Tumblr Advisor Board
I think it could be cool to put together a board of the top Tumblristas in the world, that could see previews of what's coming up and advise on strategic direction. Who should be on it?
I am going to get this out of my system upfront so that I can explain everything that's wrong with this idea in a clearheaded way: This is a bad idea, it feels incredibly gross, and it reinforces my impression that you do not understand this website at all. It is indescribably frustrating and infuriating. It makes me want to vomit, and that's even before I get to "Tumblrista".
Now then.
A key takeaway from the massive amount of almost universally negative feedback to the reblog change should have been: Tumblr users do not, as a rule, care about clout. We do not want quantified "credit" for how good our addition to a post is, and we don't want influencers who are anointed as more important than everyone else because they are popular. That's not what we do here; it's never been what we do here. If we wanted that, we could get it from ANY other social media. The fact that we're here instead makes it pretty clear that clout is not important to us, and in fact is actively repulsive to us. Anointing particular Tumblr users as "top Tumblristas" and putting them on an "advisory board" that gets special access to new features and the opportunity to give feedback on them would constitute the exact type of hierarchy we despise.
Furthermore: When a corporate entity proposes an "advisory board of power users", what they're actually doing is trying to pre-empt wider user pushback against executive decisions, by creating the illusion of user buy-in while using social pressure to enforce decisions that have already been made. The actual reasoning behind selecting "top" users is because they are popular, which suggests they have influence over other users. The idea is, rather than convincing the community as a whole, you convince a smaller subset of influential people, and then they convince everyone else. Again, this depends on a kind of hierarchy and clout-based "influencer" system that we don't have and don't want.
As for the "top users" board themselves: By choosing someone and telling them "you're a Top User and you get to be on the special committee and have special privileges," you are giving them something (supposedly) desirable: social status, (the appearance of) influence and power, etc. And you can take it away. That means now you have power over them. If they don't want to lose their special status, they will avoid displeasing you. Which means they are less likely to give you significant pushback, and they are more willing to pressure others to go along with what you want to do. That makes them incredibly useful to corporate, but completely undermines their supposed role as a voice for the community. We see this already with influencers on every other platform, who become de facto spokespeople for corporations and brands and stop meaningfully criticizing them out of fear of losing the access that is critical to their status.
I'm not saying all this because I think it's news to the CEO of a tech company. I think you know all of that perfectly well already. I'm saying it because I think you assume we don't know it, and because some people might not. But I have played this game before and I know how it goes. It never benefits the community. It is always a way to control the community.
You do not need an advisory board to get feedback about site changes. The community is demonstrably perfectly able and willing to speak for themselves individually. If you really want to know what everyone thinks, you have to ask everyone, not a handpicked group of influencers who are under pressure to play along.
I remember something a bit like this a few years ago, when Tumblr tried to introduce that disastrous feature to let users offer paid content to their followers. They first rolled it out to a select group of users, to act as a trial group
I remember one of those users was Kaijuno. At the time, they were a big damn deal; I wasn't even following them, and yet saw their posts all the time, always with thousands of reblogs, often viral. They happily implemented the paid feature, so their shitposts would still be free, but their science content would be paid access.
Except everyone was so furious at the entire feature that they turned on anyone who had chosen to trial it. Kaijuno went, overnight, from being a huge deal on this gremlin site to being blasted into obscurity; but not before they were basically turned into the de facto Tumblr spokesperson for this stupid feature and subjected to the sort of tirade of public abuse and rage that makes celebrities check into rehab. It was relentless, it was aggressive, and staff just left them to take the brunt of it all and didn't do a damn thing to stop it.
All of which is to say, this would be a death sentence for any user chosen for this elite focus group. You'd burn through your "top users", because after every unpopular change they would not be popular anymore and would probably leave the site, until people would very quickly not want to be in your clubhouse anymore and the only ones left would have no clout to be useful.
So, no. I just don't see it working on this site
