B.K.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”

We originally introduced Post+ to uplift and support the vast swathes of incredible creators here on Tumblr. It was intended as a way for creators to offer content to their followers in a paid subscription format. 

Well, it didn't land as we'd hoped. We've heard your feedback and monitored usage, and after much consideration, we've decided to remove Post+ from Tumblr.

Here's the timeline:

As of December 1, 2023, you will no longer be able to enable Post+ on your blogs. 

Existing Post+ content will remain accessible through the end of this year. 

In early 2024, we'll remove the ability to create new Post+ content, and existing Post+ content will be marked as private. From then on, it'll be up to each creator to determine whether they want to make those posts public.

Subscribers will no longer be billed starting January 2024. If you subscribed using In-App Purchase from an iOS device, you’ll need to cancel your subscription manually to avoid being charged.

You can read more about this change over here.

Many of you have asked for a way of supporting Tumblr that works like regular donations. Well, this is that, with a little whimsy thrown in for good measure. Imagine. A badge that gets shinier and shinier with your continued support—and helps Tumblr stay Tumblr. 

Enter the Tumblr Supporter badge. Part of a move towards a more user-led business model, this is a new auto-renewable subscription that allows you to wear your support of Tumblr in style. 

How it works:

The Tumblr Supporter badge is a special badge that works like a recurring donation subscription service. As a supporter, you get a specially designed badge based on how long you have been supporting Tumblr in this way. Your supporter badge will evolve from Steel to Copper, Gold, Platinum, and, eventually, Oil Slick. As your support continues, you will collect these badges at each milestone, to be displayed as you choose on any of your blogs.  

There are two subscriptions, monthly and yearly: 

Monthly: Start at Steel and progress through the different badges at each milestone, eventually reaching the coveted Oil Slick.

Yearly: Start at Platinum (it's like you've jumped ahead a year. Look at you, cheating time). You'll progress straight to Oil Slick at your next payment milestone after a year.

Pricing:

Tumblr Supporter Monthly: $2.99

Tumblr Supporter 3 Months: $7.99 ($1 OFF)

Tumblr Supporter 6 Months: $15.99 ($2 OFF)

Tumblr Supporter Yearly: $29.99 (15% OFF)

More details:

This monthly or yearly subscription will renew automatically at each interval unless you choose to cancel. 

If you cancel your subscription or a payment fails, you'll still have your badge, but it won't show up unless/until you restart your subscription. If/when you do so, you'll pick up right from the badge level you were at when you ended your subscription.

This is currently being rolled out for mobile and web in English. We’ll be rolling out to other territories in the coming weeks.

I keep getting asks saying "stop copying Twitter." We're not! If anything it's going the other way with them copying us.

Long posts, which were on Tumblr first.

Mixing text and rich media, which Tumblr did first.

If we go way back, supporting images and embedding media in the first place, which Twitter didn't used to do. (Remember twimg and Photobucket?)

A premium upgrade, which we did on Tumblr first.

They copied our tabs.

Polls, which were on WP.com/Jetpack first.

Subscriptions to individual creators, which we did first with Post+.

Tags existed on Tumblr first.

We have Asks! And custom domains! And custom themes!

We supported editing first, you couldn't do that on Twitter until relatively recently.

Now obviously they have 20x the monthly users we do, so have executed better in a number of ways:

Their native ads provide much more targeting.

Per-post metrics.

Lists and communities.

Direct Messaging. (Though theirs is still not great.)

Much more robust and real-time search.

They did livestreaming first.

Their apps and web QA seem more stable. I've never experienced an app crash there.

It's easier to navigate RTs and comment/reply to them than reblogs.

It's easy enough to suggest Blazing a post or two on 4/20 (20th April for those who note dates that way), but what about making Nov. 10th Checkmark Day? That's the day tumblr launched the checkmarks to make fun of what Elon was doing to Twitter.

Or make August 18th (original post) or November 18th (date the movie poster was added) Goncharov Day and buy or gift the Goncharov Enthusiast badge.

We could probably petition to get a knife badge for the Ides of March and who knows what else?

We got so excited we went back to the drawing board and designed some crab checkmarks, which we teased by dressing your regular checkmarks up as crabs on the day. On August 1, we launched a regular little crab checkmark and a rainbow crab checkmark for gifting and treating yourselves.

Here are some stats from Crabs Day:

You gifted 8k crabs that day. That’s an almost 20k% increase in crab sales.

We saw a more than 7k% increase in total Tumblrmart sales.

One thing that has come up internally and also on this blog is custom products, products that incorporate blog names, avatars, etc. That would be totally doable but it would take a little engineering effort so I wanted to see if this is something people really want.

that somehow "growth" will lead to more money, unlike literally every single other website on planet earth that has thought this and immediately crashed and burned

that the ideal user is someone who is too stupid to use the current app and so scared of stimuli that a chronological timeline would be too intellectually taxing

Revealed Preference has faced a lot of very valid criticism, like for example this one (Murray N. Rothbard 2006):

The revealed preference theory assumes that the preference scale remains constant over time. Were this not the case all that can be stated is that an action, at a specific point of time, reveals part of a person's preference scale at that time. There is no warrant for assuming that it remains constant from one point of time to another. The "revealed preference" theorists assume constancy in addition to consistent behaviour ("rationality"). Consistency means that a person maintains a transitive order of rank on his preference scale (if A is preferred to B and B is preferred to C, then A is preferred to C). But the revealed preference procedure does not rest on this assumption so much as on an assumption of constancy—that an individual maintains the same value scale over time. While the former might be called irrational, there is certainly nothing irrational about someone's value scales changing through time. It is claimed that no valid theory can be built on a constancy assumption.

But you’re right that the revealed preference theory does assume that people’s preferences remain constant, which isn’t always the case — we’re not static beings after all. However, I’d argue that it’s not about assuming that every individual’s preferences stay the same over time. It’s about observing trends in aggregate. Over a large user base, individual variances smooth out, and we can spot patterns. There was a recent article in WIRED about the research on chronological feeds on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter that highlights this point.

You realise that this here is exactly what has part of the tumblr-Userbase upset, right? The twitterification of tumblr (or is that x-ificaton now?), applying the research done on "other" sites like Instagram and Facebook (why do you still call it that?), however informed, to this site and by reducing the differences in utility between tumblr and its competitors, you rob it of its uniqueness, which -again- makes every model moot. I have yet to read an argument that convinces me to chose tumblr, if it looks and behaves like Instagram or Threads.

EDIT: I just read that article you linked; my apologies, I should have done that before; but some paragraphs strike me as ... let's say biased (highlights mine):

That result emerged from a multimillion-dollar, Meta-backed science project designed to study how Facebook and Instagram affected people’s political attitudes during the 2020 US presidential election campaign.

But in the new Meta study, the results came out OK for the platform. Though the thousands of users served the reverse chronological feed from September to December in 2020 encountered more political and untrustworthy content on Facebook and Instagram than users with the standard feed, the change did not significantly affect those users’ political knowledge, attitudes, or behaviors such as likelihood of attending a protest or casting a ballot.p

And here's the really interesting point:

A previous study published in 2021 that evaluated Twitter’s feed-ranking algorithm found that it delivered fewer tweets with links to external websites than a chronological one, but that those shown were more likely to point to “junk news”—biased sources that could potentially harden users’ existing political views.

In fact, we constantly seek relevant qualitative and quantitative feedback of our own to understand what’s happening and how changes affect users and the platform. But the truth of the matter is that Tumblr needs to grow as a business, or it will cease to exist.

that somehow "growth" will lead to more money, unlike literally every single other website on planet earth that has thought this and immediately crashed and burned

that the ideal user is someone who is too stupid to use the current app and so scared of stimuli that a chronological timeline would be too intellectually taxing

Revealed Preference has faced a lot of very valid criticism, like for example this one (Murray N. Rothbard 2006):

The revealed preference theory assumes that the preference scale remains constant over time. Were this not the case all that can be stated is that an action, at a specific point of time, reveals part of a person's preference scale at that time. There is no warrant for assuming that it remains constant from one point of time to another. The "revealed preference" theorists assume constancy in addition to consistent behaviour ("rationality"). Consistency means that a person maintains a transitive order of rank on his preference scale (if A is preferred to B and B is preferred to C, then A is preferred to C). But the revealed preference procedure does not rest on this assumption so much as on an assumption of constancy—that an individual maintains the same value scale over time. While the former might be called irrational, there is certainly nothing irrational about someone's value scales changing through time. It is claimed that no valid theory can be built on a constancy assumption.

But you’re right that the revealed preference theory does assume that people’s preferences remain constant, which isn’t always the case — we’re not static beings after all. However, I’d argue that it’s not about assuming that every individual’s preferences stay the same over time. It’s about observing trends in aggregate. Over a large user base, individual variances smooth out, and we can spot patterns. There was a recent article in WIRED about the research on chronological feeds on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter that highlights this point.