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You Win or You Learn

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Re: You Win or You Learn

#131

Post by rargon »

DanielleMolloy wrote: post #69

Is there any alternative for having a gallery of text&photo posts without forced login and exploitative social media distractions? (except for self-hosting) When I looked for this 11 years ago, tumblr was the only platform ticking these boxes. I just wanted to share a link to photos of what we are up to with family and friends without asking them to register at another platform, and only tumblr allowed that and did n…

See https://conntects.net

It's a free alpha. The finished product will be paid (but cheap) for those who want to post.

But it's not for porn if that's the sort of photos you want to post.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#132

Post by RangerScience »

underwater wrote: post #84
citruscomputing wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did, but that was a while ago. Things are still pretty bad -- if your blog gets flagged for racy content, you lose the ability to have a custom avatar, for example. (Even more, and you get banned.) They've also had quite transphobic moderation policies (really strange considering their userbase!) -- normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now, which'll get your account flagged or banned. They've bee…

How is it an own goal? They were bleeding money, so tried to find a way to succeed through growth of users or revenue. The path where they just left everything untouched is a path to certain failure.

My guess would be that they wouldn’t have to be bleeding money if they weren’t aiming for growth.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#133

Post by chimeracoder »

joshxyz wrote: post #129
Alex3917 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now FWIW, the algorithms that big tech companies use are often trained to recognize women’s underwear. So non-sexual photos of trans men wearing women’s underwear are often flagged, even when similar photos of women wearing boxers are not. I’m not saying it’s right, just giving the actual reason this happens. (Albeit I don’t have Tumblr-specific knowledge.)

thats fucking hilarious. it surprises me how instagram and twitter can get away with it but tumblr cant

> it surprises me how instagram and twitter can get away with it but tumblr cant

It's a huge problem on Instagram too.

Twitter is different because it doesn't prohibit sexual content in the first place, unlike Facebook and Tumblr.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#134

Post by mzs »

DanielleMolloy wrote: post #69

Is there any alternative for having a gallery of text&photo posts without forced login and exploitative social media distractions? (except for self-hosting) When I looked for this 11 years ago, tumblr was the only platform ticking these boxes. I just wanted to share a link to photos of what we are up to with family and friends without asking them to register at another platform, and only tumblr allowed that and did n…

google photos share gallery?

Re: You Win or You Learn

#135

Post by jimbob45 »

gspencley wrote: post #108
chimeracoder wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> MindGeek should buy Tumblr and allow adult content again. MindGeek isn't interested in new investments allowing independent content creation. MindGeek has been the target of active - and successful - campaigns from anti-pornography groups with explicit religious motivation (Exodus Cry, Morality in Media, etc., mostly funded by right-wing evangelicals). Those groups are the reason that Xtube shut down in 2021, and t…

While I don't disagree with the bulk of your comment, it's worth noting that PornHub / MindGeek didn't just shoot themselves in the foot but hurt the entire industry when there were numerous videos of missing teens and underage content found on their site. I say this as someone who ran an adult website for 18 years, in Canada, until suddenly our bank informed us that they were closing our commercial accounts and we c…

I say this as someone who ran an adult website for 18 years, in Canada, until suddenly our bank informed us that they were closing our commercial accounts and we couldn't find a single other bank or credit union in this country that would take our business despite a pristine 18 year track record.

Was there no way around it? Maybe with a shell company to hide your real business? I know it didn’t end up working out, I’m just curious if there looked to be any way out or if you really were just locked out of banking.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#136

Post by gumby »

Kye wrote: post #58
gumby wrote: post #54

A side point, but: the title holds another important lesson. It’s a well known truism that smart people learn from their failures. But most people also don’t bother to learn from their successes , thus have trouble repeating them.

It seems like success is luck (usually timing) more often than anything else, while failure has a more diverse range of modes.

Luck provides opportunity (if you let it) but then how you handle the opportunity is something you can learn.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#138

Post by Alex3917 »

citruscomputing wrote: post #107
Alex3917 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now FWIW, the algorithms that big tech companies use are often trained to recognize women’s underwear. So non-sexual photos of trans men wearing women’s underwear are often flagged, even when similar photos of women wearing boxers are not. I’m not saying it’s right, just giving the actual reason this happens. (Albeit I don’t have Tumblr-specific knowledge.)

Cool. Now why does it consistently happen for images where no underwear is visible, and why doesn't it happen for cis women? Why are appeals not granted? And why didn't staff even acknowledge there's a problem?

No idea. I’ve never worked at any of these companies, I just learned this in an academic conference presentation on ethnographic research into OnlyFans users. OnlyFans doesn’t have its on recommendation system, so users need to find their customers on instagram, Twitter, tumblr, etc.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#139

Post by armchairhacker »

phpisthebest wrote: post #105
armchairhacker wrote: post #72

It seems like social medias, from a financial perspective, are more commonly bad than good. Out of all the mainstream social medias I know, these ones seem to be losing money (or at least aren't generating "enough" profit): - Twitter: halved in value in 1 year - Tumblr - Reddit: stated it wasn't doing well when it increased the API price - YouTube: seems to not be doing well because it's trying to push adds and incre…

Who would have ever though giving way your product for free would not be a good business model... odd.... It is not "social media" that is the problem is the Ad Supported business model in general, everything ad supported is having problems right now, look at "news", blog sites, etc If it is ad support is has issue turning a profit. That is because ad supported is a terrible business model, however investors keep try…

The problem with social media is that it has to get a large userbase, and it's much, much harder to convince someone to pay than it is to use your free service. Especially if your service is social media.

Twitter seems to be trying to get people to pay, and it isn't going well for them.

No, in today's world in order to make a "profitable" social media, you have to get people to pay through other means. Like news.ycombinator.com, forum.bodybuilding.com, https://forums.tomshardware.com/, and other forums do by promoting the main site (ycombinator.com, bodybuilding.com, https://tomshardware.com/). The forums definitely help the main site so they are a net positive to run, but you don't pay by using them directly.

Alternatively, if you don't care about making huge profits, there are a lot of social medias out there which seem to run on donations and volunteer work alone. 4chan, letsrun.com, lemmy.world and mastadon.world, and (although they're invite-only) tildes.net and lobste.rs, don't seem to have an income source besides (at most) banner ads and a merch store.

Forums can be very cheap to run, especially if they're text-only: I imagine you can run a site with ~1 million daily users on <$100/mo, a few admins who work after their day job, and an army of volunteer moderators.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#140

Post by p1necone »

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #68
Spivak wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true at all, Blaze was a huge success, scrolling through Tumblr you see people with silly numbers of checks, lots of people pay to remove ads, it's just that that the successes aren't massively revenue generating in the way that ads are. Trying to monetize user generated content is hard because both the users and creators believe that it's their content (which it is that's how community works) and so locki…

From the CEO’s blog today: > You mention Blaze and Ad-free doing well, but their adoption is so small relative to the use of Tumblr their revenue couldn't support a fraction of the ~1,000 servers it takes to run Tumblr, much less any salaries.

(person who doesn't really know what they're talking about when it comes to services of this scale asking) Why does Tumblr need 1000 servers to run? You can serve a lot of text and relatively well compressed image files with not a lot of hardware.
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