tbh no april fools gag tumblr ever pulls will ever be as good as the lizard election of 2016 staff put more effort into that than the rest of this website combined and it shows
for those of you who werent here in 2016 on april fools that year the entire fucking website was transformed and there was an election for a position that wasnt even ever specified and the candidates were four lizards (or three lizards and a salamander as a scandal would later prove) and it was called decision2016
each lizard had their own 3d models and tumblr blog and campaign and there was also a tumblr blog dedicated to reporting on the election and they made like whole ass news broadcasts with a guy in front of a green screen
you could vote for your favorite candidate and there was a built-in function that let you make and post a campaign poster
in case anyone was wondering the winner of the election was mop. relatable and reliable. #Mop Could
lest we forget
This was absolutely the biggest April Fools effort I ever witnessed while on staff. I already posted about this in an ask but here’s more of the shit that went down behind the scenes.
- Like all April Fools, this was done entirely through volunteer work on Staff. No one was forced to work on April Fools, it’s always employee-initiated and driven, even if it needs approval from leadership.
- The prank almost didn’t go through because leadership felt that the lizards weren’t relatable enough, so the compromise was to give them hats.
- The video updates on the Decision 2016 blog were greenscreen Fiverr actors that were all recorded months? Weeks? in advance? I wasn’t on creative so I don’t know all the deets about how those were made.
- As mentioned in my post, the victory speech by Mop was one of our designers screaming as loud as she could in a closet near the end of the day. The full audio was never posted but staff kept passing around the scream on slack and laughing about it for months afterwards
- There was a “war room” dedicated to advancing the election narrative as votes came in, posting updates in real time and also pushing changes to code as necessary (for bug fixes and what not)
- The votes were real and the “election” was decided by real users, even if the graphics and whatnot were exaggerated for comical effect. Mop won because Mop won. Democracy at work
- Someone brought in their own lizard to celebrate the proceedings. It was a bearded dragon
- This was the culmination of what was probably the most cohesive and imaginative (and largest) creative team Tumblr ever had. Unfortunately almost all of them are now long gone, and Tumblr Creative is now just a skeleton crew compared to their peak
- Wretched Tooth Doesn’t Like To Talk About Himself
- People drew porn of the lizards and posted it on Tumblr. Staff saw it and were sending it to each other on the company Slack. We thought it was great. I mean, terrifying, but great
- This picture of David Karp is my favorite photo of David Karp I have on my phone
it’s so funny how tumblr rolls out updates because i keep seeing a slowly growing number of posts about how terrible it is but your tumblr is the same. it’s like a slow going zombie apocalypse. there is no escape but for now you’re alive
“Rayban charity glasses event” is a scam don’t click any link in a post that says that.
Old tumblr users remember this scam back when it first went out.
Also no, this isn’t a joke. This phishing scam is 100% running its course again so watch out for your mutuals long abandoned accounts suddenly posting it. Please make everyone aware of it since most users here are newbies who have not seen it before!
This website is so boring it’s just the same shit repeated over and over. But every website is repetition now, it’s just on the other sites it’s automated and optimized. The people here really are stagnant all on their own. In the other places they’re like that because they’re basically just advertisers or they’re advertisement audiences
Given how often I have to deal with media-illiterate dipsticks rocking up on my posts insisting that common fantasy tropes are Discworld references, I thought it would be fun to include a single legitimate Discworld reference somewhere they’d never think to look.
I can’t promise these instructions will work next week, given how often Tumblr fucks with their UI, but at the time of this posting:
On Desktop
Go to your blog settings page (https://www.tumblr.com/settings/blog/prokopetz, for me; anybody else reading this can swap in their own blog name), and scroll down until you see “Featured Tags”.
On Mobile
Tap the little dude in the lower right to view your own blog, then tap the gear icon in the upper right to access your Account settings. Scroll down until you see “Featured Tags” (note that if you have sideblogs, this heading may be present more than once).
In either case, whatever you enter there will completely replace the auto-generated list of frequently used tags that people see when searching your blog’s archive. They don’t even need to be tags that you’ve ever actually used – they can be 100% fake, if you like.
♡
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elpuntthing asked: 