since twitter has become actively hostile to its users, so they came to tumblr, and reddit has become
- actively hostile to its users, so they came to tumblr, what do we do now that tumblr is becoming
- (more) actively hostile to its users? i’ve been here for over a decade so i know tumblr users are the
- type to cling on despite everything and revel in undoing every change, but i’m so tired of the way
- this website breaks the way it fundamentally works in order to appeal to new users. the
- twitterfication of the site seems so much worse than when people jumped ship after the porn ban, and
- even then, only small communities (and twitter) cropped up as solutions. you might not be the person
- to ask for a definitive answer, but i figured a tech blog might be interested in considering - what do
- we do when there’s nowhere left to go?
Okay so, I mean this very seriously: how has tumblr meaningfully become like twitter?
-
I don’t personally find the sidebar view obnoxious and it seems to me like just another layout change
- that’s pretty typical to tumblr. New users are getting signed up with a bit more emphasis on
- algorithmic feeds, but that is still very easy to change (MUCH easier than on any other social
- platform) and the algorithm has been there for everyone for quite a while, we just typically don’t
- notice it because a lot of long-term tumblr users don’t go into the “for you” feed.
-
I don’t think that tumblr *has* fundamentally broken the way that it works to appeal to new users. My
- dash now is still very much like my dash in 2019, and still very much like my dash in 2018 (though
- much less pornographic). Reblogs are still reblogs, likes are still likes. Replies, for all that they
- seem like they’ve been around forever, are new and good and I think they work well. I’m irritated that
- the notes menu doesn’t have a “view all” option but I think that’s a worthwhile tradeoff for an easy
- way to see tags.
-
I *do not* understand why tumblr has broken linking back to previous reblogs but I don’t think that’s
- out of an effort to act like twitter; it is a bizarre choice that I dislike and don’t understand but I
- also don’t think that it has fundamentally changed the way the site works and i mean you’ve been
- around long enough that I’m sure you’ve had the same experience I have of going into the notes of a
- post and randomly clicking until you found a version that you wanted to reblog without a bunch of
- bullshit at the bottom. Tumblr has always kind of sucked, this change DOES suck but it doesn’t suck in
- a way that is particularly novel or insurmountable. (For instance, I think this change sucks MUCH LESS
- t han when they made posts with links invisible to the search, that is something that is genuinely bad
- that has been long lasting but doesn’t get brought up much in lists of the ways that tumblr has gone
- wrong)
-
Tumblr *is* changing, but I think it is changing more incrementally and less terribly than other parts
- of the internet. I also hate the floating clown, the login walls, the dash-only view for blogs (you
- can’t archive it and I HATE that), and - to an extent - the new lightbox on mobile. And I dislike that
- less than I thought I would but I don’t think it’s a fundamental change that necessarily impacts my
- interactions with the site - it *adds* a feature that I don’t care for but it doesn’t *break* anything
- that I require to have a good time on tumblr - in that way I think of it very much like Live. People
- hate Live so much and I find that perplexing because it is so easy to simply ignore it.
-
But that’s not really your question; that’s just some stuff I want people to think about because as
- much as tumblr has changed in the last two years it is nowhere near as fucked up as the recent things
- that twitter and reddit have pulled.
-
So, as to your question: where do we go?
-
Well. Not to be an extremely old person on the internet, but damned if I don’t miss email lists. And
- forums. God I miss forums. Neither of those things has all the bonuses of platforms like twitter or
- reddit or tumblr or facebook, but they were great ways to hang out with people you liked on the
- internet.
-
The internet is changing. I can feel it, you can feel it, I’m pretty sure we’re all like cattle in a
- field lifting our noses and hearing some distant rumbling and becoming slowly aware that it’s almost
- time to run. There’s a coming stampede and it isn’t here yet but you know it’s on its way. You’re not
- imagining that, that’s how things feel right now and there are a shitload of things contributing to
- it.
-
Things like SESTA/FOSTA and KOSA (which has not passed yet but is a big red flag waving on the
- horizon) have been eroding away the way that users on various platforms can function. Some platforms
- have consolidated in ways that harm users; some new platforms have popped up and shaken up the map of
- the internet; some platforms are being torn apart brick by brick by owners who don’t care about the
- users. It kind of seems like people are actually looking up and realizing that advertising is A) bad
- and B) doesn’t actually work and I think we’re running straight toward another advertising-based crash
- like we saw in 2017. It feels like all the desperate things that tumblr is doing is just rearranging
- deck chairs on the titanic as the internet as a whole starts to sink into the ocean.
-
Honestly, I don’t think it’s that bad. I think it *feels* bad, but I think we’re looking at a slow
- whimpering death of the platforms, not a bang. I think tumblr is going to hang on at least for a few
- years and I think it’s going to end up like livejournal and myspace, which both still exist as
- websites that are recognizable as updated versions of the sites they were in 2004-2010. The thing that
- I think would really, honestly hurt tumblr in a fundamental way is if it moved to a more algorithmic
- and data-sales based model of advertising, and I think that’s still pretty distant. I think Automattic
- is aware that killing the chronological feed would be the one unforgivable sin that would cause a mass
- exodus and a final crash, and I think when we see that, when we can’t just scroll through the feed and
- see what our friends did that day in order of when they did it, that’s when the party is over here.
-
-
But that’s still not answering your question.
-
So, where do we go? What do we do? Well, for now, I’d say it’s a good time to get contact info for
- your friends across various platforms. Get email addresses, get phone numbers.
-
Now is also the time for you to set up a personal website. NeoCities is currently the best place to do
- this, though it takes a lot more effort than just starting a blog on tumblr. I think that various
- oldschool blogging sites like Wordpress and Blogger/Blogspot/whatever the hell the google one is are a
- better place to have your emergency backup than a more platform-y platform if you aren’t up to doing
- something with NeoCities.
-
If you’ve got the ability to do so and a group of people who are interested in the same core subject,
- set up a forum. There’s a decent amount of off-the-shelf forum software out there and a
- text-and-small-images forum isn’t prohibitively expensive, but it’s never going to be huge and you’re
- never going to have the kind of spread and virality and random connections that you would on a
- platform with millions or billions of users.
-
If you can’t set up a forum, setting up or joining a discord server for your friends is a decent
- enough option at the moment, and may be a very good option for people who are looking to keep their
- interactions more private.
-
But yeah i think right now is a great time for people to start setting up their own personal websites,
- to start visiting actual webpages again, to start bookmarking their friends’ websites, and to start
- collecting contact info that isn’t tied to platforms.
Gotcha! While you’re here, check out some of this text formatting.
-
Bigger text ✨
-
This is bold, and this is italics. This is strikethrough. (I'm
- whispering this in small text.) This is not a suspicious link at
- all.Thistextiscolourful!
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.
alright this is exactly
+ what i was trying to point out in an earlier post. someone other than Tumblr added a community
+ label to this post on their reblog of the photo post. then everyone else kept reblogging the part of the
+ chain that has the label
+
if you go to the post here
+ you can see it has no label
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
the OP does not have a label. the followup picture of the dolls has no label. someone reblogged the
+ picture of the dolls and self-flagged it as mature, then people saw that and thought the whole post was
+ mature flagged. the majority of the reblogs on this post is people reblogging the mature-flagged reblog
+ chain and asking why it's flagged. stop reblogging that part of the chain then!
Concept paintings that I did for a deleted scene in Across the Spiderverse. In this deleted scene, Miles
+ follows Gwen to a Brooklyn construction site where he meets Miguel for the first time. I believe this
+ scene was released yesterday as a special feature called "Miguel Calling."
since twitter has become actively hostile to its users, so they came to tumblr, and reddit has become
+ actively hostile to its users, so they came to tumblr, what do we do now that tumblr is becoming
+ (more) actively hostile to its users? i’ve been here for over a decade so i know tumblr users are the
+ type to cling on despite everything and revel in undoing every change, but i’m so tired of the way
+ this website breaks the way it fundamentally works in order to appeal to new users. the
+ twitterfication of the site seems so much worse than when people jumped ship after the porn ban, and
+ even then, only small communities (and twitter) cropped up as solutions. you might not be the person
+ to ask for a definitive answer, but i figured a tech blog might be interested in considering - what do
+ we do when there’s nowhere left to go?
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.
+
Okay so, I mean this very seriously: how has tumblr meaningfully become like twitter?
+
I don’t personally find the sidebar view obnoxious and it seems to me like just another layout change
+ that’s pretty typical to tumblr. New users are getting signed up with a bit more emphasis on
+ algorithmic feeds, but that is still very easy to change (MUCH easier than on any other social
+ platform) and the algorithm has been there for everyone for quite a while, we just typically don’t
+ notice it because a lot of long-term tumblr users don’t go into the “for you” feed.
+
I don’t think that tumblr *has* fundamentally broken the way that it works to appeal to new users. My
+ dash now is still very much like my dash in 2019, and still very much like my dash in 2018 (though
+ much less pornographic). Reblogs are still reblogs, likes are still likes. Replies, for all that they
+ seem like they’ve been around forever, are new and good and I think they work well. I’m irritated that
+ the notes menu doesn’t have a “view all” option but I think that’s a worthwhile tradeoff for an easy
+ way to see tags.
+
I *do not* understand why tumblr has broken linking back to previous reblogs but I don’t think that’s
+ out of an effort to act like twitter; it is a bizarre choice that I dislike and don’t understand but I
+ also don’t think that it has fundamentally changed the way the site works and i mean you’ve been
+ around long enough that I’m sure you’ve had the same experience I have of going into the notes of a
+ post and randomly clicking until you found a version that you wanted to reblog without a bunch of
+ bullshit at the bottom. Tumblr has always kind of sucked, this change DOES suck but it doesn’t suck in
+ a way that is particularly novel or insurmountable. (For instance, I think this change sucks MUCH LESS
+ than when they made posts with links invisible to the search, that is something that is genuinely bad
+ that has been long lasting but doesn’t get brought up much in lists of the ways that tumblr has gone
+ wrong)
+
Tumblr *is* changing, but I think it is changing more incrementally and less terribly than other parts
+ of the internet. I also hate the floating clown, the login walls, the dash-only view for blogs (you
+ can’t archive it and I HATE that), and - to an extent - the new lightbox on mobile. And I dislike that
+ less than I thought I would but I don’t think it’s a fundamental change that necessarily impacts my
+ interactions with the site - it *adds* a feature that I don’t care for but it doesn’t *break* anything
+ that I require to have a good time on tumblr - in that way I think of it very much like Live. People
+ hate Live so much and I find that perplexing because it is so easy to simply ignore it.
+
But that’s not really your question; that’s just some stuff I want people to think about because as
+ much as tumblr has changed in the last two years it is nowhere near as fucked up as the recent things
+ that twitter and reddit have pulled.
+
So, as to your question: where do we go?
+
Well. Not to be an extremely old person on the internet, but damned if I don’t miss email lists. And
+ forums. God I miss forums. Neither of those things has all the bonuses of platforms like twitter or
+ reddit or tumblr or facebook, but they were great ways to hang out with people you liked on the
+ internet.
+
The internet is changing. I can feel it, you can feel it, I’m pretty sure we’re all like cattle in a
+ field lifting our noses and hearing some distant rumbling and becoming slowly aware that it’s almost
+ time to run. There’s a coming stampede and it isn’t here yet but you know it’s on its way. You’re not
+ imagining that, that’s how things feel right now and there are a shitload of things contributing to
+ it.
+
Things like SESTA/FOSTA and KOSA (which has not passed yet but is a big red flag waving on the
+ horizon) have been eroding away the way that users on various platforms can function. Some platforms
+ have consolidated in ways that harm users; some new platforms have popped up and shaken up the map of
+ the internet; some platforms are being torn apart brick by brick by owners who don’t care about the
+ users. It kind of seems like people are actually looking up and realizing that advertising is A) bad
+ and B) doesn’t actually work and I think we’re running straight toward another advertising-based crash
+ like we saw in 2017. It feels like all the desperate things that tumblr is doing is just rearranging
+ deck chairs on the titanic as the internet as a whole starts to sink into the ocean.
+
Honestly, I don’t think it’s that bad. I think it *feels* bad, but I think we’re looking at a slow
+ whimpering death of the platforms, not a bang. I think tumblr is going to hang on at least for a few
+ years and I think it’s going to end up like livejournal and myspace, which both still exist as
+ websites that are recognizable as updated versions of the sites they were in 2004-2010. The thing that
+ I think would really, honestly hurt tumblr in a fundamental way is if it moved to a more algorithmic
+ and data-sales based model of advertising, and I think that’s still pretty distant. I think Automattic
+ is aware that killing the chronological feed would be the one unforgivable sin that would cause a mass
+ exodus and a final crash, and I think when we see that, when we can’t just scroll through the feed and
+ see what our friends did that day in order of when they did it, that’s when the party is over here.
+
+
But that’s still not answering your question.
+
So, where do we go? What do we do? Well, for now, I’d say it’s a good time to get contact info for
+ your friends across various platforms. Get email addresses, get phone numbers.
+
Now is also the time for you to set up a personal website. NeoCities is currently the best place to do
+ this, though it takes a lot more effort than just starting a blog on tumblr. I think that various
+ oldschool blogging sites like Wordpress and Blogger/Blogspot/whatever the hell the google one is are a
+ better place to have your emergency backup than a more platform-y platform if you aren’t up to doing
+ something with NeoCities.
+
If you’ve got the ability to do so and a group of people who are interested in the same core subject,
+ set up a forum. There’s a decent amount of off-the-shelf forum software out there and a
+ text-and-small-images forum isn’t prohibitively expensive, but it’s never going to be huge and you’re
+ never going to have the kind of spread and virality and random connections that you would on a
+ platform with millions or billions of users.
+
If you can’t set up a forum, setting up or joining a discord server for your friends is a decent
+ enough option at the moment, and may be a very good option for people who are looking to keep their
+ interactions more private.
+
But yeah i think right now is a great time for people to start setting up their own personal websites,
+ to start visiting actual webpages again, to start bookmarking their friends’ websites, and to start
+ collecting contact info that isn’t tied to platforms.
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.
+
It's my second frustrated attempt of doing something nice
This post encapsulates a lot of the problems that we've identified with the current model of VC-funded
- social media platforms, and it's what we've built Pillowfort in opposition to. We get our funding
- directly from our users, which means we are incentivized to listen to what our users actually want us to
- change, rather than trying to appease corporate investors or advertisers. It means we have to work with a
- much much smaller staff & resources as a result, but it allows us to stay independently-owned and
- focus on our users' desires and experience. Our founder and community manager are also long-time social
- media users themselves and are very plugged into the experience of being a user of sites like these.
Gotcha! While you’re here, check out some of this text formatting.
+
Bigger text ✨
+
This is bold, and this is italics. This is strikethrough. (I'm
+ whispering this in small text.) This is not a suspicious link at
+ all.Thistextiscolourful!
Fun fact: last week I was working on how the checkmarks look on the web for accounts with a bazillion of
- them and I kept using @theshitpostcalligrapher as the example account to
- check for the people that was reviewing my code (after the @thebibliosphere had to turn them off... I hope
- the iOS fix comes out soon and you can get a rainbow again!)
+ {LinkCloseTag}
+ 
+ 
+ 
+
+ {block:IsActive}
+ {block:HasPermalink}
+
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+ 
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+
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+
+ 
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+ 
- 
- 
+ 
- 
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- 
