tumblr mobile has seadily become near unusable these past few updates. not just from a user experience perspective (which is important enough in itself) but also from an accessibility perspective.
examples include the new way the image viewer works (if you can call it “working”), the tumblr live button replacing the profile button, and that newly created blogs will be forced to have their main dashboard tab be the ‘for you’ page.
the demands of the protest would be along the lines of:
reverse the recent image viewer update
scrap the new users ’for you’ page default setting
let us turn off tumblr live indefinitely
increase efforts against spam / porn bots
make reporting abuse and hate speech as easy as reporting as reporting spam
let us go nuts show nuts again… for real this time
commit to improving usability and accessibility, and listening to users!
(suggestions welcome!)
to protest against these usability issues, and inspired by the recent reddit blackout, i propose a 48 hour blackout (where you don’t use tumblr at all). preferably of both mobile and web (since web has problems too) but mobile is the focus here.
I suggest the 48 hours between the 30th of June to the end of the 1st of July.
this marks the end of pride month (for the “queerest place on the internet”) and the start of disability month (since accessibility is a massive issue here).
tumblr office is in San Francisco, USA, so the times and dates will be calculated using their time zone (PDT).
You guys are some of the biggest most influential blogs I know, it’d probably be a great help to this protest if some of tumblrs biggest users participated in the blackout and spread the word. Sorry for being annoying and tagging yall.
I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven’t seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka “raptures of the deep”
basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.
she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.
if you can solve it, you’re good. that is the hardest part of the test.
because here’s what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they’re not dying, they’re not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.
a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he’d told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he’s at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can’t go down there, but he saw the woman go.
instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.
she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.
when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍
now this may surprise some of the audience, but the majority of humans have to survive a phase called “being a teenager” and the results are often catastrophic
hey y'all, i’m remaking this post because the last one lost some traction 😅
as you might already know if you follow me, i’ve been i’ve been out of my job as a teacher and have been struggling to find something permanent to replace it, which leaves me on a very difficult financial situation, currently. i’ve already received some donations, which were already immensely helpful to me, and i’ve been making do as i can with some odd jobs i can find. i have hope that i may find something more stable soon, as i’ve been to more interviews lately, but in the meantime, i’m kind of completely broke, to be honest.
so, i would truly appreciate whatever amount you could donate right now! and if you can’t, that you please spread this post around, as it would help me a ton. thank you!!! 💖
