Person in Public Eye: *unmalicious, off-the-cuff joke which has some vague reference to some sector of society in some way*
Tumblr: HELP! HELP! I'M BEING OPPRESSED!
If Karp put as much effort into the fucking website as he is into stopping us using missing-e we wouldn’t need missing-e to begin with.
How petty and immature do you have to be to repeatedly lie about and attempt to sabotage the work of someone who is helping people enjoy your product?
[EDIT: Weirdly, when I clicked ‘save’ on this post, I got a pop-up that just said ‘Yup.’ and then ‘OK’…]
Tumblr Change Prevents Reblogging Asks
Looks like just recently, a Tumblr change has caused reblogging ask posts to stop working.
Instead of the reblog page, a Not Found page is displayed.
This would also prevent ask posts from being reblogged with Quick Reblog as well.
I don’t know if this is a permanent change in Tumblr’s interface, however, or a temporary problem. If it is permanent, the Missing e feature will have to be removed.
NO WHY
;;
Why do you do this, tumblr?
It’ll be fixed if enough people complain about it. :U And Tumblr loves it’s users, so it has to listen.
Right?
Oh, the optimism of youth… ;)
On another note, can you believe Tumblr still has that laughable “Missing e is a browser hack,” pop-up in place?
Tumblr-based Quick Reblogging coming?
Based on what I am seeing in the new code for Tumblr’s post buttons, it appears as though they are looking into implementing some type of Quick Reblogging feature in the default Tumblr interface (though it is not yet released).
If this new feature is added to Tumblr, Missing e won’t be far behind improving and extending the useful addition!
An open letter (also emailed to policy@) to Tumblr, regarding the new T&C’s plans to ban extensions.
Further to this portion of your new T&Cs:
You may not do any of the following while accessing or using the Services: … (c) access or search or attempt to access or search the Services by any means (automated or otherwise) other than through our currently available, published interfaces that are provided by Tumblr… (d) scrape the Services, and particularly scape (sic) Content (as defined below) from the Services, without Tumblr’s express prior written consent
What you are essentially saying, is that we cannot use or design extensions, then? Because I’ll be completely blunt with you: your website would not be usable without the extensions which improve on what is frankly a half-arsed, sloppy and badly designed mess. Every update you make, every ‘improvement,’ sends the website further into a tailspin of impracticality and user-unfriendliness. Vis:
- highlighted posts which sit in such a location that they actually obscure key parts of the website - and the expectation that people will pay for the privilege;
- hidden tracked tags that I did not ask for, do not want and which actively detracts from my use and interaction with the site;
- the huge and pointless gap at the bottom of the page, since your latest ‘update’
- which is there whether I have my extensions on or not;
- the trashing of ‘Asks’ in favour of… ‘Fanmail’ - just… I can’t even begin to fathom why you felt that was necessary, but it reminds me of a socially obtuse, late-middle-aged man who thinks he understands both The World-Wide Web and The Kids and decided he would do his own marketing based on a tween magazine about kittens. In the 1990s.
- And I can’t omit the honestly embarrassing attempt to scare your users into rejecting and uninstalling Missing e, which in fact prompted thousands more to install it - and keep it when they realised that it truly does make your website better - and which is presumably the cause of this particularly bolshie and ill-conceived attempt at controlling your users’ browser activity. People were not only disgusted by that choice of action, but actually lost respect and trust for Tumblr as a company and service because of the petty, bullying and outright dishonest methods you chose to use.
If I could be bothered, I’m sure I could find your another five. Or ten. Or twenty. When I first joined Tumblr, I found it bizarre, disjointed and confusing, and abandoned it almost immediately. When I decided to give it another go, it was Missing e which kept me here, and that is why I am so evangelical about the extension (that and the fact that despite your treatment of him, Jeremy Cutler has shown himself to be a genuinely decent, competent and patient person who goes out of his way to help resolve any bugs or user issues which may arise, both with his extension and the ones which simply exist on your site; he has been a class act, where Tumblr has been nothing more than a blinkered bully).
Let me make this very, very clear: I would not use Tumblr if I could not have Missing e’s functionality. I simply wouldn’t waste my time, because your website is badly designed and almost counter-intuitive to use without it. The site has too many inherent and fundamental flaws to balance the generally fairly limited and repetitive content and keep me here, without it.
I also use Stylish to alter the appearance of my Dash, because your rigid and by no means universally-practical design simply does not work for me. It is ugly and it is dull, and replacing icons with images which appear to have come from a pre-school rubber stamp collection hasn’t really changed that.
I’m already seeing my friends becoming disillusioned with Tumblr and complaining that they wish there was somewhere they could use which provided the mechanisms which make blogging within fandom worthwhile. If the developers behind the extensions you are attacking with this change in your Terms & Conditions set up a new blogging platform, incorporating the features they have brought to Tumblr, I would be gone without a second glance. And so would they. I’ve already seen it happen once in the last quarter.
I’ve been using blogging platforms for something like twelve or thirteen years; perhaps even longer. I know what I am looking for and I have tried all the main platforms, which all have different strengths and optimal uses. You need to accept at some point that Tumblr is not the Russian political hotbed of LiveJournal; nor is it the respectable, adaptable, corporation-friendly communications forum of Wordpress; nor is it the opinionated anon soap box of Blogspot/Blogger or the personal diary hub of OD or LJ. What Tumblr is, is a forum, ultimately, for ‘sharing shit I like.’ People want to do that with one-click reblogs, they want to be able to track as many tags as they like about the things they are interested in, and to be able to view them when they want and prioritise them as they see fit, without you telling them what they need. They want the ability to bookmark their dash, so that when your platform fails to notify of reblogs from anyone you follow - not by email, not by on-dash notification bubble; because neither have worked for months - they actually stand a fighting chance of finding them in the endless pages of posts for all those blogs you encourage us to follow. They want to know what time something was posted, so that they can figure out if that was before or after they were last online, and whether this is the same post they saw earlier. They want to have simple shortcuts for tagging, and the ability to make passing responses to posts without spamming the ever-living fuck out of their followers and thus, keep your website usable.
Nothing - absolutely nothing - in Missing e (which is an extension no more harmful than Gmail Checker, and not a ‘hack’ as you elected to call it), exists to in any way attack, DDoS, spam, data-harvest or otherwise endanger Tumblr, its users or its structure. I haven’t looked into XKit myself, but I think we can reasonably argue the same for that extension, too. Their only purpose is to add useful functions that Tumblr has neglected to include. They are basically the parent who affectionately watches the kids “decorate” the Christmas tree, and then gently tidies it up to make it look a bit prettier and more presentable; the kids had a nice try, but it takes a bit of finessing because it tends to be a bit slap-dash. They are helping you serve your users and it is a service that hundreds of thousands of people have taken up - and it is continuously growing. And those guys are doing it for nothing more than personal enjoyment and table scraps to keep their endeavours running. What possible harm is there in that? If your technical infrastructure isn’t sound enough to handle the traffic, it is not the fault or the developers, it is the fault of the business managers and your own technical, strategic and financial management.
So, this T&C change isn’t just churlish and ill-spirited, it’s ungrateful, unwise and actually pretty offensive to those of us who realise that you are literally dictating how we can or cannot use our browsers. Don’t believe for a moment that you can shrug off an action like this and assume it will be accepted. I’m sure you saw what happened to LiveJournal over the comments disaster. The most active and productive users simply went to another service, which is continuing magnificently and benefiting enormously from its increased content generation.
Instead of attacking the genuinely brilliant and generous minds behind the most popular extensions for your site, embrace them. Let them fix your failings - because they are failings and they continue to worsen with every attempt to beat down or ham-fistedly rip off those with creative ideas.
