Fjaorargljufur, Iceland by hansiphoto on Reddit
More Tumblr thoughts to share, but at least it's all funny today.. Earlier while scouting different publishing platforms, I decided to see how many people had complained about each platform through a few Google searches.
Guess which one clearly had the most negative public responses over a span of several years? That's right - Tumblr was not only by far the most complained about publishing platform, but it seems that a large number of different people all specifically used variations of the word 'trash' to describe Tumblr as a platform or community.
This sorta made me feel bad that I've been calling Tumblr trash over these past few weeks while attempting to determine its usability, even if I've only been honest. But if everyone seems to know that Tumblr is complete trash and if Tumblr/Automattic seems to be unwilling to do anything about its bot problems, there's actually a much higher chance that many of these spammy botted/scraped blog-rings come directly from Tumblr itself, knowing that most users won't continue to post quality content after getting to know the space.
I'm sure there are some absolute losers who'd rather do more work to download and repost others’ posts as their own finds for useless internet points rather than reblog, but even those morons would be unlikely to spam all of the lifted content immediately at once before they've built up a meaningful base of followers.
On the other hand, if Tumblr itself just wanted to keep content that was soon to be deleted by the original poster active on its site forever, then setting up these lazy botted/scraped blog-rings without any followers would be exactly the thing to do. =)
Funnily enough, I came across another new blog just last night that had hundreds of newly posted scraped images, all with less than 5 notes each. 😂 They had scraped a few images from our blog, but mostly the images came from others, and a good number of the images were then spam reblogged by another equally new alias account, with equally little traction.
Prior to seeing that and thinking about it, I generally assumed it was individual losers being lame out of boredom, and I mostly just felt bad for them (since I haven't cared to share any original content yet). But if it's the rotting technology platform botting/scraping its own users posts before the original posts/accounts get deleted, that would be even more hilariously pathetic and sad.
I mentioned it the other day, but I really did have a better impression of Automattic prior to all this. I can't imagine how embarrassed their employees must be to have to work on this platform, knowing they are fully complicit in (if not outright responsible for) the rampant usage of bots to inflate their traffic numbers and keep the site from ever dying completely. 🤣
Publicly Tumblr has talked about hoping to target younger users with this platform, except the same platform has an overabundance of unchecked adult accounts plus endless niche porn bots that all engage aggressively with ‘regular’ accounts every day? If one were to take Tumblr’s statements literally, they would only be able to conclude that perhaps Tumblr actually wants to direct its younger internet users towards these niche adult themes intentionally. If this objective but pessimistic outlook were to be true, then Tumblr/Automattic has been doing an exceptional job of being scumbags professionally, for quite a while already.
As for me, I just think it's a shame that Tumblr/Automattic has seemed to give up on rather than fix its simple issues, since I think the platform still has real potential in 2021, even having flamed out previously from bad decisions. Being able to update images while allowing followers evergreen re-blogging features is a publisher's dream.
With that said, attempting to use this trashy bot-heaven professionally at this point would be an absolute nightmare, so I'm officially out on Tumblr as a viable primary platform. If this blog continues in the future, it will only be used as a side outlet.
I am the exact target audience Tumblr seems to hope to attract to Post+, yet using their platform has taught me to not only avoid this site, but also every other Automattic project going forward. GG Tumblr, that's what kids nowadays call an epic fail.
The TL;DR moral of this post? Trash will be trash. Once you know it though, it becomes easier to avoid being near the stench.
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