Jen's MixTape

we cry "the innocent women and children" to appeal to the masses, to try and force their sympathy, but the men and boys are innocent too.

I have seen sons crying out for their mothers, their fathers, their siblings. I have seen them break down at the loss of their families. I have seen them cling to their dead and grieve.

I have seen fathers cradle their dead children, seen them kiss their faces and hold their little hands. I have seen them faint with grief when asked to identify the dead. I have seen them carry their sons and daughters. I have seen them fasting to provide what little they can for their families.

I have seen men and boys digging through the rubble with just their bare hands, I have seen them comforting strangers, playing with children, rocking them, hushing them, even if the face of such imminent danger. I have seen them cry, seen them grieve, seen them break down into each other's arms, seen them be selfless, beyond selfless, becoming something I don't have a word for.

I have seen the men who are doctors refuse to leave their patients, even when they have no medicine or supplies to give them, even when they're threatened with bombings. I have seen fathers who have lost all their children pick orphans up into their arms and proclaim them their child so they are not alone. I have seen men and boys digging pets out of the rubble.

The reblog chain is one of the things that makes Tumblr unlike anywhere else. All the notes on reblogs are attributed to the original post, no matter which branch people actually liked or reblogged. We want to keep encouraging conversations, and give contributors the recognition they deserve. 

Soon, you'll be able to like, reblog, or reply to any part of a reblog chain, and that note will go to that reblog's author. Each reblog will have its own counts, instead of one aggregated number from every version of the post. And yes, you’ll be able to like multiple posts in one chain.

If a reblog doesn't add anything, the love flows up to the last person in the chain who did. Your post doesn't lose notes just because people spread it quietly.

Past notes will stay on the original post — we're only changing what happens from here on out. Retroactively re-attributing all of them would be... a lot.

It will also mean that if someone has something hateful to say, it will not get back to the original author and they will not be able to respond or clarify or set the record straight. It will make it so that someone can reblog a post and turn it into a vehicle of hate against that original creator, without any recourse for that original creator. It will lead to more toxicity and ridicule and hate on the site.

It will mean that if somebody downstream reblogs a post of mine with a question about some aspect of what I said, I will not be the one answering that question because I will have no idea that it was added.

It will also mean that if someone reblogs a work of art and adds a meme of someone weeping for joy at how beautiful it is, and then that gets reblogged and liked a million times, the original creator will not get any of those notes, and the original post on their blog will still only have 20 notes even if it becomes the most popular piece of art on the entire site.

This is going to utterly obliterate any sense of community that came from engagement with a post. Every reblog that adds anything is going to become an amputation of that post, and a creator will have to actively crawl down every separate reblog chain of every post if they want to try to find out what's happening with their content.

Just FYI everyone, because of this change I will be disabling reblogs on posts where I am sharing my own thoughts and ideas. If it's just a photo set or something I will not disable them, but anything else is going to get disabled because I do not want to feel like I'm putting my work out into the wilderness and have no meaningful way of tracking what's happening to it, and have a reblog suddenly turn it into somebody else's post, and any further engagement go to them.

Because let's be realistic, no one's going to go back through a reblog chain to interact with previous iterations. All of the engagement is going to stick with the current version that is in front of someone, which is cut off and separated from the original creator. If for no other reason than that no one will understand how this new system works, and they're going to (understandably) use the site the same way they always have and expect the same results.

I can think of so many ways that this could be weaponized and used for harmful purposes, and that is the very last thing we need in a world where there is already too much hostility.

Even if things are handled in a well-meaning way by people, it would still make it difficult, if not impossible, for creators to have any ongoing involvement in what happens to their own content once it is out in the wild, and will potentially cut them completely out of the conversation.

If you are as horrified by this change as I am, please do not stay silent. Please give some strong feedback through the feedback form so that the staff can realize how hated this change is.

So I’ll put my addition here:

However.

An average golf course uses about 548,000 gallons of water per day.

Indianapolis has 77 golf courses within a 20 mile radius, utilizing an average of 42 million gallons of water. Per day.