Hurting small creators is the whole point
As tumblr staff scrambles to undo their change to reblogs I would like to remind everyone who needs to hear it that "we are going to discuss this before moving forward" is corporate speak for "we are going to quietly try to roll this out again in a few weeks under a different name."
The goal of all big tech is to ultimately create an ecosystem of uncompensated labor that they can turn into profit — whether that's through AI, outsourcing labor to places where they can get away with paying people pennies a day, or appropriating your content for site traffic and then obfuscating the metrics from you so that you can't advocate for yourself.
Maybe I'm wrong! It would be cool if I was wrong. But I've seen this same shit play out too many times to have much optimism.
This isn't to be cynical, it's good that we got them to roll it back, even if only temporarily. But I would like to encourage whoever is reading this to be vigilant about what comes next, and to be prepared to bring the same level of outrage when they inevitably try to do something like this again.