my feedback to Tumblr
posting a version here as well before I strike alongside other users for several days. I highly encourage you to submit your own support ticket and select "feedback."
-- Dear Tumblr Staff,
I have a blog I've been running since 2018. I encourage all of my readers on Archive of Our Own to come find me and interact here, on Tumblr. I post here daily and have consistently interacted with followers and non-followers alike. Some of these posts receive tens or even hundreds of thousands of likes, reblogs, and comments. I am sincerely proud of this accomplishment.
This process, this achievement, works because we can interact with reblogs, comments, and tags. With each other. Without it, what truly is the point of Tumblr? Siloing us into age appropriate categories? Disconnected communities and fostering a culture of indifference or worse, animosity to others?
The porn ban was one thing, and I understand the legal mess without agreeing with the outcome(s) But I do not understand this. At all.
No one asked for this. No one WANTS this. I don't say that to threaten, only to express my extreme displeasure with the new reblog chains, and to convey the reality of what is about to occur -- you will lose thousands of active users. Thousands.
For a site meant to build collaboration and foster interaction, this is a grave mistake. It is absolutely insane to launch this on people who have consistently valued those above items, keeping this site alive while a mass exodus occurred years ago. Those blogs and people have persisted, and this is the ONE thing that keeps them on here. Interaction with other people. Connection. A feeling of community stretching across blogs that may never be directly connected to each other.
I know you may or may not reply, and that an eventual reply would indicate that my feedback will be taken into mind. But it won't. Because this decision was forced on a userbase that had no input on the impact and did not want this. A decision that, in all likelihood, was never made with users in mind.
And yet, I still hold out hope for the consensus to alter the path we're currently on. I still believed in Tumblr, but not with this change.
