javi

@javi@goblin.band

Hi! I'm @_jv_ and https://tumblr.com/jv, but this is my little instance where I'm doing a bit of an experiment to merge both. Basically, I'm trying to build a tumblr-like platform that runs on the fediverse. I called it Goblin, and you can find the source code here:
https://github.com/johnHackworth/goblin

Soft. dev by trade, I used to build things for places like Tumblr and WordPress.com before their fall, now I work for a company I won't mention here after learning from my previous mistakes.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

javi, (edited ) to random

offf, this story about how Google made google search into a pile of seagull shit hits me hard:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Around the time of this story, I was living through a similar situation in my work life (on a much smaller scope, of course, WordPress.com first, Tumblr later).

Back in 2019, working on WordPress, I started finding myself, almost weekly, arguing against people who wanted to take the product we were working at and made it worse if that mean they could squeeze 0.1% more revenue from it

The 0.1% figure is not even a random number: I remember this speciffic A/B test on WordPress.com that was declared a success and shipped to 100% of the users because it increased the free-to-paid conversion by 0.1%. Soon after it was released, I found out that as a side effect, it increased the churn of free users by 20 something %,so I called for an urgent rollback and removal of the change. So I was promptly explained that we didn't care about free-users churn, because finance had calculated the average long-term value of the free users to be something like $2 per year, and the increase in conversion was bigger than what we could get from them.

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.

Back then I was the lead of one of the two dev divisions working on WordPress.com, so my job was mainly to discuss what we were going to be doing, when and how. And I was getting drained by a constant state of fight against a constant wave of shit they wanted us to build. So much than by the end of 2020, the CEO quietly told me to follow the growth team plans and shut up or step down.

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.

I found myself in a place where building something good that people enjoy using was no longer a priority, but tricking people into generating more money for the company was. And when I looked around me, I could see that happening everywhere else, not only in my company. Experiencing the start of the enshittification years from inside wasn't easy.

And, as in the article, the people who decided to turn the shit-metter up to 200%, have a name, in every case. And these people, no matter if they are called Sundar and Prabhakar or Matt and Mark, are destroying the internet. These people are milllionaires, or billionaries, and are destroying our shared, common spaces to squeeze some extra cash from us.

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.

javi,

The worst thing is that they are sustainable already. Google is one of the biggest money-making machines the humanity has seen. WordPress.com, on its own, was also profitable. But it's the classic "you know what's better than 100 millions in profit? one billion!" situation.

javi,

oh, WordPress.com development is mostly open source, so if I'm too speciffic, anyone could go to github and find the single PR where that change was shipped, etc. I don't want to put anyone under the spotlight, specially engineers who were just doing what they were told to do. Also, it's just one example of many, the only thing interesting about that particular example is that I complained about it and I got told about the 'free user value' calculation.
But well, on broad strokes, it was about making it harder to tell which features were paid and which ones were free during onboarding. So a lot of people who wanted to create an account to host a free blog, found themselves being redirected to the shopping cart and asked to pay for things they have selected thinking they were free.

javi, to random

Last one until next Christmas

javi, to random

Also, KUNGPOWPENIS threads are the perfect example of why the spirit of tumblr should be kept alive.

In places like Twitter, you just need to be more popular than the OP to 'ratio' them and mock their post. In tumblr? You need to start a social movement where another 11 people joins you to mock the original post. It's the "yes, and..." spirit of tumblr collective creation via reblog threads applied in a chaotic evil way.

(I also find absurdly funny that tumblr's CEO makes the mods to remove any single-letter reblog of his own posts to avoid being mocked)

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9sg494exa42q1fa3

javi, to random

I love how this reblog from the tumblr's rss feed look in mastodon:

Before clicking the 'read more:

after:

javi, to random

nope, the replies doesn't accept any media, to replicate how they work in tumblr and push people towards reblogging instead. But hey, the way the replies work in tumblr is pretty stupid, so maybe we should change that

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9sf10bccrhqlr8jo

javi, to random

oh buttondown is also federating!! between them and ghost, almost every substack newsletter I used to read from time to time will be available in the fediverse!

RE: https://mastodon.social/users/buttondown/statuses/112315274243684638

javi, to random

Oh fuck I just realized that since Ghost is federating soon, and a lot of people moved their newsletters from substack to Ghost ... The means you will be able to get your newsletters as regular posts in Goblin 😍

javi, to random

Just a general reminder that when Automattic sold millions of 2012 teenage selfies from tumblr to OpenAI and Midjourney without asking for consent first, they were MASSIVELY violating GDPR too:

https://qbankdam.com/en/blog/seeing-the-whole-picture-how-gdpr-views-your-images-as-personal-data

javi, to random

oook, it looks like when you edit a reblog, goblin not only edit your text, but also reblogs the original post once extra time per edit :D

I'll have that fixed

javi, (edited ) to random

I think US democracy is working as it always has. What's happening this time is that The establishment over there has lost the monopoly on information, and people is starting to see the seams of the system.

Consider how the perception about the Gazan genocide would differ if people only knew about it from TV news and the New York times and the like. The US news have always been extremely slanted towards protecting the US government to be seen as anything else than heroic by its own people. In many subjects, the US press is basically a propaganda branch of the gov.

Don't get me wrong, that is true for basically any country, but the US has always been very good at keeping the press and the media within the lines of the narrative they want to pursue, while the rest have a less solid grip on them.

Consider the Iraq 2002 invasion. The entire world were openly discussing how the US gov was openly lying about the mass destruction weapons capabilities of Iraq to justify a purely economic & propagandistic invasion, but the US press just ate that bullshit by buckets(I' m sure most journalist over there knew it was pure crap, as the ones from the rest of the world knew) and repeated it to the masses. Everywhere else, there was massive anti-war demonstrations and at least two governments involved with the invasion (UK, Spain) lost their next general elections in big part because how outraged people was about their involvement with the invasion. But in the US, no one really criticized Bush or Powell about this until ten years after the fact, and even so, it was just minimal criticism.

So what we are seeing now is what happens when the US gov lost the grasp on how their citizens get their news about what they are doing. And obviously, people is absolutely appalled about it.

Social media has had devastating effects in the world. We are dealing with a global surge of fascism 2.0, and internet has a lot to do with it. But the citizens of the military hegemon of the world waking up to what their government has been doing for decades is one of the few very positive developments they have brought.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/users/malwaretech/statuses/112310498560797841

javi, to random

Goblin dev on my side is a bit halted on my side because I saw @vergess saying good things about "I was a teenage exocolonist" and I got it on Steam and it's indeed good, so it's taking all my scarce free time.

How it is? Like a modern version or Princess Maker with a stronger focus on NPC interactions. With some very good writing.

javi, (edited ) to random

Btw, this feature was introduced because I'm petty as fuck and I actually suggested to add this to Tumblr a couple of years ago and it was shot down for being "too complex"

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9s92oktgu6bg5w5q

javi, to random

Since I've a new work laptop without a goblin dev environment, I think I'm going to use it as an excuse to install the docker branch there and iron down the last details so we can take it to master already.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9s92oktgu6bg5w5q

javi,

Custom, based on <Https://tiptap.dev>

Editors are kind of my thing, I built the Tumblr one, so I have big opinions about them 😂

javi,

Sure! With what??

javi,

Both of course. But my phone predictive keyboard hates me 😂

javi,

Que manda el editor de wafrn a la api? Markdown? Si te gusta el de Goblin puedo sacarlo a un módulo en si mismo para usarlo allí también (aunque ahora mismo manda html, que es lo que almacena goblin... pero creo que sería fácil hacerle sacar markdown si hace falta)

javi, to random

The chances of Sam Altman and Sam Bankman-fried becoming "roommates" in the next few years are far from being zero.

javi, to random

Believe me, linkedin, I really don't want to follow Chema Alonso.

javi, to random

I've already posted about it in the past, but there is an actually decent chance of the current generation of AI companies not surviving the next few years.

I'm listening to this episode of Better Offline pod, and they are doing a great job explaining why:

https://pca.st/episode/359b3345-83d4-47eb-aa6a-5c4100fb6bd1

javi,

OpenAI may be losing over a Billion per month right now, according to some estimations. They may not survive for long

javi,

It's not, indeed. But it means that billion/month loses is not just a number. It means a bunch of people are losing a lot of money every month openAI is still operating. And if these people decide to just stop losing astronomical amounts of money every month, openAI will have to close

javi, to random

I read somewhere that there were 9 people involved in the actual protest, but they have fired 28 people. So yeah, it looks a lot as if Google went through their internal archives, looked for people sympathetic to the protesters, and fired them for merely supporting them.

RE: https://toot.cafe/users/baldur/statuses/112296962600007249

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • khanakhh
  • kavyap
  • thenastyranch
  • everett
  • tacticalgear
  • rosin
  • Durango
  • DreamBathrooms
  • mdbf
  • magazineikmin
  • InstantRegret
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • megavids
  • ethstaker
  • ngwrru68w68
  • cisconetworking
  • modclub
  • tester
  • osvaldo12
  • cubers
  • GTA5RPClips
  • normalnudes
  • Leos
  • provamag3
  • anitta
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •