B.K.

Maverick member of @staff. Product guy. Building weird things and getting paid for it. Support 🇺🇦

[staffs-secret-blog]

Well I take it that they're getting rid of live then

[bohdank]

Some dreams become plans, and some plans become dreams.

[philosophors]

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”

— Will Durant, “The Story of Philosophy”

[bohdank]

Christmas Vibes in the air.

[staff]

Post+ is going away in January 2024.

We originally introduced Post+ to uplift and support the vast swathes of incredible creators here on Tumblr. It was intended as a way for creators to offer content to their followers in a paid subscription format. 

Well, it didn't land as we'd hoped. We've heard your feedback and monitored usage, and after much consideration, we've decided to remove Post+ from Tumblr.

Here's the timeline:

As of December 1, 2023, you will no longer be able to enable Post+ on your blogs. 

Existing Post+ content will remain accessible through the end of this year. 

In early 2024, we'll remove the ability to create new Post+ content, and existing Post+ content will be marked as private. From then on, it'll be up to each creator to determine whether they want to make those posts public.

Subscribers will no longer be billed starting January 2024. If you subscribed using In-App Purchase from an iOS device, you’ll need to cancel your subscription manually to avoid being charged.

You can read more about this change over here.

And, while Post+ is going away, Tipping is here to stay. You can enable Tipping via your Blog Settings on web (Account Settings on mobile). Once a blog has Tipping enabled, any original post can receive a Tip, with the money going directly to the creator. 

[bohdank]

Have you bought anything on Tumblr?

Yes.

No, but I would love to if I had the means.

No, and I don't see anything appealing to me.

Voting ended onNov 28, 2023

[bohdank]

Don’t kill the beans!

[sorelatable]

Reblog if you’d attend!!

[frizzyhairedbandit]

LETS GET THIS PARTAY STARTED! WHEN AND WHERE?!

[once-ling]

YES! LETS DO THIS SHIT!

[apbajs]

[coneboyofficial-deactivated2018]

[austrian-battle-scars-blog]

[noizycinnamon]

REBLOG SO HARD

[loebclassics-deactivated2023081]

LET’S DO THIS FUNKY THANG

[thisiskristine-deactivated20130]

[hiddles-diddles-my-skittle-deac]

I would so go to this.

[thepuckishrogue]

Kay so this kinda needs to happen

[cheekbonesofbenny]

Perhaps if this gets enough reblogs it’ll happen.

[ivegotthetriforce]

Tumbl-Con 2014, in Chicago. It’s happening.

http://tumbl-con-usa.tumblr.com/

[zygodactylus]

love that we have this post so we can always see a trainwreck in progress, whenever we want

[cryoverkiltmilk]

Like finding Pompeii graffiti from The Day Before

[agapi-kalyptei]

[tumblr] should introduce new badges. when you send someone death treats or "kill yourself" messages/asks/replies/reblogs, you get an asshole badge. and you cannot hide it or remove it for 12 months

[staff]

Tumblr Supporter badge: Show your loyalty with Pizazz

Many of you have asked for a way of supporting Tumblr that works like regular donations. Well, this is that, with a little whimsy thrown in for good measure. Imagine. A badge that gets shinier and shinier with your continued support—and helps Tumblr stay Tumblr. 

Enter the Tumblr Supporter badge. Part of a move towards a more user-led business model, this is a new auto-renewable subscription that allows you to wear your support of Tumblr in style. 

How it works:

The Tumblr Supporter badge is a special badge that works like a recurring donation subscription service. As a supporter, you get a specially designed badge based on how long you have been supporting Tumblr in this way. Your supporter badge will evolve from Steel to Copper, Gold, Platinum, and, eventually, Oil Slick. As your support continues, you will collect these badges at each milestone, to be displayed as you choose on any of your blogs.  

There are two subscriptions, monthly and yearly: 

Monthly: Start at Steel and progress through the different badges at each milestone, eventually reaching the coveted Oil Slick.

Yearly: Start at Platinum (it's like you've jumped ahead a year. Look at you, cheating time). You'll progress straight to Oil Slick at your next payment milestone after a year.

Pricing:

Tumblr Supporter Monthly: $2.99

Tumblr Supporter 3 Months: $7.99 ($1 OFF)

Tumblr Supporter 6 Months: $15.99 ($2 OFF)

Tumblr Supporter Yearly: $29.99 (15% OFF)

More details:

This monthly or yearly subscription will renew automatically at each interval unless you choose to cancel. 

If you cancel your subscription or a payment fails, you'll still have your badge, but it won't show up unless/until you restart your subscription. If/when you do so, you'll pick up right from the badge level you were at when you ended your subscription.

This is currently being rolled out for mobile and web in English. We’ll be rolling out to other territories in the coming weeks.

That’s all for now. We hope you enjoy this new badge as much as we enjoyed coming up with it, so we can keep making odd little tchotchkes for you to enjoy. Stay weird, Tumblr <3 

[photomatt]

Twitter is Copying Us, not vice versa

I keep getting asks saying "stop copying Twitter." We're not! If anything it's going the other way with them copying us.

Long posts, which were on Tumblr first.

Mixing text and rich media, which Tumblr did first.

If we go way back, supporting images and embedding media in the first place, which Twitter didn't used to do. (Remember twimg and Photobucket?)

A premium upgrade, which we did on Tumblr first.

They copied our tabs.

Polls, which were on WP.com/Jetpack first.

Subscriptions to individual creators, which we did first with Post+.

Tags existed on Tumblr first.

We have Asks! And custom domains! And custom themes!

We supported editing first, you couldn't do that on Twitter until relatively recently.

Now obviously they have 20x the monthly users we do, so have executed better in a number of ways:

Their native ads provide much more targeting.

Per-post metrics.

Lists and communities.

Direct Messaging. (Though theirs is still not great.)

Much more robust and real-time search.

They did livestreaming first.

Their apps and web QA seem more stable. I've never experienced an app crash there.

It's easier to navigate RTs and comment/reply to them than reblogs.

What did I miss?

[memorizingthedigitsofpi]

I really enjoyed the concept of Crab Day, and I'd love to keep it going, but I think we should tie the celebration to tumblr holidays.

It's easy enough to suggest Blazing a post or two on 4/20 (20th April for those who note dates that way), but what about making Nov. 10th Checkmark Day? That's the day tumblr launched the checkmarks to make fun of what Elon was doing to Twitter.

Or make August 18th (original post) or November 18th (date the movie poster was added) Goncharov Day and buy or gift the Goncharov Enthusiast badge.

We could probably petition to get a knife badge for the Ides of March and who knows what else?

The debate will continue to rage about whether or not to give tumblr money, but for those of us who decide we want to, let's have fun with it.

[staff]

Hello, crab fans. Wow, you have been having a busy time! On July 29, also known as Crabs Day, you took to TumblrMart to give the gift of crabs to your pals. And boy, did we notice—not just all the great crab memes and trending posts on the day but also the burst in sales which made up a substantial financial boost to the running costs at Tumblr. And it truly took our breath away.  

We got so excited we went back to the drawing board and designed some crab checkmarks, which we teased by dressing your regular checkmarks up as crabs on the day. On August 1, we launched a regular little crab checkmark and a rainbow crab checkmark for gifting and treating yourselves.

Here are some stats from Crabs Day:

You gifted 8k crabs that day. That’s an almost 20k% increase in crab sales.

We saw a more than 7k% increase in total Tumblrmart sales.

All this money goes straight back into running costs—such as a month’s worth of power costs for Tumblr application servers. That’s all you! You’re doing that! You’re keeping Tumblr around with your generosity toward your friends. Crabs be thanking ye ❤

[bohdank]

We do not promise anything but... 😏

[bohdank]

IT'S OUT IN TUMBLRMART IF YOU'VE BEEN WAITING!

[emporium]

Custom Products

One thing that has come up internally and also on this blog is custom products, products that incorporate blog names, avatars, etc. That would be totally doable but it would take a little engineering effort so I wanted to see if this is something people really want.

Do you want personalized products and if so what products are the most attractive?

[kuromi-hoemie]

idk i know this is different, but there r a lot of ppl on here who try to make money and do art n sell commissions n stuff. is there room for users to become vendors and for the market to feel like an actual market? I'm thinking somewhere between etsy and redbubble with fairer profit sharing.

[bohdank]

We've been discussing allowing people to sell their physical products internally for some time. We have identified some implementation options through partnerships that would allow us to launch it faster. So stay tuned!

[beesmygod]

i keep loling thinking about how tumblr thinks

that somehow "growth" will lead to more money, unlike literally every single other website on planet earth that has thought this and immediately crashed and burned

that the ideal user is someone who is too stupid to use the current app and so scared of stimuli that a chronological timeline would be too intellectually taxing

that its somehow tumblr's fault if users see things they dont like on their own dash that they cultivated themselves by following specific people on purpose

[bohdank]

Growth leads to more money. That’s the nature of advertising businesses. You need more users to have more inventory to sell. Also, you need more users to be interesting to advertisers.

Users aren’t stupid, but we are all human. Revealed preference is often the complete opposite of the stated preference, and we have the data that shows that. Our goal is to optimize the experience not kill features because “tumblr staff just wants so”.

[rhetoricandlogic]

Why do you base your decisions on an economic model from 1938?

Revealed Preference has faced a lot of very valid criticism, like for example this one (Murray N. Rothbard 2006):

The revealed preference theory assumes that the preference scale remains constant over time. Were this not the case all that can be stated is that an action, at a specific point of time, reveals part of a person's preference scale at that time. There is no warrant for assuming that it remains constant from one point of time to another. The "revealed preference" theorists assume constancy in addition to consistent behaviour ("rationality"). Consistency means that a person maintains a transitive order of rank on his preference scale (if A is preferred to B and B is preferred to C, then A is preferred to C). But the revealed preference procedure does not rest on this assumption so much as on an assumption of constancy—that an individual maintains the same value scale over time. While the former might be called irrational, there is certainly nothing irrational about someone's value scales changing through time. It is claimed that no valid theory can be built on a constancy assumption.

Besides, the preference of A over B and C stays only valid as long as A has any characteristic that makes it preferable. If they're all the same, the whole model is moot.

[bohdank]

The fact that this model came from 1938 doesn't make it bad. The older the concept, the more aware you are of its strengths and weaknesses.

But you’re right that the revealed preference theory does assume that people’s preferences remain constant, which isn’t always the case — we’re not static beings after all. However, I’d argue that it’s not about assuming that every individual’s preferences stay the same over time. It’s about observing trends in aggregate. Over a large user base, individual variances smooth out, and we can spot patterns. There was a recent article in WIRED about the research on chronological feeds on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter that highlights this point.

To be exact: The revealed preference theory informs our strategy, it doesn’t dictate it entirely.

[rhetoricandlogic]

There was a recent article in WIRED about the research on chronological feeds on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter that highlights this point.

You realise that this here is exactly what has part of the tumblr-Userbase upset, right? The twitterification of tumblr (or is that x-ificaton now?), applying the research done on "other" sites like Instagram and Facebook (why do you still call it that?), however informed, to this site and by reducing the differences in utility between tumblr and its competitors, you rob it of its uniqueness, which -again- makes every model moot. I have yet to read an argument that convinces me to chose tumblr, if it looks and behaves like Instagram or Threads.

EDIT: I just read that article you linked; my apologies, I should have done that before; but some paragraphs strike me as ... let's say biased (highlights mine):

That result emerged from a multimillion-dollar, Meta-backed science project designed to study how Facebook and Instagram affected people’s political attitudes during the 2020 US presidential election campaign.

But in the new Meta study, the results came out OK for the platform. Though the thousands of users served the reverse chronological feed from September to December in 2020 encountered more political and untrustworthy content on Facebook and Instagram than users with the standard feed, the change did not significantly affect those users’ political knowledge, attitudes, or behaviors such as likelihood of attending a protest or casting a ballot.p

And here's the really interesting point:

A previous study published in 2021 that evaluated Twitter’s feed-ranking algorithm found that it delivered fewer tweets with links to external websites than a chronological one, but that those shown were more likely to point to “junk news”—biased sources that could potentially harden users’ existing political views.

So, feed your users junk news, doesn't matter, as long as they don't disengage. Is that what Tumblr is aiming for?

[bohdank]

Respectfully, you cannot see the forest for the trees. That was just an example of how research is done to spot aggregate trends. We don’t use Facebook's (that's still the name of the app, by the way) research or data as a mantra to inform our product development decisions. And we are not trying to become Twitter or Instagram; the undifferentiated product is worthless in a competitive marketplace.

In fact, we constantly seek relevant qualitative and quantitative feedback of our own to understand what’s happening and how changes affect users and the platform. But the truth of the matter is that Tumblr needs to grow as a business, or it will cease to exist.

For this reason, changes are inevitable. Many things that got us here won't get us there. So we are constantly trying to strike the balance between the needs of our tenured and new users—like supporting both chronological and algorithmic feeds—in a way that's authentic and still preserves the core values of Tumblr. And believe me—it's not an easy task. We won’t get it right every time, but we do hear everyone’s perspective.

[beesmygod]

i keep loling thinking about how tumblr thinks

that somehow "growth" will lead to more money, unlike literally every single other website on planet earth that has thought this and immediately crashed and burned

that the ideal user is someone who is too stupid to use the current app and so scared of stimuli that a chronological timeline would be too intellectually taxing

that its somehow tumblr's fault if users see things they dont like on their own dash that they cultivated themselves by following specific people on purpose

[bohdank]

Growth leads to more money. That’s the nature of advertising businesses. You need more users to have more inventory to sell. Also, you need more users to be interesting to advertisers.

Users aren’t stupid, but we are all human. Revealed preference is often the complete opposite of the stated preference, and we have the data that shows that. Our goal is to optimize the experience not kill features because “tumblr staff just wants so”.

[rhetoricandlogic]

Why do you base your decisions on an economic model from 1938?

Revealed Preference has faced a lot of very valid criticism, like for example this one (Murray N. Rothbard 2006):

The revealed preference theory assumes that the preference scale remains constant over time. Were this not the case all that can be stated is that an action, at a specific point of time, reveals part of a person's preference scale at that time. There is no warrant for assuming that it remains constant from one point of time to another. The "revealed preference" theorists assume constancy in addition to consistent behaviour ("rationality"). Consistency means that a person maintains a transitive order of rank on his preference scale (if A is preferred to B and B is preferred to C, then A is preferred to C). But the revealed preference procedure does not rest on this assumption so much as on an assumption of constancy—that an individual maintains the same value scale over time. While the former might be called irrational, there is certainly nothing irrational about someone's value scales changing through time. It is claimed that no valid theory can be built on a constancy assumption.

Besides, the preference of A over B and C stays only valid as long as A has any characteristic that makes it preferable. If they're all the same, the whole model is moot.

[bohdank]

The fact that this model came from 1938 doesn't make it bad. The older the concept, the more aware you are of its strengths and weaknesses.

But you’re right that the revealed preference theory does assume that people’s preferences remain constant, which isn’t always the case — we’re not static beings after all. However, I’d argue that it’s not about assuming that every individual’s preferences stay the same over time. It’s about observing trends in aggregate. Over a large user base, individual variances smooth out, and we can spot patterns. There was a recent article in WIRED about the research on chronological feeds on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter that highlights this point.

To be exact: The revealed preference theory informs our strategy, it doesn’t dictate it entirely.

[the-one-who-died-at-the-end]

I love @staff