“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.
