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I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021.

Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting the art of targeted ads. I am a wallet of flesh and blood which must be stripped bare and profiled and picked apart for the maximally efficient way to squeeze profit from my presence. Every other site will fold and morph itself to a shape of my liking - like a fairy tale trickster stealing memories and taking their mold - to lull me into compliance and loosen my coin purse.

Facebook sees me searching fitness equipment and injects my timeline with athletic wear ads. Reddit profiles the subreddits I follow and eagerly promotes a new coding bootcamp or cloud service at every turn. Google overhears me lamenting over my moving to-do list on voice call and fills in my “how much to tip movers” query before I’ve gotten the third word typed out.

Tumblr never even tried.

They could have. The information is there. The basic infrastructure, presumably, exists. Tumblr can recommend me tags based on tags I follow, blogs based on blogs I follow, even posts that for one reason or another may strike my fancy. Tumblr could be - SHOULD be - funneling this framework into advertising, as the only means that free-to-use social media platforms can turn a profit in our capitalistic hellscape.

They just don’t.

Today I saw an ad for treating Hyperhidrosis - a condition, I think, in which a person sweats too much - and I saw it twice, four posts apart, and it is so incredibly benignly impersonally ineptly untargeted toward me compared to all other pinpoint-aimed advertising that I’m endeared to it. Tumblr knows NOTHING about me. 8 years, 51,000 likes, and tumblr has not learned a THING about me.

Advertisements for a mattress? Shitty mobile game ads that don’t make even the slightest pretense at being anything other than a candy crush rip-off? Choose-your-own adventure games either about Royal Espionage or Choosing The Wrong Dress For Your Date with ZERO in-between.

And then this. This here. The culmination, the crown-jewel of tumblr’s nihilistic non-compliance with the state of social media advertising. Any pretense of capitalistic exchange is abandoned at the gas station by the side of the road. This is not a company. This is not a product. This is not anything that fulfills the contract of consumer and seller. 

THIS. THIS IS WHAT TUMBLR HAS TO OFFER INSTEAD.

“Pour vinegar on your bread, fuck you.”

“Put it in the garbage, fuck you.”

“Your wife says you’re a fucking dumbass, fuck you.”

That’s it. That’s the advertisement. You vinegar-breadless cuck. You virgin extraordinaire bereft of bread and garbage can. I am fucking your wife right now in our vinegar-soaked motel bed. She puffs a cigarette which I pulled from the trashcan and we both laugh heartily at her recounts of your immasculine ineptitude. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you. Fuck you. 

“You guys seen this new Netflix show they’re promoting? The one about 11 year olds twerking? Literal fucking pedophilia. Watching Netflix originals needs to be classified as a mental illness ASAP“

actually refers to?

because from the context i can’t tell if this is about something similar to child beauty pageants or if this is, like, “let’s shame kids of color for dancing because moral panic”

For all I know the show could be fine - but I do have to agree it’s kinda weird to be showing 11 year olds dancing “sensually” (Netflix’s words, not mine) as a form of empowerment?

11 year olds should be allowed to do what they want, but it seems wrong to specifically *promote* something that sexualizing them

UH BA BA BA BUP.

The (relatively mild) ideological abuse I have experienced was used to convince me of some bad and harmful shit. But I’m worried that the things I’ve said about it make it seem like the abuse was bad because it convinced me of untruths. That’s a very very small part of the problem.

It is possible to commit ideological abuse in the name of ideas that are 100% true. People think that ideological abuse is only done in the name of darkly comic nonsense (Xenu only makes sense to someone who’s been abused so badly they forget how to think clearly) or ideologies based on cruelty and subjugation. It’s true that abuse is more common in ideologies that cannot possibly defend themselves with actual arguments, but it’s completely possible to abuse people in the name of things which make sense.

If you’re dealing with someone who thinks two plus two is five, you can show them they are wrong with counters or numberlines or whatever. This will teach them basic arithmetic and also respect their personhood. This is what any decent person would do.

Or you can control them with fear. You can make it sure that they know that if they ever say two plus two is five, they will be physically harmed or threatened with physical harm. You can lie and belittle and mistreat them in dozens of ways and any time they complain you can tell them that they deserve it for believing that two plus two is five. You can say that they’re not allowed to make even the smallest decisions for themselves (what to eat, how to dress, who to be friends with, what to read) because a person who believes two plus two is five shouldn’t be allowed to decide anything. You can isolate them from anyone you haven’t vetted (which means no friendships with anyone who is wrong about math, but also no friendships with anyone who says “obviously two plus two is four but there’s no need to hit people over it.”) The fact you are right about math doesn’t make it not abuse. You’ve abused them into believing something, and the fact that it is true doesn’t make the abuse ethical.

You’ve also severely damaged their ability to learn math. If they have a basket with two apples and they add two pears, they won’t be able to take an honest look about how many total fruits they have. They are only going to be able to think “I must have four fruits because I don’t want to get hurt again” or “I must have five fruits because there is no way on earth that despicable piece of shit can be right about anything after what they did to me.” You’ve done lasting and possibly permanent epistemic damage to this person. For a long time, maybe for the rest of their life, they will not be able to approach arithmetic with logic; they are going to come to a calculator with so much emotional baggage that they can’t be rational. They may genuinely need to espouse wrong beliefs about numbers because the only psychologically feasible alternative is espousing the (also wrong and more dangerous) belief that they deserve to be abused.

Almost everyone who commits ideological abuse thinks they are convincing their victims of the truth, and they think that this justifies the abuse. They are usually wrong about their ideas being true, but they are always wrong about their tactics being justified. I want anyone reading this to know that if you are seriously hurting someone to get them to believe you, it doesn’t matter that you are right. You have to find another way to do that. What you are doing does horrific damage and doesn’t even succeed in making people actually believe you, just in parroting you so that you will stop hurting them. You have to treat people who are wrong like people. Abusing someone into believing the truth doesn’t become okay because it’s the truth.

More importantly, I want you to know that if someone is using violence, the threat of violence or manipulation to control your beliefs, that is abuse. You do not deserve to be treated this way. You do not have to figure out right now whether what they are trying to make you believe is actually correct. You can leave (if it’s safe) or practice harm-reduction (if leaving isn’t safe yet) before you figure out whether or not they are telling the truth. It is not okay for them to do this to you, even if they are right.

For years, if you asked people what GNU/Linux would need to do to get a larger market share on the Desktop, experts would say “I don’t know“ and amateurs would say something that boiled down to “Be more like Windows“.

Some people had almost-troll opinions like “The problem with Debian is apt-get. It’s much more convenient to just install an exe file from a compact disc.“ except completely seriously. I remember things like “The problem with Linux is that it’s slow because you can’t defrag your hard drive“ or “The problem with Linux is that you can’t write savegames in /usr/games like you would do on Windows where you write savegames to C:\Program Files\“

But they weren’t trolls. They just weren’t able to articulate their vague unease about the idea of switching away from Windows.

After I switched from Linux to Mac OS X and back again in the mid 2000s, I got the impression that a lot of the “superior usability“ of Windows was actually just familiarity, but the same was true about OS X. There was a lot of terribly inaccessible, unintuitive or difficult-to-discover stuff in OS X, and Apple had a habit of changing APIs and UI guidelines around so older apps stuck out.

I remember somebody making a video in 2005 or early 2006 showing random people on the street the KDE4 beta in his laptop, telling them it was the new Windows Vista preview, and they all loved it and said it was a huge improvement over XP. (This actually proves very little, if you already know people can’t articulate why they use Windows in the first place)

I’m so glad that whole discussion died down, even though I wish the desktop itself didn’t have to die for this to happen.

If you want to be a jerk about it, you can ask people:

What should Microsoft do to increase adoption of Windows 10 in tablets?

Linux is already good enough.

None of your complaints about Linux are valid, and you wouldn’t switch to Linux today if I told you these things you want had already been implemented in 2009.

Listening to Windows users about what Linux needs to do is pointless if you don’t already have a pretty deep insight into the whole UI/UX thing.

There is a lot of room for improvement in Windows that Microsoft could implement, but won’t, for the sake of backward compatibility. Instead, they introduce completely new APIs for completely different things.

Windows has horrible UX in many places, but people expect the horrible UX to be there because they grew up with it, so they don’t complain about it any more.

If you used a couple of different operating systems with radically different user interfaces, you know that it’s all arbitrary, but a lifelong windows user is like a blind man groping for an elephant, insisting that the way Windows does it is the obviously correct way to do it, and all the ways in which Windows is uniquely terrible are actually features, not bugs.

me having a conversation with @xhxhxhx

the trick is they don’t have to pay your people any more than they would pay their own casuals and yours are better! it’s perfect! on top of that the union pays the workers a 10% wage bonus on top of whatever the employer offers (that’s what eats up the investment capital) so there is a strong incentive for any individual worker to join the union.

the goal of course is to gain a monopoly on workers in a particular industry and then put the screws to the employer, charging them 20% more than before so you can continue to offer workers the 10% premium and pay back the investors; any company that tries to wriggle out of it or hire scab labour gets cut off.

Then, after all the laws go into effect, raise your prices on the employer end!

so if someone comes up to you and demands a hundred bucks or they’re going to shoot you in the face or set fire to an orphanage or something then sure, the rational choice is hand over the cash as preserving your face and the orphans has higher expected value.

but that’s playing the game according to their terms, and you just lost the larger game in which they can now extract everything from you by presenting you with this choice repeatedly until you have nothing left, so the actual rational choice is to chimp the fuck out and try to tear their face off and do as much damage to them as you can until they gun you down.

is this bad for you? yes! you get shot! you lose the game! but they also take damage the reduces the attractiveness of playing this particular game again, and if they can anticipate your commitment to reacting in this way then they will not present you with this choice in the first place, so you win.