateful fringe content]") is the exact same echo-chamber-and-radicalization-mechanism that filled Tumblr with this kind of crap in the first place.

<comment><USER5> But Twitter makes it so that's all up in your face. I haven't used Tumblr hardly at all, but it seems like it's _optional_ to participate in that, since things are a little more partitioned.

Anyway, I'm interested in hearing more about the radicalization thing, which I haven't actually observed first-hand, but several people in the comments here have mentioned. What interaction elements do you think lead to it?

<comment><USER8> I used Tumblr for years. From probably 2008 until 2017.

It's not entirely optional to interact with radicalised elements on Tumblr. The tagging system lets them find you, and then they can brigade you if you fall foul of whatever pet cause they have.

This happened to me when I'd posted a photo of my dog. She's my pride and joy, and it was a harmless and cute photo of her jumping to catch a ball in the air. My mistake was using the caption "Good girl!" and tag #goodgirl. (I also tagged #dog, #fetch, #springerspaniel, #spaniel.)

I was flooded with follows from people, mostly men but also some young-ish girls, in the "daddy dom" community (their main tag seems to be #ddlg, but #goodgirl was enough for them to find me). That was a pretty disturbing subculture with definitely uncomfortable elements of abuse built right into the foundation of it.

I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. They mercilessly harrassed me. They flooded my inbox with abusive message: "dirty cis scum, kill yourself", things like that. They reblogged my photo saying some pretty vile things about me and my poor dog. In their reblogs they utterly misrepresented what I'd said, reposted it endlessly, called me transphobic, a bigot, threatened to dox me.

In the end I abandoned my entire blog there and deleted it. As far as I know, there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful reblogs taken down. I reported them all for abuse and harassment, but Tumblr did nothing. Tumblr's staff don't care. They would never respond on Twitter or by email or to my reports through the form on the site. Just radio silence.

This is purely anecdotal, I know. I know someone else who also accidentally drew the ire of Tumblr and ended up having to delete their blog and leave the platform to escape a sustained campaign of harassment and threats from a similar group of people. Again, Tumblr-the-company did nothing to stop it.

<comment><USER5> Ouch, sorry to hear about that.

Do you think it actually promotes radicalization, though, or is that just the culture that developed there? E.g. Mastodon's interaction design is very similar to Twitter's, but the people are waaaay nicer, because that's just the prevailing culture. Compare to other parts of the Fediverse, such as GNU Social, which is much more Twitter-like in tone.

Either way, I think it's a good lesson in how public-by-default social media is kind of a terrible idea in retrospect. You wanted to share a non-sensitive post, but maybe just to people who are in any way socially accountable to you, not the entire world.

<comment><USER35> Even if a platform tends to encourage meanness, stupidity, and radicalization, the specific direction that takes can depend more on founder effects. I don't know of any interaction design that made Tumblr in particular so radically left-wing.

It's also easier for a nice community to become mean than for a mean community to become nice, so maybe give Mastodon some time and exposure and see what happens.

<comment><USER5> Definitely. Mastodon is very much still in the honeymoon period.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I'm still shocked nobody has figured out how to turnkey self hosting. I mean I understand how complicated it is, given the range of options, but it seems like it's tractable.

Maybe if AWS/Azure etc... had some kind of sign up API that would make it possible.

<comment><USER37> My DreamHost shared hosting WordPress is pretty turnkey. It's not the most user-friendly UI, but it really is as simple as "register domain" on one page, "install WordPress" on another, and then setup my admin account. After that, they keep the software up to date and email me to let me know when I need to click the link to upgrade the database (very infrequent).

I'd imagine there are hosts that are more turnkey than that (wordpress.com, likely).

I wonder if it's really the case that people just don't want to pay.

<comment><USER36> It's true, there aren't any that I've seen that are more turnkey, but that's not self hosting.

I'm thinking something like Medium, where you enter your name/contact info etc... on one page and a CC and that's it.

A back end process registers the URL/whois, sets up a cloud host account, pushes a default package to the host (maybe even WP), then sends your email the key/login for the front end and the cloud host login.

So it's a one page setup for something that you can either use as a default Medium like site or SSH into and do whatever you want. You pay the monthly EC2 account, a yearly maintenance with a DNS Registry etc... like you would had you set everything up individually.

The only thing you can't currently automate is setting up people's accounts on cloud providers. I don't see that changing but would be interesting if you could.

<comment><USER37> Dreamhost is pretty close to self-hosting. I can SSH in. I can download all of the files in my Wordpress installation, copy them elsewhere, dump my MySQL db, copy that elsewhere and have it running on another machine. The only way it differs from a VM is that I don't have root.

Dreamhost actually does, iirc, allow me to get the same experience with a VM.

Really, I'd argue that anyone offering Wordpress in such a way that you can easily download all of your data and put it somewhere else is fine on the self hosting axis.

And lots of people _do_ pay for hosting, but there are millions more who won't pay even $1/month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Tumblr was one of my favorite places on the web for a time. A real anti-fbook, but then they were taken over by yahoo.

It didn't change a lot at first, but the wall street ad and censor machine started to creep in and it became obvious what once was a haven for sharing things you would never do on fbook, well it got a new moderation staff and more changes.

I stayed with it even after the change to hide the porn by default and such. Then one day one of my tumblrs got banned.

I understood, it very much looked like many of the rampant spammer's tumblr sites, I had thought thay by using a custom modded theme and other things a tumblr employee would see it was not a cut of mill spam blog but highly custom and completely unique.

I was wrong, the moderator that made the site disappear did not see it. When I emailed the next level staff asking why and suggesting that it was unique and not spam, they replied it was flagged as spam and is gone.

I wrote back one time begging for access to download a copy of my tumblr, it was all original content, all the text, all the photos. They did not care to even reply.

I tried to write the CEO, I reached out for an explanation on twitter even. Nothing.

I know, not a customer, the product, and your rights to speech are not rights when publishing on a sharecropper lords platform, but I expected more of tumblr. I was mistaken.

I later read about how some of these companies were employing a lot of people from places outside the USA and did some research on the majority of religions and morals of those areas and scratched my head wondering how the main people of tumblr could even consider such a move given the wide range of widely shared content likely being disturbing to so many in some of those places.

Then I realized, it was not just about the cheap labor, it was about have an excuse for why so much was mopped up without a second thought. IT wasn't the tumblr crew doing it right - this was the plan from yahoo and the future advertiser's and wall street and all that.

I'm so mad I did not backup my tumblrs when I had the chance, so mad that I gave them so much. Promoted it as a place to have fun without the stress of fbook, linked in and such.

Never again.

At least with other portals you know there is a chance at loss ( I routinely save my comments before submitting to any wordpress based site, assuming that akismet will likely flag my comment and make it disappear into the ether box not seen by blog admins.. and of course blog admins make them hidden as well.

Can't believe I'm about to say this, but I have more faith in G plus providing customer service and fair rules than tumblr. Boy that did not taste right coming out of my virtual mouth.

That's how pitiful tumblr is now, unless it goes back to being self owned / private or whatever, it is dead to me, And there is not backup for them to get of my past trust and love.

<comment><USER39> You've probably tried these, but just in case...

\- Internet Archive

\- Googling the URL to see if anything's still in Google's cache

I wonder if you'd be up to sharing what the tumblr URL was, perhaps privately.

<comment><USER38> Thanks for the ideas there ex. not sure how to share privately, but I think the url was: sexchaterotic dot tumblr - I had three of them, one is still active, so it could be a different url. My open set of notes and emails only go back so far.

Since the ban of the other one I've been too paranoid to post anything there for the fear of it being destroyed with no way to do anything about it.

I did manage to export a tumblr site into a wordpress at one point, and now control whether the content stays or gets removed and have backups. Wish I could of exported that other one, it was pretty custom.

<comment><USER39> Interesting.

I tried to find the blog you mentioned, and sadly it has indeed pretty much fallen off the end of the internet. Neither the Web Archive nor Google's cache has it, sadly.

But I did find proof it once existed: [https://www.sexchatsexchat.com/peeps/sexystuff/tag/sexy- quot...](https://www.sexchatsexchat.com/peeps/sexystuff/tag/sexy-quote/)

I also found an archived registration record from 2014 for [http://cn.sitexy.com/whois/sexchaterotic.com](http://cn.sitexy.com/whois/sexchaterotic.com) but I'm unsure if this was relevant.

I've sadly seen quite a few tumblrs be destroyed, in the form of users who I suddenly realize have a "2" or "-new" after their name. The content they're posting is sufficiently interesting to their followers that they get their network back reasonably quickly (one person finds the new account, follows them, then that spreads the posts back into the rest of the network), but they lose the link between the notes/reblogs and their ID.

And that's the thing. From the standpoint of "normal" social networking, having new people discover you, etc, you generally do want to keep your identity so people can track that _you 're you_.

I guess for _real_ fringe interests (although I can't really say what you're posting is that much of a fringe interest, at the end of the day, really...), Tumblr doesn't seem the best place to go - which _is_ pretty hypocritical, I'll give it that, yeah.

I can't find it now (agh) but I remember reading an interesting Yahoo report that said something to the effect of shutting down Tumblr. All I can find now about it is earnings reports, but this PDF was a bit more explicit about it than that. Tumblr will, eventually, one day be gone; and the world is going to be a very very strange place when that happens. :/

There's no point stressing out about that point now though; nobody knows how it will pan out - maybe some crazy-insane (in a very good way) bunch of people will band together to make their own new thing, or maybe everyone will converge on some existing site. I doubt _everyone_ will disperse, although that will sadly happen. IMO, any individual effort will be fruitless unless it fits in with the group dynamics that play out at the time, and I see no point in taking the chance that the frantic freakout efforts I make will hit that dynamic, so I'm just watching.

This being said, I definitely classify the question of archiving as something that is a very good idea to do right now, IMO. Sadly it seems so unnecessarily nontrivial to do so; I'm not aware of any software to download tumblr accounts that isn't a completely broken half-an-hours-effort-at-4AM job. This is sadly probably why there are few/no backups of more rare accounts. :(

It's possible the Web Archive might have something, but the few parts of their archives that _are_ public are effectively impossible to search (you basically have to download GBs if not TBs of data, open it, go "nope", delete it all, and download the next set).

Hm, this turned into a bit of a rambling rant.

I'm really glad you were able to export the content into wordpress (was it the one I found above? lol). Is the WP installation hosted by you? That, along with picking a smaller hosting provider, and verifying ahead of time that they're fine with the content you want to post, should hopefully minimize heartache. (This is actually a general protip: go with a smaller provider who's one or two people, let them know what sorts of DMCA/takedown/angry emails they might get at your behest and how you plan to deal with them, and even crazy content (eg, obscure political views, flamewars on steroids, sex chat-related sites, etc etc) will stand a chance at staying up for a little while.)

Actually that makes me think of something.

The thing with hosting your own website is that, unless you operate, say, Sci- Hub, which has the kinds of enemies that can pressure domain registrars into deregistering you, you'll be fine, because, in the scenario where your hosting provider boots you (or gets yanked in the middle of the night themselves - this can sometimes happen with tiny outfits), you just switch providers, apologize for the downtime :), and move on. (Obviously you have a local site backup. Right?) DNS registration is a bit hazier thanks to reregistration bots that constantly sniff for expiring domains and snatch them. Some of the automated systems that do this will even pay $$$ to grab the domain early in the termination pipeline (expiring domains go to auction before they are fully un-registered) if they detect the site was popular.

It may be worth asking around Web hosting communities for a good registrar that doesn't boot fringe interest groups (there are fewer smaller registrars, so the hosting thing I mentioned about going with a smaller outfit can't apply here). I mean to do this but haven't yet.

So... an interesting ideal could be, you could register your blog with tumblr _on a custom domain_, do whatever customization you wanted, post whatever you wanted, and then, when tumblr yanks your site,

a) you still have the domain, so you just pivot that over to your own hosting...

b) ...which has all your content on it, either because you were posting it to both, or because you imported your continuous backup of the tumblr account :D

TL;DR, tumblr isn't for "real" fringe stuff, banhammers are both silly and horrible but unavoidable, using your own hosting will zero your chances of getting disappeared.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Only if tumblr promises to close down account/blogs promoting pedophilia/zoofilia/similar degenerate stuff. The moderation after the Yahoo buyout got quite stale, they don't even block nazi, or anti-zionist stuff which is a red flag in liberal media.

<comment><USER41> And who decides what is "degenerate stuff"? You?

No, thank you.</comment></comment>


How Atlassian Built a $10B Growth Engine - <AUTHOR> https://producthabits.com/atlassian-built-10-billion-growth-engine/ <comment><USER2> Most comments revolve around JIRA as an issue tracker. I think those miss the point. Atlassian products are never best in any given category (in my opinion); however, they all integrate easily and (almost) out of the box. Choosing JIRA over another product might not be meaningful, but you need source control, chat, build servers, etc. Having them play nicely together without fiddling with tricky settings is a huge benefit.

<comment><USER3> What if you have a product, that integrates best tools in any given category? Slack, GitHub, etc? Can this solution beat Jira?

<comment><USER4> > What if you have a product, that integrates best tools in any given > category? Slack, GitHub, etc? Can this solution beat Jira?

No, it can't. Atlassian's tooling is used by large teams. It doesn't make sense in a small team environment. In a large team of say a dozen people, can you imagine managing accounts/permission/access to a dozen services? That's over 144 accounts, plus billing, plus all the other stuff needed to make everything play together. Nobody wants that headache.

That's just the tip of the iceberg too. Atlassian already plays well with Github and other services. So you can have your cake and eat it too.

<comment><USER5> Large teams generally use SSO solution like okta, oneLogin etc. so not really an issue

<comment><USER6> We use JIRA and Bitbucket in an org with thousands of users. AD SSO support is mandatory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've developed against JIRA and used JIRA pretty heavily at several companies now. JIRA is a really nice product, but one's experience with it heavily depends on who "owns" it.

<comment><USER8> Finally, someone makes _the_ point in a thread about JIRA.

JIRA's most powerful feature is that it affords for mapping businesses processes onto software. This is incredibly compelling to enterprise customers. Software that enforces workflows, procedures and requirements can be an incredible lever and JIRA's price point makes build vs buy decisions an absolute no-brainer.

The down side for the true end-users, those who actually use the software day- to-day, is that most business processes are awful.

If your experience is the hellish existence that I see strolled about on threads where JIRA comes up, I can say with near absolute confidence that it's because of one of three things:

* Your admin(s) set it up once and hasn't bothered to iterate on those workflows. * The business mapped their autonomy stripping processes onto JIRA intentionally. I'd guess that most of your work experience is similar. Process stifled nonsense. * You're on an instance that is serving too many people with too few resources. Shard your instances folks, the money for extra licenses is wildly cheaper than the human time you're wasting waiting for stuff to load.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. Conway's Law doesn't just apply to software you produce but also how you configure things like JIRA. If JIRA sucks chances are you're probably looking at a reflection of your organization's dysfunction.

<comment><USER10> Learning from Conway's law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the eary days, Jira was an awesome bug tracker (free for OSS), compared to Bugzilla or Trac. But they focused on adding lots of features without much thought on the overall user experience. Their latest UI revamp only made things worse.

Somehow, they managed to accumulate the negatives of a flexible product (resulting in poor/incoherent UX) and the negatives of rigid assumptions regarding workflows (try modelling staggered deployments in different datacenters/environments spanning multiple sprints... good luck!).

Going forward, I expect Atlassian to cater to rigid organizations and neglect those who design their own processes (whether lightweight ad-hoc or complex custom ones that don't fit what Atlassian Sales can understand).

<comment><USER12> I also "love" how they re-designed the issue UI. What do you need in an issue? Obviously, issue description. Now even on largest monitors issue description starts below the fold. Everything else is taken up by nice crisp white-space- separated "important" information: the sprint name, the epic link, number of hours projected, who it is assigned to, etc. etc.

<comment><USER13> how many points is this outage going to be to fix? we'll need to bring it up to the project committee to see if we can allocate it out of the next sprint

<comment><USER14> "Points" the gateway drug of JIRA. It's honestly the most difficult/simple concept to understand, since it's all about "don't think intuitively, because in JIRA that's the wrong way to think."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Growth is great, but I've never met a single dev that is excited to use their tools. Management loves their app because they can spit out numbers, and don't care how good or meaningful those number are.

Jira is a painful to use, especially compared to trello. They own trello now, so I hope they don't mess it up.

<comment><USER16> > Jira is a painful to use, especially compared to trello.

If you're using JIRA for stuff that Trello works for, then sure.

What JIRA does and does exceptionally well: grows with your organisation. You can start using JIRA for a simple ticketing system with 3 devs, then continue using it through 100x growth and still use it with multiple product teams, multiple development teams, overlapping projects, CI, code review, wikis, reporting tools, and so on.

If you think that all these tools and sophistication is bullshit, then that's a different conversation -- but a non-negligible number of smart people think that these integrations worth a lot.

JIRA is like Excel or Word -- 80% of people use only 20% of the functionality (or less), but it's a different 20% for all of them. And it's really-really painful to realize that Trello/GH Issues/etc. works great with a slick UI, except that it can't do that single stuff you'd really need because of your special situation.

<comment><USER15> >If you think that all these tools and sophistication is bullshit, then that's a different conversation -- but a non-negligible number of smart people think that these integrations worth a lot.

If you can point me towards someplace visible that is using these tools well, I'm more than happy to be wrong. Every time I've seen them used, they're more like rorschach number generators for management, so I have naturally assumed that my experiences are the normal. That is, of course, a fallacy, so if you can point me to such a paragon of use, I'll be more than happy to check it out.

<comment><USER16> You seem to be talking about JIRA reports. JIRA != Trello + fancy reports.

The strength of JIRA is that if your company suddenly needs a different development flow (whatever it is -- new tooling, new workflow, more teams, awkward regulatory requirements etc.) then you can stay with JIRA because whatever you want to do will be possible with JIRA.

(Uh, I sound like an Atlassian shill, even though I dislike the lagginess of their UI and also how they handle Bitbucket. :) )

<comment><USER17> > The strength of JIRA is that if your company suddenly needs a different > development flow (whatever it is -- new tooling, new workflow, more teams, > awkward regulatory requirements etc.) then you can stay with JIRA because > whatever you want to do will be possible with JIRA.

This actually seems to me to be the biggest _problem_ with JIRA... JIRA allows for the creation of arcane processes that very easily become burdensome because JIRA is very loose in its opinions. And, on top of that, the management of that process also often becomes a burden for the same reason...

And you're also stuck carrying around all the features you don't use...

<comment><USER18> You can also build flexible, low-overhead workflows using JIRA. The key is to keep managers out of the admin section, make sure the dev team is in full control, and tend towards saying "no" whenever anyone asks for changes to the workflow.

<comment><USER17> I think anecdotally that may work, but I'm not convinced that dev teams are _that_ much better than "managers" are at creating or managing process (nor are they often very interested in doing it)...

But I think this does get to the core issue with JIRA. Whether you "like" JIRA or not is more a reflection of your organization than it is a reflection of JIRA as a tool.

<comment><USER19> Just anecdotally I can confirm that different development and product teams work good with JIRA and Confluence in conjunction.

The agency I work at uses these tools together with ovur clients, as well as internally on different levels.

We have an internal project were we are just using tasks, subtasks with 3 states in a team of 9 in three to four locations. And we have a client, being served with about 100 people in different teams working on multiple projects, spanning multiple locations. Here we use the same tool. In one case with just a basic setup. One a 'little bit' more elaborate and customized...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some facts in the article that was linked are definitely not correct. Fogbugz was out there before JIRA. Spolsky wrote about JIRA multiple times, yet the article never mentions it.

So what is this site anyways? There's no About page, no contact, no ownership information, no author, nothing. Looks like an advertisement to me.

<comment><USER8> producthabits.com is a lead generation for whatever Hiten Shah sells next. He's fairly prolific in the software startup and product marketing spaces.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > While a lot of companies make acquisitions, most don't execute well on > integration.

I have a theory that much of the success of web-based companies isn't due to the internet's reach itself, but because they can actually harness programming to business. Make something happen; check for something; modify everything. Of course, there's always problems with programming but it's so much easier than doing it any other way.

But traditional businesses cannot reap these benefits, because they cannot make IT central. They can't be IT first. And they lack the talent and experience to handle all the problems of programming. Therefore, it is the new web-based companies that know what they are doing (with programming) that win this.

The quote above is a great example: it's hard to integrate acquired businesses, they usually just become a messy "conglomerate". What if you could actually integrate other products and services _into_ your products and services? With programming, it is _possible_ , whereas it wasn't really before.

There are still problems - and other commemts highlight how the UI has suffered. Indeed, enlarging a codebase inevitably has much in common with a messy "conglomerate". But it's so much easier than doing it in any other way than with programs (i.e. traditional businesses).

(Atlassian's products also help other businesses run on programs, but that's not my focus here).

</comment><comment><USER13> we just moved from jira hosted to jira cloud and it is, shockingly, worse! As a user I've always hated JIRA and as an admin it is shockingly bad. There must be some alternatives that are still viable.

<comment><USER22> May I suggest a crazy idea? Ditch it and just see what happens.

We are a large organization, and had an end of year crunch so naturally when you need to pinch the absolute most productivity out of your workers, typically process is the first thing that goes.

We just had our most productive 2 week sprint in over a year, by a mile. Instead of Jira, we busted out the dusty whiteboard, and used this amazing technology called an expo marker to write down what we were working on and who was working on what. It had amazing visibility too -- our manager could stop by at any time and see with his own eyes what we were working on -- all without having to log in! The best part? We got to ditch the meeting to plan the planning, the planning to plan the week, and the retro to go over the week to start of the next week's meeting to plan the planning. We got back like two entire days, and we didn't have any 9:00 AM context switches when most of us were in the zone already having to give a benign update that could have just been communicated via slack!

Some of this is sarcasm and I do understand why managers and leaders reach for Jira, but seriously: Why did we stop using the whiteboard. If you need visibility into this crap, hire someone to do that. You have analysts for your business, why not have an analyst for your tech? It doesn't make us more productive.

<comment><USER23> > Why did we stop using the whiteboard?

Because whiteboards aren't visible outside the rooms they're in, and they don't save histories of what was written on them in the past. If your org is scaling beyond a single geographical location, then you need some kind of system to communicate status to stakeholders elsewhere. Email and Slack are nowhere good enough for that; a ticketing system is absolutely vital.

<comment><USER24> Whiteboard + webcam?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Having worked extensively with JIRA in the past, I will say that whoever designed it had to have done it with clear intention.

JIRA has an uncanny way of attracting to it a very specific (and valuable) person inside organizations.

I mean the person who is obsessed with the creation and quantification of knowledge worker processes that are subtly complex. This complexity naturally gives plenty of fodder and massive surface area for engagement and features —- one can spend hours tweaking JIRA workflows, running reports, and playing with the query builder. And we all know that once a user is engaged past a few days you've got them, almost like a kind of pair bonding. They have bonded with your software, and they'll be forced to spend their days in it. If there is some ritual like work involved all the more better.

I've seen these guys come in from other organizations where they've used JIRA and the first thing they do is push for its adoption and use. There could be plenty of other things to tackle and I'm not here to make the case JIRA is or isn't a good tool, has value, or is more or less important, I'm just sharing my observations. When you've literally made it your job to be the JIRA master, you are in fact more concerned with the performance of the work than the actual work product itself. It's like the difference between introverted and extroverted personality types. Some people come in and want to get their hands dirty with the product and code, while others want to setup JIRA and start tweaking workflows.

Another brilliant thing I noticed they did was to optimize the scrum display for large TVs. Many issue trackers and other tools simply don't look good (not readable) or are not functional on a massive 70" screen. The purpose of this is clear: for standups and planning meetings where it is used in a group setting (usually by the JIRA advocate/master).

Another big thing is the daily e-mails. It's a way to show your boss and co- workers you're doing something without telling them directly. And it makes people feel good to see activity, regardless of what is actually being done, it's often times more important that people are working together, as 90% of all work done in JIRA is irrelevant anyway.

People talk bad about JIRA and despite its flaws you'd do well to study its workings if you are at all interested in building a similar B2B or enterprise app that requires a certain manipulation of the end user.

</comment><comment><USER26> > _The thing that made the product challenging to learn was what developers > loved most about it—that it did everything needed for issue tracking, and > they could customize it to work precisely the way they needed it to for > their specific teams and projects._

I don't believe this. There were plenty of competing Open Source tools out with the same problems. I hated every single one of them and so did other developers I know. Perhaps developers preferred Jira because the management could be told they'd have to pay a qualified contractor for customization instead of torturing the developers with that kind of work?

<comment><USER27> This is the lie the industry keeps telling itself, especially in print.

Vendors come in and bullshit your bosses and the purchasing authority about how awesome their tools are and all the things it can do.

By the time the developers catch wind of it the check has already cleared, and they -have- to use this tool because someone with firing authority paid for it and you're not going to get away with embarrassing them by calling them on their bullshit (young me tried, young me failed).

I'm not aware of any development team that consciously picked Atlassian. Atlassian gets picked for them. Their success is in selling to the management chain, not in being a good product. Because they aren't (but then neither are many of their commercial competitors).

<comment><USER28> Couldn't agree with you more.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What differentiates JIRA from other issue trackers is that it's very popular with Chip/Asic companies; they have support for all chip design phases, which other issue trackers lack.

in other words, they found a market need others ignored, and they served it.

<comment><USER30> Where can I read more about this? Would you kindly refer me to some web page or anything ? Also, do you know which ASIC/ Chip / VLSI companies use JIRA?

<comment><USER29> I know Intel uses JIRA heavily from colleagues

I work at another ASIC company (Storage Industry) and we use JIRA as main issue tracker; JIRA feels very tailored for ASIC, at least the version at our company

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The amazing part Jira is most basic tool many of us use daily . As evidenced by huge number of posts here people really hate it yet there is no good alternative. So instead of uber for pancakes maybe someone will be inspired to build one :)

</comment><comment><USER31> How they built a $10B growth engine was by being precisely on point with their timing and then having pretty good product execution.

<comment><USER32> Not just product execution but GTM strategy, pricing. Jira is cheap. It's a no brainer.

Disclaimer: ex-Atlassian

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> They sure did outsourcing well, I wonder how has that contributed to their success. There's a big dev shop in Poland maintaining and developing large bits of their core offering - Spartez.

<comment><USER8> Most of their dev is done Sydney and SF. They also have offices in Austin and NY now.

Spartez has obviously been a great partnership but "large bits of their core offering" is inaccurate. That's not to deminish the efforts of the people involved. It's just materially untrue for most values of "large" and "core".

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The more interesting question is "Who can beat Atlassian in productivity market?" What properties this product should have? What Atlassian weaknesses should it attack?

</comment><comment><USER34> it's the SAP of development management tools. Everyone hates it but everyone uses it

<comment><USER35> I came for this comment. The big difference between JIRA and SAP is that SAP is a "batteries-included + kitchen sink" package (which tends to require molding business processes around it). My problem w/ JIRA is that anything beyond the simplest workflows/BPM requires purchasing a ton of paid plugins that tend to be abandoned over time. Atlassian knows what users want but they are dog-slow at bringing them to fruition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> As an unhappy Bitbucket user, I have my fingers crossed for better Github enterprise pricing (does not scale for dev agencies with many repos), but mostly for AWS Code Commit.

It's somewhat scary the breadth that AWS has in their ecosystem now; however, Bitbucket is wrought with issues like:

\- no large file collapsing, i.e. lock files

\- random downtimes ( I wonder if they actually meet their SLA )

\- feature requests on boards where Atlassian members ask _why x is needed_ , followed by a slew of +1's, to only see someone ask 3 years later, "where is this at?"

I'm a jaded Atlassian user who believes they buy competition and then stagnant the product's evolution.

<comment><USER37> > I'm a jaded Atlassian user who believes they buy competition and then > stagnant the product's evolution.

What product do you think Atlassian has bought to stifle it's evolution? Bitbucket specifically was a product with 50k users and Atlassian has grown it to Millions. Buying a competitor just to let the product stagnate and die makes rarely sense in business.

<comment><USER38> I'm certain no one at Atlassian wants to stifle Trello. Trello is Atlassian's Instagram.

By the way did you see Trello is now part of Bitbucket as a default?

What exactly was HipChat competing with in the Atlassian portfolio when it was acquired? Nothing. HipChat was three people when it was acquired. It was over 100 not long after. That space grew so fast that you could argue maybe Atlassian should have put 200 on it. Regardless, it got the biggest investment of any group chat tool in the game at that time. Slack did an amazing job in the viral growth front. Credit to them. Atlassian is beefing up HipChat for enterprise/BTF and launched Stride for everyone with an email address and a need for something more focused than slack.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Funny, they don't mention Bamboo CI. But probably for the better since there are tons of better tools out there like CircleCI, Shippable, and even Jenkins.

<comment><USER8> One thing to keep in mind is that Bamboo was first released in 2007. Less than a year after AWS was initially launched and well before things like Travis or CircleCI existed to make the cloud side of the CI equation obvious.

I agree that there are better services if you don't mind running on other people's infra. Behind the firewall Jenkins I'm not sure about, I haven't tried it in ages.

<comment><USER40> Team City is great IMHO; at least compared to bamboo.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Good for them, but JIRA still sucks.

</comment><comment><USER42> I didn't realize there was so much money in to-do lists.

<comment><USER43> There is obviously more to it than that, but it was my thought way back when.

I interviewed with Mike and Scott when there didn't seem to be many other people involved. A few days later the company I worked for started the process of getting acquired.

I tossed up what I thought my share options might be worth against two guys who seemed to be just out of uni with a bug tracker.

I called them back and said I'd stay where I was. My options were worth nothing. Joke was on me big time!

Later on lots of my dev team ended up working for Atlassian and I thought it might be time to check it out again. I went for an interview and was told I wasn't smart enough, despite the fact I'd already mentored a bunch of their devs.

At least they gave me an interview. Most places don't 'cause I don't have the book learning to get past HR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> The title, mentioning $10B, is misleading. As of 2017, Atlassian revenue is $620 million.

Source: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlassian)

<comment><USER45> Market cap is different from revenue: [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/atlassian-heads- toward-10-...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/atlassian-heads- toward-10-billion-market-cap-with-a-story-to-tell-2017-10-19)

<comment><USER44> You're right. The title is probably referring to the market cap. I didn't know Atlassian was listed.</comment></comment></comment>


'Hurt Locker' Subpoenas Arrive with New Language . . . and Higher Demands - <AUTHOR> http://techdirt.com/articles/20100903/11144710895.shtml

<comment><USER2>
        It's still not "extortion," in that USCG can claim to
        have a legitimate legal basis for the demands, but it
        certainly comes damn close in practice.

No, it's extortion. The process for determining who might have used BitTorrent here is seriously flawed, and the flaws are known, but the attitude from the accusing side is "So what?"</comment>


Obama's Executive Order on Cybersecurity May Be Imminent - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/02/11/obama-cybersecurity-order/

<comment><USER2> What does this executive order mean exactly? Does it mean he's actually creating a new law because of "imminent threat" (that's not really imminent) or some excuse like that?

If so, how can he be allowed to do that?</comment>