i get the point of the polls informally showing that the vast majority of tumblr users have been here for years and barely anyone is new. the problem is that the suits don't look at that kind of data and go "ah, we understand. the majority of our users are oldheads who want things to stay the same. we misunderstood our audience." they absolutely have hard numbers on these things. they surely know most active users have been here forever. but they look at these stats and go "wow, our growth rate really IS shit. we're still relying on an ever-dwindling pool of users who have been here since they were teenagers in the early 2010s. we need to be working even harder to make this place appeal to new users"
the higher ups and investors on sites like this want infinite growth forever. this is why they keep changing the layout to make it look like other, more popular sites, even though we hate it. this is why they try out shit like tumblr live that doesn't appeal to the established core userbase in the slightest. it's not for us. it's also not for the ~5% of active users (if the poll going around is to be believed) who signed up within the last year. no, they're chasing after the hundreds of millions of people who use twitter and the BILLIONS of people who use tiktok, hoping to appeal to them and make tumblr more popular again
this is, of course, deeply stupid. nobody is leaving tiktok to hop on tumblr live. they already have tiktok. and we're on tumblr because we like tumblr, not because we want it to morph into something else. but i'm sure automattic's got venture capital investors breathing down their necks going "why isn't tumblr more like twitter or tiktok or facebook or instagram or" etc. etc., and so here we are
Tumblr is most popular with artists, and the once thriving DeviantArt is barely used anymore except by AI accounts. That's what Tumblr should be taking advantage of. Being a powerful portfolio and networking site for artists. Let people add choice posts of theirs to like a "gallery" feature, like a curated archive. People already try to do this with links to view their art tag or writing tag. Build that shit in!