Writing Sucks

here it is with the right words

But the PDF thing kinda makes sense. Bear with me.

But first, some context.

See, in the 1990s before PDF files there was almost no way to generate a document on a Mac and read it on a PC. Or vice versa. Businesses struggled with how to email important documents around and guarantee they looked the same on the other end, regardless of what computer & software the recipient had.

Adobe changed all that with PDF.

Since Acrobat Reader was available (and free!) for Windows & Mac, suddenly the problem went away. Everyone knew how to read a PDF. Adobe became a universally recognized brand overnight even if you'd never heard of Photoshop, because everyone had goddamn Adobe Reader installed.

Because of that, every tech company yearned to be just like Adobe: invent something universally desired, used by billions of people.

Fast forward to a Yahoo/tumblr meeting sometime in 2013/2014.

Tumblr development staff demonstrates how the back end of tumblr works, which (honestly) is revolutionary as compared with how any other social media site worked at the time. Each tumblr post is composed of blocks of data, any one of which can be text, sound, an image, a movie... anything. These blocks of data are threaded together into what looks to the user like one cohesive message (a single tumblr post) but under the hood it's magic.

Further, the mechanism for doing this can be standardized. In other words: tumblr could, if they wanted, publish the standard as a way for ANY social media site to manage its data.

If other sites did that, then they could trade messages with tumblr! Imagine posting a message on tumblr and reading it on Instagram. Or see twitter messages natively on your tumblr feed. I mean personally, that's a horror show. But the concept is interesting.

(In fact, that's how Mastodon and the Fediverse work in 2025. Each Mastodon post is a standard chunk of data that any website can read & display, assuming it understands the underlying ActivityPub protocol and plays by its rules.)

So the Yahoo executives attend this technology demonstration and one of them quite visibly has a light bulb wink into existence over their head. The light bulb is an old school incandescent, 300 watts at least, and glows furiously bright.

The Yahoo exec stands up. His chair knocks backwards.

"OH MY GOD," he stammers. "This tumblr thing could revolutionize social media. It'd be like the new PDF!"

Then blood shoots out of his nostrils and his head explodes, but all anyone ever remembers from that meeting is "PDF".

They saw in tumblr potential for a universally read social media site that could interact across other social media platforms, and potentially becomes the dominant form of interconnectivity between platforms.

Except they fumbled it massively?

That’s my understanding of the above.

A "universally read social media site that could interact across other social media platforms"? We had that in the 1990s, or the seeds of it, back when the internet was focused on protocols and not platforms. "Web 2.0" was a deliberate move away from that, made possible by some really terrible legislation.

No matter how good Neue Post Format may be, and no matter who was helming the company, that level of interoperability was never going to fly in the face of unified opposition from Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

The other big social media sites don't want interoperability: they want to lock you in to extract value from you while providing you with an increasingly-miserable experience. If you can read their feeds and connect with your friends on their sites from any number of other sites, then they have no hold over you. This is called "switching cost".

Fed up with the ads on Heebee? Tired of the algorithmic bias on Gumpy? Why would you put up with it if you could just go to Poob and get the exact same contact, and stay in touch with all of your friends, relatives, and moots?

someone urinated into the ballpit while it was empty and posted it in the tag

this is not a joke

Bartholomew

Dolores

Norman

Harold

Magnolia

Names that are normal for babies but weird when you're old:

Maddison

Tanner

Skylar

Mckenzie

Logan

Names that are normal for old people and normal for babies:

Elizabeth

Mary

Michael

Finnegan

Peter

Names that are weird when you're a baby and weird when you're old:

Radish

Kerosene

Australopithecus

Anthill

Hedgemony

Names that are weird when you're normal:

Balthazar

Romulus

Clandestia

Persephone

Kremulon

Names that are normal when you're weird: