thetetra:

zigzag-wanderer:

beemovieerotica:

PSA: bot comments are taking over ao3

The above examples have been provided with the authors’ permission to demonstrate what these look like.

Basic rundown:

• They are all 3 sentences long
• Perfect grammar, capitalization, and punctuation
• Like absolutely flawless English teacher-style writing with only a single exclamation mark, ever
• No mentions whatsoever of character names, settings, situations, or anything that could be tied to the story
• The usernames may be identical to people who exist on ao3, but the name is not clickable, and no profile is associated with it EXCEPT when you directly search for that name. What this means: the comments come from an unregistered (not logged in) reader, bots scrape the site for real usernames, attach that to the comment, and post

Please spread the word about this so authors can filter comments and report them accordingly

There has been some speculation about why this is happening at all, and the best guess is that this is a feature that AI-training story-scraping tools are implementing to try and make their browsing traffic look legitimate

what fresh hell is this?

foxyjoy-art:

Happy Birthday Xie Lian!

teaboot:

fattylime:

a study i did because i realized idk how to draw environments at all LMAO

STOP SCROLLING THIS IS A PAINTING

burntblueberrywaffles:

firawren:

Which of these would you rather see on your dash?

Hey @staff. This is a perfect example of why collapsed reblogs is such a bad idea. Seeing the full thread, you go like this:

😮 ooh, that’s cool
😀 “they’re free,” hehe!
🤣 “16 cents,” perfection!!

I have achieved joy, I feel positive feelings toward Tumblr, I want to engage, I want to stay, my eyeballs land on more ads, you make more money, everyone wins! 🎉

Seeing the collapsed thread, you go like this:

😮 ooh, that’s cool
😐 “16 cents”? yes, that’s literally what the pic shows, not sure why you felt the need to say that

There is no motivation for me to uncollapse the reblog chain—it looks like a boring conversation about the denominations of coins. And even if I do uncollapse it, you’ve ruined the joke by showing me the punchline before the setup. I am sad, Tumblr is boring, I go elsewhere to entertain myself, I see less ads, you make less money, everyone loses. 😥

Reblog chains are the best thing about Tumblr. They are your unique super power. They are the thing that makes people screenshot Tumblr and share it around. Why on earth would you kneecap them??

I don’t know exactly how you plan to implement this. Give people the option to keep them collapsed if there truly are people who are annoyed by how long they can get (you already have a version of this feature), but don’t collapse them for everyone or new users by default. Please. It will make Tumblr so much more boring.

chaser:

ALT