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we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

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There's some interesting stuff in the essay! There are the bones of good analysis, and I REALLY WISH THIS GUY HAD READ PEDAGOGY OF THE OPPRESSED

Sorry.

But y'know, it's an essay that comes to the conclusion that the ACTUAL problem is these DAMN KIDS and their LACK OF CRITICAL THINKING

And I'm like. Hey. Apparently in the first sessions that he tried this in, the kids were already coming to conclusions that he hadn't thought of. That they WERE thinking critically, and were succeeding at it in ways that shocked him.

And the ending note of this essay is 'maybe kids like being taught rather than being handed easy solutions'

NO, YOU IDIOT

They like being treated as people instead of objects! They saw you struggle, and by watching you struggle were no longer at risk of being shamed and degraded for not getting the answer right!

He even says in the essay "They felt free to posit their interpretations and even to disagree with me." Like, damn dude, that's kind of a self-report. So you mean that in general, in all your classes before this, they didn't feel safe to do so?

"But too often, I think, they are misinterpreting the silence for apathy or lack of engagement, and are not identifying it for what it really is: a lack of critical thinking." Oh, and not interpreting the silence as fear? That students might be keeping quiet and not answering questions because they're terrified of getting an answer wrong and having you embarrass them in front of their entire peer group?

This was a formative experience of my life - in 6th grade, Mr Nidey's class, there was a question on the Mongols asked in class. I don't remember the exact question but I remember being elated that I knew the answer, and throwing my hand into the air, and saying 'Genghis Khan' to the teacher. He responded by telling me I was wrong, going off on a rant about how I was always being disruptive and rude in class, and how sick of it he was. The answer, of course, was Genghis Khan.

Afterwards, there was a parent-teacher meeting where he apologized to me, but the damage was already done - and more importantly, he berated me in public, and apologized in private. After that, I never answered a question in class willingly until college.

This guy's essay is focused on how AI and gamified learning and teachers being coddling to their students is rotting kids' brains, and I couldn't disagree more. This isn't new, this isn't surprising, and it's been getting worse for decades. It has nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with the industrial process of education.

No Child Left Behind normalized standardized tests at basically every age bracket, and conditioned funding on the scores on said tests. Teachers have been underpaid, underfunded, and overworked for generations, but now are even more likely to lose their jobs just for the sin of not 'teaching to the test'. Students have historically cheated on tests, not just to gain the benefits, but far more often to avoid the consequences. Failing a test can lose a child's free time to detention, failing a class can lose them their summer to remedial classes. They might be held back and watch all their friends disappear as their peer group moves on without them. They might be punished at home, from losing opportunities to being physically harmed.

for your reference, i tracked down one of my original posts; which had a notes section that looked like this:

and here is what it looks like now:

holy shit. by my math, that is not even two percent of the amount of aggregate notes my writing actually has. i am not able to see any of the literal hundreds of replies, comments, or tags.

maybe this is a bit presumptuous but i consider myself to be fairly popular on this site. i still remember the first time a large blog "picked up" my work - how quickly all of a sudden i was getting seen. notes on my poetry jumped from like 10 to 300 to 3k. overnight. that was the magic of tumblr, and the incredible writing community i found here.

but now if i answer any of my fellow writers, if i say please go check this out or even if i add additional context to my own work - the artist is removed completely from their own content.

do you want to reply to an "ask game"? do you want to reply to a story prompt? do you want to just make a funny joke with your friends? well, that sucks - you might be depriving them of literally 98% of their notes.

it isn't about clout chasing. it is about giving creators control over their own materials. even a silly post deserves to be connected directly with the person that thought it up.

@changes (Edit: I already sent this to Tumblr Support under the feedback option. I encourage everyone to send feedback on how bad this feature actually is).

For years, the total note count on a post served as a universal metric of a piece of content's impact. Whether a user liked the original post or a reblog fifteen branches deep, that engagement flowed back to the source. This ensured that the original artist, writer, or editor received the full credit for the viral success of their work.

Under this new system, engagement is trapped within the specific reblog a user happens to see on their dashboard. If a massive, high-traffic blog reblogs a piece of art from a small creator, every like and reblog that occurs through that larger account stays with them. The original creator is left with a stagnant note count on their own dashboard while their work generates thousands of interactions for someone else.

Erasure of Creator Visibility

Instead of seeing one post with 10,000 notes, a creator may now have to hunt through dozens of different reblog chains to find where the conversation is actually happening.

If the notes no longer flow back to the original post, the creator loses the ability to see who is enjoying their work, what the tags say, and how the community is responding.

On a platform where engagement often dictates visibility, splitting that engagement into tiny, unlinked fractions makes it significantly harder for original works to gain momentum compared to the high-reach blogs that reblog them.

Incentivizing the "Big Blog" Monopoly

This system rewards accounts that have already established a large following at the direct expense of the smaller accounts that actually produce the content. It transforms reblogging from a method of sharing into a method of acquisition.

When a reblog functions as its own independent post with its own note count, the incentive to click through to the original source disappears. The platform is transitioning from a collaborative ecosystem into a standard social media feed where the person who posts the content last—not the person who made it—reaps the rewards.

Impact on Collaborative Conversations

Tumblr’s unique culture is built on the reblog chain: a chronological, evolving conversation. By allowing users to like or reblog "any part" of the chain as an independent entity, the platform is breaking the narrative thread.

If engagement is siloed into specific branches, the incentive to add to a conversation is replaced by an incentive to simply own a piece of the engagement. This change doesn't encourage conversation. It encourages the commodification of individual posts within a chain, making it harder for the original voice to ever be heard over the noise of the rebloggers.

The Disincentive to Create

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of this update is the psychological toll on the creative community. When the platform actively diverts credit and engagement away from the source, it destroys the motivation to share original work at all.

For many, the reward for posting is seeing how far their work travels. If that travel is now invisible or attributed to others, the labor of creating becomes thankless.

This system makes creators want to share nothing. If the platform is built to harvest a creator's effort for the benefit of curator blogs, the logical response is to stop providing the raw material. I am one leaning into this category. Without us creators, the curator blogs have nothing to curate.