Love is love!! @literallywhateverfan - Tumblr Blog

Reblog to make it die faster

I know you aren't with Tumblr anymore but idk who else to ask. Why does tumblr make so many random changes AND never give any forewarning or a reasoning for why they made it, AND never give any data on the feedback we send or the results they get from those changes? I understand that tumblr doesn't make money so changes are necessary but it's the sudden changes with no warning or explanation combined with the fact that they ask for feedback and then ignore all of the feedback we send and never release anything related to that feedback we send in that gets to me and makes me not want to use tumblr and refuse to recommend it to friends.

Well well well...

this is a very difficult question to answer. Because... things... are complex.

I guess the gist of it is "the reality where a good part of the tumblr community lives is not the same reality that staff experience". Mind you, I'm not saying that Staff is oblivious or uninformed. Kind of the opposite. Staff manages a big extra layer of data we the users don't get access too. Things from "how long we have to achieve X or close" to "this change had very bad feedback but didn't make the usage numbers go down and it's bringing 0.03% more revenue".

There's a hard reality we tumblr users who like tumblr as-it-is need to start accepting: We are not making tumblr make money, so we are not going to be the 'client' here.

While I was in staff, we tried. We tried hard: Post+, the merch store, blaze, ad-free ... all those were attempts to make tumblr a platform funded by its community. The results were ... not great. Like, two orders of magnitude worse than they needed to be. That let tumblr in the hands of advertising money (that even if tiny compared with other sites, it still is the main Tumblr source of money by far). And for that, if you want to make the site stop burning millions per month you need way more people than we tumblrinas are right now.

Mix that with.. a certain disdain for tumblr as a platform from part of the top management. A big bunch of staff are hard-core users of tumblr who are more or less in tune with the feelings of the community, but in the upper management layers... there's only one or two persons I can think of that actually seems to like and enjoy tumblr. The rest of them are mostly users of other platforms in their personal lives, and ... they just don't get why tumblr is so hooking for some of us. They don't understand how it works, they don't understand the popular content here, they don't understand the people who already use this place.

Earlier this year I actually had a call with the CEO to try to explain him why tumblr was a great platform for a certain type of mindsets, how I have adapted to this boiling cauldron of feral goblins so quickly and become enthralled by it when I started using it four years ago. And I think I failed completely at trying to make him excited or even interested in either the site culture or its community. Or convince him that tumblr could expand vertically (bringing more tumblr-minded people in) instead of horizontally (broad the appeal of tumblr for the masses even if it dilutes the current essence).

So for management, it's just a game of numbers: The current tumblr community doesn't cover the costs of running the site, so they need a new community that does. And if in the process, some of the old community leaves forever, :shrug:, not a big loss, since they weren't making the company any money anyway. It's more important for them to get all those people leaving twitter or other platforms to actually come here and stay, and get those key metrics up up and to the right. Of course, this is just my personal opinion and I'm sure if someone send this post to those in management who I'm vaguepostingly mentioning here, they would be all "Of course we CARE about our community and tumblr's history!". But hey, you know you really don't.

"But Javi, isn't alienating the core community who creates most of the content in this platform a stupid and terrible idea in the long term?". Why, dear anon, of course it is. Or that's what I think. And that's what I ended arguing about again and again and again and again while I was part of staff. And that's, maybe, one of the handful of recurrent points where I wasn't "aligned with the direction of the company" that made me un-staffed (take that, tiktok kids!).

Why, then why tumblr management keeps pushing for this pace of rapid and alienating changes? Because Automattic, tumblr owner, is a private funded company. And there has to be smoke and mirrors showing that tumblr is actually moving fast and making the numbers go up up up. Every. Fucking. Quarter.

Do you know what's the most stressing time of the year for your random staff member? Is it eurovision with its peaks of traffic? april's fools with all the tomfoolery? No. It's the biannual Automattic board meeting. Because in every. single. one. of. them. we didn't know if that was going to be the day where tumblr's downsizing would be greenlighted. Literally, every six months the board would look at what happened at tumblr and say "ok, this is terrible but moving in a promising way, let's see if these things you are planning work and re-evaluate in six months".

Does this mean they are in the wrong and me and the people pushing to keep tumblr more tumblr were right? Well, no. Not necessarily. Tumblr has been under a very real existential thread for ... at least a couple of years. And the reality is that 'trying to monetize tumblr as-is' didn't work at all from a purely economic point of view, and tumblr wouldn't have survived for much longer without showing clear gains. So who knows, maybe by diluting tumblr they could manage to make it profitable and keep this site live for decades. I would be VERY happy to be in the wrong here.

At the end of the day, put yourself in staff shoes. You have been trying a lot of "sensible" things to try to make Tumblr sustainable. Your boss is reminding you that tumblr keeps losing money and setting dates for "lines of no return" where the company would need to deinvest on Tumblr if there is not a clear financial improvement. You know you are burning the midnight oil and the sensible changes requested by the community you have made barely had put you closer to the goal. So it's time to try the crazy stuff and see what happens. Yeah, maybe that makes the boat explode, but maybe it changes it enough to keep it afloat. The alternative is letting it slowly sink into the darkness.

So, as I warned at the start of the post, this is a very complex issue with a lot of factors involved. And of course, this is just my particular view on it, I'm sure other ex-staff members would see it in a different way. Staff members need to keep their voices 'aligned with the direction' so they don't get un-staffed, but I can tell you that a good bunch of them are in private slack channels saying things like what I'm saying here (hello friends from #********* and #******-****!). Some of them like the X change but hate Y. Others don't really care and are just doing their job and doing what their boss told them (which is a completely valid stance... this is a job).

So yeah, it's complex. Believe me, a lot of folks in staff listen to what the community says. Deeply. But right now I don't think management thinks that catering to the current community is a valid path. And given the constraints of time and money that staff needs to operate within, I'm not even sure it matters much.

a bunch of people in the notes had interpreted my post as "the doom is near". Well, yes and no.

I mean, tumblr has been at the brink of closing since... 2018 at last? Maybe even before? So it's not this is a new situation.

So do I think tumblr is going to close next month? No, I don't think so. Could it happen? sure. But I don't think so.

I really hope the changes Staff will do in the next few months will get this site to a better financial situation, but if that don't happen, I don't think Automattic would close the site right away. Instead, they would start moving people to profitable projects and leave tumblr with a skeleton crew, with the site being online but a without much, if any, new developments, bugs that take a long time to be fixed and ... well, less efficient moderation. If we get to that point, what happens after that is terra incognita: Maybe it could close after a while, maybe it could keep like that forever, maybe Automattic finds someone else to sell the site to. The timing? it depends a lot of the whimsy of a handful of rich white dudes. Staff may have three months to get more money in before the company decides to start pulling resources out. Or six. Or two years. It's hard to tell, since it's all mostly about the vibes the top brass feel at each point.

andiest

People have GOT to get used to the idea of paying for the sites they use all the time. if it's free, it's usually because they're selling ads and/or your data. In a few cases it's because the site operates as a non-profit, has a legion of volunteers, and works their asses off to get enough donations to cover everything. For small platforms/sites and in rare cases these days, it's because there's One Guy In Kansas paying for the servers and he or a handful of volunteers do all the site upkeep.

The internet is NOT free. Servers cost money. Unless you think everyone should have to keep exchanging their privacy plus the privacy of literally everyone they know so big platforms can stay totally free to users, you will have to accept that you will need to pay to use the websites you like, like this one. There's really no other option for large platforms. Federated setups have all the same drawbacks as Ye Olde Forums do. Including the fact that they are not free either! Someone has to pay for the goddamn servers!

You have to understand that the era of Everything Online Is Free is quickly coming to an end. If a hell of a lot more people don't get on board with the idea of actually paying for the shit they use literally everyday, we're all gonna give up more and more privacy and see more and more intrusive ads. The enshittification will continue to accelerate.

if you like being here on Tumblr dot com but think giving them money is bad unless they do certain things, I dunno what to tell you, other than the site has to still be up for them to make the changes you want. And that once this site is gone, it's extremely unlikely a replacement will come along.

For real, if you've been assuming a New Tumblr to crop up after a few months, you shouldn't be. Because, again, the free and easy money all the tech companies were getting 10-15 years ago is gone. They'll have to have a solid plan for turning a profit or they'll never get a new platform off the ground. And we have ample evidence at this point that it's hard as hell to even break even on a big platform let alone turn a profit.

"What about non-profits?" AO3 is an anomaly being a massive platform successfully running as a non-profit. They have a legion of volunteers and work their asses off fundraising every year to keep the servers up. All their financials are open to the public and people still act they're evil money-grubbing assholes, LOL. The only actual social media platform being run by a non-profit that I know of is Co-host. They're going through growing pains and the features are sparse at the moment. It's worth a look and I hope they do well, but I doubt it'll ever be anywhere as big as Tumblr.

dduane

All of this is painful to hear, and encourages me to remind people:

Nothing lasts forever. (And @neil-gaiman will forgive me, I'm sure, for not attaching the currently topically inevitable image...which is more about the eternal verities than the unhappy side effects of capitalism.)

If you've got data posted here—images, text, video, whatever—that you value and you don't want to find one day (who knows when) are suddenly just gone beyond retrieval: Archive it. Start now.

I've been engaged in this for a while. And also have been noodging @petermorwood about this for months, nay years, to get him to store his long weapons threads on his own website. You, too, should be storing your most valuable data in some space or place that doesn't depend on a platform to keep it alive.

Community can't be stored, obviously. The ongoing realtime exchange of serious stuff and goofery here is irreproducible and irreplaceable. No one here wants to lose it. But there's no point in pretending that what we have here is never going to end. People on other platforms have already been deeply hurt by changes that have simply destroyed years of their data without warning (such as over on what used to be Twitter: all image and video data uploaded before 2014 was recently simply made inaccessible overnight, without warning).

If there's stuff here that you value: look around and find a way to to store it away that works for you. Make a plan, and start gradually enacting it. Get proactive about protecting what matters to you... because you cannot depend on platforms, any platforms, to forever stay the way they've always been. Their priorities are not your priorities. They will change, and not necessarily in line with your preferences.

Tl:dr; Don't panic. But start planning.

Build your lifeboats.

#lol so true #my first time opening this app in forever #tumblr #the internet #what a welcome