sideblog

don't interact with corporate tumblr accounts

yes even to dunk on them. i don't care if you have the sickest burn of the century lined up, don't even give them the time of day

And if that doesn't change, you may not believe it, but tumblr will close. Back in 2019, if Automattic hasn't bought it, I'm pretty convinced Verizon would have closed before the end of the year. This time, once Automattic says "we can't keep losing millions per month on this"... I don't think there will be anyone else willing to buy this hellsite, even for a single dollar.

Personally, I would prefer Tumblr to be paid by its own users and not being reliant on advertising. I work here, I could have almost everything for free, but I pay my own blazed posts and crab gifts because of this. But we are FAR from getting enough income from people subscribing, blazing or buying gifts. FAR.

And we are not talking about Facebook-like greed here, "Tumblr wants to squeeze us to make even more money!!!". We are talking about Automattic keeping Tumblr alive for three years already, losing millions and even if doing it costs a significant percentage of the income of the company. And no company would let something like that happens forever.

So if you like tumblr, if you enjoy this boiling cauldron of feral goblins, boicot advertisement if you want, but then toss a coin to your tumblr each month.

And it's ok if you can't, but then please, let people, or companies, blaze their posts in peace. If they bother you so much, just install an ad blocker.

There are several variations of "we have to keep this site unprofitable!!". And holy shit. Christ on a stake. Forgive my French, but me cago en la puta hostia como se puede ser tan corto.

Repeat with me:

You.

Don't.

Keep.

Any.

Site.

Unprofitable.

Because if it's unprofitable,

you don't get to keep it for long.

Full stop.

Do you know why Tumblr has stayed around for so long while being unprofitable??

Because it had been run by FOUR DIFFERENT COMPANIES IN THE LAST TEN YEARS.

So each one of those companies tried to make it profitable for two, three years and failed. And at that point, they just sold it to someone else to try.

The last time, Verizon sold it to Automattic for the business equivalent of a jar of peanut butter and a half-full cola bottle. Because they were going to close it anyway, so better to get that than nothing. And you know why Automattic could get it for cheap? Because. No. One. Else. Offered. Anything. Verizon announced very publicly they were trying to sell it and they got one (1) offer. Because purchasing Tumblr means you are purchasing a thing that puts you several million in debt PER MONTH.

So can you picture, can you imagine, what it will happen if the current owners decide that they can't keep having this thing that costs them so much money per month to maintain?? It has been owned by Automattic for three years already, longer than what it was owned by Yahoo or Verizon. Can you imagine what it would happen if they decide to stop losing money on this thing??

No, there won't be any new owner.

Big brands were advertising on the internet way before the hyper focused ads and data mining became The Way of paying for internet services.

If tumblr starts asking you to fill a profile with your personal info, ask you to connect your contacts, etc, that's the symptom of a turn towards an algorithmic advertising business model. But Tumblr could have done that at any point in the last 10 years and become a money-making machine like the other major social networks. And it didn't happen, for a reason: neither the current management nor the past one wanted to do that and they always have been trying to make Tumblr the platform that manages to succeed while respecting its user's privacy.

You know, I personally don't care about Marvel, but I have gotten blazed posts by Tor books and I was delighted. And if you think about it, marvel blazing its posts is EXACTLY what we want to happen all over the internet. Being realistic, we are not going to make this site to be 100% user funded for a long while, so ads are inevitable. That being the case, what's a better option than the brands sending their ads to everyone, without any segmentation, paying for N impressions and that's it. That was how internet ads were before Google and Facebook became the big brother and started selling our info to advertisers so they could convince your uncle to embrace fascism.

This is another important bit to understand: I would love tumblr to be funded by user donations, like ao3. The problem is... tumblr is not ao3. Let's left aside the "Tumblr is owned by a for-profit corporation" bit (Actually, it wouldn't be the first time that Automattic just open-source a project and donate it to its community to be maintained collectively), the problem is the type of platform both things are. Ao3 stores only text (I'm not an ao3 user, so please someone correct me if I'm wrong), but Tumblr ... well, doesn't.

To give you an example of what I mean: Based on its text limits, a single Tumblr post could contain the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (well, you would probably need to edit it to be strategic with the paragraph breaks, but character-count-wise it could fit). And yet, that humongous post (suck that, colors of the sky!) would take about 1/20th of the space and bandwidth that any regular gifset post takes already. And it doesn't need transcoding of the images (so more powerful servers can do the job) nor worldwide data centers (you don't notice much if you are downloading 4mb of text from the opposite side of the planet... but you will if you are downloading 50mb of gifs).

tumblr is a for-profit site. at some point, if it doesn't make money, it WILL get shut down

since a lot of you cannot or will not pay for subscription (not saying that is not valid! just that it's not happening) the money has to come from somewhere else therefore,

(but really 2.a) unless you don't want tumblr turned into an algorithmic hellscape, leaving brands alone* is the price you pay.

Please note im saying leave them ALONE that means you do not need to engage with them! which is actually consistent with OP's post! You can just ignore them (seriously installing firefox with ublock origin and maybe xKit if you're feeling fancy I have never seen an ad on this site unless a mutual posted a screenshot. Never. Not one)

imo there is a big difference between a site "being profitable" and a site "turning its users into the product" and the latter is MUCH WORSE.

I just saw a creator on tiktok reminding followers that it’s actually a problem when someone goes back to the earliest post and watches all the posts chronologically, liking and commenting along the way. The stupid app recognizes it as spam or something and then kinda puts a halt on their account? Literally punishing people for positive engagement?? 🥴🤦‍♀️

I’ve already heard people saying years back how they don’t want to be “creepy” and go through a persons blog, liking and reblogging tons of stuff. But think how many more people are going to be worried about it now, thinking they might do actual damage! Most people, especially younger people, are so used to the way tiktok works now. So please, do not ever worry about this on here. Just remember-

The worst that usually happens is a creator going “wait, what, HOW did you find that 7 year old post that had no tags buried in the depths of my blog?”, very few people actually get mad about it (and from what I’ve seen, the people who do are all entirely immigrants from socmed sites like TT where they have entirely different cultures about it.)

WOMAN (angrily) They’re marigolds!

MAN 2 God! I think she’s right! They are marigolds!

The man in the red cardigan in the clip was played by Michael Greer, who was openly gay himself - unusual for the time. He actually worked closely with the director and rewrote much of the film’s dialogue to reduce the homophobia and make it more realistic. As a result it’s quite progressive for its time, having a gay character, played by a gay man, living in a happy same-sex relationship, which is more than a lot of media offers us today.