things i will miss about tumblr

[bestmiaou]

 i'm starting to transition off of all of the corporate social media platforms for a lot of reasons, and the one i think i'll miss the most is tumblr. it is an incredibly effective meme generator, simply due to both the size of the community and how easy it is for adjacent communities to "infect" each other we new ones. it also had some of the best semi-public communities i've ever participated in (and also some of the worst, but that's how it goes, i guess), which has largely gone away due to them making changes needed to monetize their user base as hard as possible. there is, by definition, only one way to maximize profits from a social media website.

Comments

[flamingsword]

I can't tell if there should be a /s after that last line ...?

Like, of course tumblr is going to side with Apple and be jerks, but they could just ... not pander to Apple? Apple has a lot of market share, I get it, but tumblr has a lot of social cache with its users. They could persuade mobile users to go for android etc. rather than always buying iPhones and being chained to the app store.

Apple are not going to stop being jerks until they get real pushback from content sharing platforms. Tumblr could have led that charge and instead folded like a wet paper bag. So much for their social action.

[bestmiaou]

that line was serious and mostly about the changes to how tags and search work, which broke down some of the really strong communities that existed prior to that. all of which happened years ago in the effort to monetize.

on the subject of Apple specifically, i highly doubt that the presence/absence of a tumblr app will sway a significant number of people from any particular phone. if they banded together with other social media sites, that might work, but that carries a high risk of those sites being labelled (rightly or not) as supporters of porn which would almost certainly hurt their sites more than help.

in either case, corporate social media has been homogenizing for some time. they are all converging on a similar feature set that maximizes ad revenue, sometimes at the expense of basic functionality (like a chronological view of all things you are following). only one set of these revenue impacting decisions will produce the most profit at any given time, again by definition. you might argue that one set will produce the most short term profit while another will have better long term profit, but it has been a long time (if ever) that corporations cared about long term profits over short term profits.