Girl what the fuck is going on in tumblr offices right now to let the decisions they just dropped be made
To the executive who made the decision and the RND staff that told said exec to make that decision: the only reason you’re winning the race right now is because you’re the tortoise. Don’t be the fucking hare.
“Valley what the fuck are you talking about”
Today, tumblr staff posted a very long announcement on their blog, which you can find here.
It’s a long post that’s pretty hard to read, mostly because the entire thing reads like the writer was held at gunpoint by the zuck himself. (To the poor staff member who had to write this shitshow, I’m so sorry, may you get a raise for your efforts) Here are some of the main points:
- Tumblr (the company) is concerned about gaining more users from outside sources, such as other social media sites
- They’re planning on doing this by updating their advertising practices to the industry standard (basically, advertising tumblr the way Meta advertises Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, or the way Twitter advertises itself)
- They want to change how tumblr looks when you’re not logged in so that more people are convinced to sign up (they didn’t say how, exactly) but that’s not fully fleshed out yet
- Gave a very interesting statistic that the average tumblr user scrolls though 25 posts a day and did not specify wether or not this is good or bad (most likely because it’s fucking wrong)
- Plan to improve their “algorithmic ranking capabilities on all feeds” (which I don’t understand fully, but it sure fucking sounds like data mining)
- Plan to change thread mechanics again, but this time they’re collapsible
- Plan on putting new creators in the forefront by boosting their visibility on all dashes, and “improving the feedback loop for creators” (which once again I don’t understand fully)
- Plan on implementing spam filters when posts make rounds
- There’s a lot more RND on their end about to happen, regarding notifications, emails and staff-to-user communications
- Want to make emails more personal per creator (??????????)
- Backend stuff regarding site stability and performance on mobile
TL;DR: Tumblr is attempting to catch up with other social medias by becoming more like Twitter, even though the whole reason they had a massive influx of users recently was because of their lack of invasive, intrusive and vile business practices to sell themself.
Needless to say, people are fucking pissed. A lot of this is the exact opposite of what tumblr users want, and feels like the thing that’ll make this site finally crash and burn alongside the others. Which is terrifying!
So if staff are reading this, I’m gonna repeat my statement: the singular reason your site ended up being refuge in this time of dying socials is because the bar is in hell, and you barely jumped it by not having the bells and whistles that everyone’s tired of. Don’t trip while you’re still ahead.
This is not at all what they're doing and spreading this panicked information is not helping.
Tumblr is making their dashboard controls open source so that the community has full control over how their dash is curated and can develop tools to customize it how they want. This was announced DAYS ago, but has been getting zero attention compared to people who only want to read everything as bad faith as possible.
Twitter would *never* make a move like this in a million years because keeping their model proprietary is too important to them to the point that they're suing Meta over Threads.
Tumblr are also extremely against data mining and their stance against it has cost them money they could have been making in order to make up for the deficit this site costs Automattic annually. Tumblr Live doesn't even "data mine" like the popular rumor states, because if you check what they collect it's username, age, and IP. The only identifying bit of this is IP, and if you use a VPN it will render that part moot.
I have a longer post about all this that includes my sources if you check the Tumblr Live tag on my blog. Look, I want Tumblr to improve too but the misinformation needs to be dealt with or we are never ever going to be able to give a scrap of useful feedback. Because asking them to stop doing something they're already not doing is flooding out all the actually useful critique.
further points:
- changing how tumblr looks when you’re not logged in is almost certainly about removing the “oooooops you’re not cleared to see that teehee! better sign up first!” they explicitly mention wanting people to actually see what tumblr is like before deciding to sign up. this is a good thing.
- the statistic is 25 posts per SESSION not per DAY which is completely normal and expected. i don’t see more than 25 posts most times i open tumblr (unless i’ve been gone for a while) because i don’t get that much new content on my dash OR because i don’t have time for more than that. they did not say it was good or bad that 25 is number, just that the first 25 posts should be good because that’s mostly what people see when they open their dash. and when half of it is your own posts or your mutual all reblogging the same post that makes it not an awesome experience. which is what they’re trying to fix.
- “algorithmic ranking” just means how well their algorithm uses the data it already has. you interact with x tag a lot so you would probably like more of x tag. tumblr is notoriously horrible about this rn because if you reblog one thing about that and then hop over to the for you tab it’s nothing but that thing. if they were going to mine more data they would be talking about gathering data. “algorithmic ranking” is literally just moving around cells in a spreadsheet of data they already have, there’s no conversation about gathering more data.
- improving the feedback loop for creators means getting them more reblogs/comment when they post original art/writing/content so they feel like it’s worth it to post to tumblr. which is what creators want.
“tldr”ing this as “tumblr is trying to become like twitter!” is ragebait nonsense. nothing about these changes make it “more like twitter” and i don’t know where you got half the stuff in this post except by willful misreading. i get that the language isn’t familiar to you and that you don’t understand it, which yeah is not great messaging on tumblr’s part and i wondered at them posting it (though super appreciate the EXTREMELY TRANSPARENCY which no other social media site is doing). but please don’t try and speak authoritatively on something you don’t understand, and especially don’t put a tldr that is a completely inaccurate summary of what’s going on.
