We’ve been gradually tightening the Ask feature to eventually ensure real questions are all that make it through. In addition to keeping out spam and junk, we’re doing this in preparation for some new feedback tools that are about to roll out. This is increasingly important as the current Ask feature was not designed for high-volume communication and is becoming problematic to scale.
While I promise the new features will be some of the greatest we’ve built, I must stress that we have no plans to make Tumblr a replacement for email. You can send your friends as many messages as you want with Gmail, Gchat, Facebook, etc.
While I understand his reasoning for what he's done, the limit on the number of asks per hour is far too small. The thing that irks me most about this though is that last part. While yes, we can give the people we talk to our Facebook, etc., I know that there are people who aren't comfortable doing that. Tumblr also acts as something of an anonymous support group for a lot of people and by removing the ability to have those conversations, you're removing that support. I love all of you who follow me and that I follow but there are some of you that, I wouldn't quite be comfortable sharing those more personal things like my Facebook or email with some of you, it's not that I don't like you, they're just not things I readily give out. By limiting this form of communication between users, and not providing another meant for conversations, you are limiting the social aspect of what is supposedly a social network. While this if your website, Mr. Karp, thus you are most likely going to do what you want with it, listening to the users wants and doing what you can to make them as happy as can be is how you are going to keep your users. I promise you that if you don't give alternatives, you will lose the users that you claim are important to you as they go find alternatives. You, and your site, are not invincible Mr. Karp, don't make the same mistakes Myspace did. Before you take this as an attack, it is very much not, all I'm doing is what I'm encouraged to do here, speak my mind about things that matter to me, and tumblr matters to me a lot, because of it I have three new amazing best friends who I never would have known existed otherwise and I met them because we had lengthy conversations here. Please don't be your own undoing.
