I’ve left the data farms but occasionally revisit the Matrix

Warner Bros.   Even though Twitter is now in its MySpaceX era, I won’t shut my account. I have scripts that run through it, and I don’t wish for some schmuck to come in later and claim my username. Mastodon has taken off this week, my Twitter notifications are at a low, and as I […]

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Another innocent post at NewTumbl that’s too much for the moderators

Even though I like NewTumbl, it’s never a pleasure to be proved right again about its user-based moderating process, where there is no appeal. Alex at NewTumbl, who empathized with my situation, says this is the latest one to fall foul of the Republic of Gilead user base—and which would have had a pass at […]

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NewTumbl: a parting response

After I posted that I would leave NewTumbl (not quite those words—I said I would still return to check out a few people I followed), I had a very nice note from Alex, one of the US folks there whose posts I regularly enjoyed, along with those of Marius and a few others. Alex reblogged […]

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Verizon’s continued hypocrisy borne of pettiness

Remember Tumblr, the platform owned by Verizon that I left?    I left because of Verizon’s policies, of placing their corporate agenda ahead of the users.    I went to NewTumbl instead—a site that Tumblr users might not know about, since Verizon has ensured that searches for its competitor come up empty.    I was […]

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The intelligence gap tells you when to block on social media

That didn’t take long. I’ve been on NewTumbl 15 days and already a troll’s been by (the above is in reverse chronological order). I guess this is the internet in the late 2010s: people don’t believe in exchanging views, and that trolling is the new normal. You see it all the time on Twitter and […]

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Tumblr is now where Verizon’s corporate agenda rule

How quickly an opinion can change.    I have been on Tumblr for 12 years, signing up in 2007, with my first post in January 2008.    For most of that time I have sung its praises, saying it was one of the good guys in amongst all the Big Tech platforms (Google, Facebook) that […]

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Tumblr is dead, long live NewTumbl

Postscripts: click here to read why I’m considering ceasing to post on NewTumbl, in November 2020. Click here to read about NewTumbl’s encouraging response in December 2020. And, just over a week later, how the site really has become too puritanical for its own good.     Tumblr is dead, long live NewTumbl.    I […]

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Social media: not the evolution you might have expected

I’m getting a buzz seeing how little I update social media now. Around February 2016 I began updating Tumblr far less; I’ve gone from dozens of posts per month to four in December 2017 and seven in January 2018. (Here’s my Tumblr archive.) Facebook, as many of you know, is a thing of the past […]

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A look back at 2015: a year that was harder to laugh at

I’ve done this a few times now: looked through my year’s Tumblr posts to get an alternative feel for the Zeitgeist. Tumblr is where I put the less relevant junk that comes by my digital meanderings. But as I scrolled down to January 2015 in the archive, I’m not that certain the posts really reflected […]

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A warning to those with rivers.pro tagcloud code in their Tumblr themes

Does anyone have the rivers.pro tagcloud code in their Tumblr theme? If so, it’s time to remove it. The code forwards to a website which McAfee SiteAdvisor labels dodgy. It is very hard to remove from a customized theme, since every time the page loads, the forwarding takes place. You’ll have to find a way […]

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