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submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by dgerard@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of WordPress. He recently had a bout of extreme shitheadry and massively transphobic behaviour on his product fucking Tumblr of all the fucking places to be a transphobe. Nobody there is delighted with him at present. His own staff are publicly posting what a shithead he is on the official Tumblr staff account!

So it turns out Mullenweg’s been like this for more than a few years now, it’s just the maggots are finally bursting through the skin.

The linked post is the tale of how wordpress.com was completely fucked around in 2019 for a signup increase of 0.1 percent!!!

This change also increase free account churn by 20 percent. But that officially didn’t matter, free users weren’t worth a lot.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the ‘free plan’ button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

The dude asked to move from wordpress.com to Tumblr. Guess what?

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be “the last bastion of the free internet”, cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren’t we, etc etc.

that CEO was of course Matt Mullenweg.

All platforms are grass. Tomorrow we die. Shitpost the day.

But remember the enshittifiers responsible. They really fucking hate being named.

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[-] Emperor@feddit.uk 12 points 6 months ago

That's why the fediverse and its principles are important. Because that's how we take back internet from their dirty hands. That's how we make internet resilient against them. That's how we build the commons.

👆

[-] Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works 9 points 6 months ago

Is there a Fediverse Tumblr alternative? I know we have Reddit, YT, Twitter, Instagram, but can’t remember seeing a Tumblr-like.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 14 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

it was gonna be Tumblr! But they never got around to the activitypub bit

the thing is, what does "Tumblr alternative" mean? So much of the social structure of Tumblr is a community that works in terms of particular bugs, glitches and how Tumblr was coded by whacking the keyboard with dildos. You could only reproduce that by reimplementing specifc quirks, and even then you'd need a community that would put up with a platform that's fucked up in those specific ways.

[-] Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Simply having Tumblr use AP is not really an alternative unless it’s something we can self host and keep out of reach of corporations.

[-] flizzo@awful.systems 6 points 6 months ago

I'm having fun thinking of infinite leather daddies whacking keyboards with dildos now.

[-] dgerard@awful.systems 7 points 6 months ago
this post was submitted on 27 Apr 2024
51 points (100.0% liked)

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