If nothing else, the attention this Pitchfork thing received is a good indicator of how on fire Tumblr is. I’ve been following along, but not because I want to declare the death of Tumblr or because I want to be sort of vicious to a girl who pours herself out on the Internet. I’m just into community management and I like to analyze fuckups — especially when they aren’t mine.

Gawker does a pretty good job of breaking down what happened and where key mistakes were made. But there’s something else to the story that they didn’t really cover — you could call it the problem of realtime transparency.

if you’re a successful service like Tumblr, you set up the expectation for speedy responses and total transparency. But when you combine the two, and speedily/openly respond to a serious issue from a pissed off user within the framework of a whimsical microblogging platform, you are making a mistake. You’re not giving yourself the time to be thoughtful, you’re not giving yourself the time to get — and check —the facts. You’re committing to realtime transparency and you’re setting yourself up to fail.

As far as I can tell, community management is not what Meaghan’s blog is for and an issue like reclaiming a sub-domain ought to be handled elsewhere. But let’s say a higher-up demands that Meaghan respond to the uproar and says she needs to do it on her blog because the staff blog gets too much exposure.

OK.

It would have been fine to write something in this vein:

“Hey all, you may have heard about the drama around the Pitchfork launch.

We hate drama as much as you do. That’s why we have a well-defined and fair policy about reclaiming subdomains of abandoned Tumblrs. Right now we’re trying to understand the frustrations of a user who says that his Tumblr, while dormant, wasn’t actually abandoned.”

As soon as the dust settles and we’ve resolved the support ticket with this user, I’ll update this post with the details. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.”

It sounds super stiff, but it’s ok. Right now, all you’re trying to do is quiet things down and get some breathing room.

Sometimes community management can feel like the wild west, and at this stage I think it requires a lot of intuition. But like any other job, I think eventually it crystallizes into a bunch of set pieces, and so long as you are empathetic you can pull them off without sounding disingenuous. In this case, the appropriate set piece would have been acknowledging the situation and setting up the expectation for an update when the facts are straight.

Remember that scene in 40 Year Old Virgin where Steve Carell gets ready to masturbate by lighting a bunch of candles and turning on some mood music? When I saw it, I didn’t get the joke and someone had to explain to me that it’s funny because this is how women pleasure themselves, and Steve Carell is a guy.

Since then I’ve been kind of fascinated by the mores of masturbation among men and women. So it struck me as noteworthy that Firefox employs 2 features that seem to accommodate both the classically male and female approaches to self-pleasure.

The “Clear Recent History” feature (inexplicably found under Tools, not History) is decidedly masculine. It’s like the tissue torn too late from its box. The deed has been done, all that’s left is to shamefully try and clean up the mess you’ve made. It’s a feature designed for spontaneous outbursts of onanism.

In contrast, Firefox’s “Begin Private Browsing” feature has a more feminine touch. It requires thoughtful foresight - it’s the internet equivalent of closing your silk curtains or softly locking the door of your bedroom before you dim the lights and get down to it.

PS: I enjoyed reading Mozilla’s reminder that pornography is just one of many illicit use cases for these features:

Many people believe that the primary use case for private browsing mode is viewing pornography. While viewing pornography may be a popular use case due to the nature of content on the Web, assuming that this is the only reason that users need private browsing trivializes the overall feature. For instance, users may wish to begin a private browsing session to research a medical condition, or plan a surprise vacation or birthday party for a loved one. Use cases will range from users cheating on their spouse, to users buying engagement rings. Given the breadth of our user base, specific use cases are likely to be extremely varied.

meaghano:

him: MEAGHAN.
me: What?
him: Nothing I just miss you.
me: You do not.
him: Okay fine I don’t. I’m just feeling super feelingsy today.

At first I just thought this was funny, but the phrase “feeling feelingsy” stuck with me, and now for lack of a better word it’s become part of my sparse emotional vocabulary.

I guess I’d define “feeling feelingsy” as feeling something for the sake of it, feeling something because the part of you that feels is bored and wants something to do, feeling something to prove to yourself and others that you are in fact capable of feeling anything at all.

Unlike that dude, I usually can’t tell when I’m feeling something real and when I’m just feeling feelingsy, which isn’t really a good feeling at all.

Exploring Tumblr today, I accidentally ended up getting a funny little ribbon on the bottom-right corner of my avatar. This signified that I had donated money to Haiti relief, which I hadn’t done. To remedy the situation, I tried to remove the ribbon. This proved to be impossible. Left with no other options — except hypocrisy — I gave some money to Doctors Without Borders.

A bad user experience created a good outcome. Go Tumblr!

PS: I really do wish I could easily remove this ribbon. It’s not a big deal, but I just don’t like:

1. Joining some faceless online army for any reason
2. Changing — or even noticing — my avatar. Avatars are like small, mean mirrors that pop up on your computer screen with minimal warning. I guess this is rooted in deeper issues.
3. Gestures of support that inevitably conclude. Remember when Iran had that election and everyone on Twitter made their avatar green? I don’t see any more green avatars. At this point, a green avatar would be ridiculous and dated. But I would hate to be the Twitter user deciding who, for the sake of aesthetics and timeliness, changes their avatar back to normal and in so doing essentially withdraws support from Iranian dissenters.

PPS: I might have donated money anyway, even without the ribbon! But we’ll never know. The events that transpired rendered impossible any understanding of my own actions; forever — at least in this particular case — closing the door to self-knowledge.