If They Dont Get It To Breakeven Theyll Hopefully Best Case Just Open Source The Website Which Is A Method

If they don’t get it to breakeven they’ll hopefully best case just open source the website which is a method they’ve done in the past. And it would probably work, and then the website would to my understanding be being maintained by users. Now this is where my understanding gets fuzzy so anyone with more knowledge of how this would shake out feel free to chime in. But my understanding is that the source code for the site would be opened up and maintained by the community likely through mostly volunteer work. I would guess largely uncompensated.

Well.... sort-of. When you say it's "a method they've done in the past" I get the impression you're referring to Automattic and Wordpress. For those less technically inclined, I think it'd be useful to go over some basics of how Wordpress works: Wordpress is just a bunch of code that anyone can download and put onto a server (either a physical computer somewhere or a rented server). Once that's running they can point a domain at the server, and boom, a new Wordpress site is born that anyone on the internet can visit!

But I'm not really sure that anyone would actually want to visit at that point -- the site is empty! You need to add stuff ("data") to it to make it actually useful -- that can be pages, plugins, themes, posts, comments, accounts, whatever -- all of it is "data" that you have to add to Wordpress in order to make my site not blank and empty.

You can think of a Wordpress website as having 3 pieces: the Wordpress code, site data (posts, themes, users, etc), and the computer/server that hosts it. Only 1 of those things is open-source, and that's the Wordpress code. The other two are owned and controlled by whoever runs the site.

So, let's say that tumblr decided to open source their website. Well, what that means is that they'd make the code public. That would let me get a server and launch tumblr2.com, which definitely would be cool, but tumblr2.com would be empty -- it wouldn't have any of the tumblr accounts, posts, any of that site data that tumblr has. If someone actually did that and set up tumblr2.com, I think most people would probably continue to use tumblr.com just because that's where everyone is already and that's where all the content is. And since there's no way for my new tumblr2.com to talk to tumblr.com, you can't follow or share content between them. Yes, there are other sites that can be configured to be able to do that (looking at you mastodon/fediverse) but that's not tumblr. That model would require months and months of solving coding problems to even get close to working on tumblr.

Ok, so then what's the benefit of open-source? Well, with the source code fully available, that would allow people to switch from suggesting features by describing them with words (which an engineer at tumblr would need to interpret and figure out how to code up) to instead writing the code for new features and submitting it to staff, which staff could just copy paste in. In theory, this would mean that tumblr would have to spend less money on staffing the site because staff wouldn't need to be writing code, but it's important to note that they'd now need a new type of staff for reviewing code submissions!

Not only does there still need to be people at tumblr who are looking over code submissions and making sure they're high quality, bug free, and will work with the rest of the code, but there also still needs to be people at tumblr handling moderation / T&S, and there still needs to be people managing the servers that host tumblr and its data so they don't explode or get hacked! While in theory it might be possible to lose a few staff members, in reality even in the best case it probably wouldn't be very many. It would just shift people from writing code to reviewing community contributions, and in fact, they'd still need people writing code because there are sometimes code needs to be written that nobody in the community wants to / has time to write! Or perhaps there's a bug that requires looking at a users personal information to debug -- community members just can't be allowed to do that, so you'd need an internal engineer to do it.

Point being, while I do think open source would be nice, for a website that works like tumblr it really wouldn't resolve many (or possibly even any) of it's problems :( Sorry to be a party pooper, but I thought it would be useful to give a somewhat detailed explanation so hopefully you can understand why open source isn't a silver bullet.

Okay so here’s my thoughts on the staffcon thing.

I still think collapsing reblogs so posts look more like other social media isn’t gonna work as a feature but they will probably roll them back a little and at least add a toggle off for it if they try it and enough people submit feedback. Edit: this is actually less of an issue, most of the discussion is based on a misrepresentation of what’s happening. They’re just making it easier to scroll past long posts.

I think submitting feedback is a takeaway. There was a pretty clear effort to just remind the user base that there are real humans on the other side of a paycheck having to read and respond to the inputs of every feedback method on the site, which is fair. It’s easy to be an asshole online in any semi anonymous platform and that is something that tumblr culture takes a certain bloodthirsty pleasure in.

And yes, of course, user complaints about issues such as accessibility and the many ongoing glitches and bots and the search function, etc. are valid and do need to be addressed. But at the very least it would be cool if we as users maybe try to cultivate a slightly less pitchforky social norm when submitting feedback about changes to the site. The ceo is not reading every @ to his blog. One of his employees is. The people reading all of the feedback are just people doing their jobs. All jobs suck under capitalism, maybe we could try not to make their jobs actively worse.

Would you be rude to an overworked server in a restaurant? No? Cool also try to not be a dick to the person getting paid to answer customer or user complaints.

Related to that, funding. Many current and former members of staff have been pretty frank about funding in the past. The company is trying to at the very least breakeven, which not a single company who has owned tumblr has managed because the hosting fees for this site are insane due to all of the stuff on it.

If they don’t get it to breakeven they’ll hopefully best case just open source the website which is a method they’ve done in the past. And it would probably work, and then the website would to my understanding be being maintained by users. Now this is where my understanding gets fuzzy so anyone with more knowledge of how this would shake out feel free to chime in. But my understanding is that the source code for the site would be opened up and maintained by the community likely through mostly volunteer work. I would guess largely uncompensated.

So personally I think maybe the vitriolic response to every change they make going forward to try and monetize the site and pay even some of the cost of operation is perhaps a bit overblown, because they’re still trying to find a way to keep paying those people to work on tumblr, and I think people continuing to be paid for the work they do is better than volunteers doing unpaid labor.

I do also think there’s a secret third option for automattic and every other company finding themselves with a worse outlook now the Silicon Valley bubble has started to really burst, and that is for all existing staff members to unionize and then turn the whole thing into a worker coop. Much more stable organizational structures. Worker coops are also one of my favorite short term solutions to many other systemic problems we are currently experiencing.

I do hope this site continues to exist for many years, especially as it is one of the only places on the internet where the culture makes it safer to talk about some of the more permanent and long term solutions to various systemic issues that function within societies. Also funny text posts.

Meta Stack Exchange

Moderation strike: Results of negotiations

We have reached the following conclusions during negotiations between community-selected strike representatives and representatives of Stack

Here's the official post with the results of the strike negotiations if you really like reading, but I'll try and put out a more layperson friendly version in the coming days.

Looks like the Stack Overflow strike is finally coming to a close, after nearly 8 weeks, having achieved all of its major goals (with only a few, small, compromises)! Just wanted to put something out since I'm pretty excited about it. Once it's official and the meta post is out I'll see if I can put together a more detailed analysis of negotiations and why this went so differently from other strikes such as the one on reddit.

Little update, within 24 hours of the end of the strike the stack overflow mods handled over 10k of the collected flags. Those folks are machines and are incredibly good at what they do, illustrating exactly how much the company needs them.

The end of the Stack Overflow Strike

Note: Skip to the bottom if you just want a quick list of strike outcomes and not story mode.

For those of you who missed it (I know many of the engineers I talk with day to day did), starting on June 5th the Stack Exchange elected moderators and many curators and users announced they were on strike. The relationship between the company and the community had been slowly slipping for the last 5+ years as company actions gradually degraded the once robust trust that community members had in how their platform was being run. However, none of these changes had truly threatened the long term existence of the site like the decision to unilaterally override the existing, community established policy to ban GenAI content with a new, secret, moderator only policy that effectively forced moderators to stop moderating GenAI content (this policy as since been released, and I'll link it later).

The combination of a policy whose contents were secret and which went directly against community consensus (and which many believed would ultimately result in the death of the site) convinced over 100 moderators and over 1500 users to sign on to the strike letter. These users included two key groups: first, Charcoal, a highly effective community built and maintained spam prevention group, chose to shut down their operations as a part of the strike, and second, the Stack Overflow moderator team agreed to stopped moderating, resulting in a backlog of nearly 20,000 unhandled flags during the strike.

This impact was enough to bring the company to the table. Despite despite banning strike organization from taking place on stack exchange chat rooms or sites (which required moving to a discord server for organization) and hush-hush messages to striking moderators implying that their moderator status may be revoked under certain conditions, the community held strong and the strike began.

Mere days after the strike began, the VP of Community reached out to ask for a set of community representatives to negotiate with in private. Elections ran through week 1 of the strike and ultimately 3 moderators were selected who would communicate with strikers in the strike discord and communicate with the company representatives in private, allowing negotiations began at the start of week two. These negotiations were interrupted by a couple of events which I've previously written about:

First, the botched release of the "AI Question Assistant" which turned out to pass questions to the ChatGPT API with a prompt and return the result (quickly jailbroken, widely mocked, and ultimately scrapped by the company). It had problem such as changing what question was being asked, fixing bugs in code, and answering the question instead of fixing it.

Second, the removal of the Data Dumps (with the implication that this was to prevent GenAI companies from training on it), which turned out to be a directive straight from the CEO and was quickly reverted after a call from one of the company's founders.

And finally, clear misrepresentations of the strike to any media outlet that contact them.

After the first month, spirits were not great. Progress was occurring but at nowhere near the pace that people had hoped for. The strikers had hoped for an immediate retraction of the GenAI policy, which had not yet happened, however what the negotiators were able to share sounded promising, so the strike continued.

Finally, after nearly 8 weeks on strike, the negotiators came to an agreement and announced that Stack Overflow had conceded on nearly every concern. Here's a quick rundown of the results:

One strike demand was that the private policy moderators had received would be published and so it was. This made it clear to everyone how damning that policy was. In summary, it restricted moderators to only act on self-admission and otherwise treat GenAI content as human (even when it includes clear tells such as talking about a knowledge cutoff date).

The second was that this moderator-only policy was retracted. It was replaced with a heuristic based policy that would allow moderators to act on certain heuristics, which was effectively the status quo prior to the strike.

They also made a commitment to keep the data explorer, the data dumps, and the API freely available. This wasn't initially part of the strike demands but was added after the data dump snafu in the middle of the strike.

They agreed to never mandate moderator actions in private that were not justified by a public policy.

They agreed to update their press policy to ensure that statements about the community are reviewed by their internal community team and not sent out without consultation (which is apparently what happened).

They granted moderators an ability to establish when the company has failed to hold up its end of the moderator agreement (by vote). If the moderators established that the agreement was violated, they have committed to reverting any changes that were made improperly and do them again, in a way that is compliant with the agreement.

They updated their policies around how they will handle support cases complaining about moderator action to involve actually consulting with the moderator(s) who made the decision, and also their policies around communicating with moderators more widely. Mods have been asking for a return to more active and open communication from the company and these changes are a huge step in the right direction there.

And finally they made some softer commitments around taking community feedback under account, being more transparent with platform changes, and making an effort to communicate more with users and moderators.

These changes are massive and while there is still some talk of continuing the strike until there is more follow through on these commitments, many users are chomping at the bit to get back to work. The vote currently stands at around 95% approval for ending the strike, so I think we can safely call this over, and a massive win for the Stack Overflow community. And if there's more you want to know about Stack Exchange or the strike itself, my askbox is open ^.^

Ok I've chatted with some friends and I'm actually pretty OK with the dash redesign. I wish there was an option to put the left bar icons back in the top right, but I also see the usability case of "these random icons dont really make sense until you memorize what they do, we should put names next to them"

they are holding hands

Just opened tumblr in incognito and apparently staff really is serious about keeping chrono dash... even though new users can't set it as the default?