I'm Tired

The tl;dr is that, from the looks of it, Automattic absolutely has every intention of turning Tumblr into a marketing media platform.

I work for a marketing company. I build websites.

Specifically, I build websites on Wordpress.org, which is operated by the Wordpress Foundation.

The Wordpress Foundation is the non-profit counterpart to the for-profit company Automattic.

Automattic, as we know, is the company that currently owns Tumblr.

Now, the thing about Wordpress.org (not to be confused with Wordpress.com) is that it's very, VERY popular amongst small businesses. Not only can you build a fully-customizable website with relative ease, you can also add an online shop using another Automattic product: Woocommerce.

Not too long ago, I noticed a new feature was added to Woocommerce: A button next to each Woocommerce product which allows you to Blaze them to Tumblr right from the comfort of your dashboard:

This is what I get when I click that little "Blaze" button...

As someone who understands these tools, I understand the potential implications of these features:

The Blaze feature is basically an up-and-coming ad campaign system that's directly integrated with Woocommerce websites, which I think is the first ad marketing system of its kind. You don't have to log into a social media account to advertise your products, use a second-party integration, or even pay another service to manage your social media ads. It's all baked right into your business's website.

THIS is their planned money-maker, folks, not the rainbow checkmarks or crab armies. And the reason why Automattic would do this kind of thing is simple: Businesses are wealthier than individuals. By implementing a B2B service, Automattic can make more money off of Tumblr than user subscriptions and shoelaces will ever provide.

It's all the same song and dance. Businesses can now shove more ads into your face in a new, convenient fashion. It'll be ads that don't look like ads disguised amongst ads that do look like ads, just like it is with Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and literally every other marketing media service that calls itself a "social" media.

(Tumblr's new video feature? My guess is that it's there to prepare for video-format Blaze campaigns. Influencer-style videos are the only kind of ad format Gen-Z is receptive to, which is why you're suddenly seeing videos on every platform.)

All they really gotta do now is make Tumblr look appealing to the normies so they can draw in a userbase that isn't trying to escape the onslaught of commercialism that plagues other sites.

My sweet summer children, the issue is not whether you see Blazed content or not. It's about Tumblr becoming a marketing media platform, which will give you a completely different and far less fulfilling user experience than a social media one does.

Everything Tumblr's current userbase loves about Tumblr has to do with the fact it provides real human connection. People make jokes, goof around, have meaningful conversations, read crazy tales from other people's lives, and form oddball holidays about Caesar getting stabbed. You see content you opt into seeing and don't see content you haven't, and any content that becomes popular does so because it's interesting, not because you managed to hit the jackpot on the algorithm slot machine.

You know what Tumblr has? Culture. Tumblr is one of the very few websites where a public-facing culture grows organically out of human interaction. I get to see people being people rather than the idea of being people.

But this will all gradually dissolve as Automattic adds more features on Tumblr that cater to the needs of businesses. Why? Because the marketing needs of businesses and the social needs of people are inherently incompatible. You can't have a hybrid marketing-social media website without it being kind of shitty at both, and "being kind of shitty at conversions" is not what gets businesses to shell out for your ad services.

I've love to be wrong, by the way.

It's possible this is why we're seeing so many different avenues of revenue from Tumblr; it's an attempt to try to retain this site's culture while providing some kind of competitive edge in the (critically out-of-control) advertisement market. (There's literally too much content out there to make SEO work for everyone and it's only going to get worse as time goes on.)

i mean... yeah, this.

like, as much as i love the chaos of this site, it cannot survive without a revenue stream. and it appears that they're doing everything they can to make this site profitable without mining critical data from the users. the "for you" tab pretty clearly bases its "algorithm" on the things that i have liked and/or reblogged, as well as the things people i follow have liked and/or reblogged, and that's... pretty tame, in today's environment. its assumption is that if someone i follow likes this thing, then probably i like it too. (it is often wrong.)

but it doesn't seem engineered to make you feel an emotion, unlike facebook's infamous algorithm which is explicitly designed to make you as outraged as possible. it seems to be -- at least at this stage -- an ai version of looking through an author's bookmarks on ao3. and as long as it stays like that -- and stays optional, which is extremely key -- i'm okay with it!

the thing is, tumblr is a relic of a past version of the internet. people don't really blog anymore. it doesn't appeal to the youngsters whose entire internet experience has been curated and algorithm-ed to death. we joke about this site's aging userbase, but it's aging because this site is the last bastion of the time when the internet was the community of the weird. the era of webrings and message boards and livejournal communities, where "the internet" was where the weird kids who had nothing in common with their peers went to talk to people who actually understood them.

and that's great, and wonderful, and makes this site a bizarre, inexplicable, fun place to be -- but servers are expensive and maintaining huge sites with heavy traffic costs a lot of money.

do i think that automattic -- or any corporation -- genuinely has anyone's best interests at heart except their shareholders? no. but i do feel like they are trying to find a balance between letting tumblr be itself and making enough money to sustain the site, because they know that tumblr is not ever going to be tiktok and the only way to keep the userbase is to let it keep being weird? yeah, okay, i can buy that.

it's like a less-insanely-dystopian version of disney buying out marvel -- is it a soulless cash grab? yes. are they watering things down to make them more palatable to a larger audience? obviously. is this horrifyingly indicative of a larger societal problem with corporations, the internet, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and human nature? absolutely. but will they try to fundamentally change the nature of the stories that drew people to them in the first place? not unless they're incredibly fucking stupid, they won't.

look, i would love to keep tumblr being the home of the anti-capitalist unprofitable weirdos with our own culture that the rest of the internet finds both deeply incomprehensible and incredibly magnetic. i would love for us to always be unmarketable. but the sad and horrific reality is that we live in a world now where nothing is allowed to be unmarketable. and for tumblr to survive, it must evolve.

and as long as they're not doing that by mining my data from other sites i visit, or from my personal information, or from me having my location turned on so i can use gps to not get lost -- i can live with that. sure, it's shoving ads in my face and that's fucking annoying, but it's not tailoring those ads to information extrapolated from whose phone was near mine for an extended period of time, or which headlines pissed me off enough to get me to click on the link, or the random question i googled, or the store i visited.

does it suck absolute fucking ass that we live in a world where "hey, at least these insufferable ads being shoved in my face weren't selected by an artificial intelligence that has somehow accessed my entire personality based on my interactions with people and articles and products in completely different spheres that i didn't even know the site knew about" is the best social media experience available right now? absolutely!!!!! it's objectively insane!!!!! how the fuck has it gotten this bad!!!!!

The tl;dr is that, from the looks of it, Automattic absolutely has every intention of turning Tumblr into a marketing media platform.

I work for a marketing company. I build websites.

Specifically, I build websites on Wordpress.org, which is operated by the Wordpress Foundation.

The Wordpress Foundation is the non-profit counterpart to the for-profit company Automattic.

Automattic, as we know, is the company that currently owns Tumblr.

Now, the thing about Wordpress.org (not to be confused with Wordpress.com) is that it's very, VERY popular amongst small businesses. Not only can you build a fully-customizable website with relative ease, you can also add an online shop using another Automattic product: Woocommerce.

Not too long ago, I noticed a new feature was added to Woocommerce: A button next to each Woocommerce product which allows you to Blaze them to Tumblr right from the comfort of your dashboard:

This is what I get when I click that little "Blaze" button...

As someone who understands these tools, I understand the potential implications of these features:

The Blaze feature is basically an up-and-coming ad campaign system that's directly integrated with Woocommerce websites, which I think is the first ad marketing system of its kind. You don't have to log into a social media account to advertise your products, use a second-party integration, or even pay another service to manage your social media ads. It's all baked right into your business's website.

THIS is their planned money-maker, folks, not the rainbow checkmarks or crab armies. And the reason why Automattic would do this kind of thing is simple: Businesses are wealthier than individuals. By implementing a B2B service, Automattic can make more money off of Tumblr than user subscriptions and shoelaces will ever provide.

It's all the same song and dance. Businesses can now shove more ads into your face in a new, convenient fashion. It'll be ads that don't look like ads disguised amongst ads that do look like ads, just like it is with Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and literally every other marketing media service that calls itself a "social" media.

(Tumblr's new video feature? My guess is that it's there to prepare for video-format Blaze campaigns. Influencer-style videos are the only kind of ad format Gen-Z is receptive to, which is why you're suddenly seeing videos on every platform.)

All they really gotta do now is make Tumblr look appealing to the normies so they can draw in a userbase that isn't trying to escape the onslaught of commercialism that plagues other sites.

My sweet summer children, the issue is not whether you see Blazed content or not. It's about Tumblr becoming a marketing media platform, which will give you a completely different and far less fulfilling user experience than a social media one does.

Everything Tumblr's current userbase loves about Tumblr has to do with the fact it provides real human connection. People make jokes, goof around, have meaningful conversations, read crazy tales from other people's lives, and form oddball holidays about Caesar getting stabbed. You see content you opt into seeing and don't see content you haven't, and any content that becomes popular does so because it's interesting, not because you managed to hit the jackpot on the algorithm slot machine.

You know what Tumblr has? Culture. Tumblr is one of the very few websites where a public-facing culture grows organically out of human interaction. I get to see people being people rather than the idea of being people.

But this will all gradually dissolve as Automattic adds more features on Tumblr that cater to the needs of businesses. Why? Because the marketing needs of businesses and the social needs of people are inherently incompatible. You can't have a hybrid marketing-social media website without it being kind of shitty at both, and "being kind of shitty at conversions" is not what gets businesses to shell out for your ad services.

I've love to be wrong, by the way.

It's possible this is why we're seeing so many different avenues of revenue from Tumblr; it's an attempt to try to retain this site's culture while providing some kind of competitive edge in the (critically out-of-control) advertisement market. (There's literally too much content out there to make SEO work for everyone and it's only going to get worse as time goes on.)

i mean... yeah, this.

like, as much as i love the chaos of this site, it cannot survive without a revenue stream. and it appears that they're doing everything they can to make this site profitable without mining critical data from the users. the "for you" tab pretty clearly bases its "algorithm" on the things that i have liked and/or reblogged, as well as the things people i follow have liked and/or reblogged, and that's... pretty tame, in today's environment. its assumption is that if someone i follow likes this thing, then probably i like it too. (it is often wrong.)

but it doesn't seem engineered to make you feel an emotion, unlike facebook's infamous algorithm which is explicitly designed to make you as outraged as possible. it seems to be -- at least at this stage -- an ai version of looking through an author's bookmarks on ao3. and as long as it stays like that -- and stays optional, which is extremely key -- i'm okay with it!

the thing is, tumblr is a relic of a past version of the internet. people don't really blog anymore. it doesn't appeal to the youngsters whose entire internet experience has been curated and algorithm-ed to death. we joke about this site's aging userbase, but it's aging because this site is the last bastion of the time when the internet was the community of the weird. the era of webrings and message boards and livejournal communities, where "the internet" was where the weird kids who had nothing in common with their peers went to talk to people who actually understood them.

and that's great, and wonderful, and makes this site a bizarre, inexplicable, fun place to be -- but servers are expensive and maintaining huge sites with heavy traffic costs a lot of money.

do i think that automattic -- or any corporation -- genuinely has anyone's best interests at heart except their shareholders? no. but i do feel like they are trying to find a balance between letting tumblr be itself and making enough money to sustain the site, because they know that tumblr is not ever going to be tiktok and the only way to keep the userbase is to let it keep being weird? yeah, okay, i can buy that.

it's like a less-insanely-dystopian version of disney buying out marvel -- is it a soulless cash grab? yes. are they watering things down to make them more palatable to a larger audience? obviously. is this horrifyingly indicative of a larger societal problem with corporations, the internet, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and human nature? absolutely. but will they try to fundamentally change the nature of the stories that drew people to them in the first place? not unless they're incredibly fucking stupid, they won't.

look, i would love to keep tumblr being the home of the anti-capitalist unprofitable weirdos with our own culture that the rest of the internet finds both deeply incomprehensible and incredibly magnetic. i would love for us to always be unmarketable. but the sad and horrific reality is that we live in a world now where nothing is allowed to be unmarketable. and for tumblr to survive, it must evolve.

and as long as they're not doing that by mining my data from other sites i visit, or from my personal information, or from me having my location turned on so i can use gps to not get lost -- i can live with that. sure, it's shoving ads in my face and that's fucking annoying, but it's not tailoring those ads to information extrapolated from whose phone was near mine for an extended period of time, or which headlines pissed me off enough to get me to click on the link, or the random question i googled, or the store i visited.

does it suck absolute fucking ass that we live in a world where "hey, at least these insufferable ads being shoved in my face weren't selected by an artificial intelligence that has somehow accessed my entire personality based on my interactions with people and articles and products in completely different spheres that i didn't even know the site knew about" is the best social media experience available right now? absolutely!!!!! it's objectively insane!!!!! how the fuck has it gotten this bad!!!!!

Right now, the stuff that gets attention on Tumblr is stuff that's interesting, original, and kind of oddball.

Users emulate this when creating new content because emulating the culture around us is how we feel included, and also how we demonstrate participation and receptiveness to the social environment we're in.

But the kind of content that becomes popular on marketing media platforms isn't the stuff that's interesting—it's the stuff that's sensational. Because sensational is what sells. Marketing media platforms need "sensational" to be the popularizing factor for all content because that's what makes it effective as a marketing device.

So even if you block and ignore the ads, you will still see a change in what gets popular, which will change the nature of the content people produce, which will change the culture.

The tl;dr is that, from the looks of it, Automattic absolutely has every intention of turning Tumblr into a marketing media platform.

I work for a marketing company. I build websites.

Specifically, I build websites on Wordpress.org, which is operated by the Wordpress Foundation.

The Wordpress Foundation is the non-profit counterpart to the for-profit company Automattic.

Automattic, as we know, is the company that currently owns Tumblr.

Now, the thing about Wordpress.org (not to be confused with Wordpress.com) is that it's very, VERY popular amongst small businesses. Not only can you build a fully-customizable website with relative ease, you can also add an online shop using another Automattic product: Woocommerce.

Not too long ago, I noticed a new feature was added to Woocommerce: A button next to each Woocommerce product which allows you to Blaze them to Tumblr right from the comfort of your dashboard:

This is what I get when I click that little "Blaze" button...

As someone who understands these tools, I understand the potential implications of these features:

The Blaze feature is basically an up-and-coming ad campaign system that's directly integrated with Woocommerce websites, which I think is the first ad marketing system of its kind. You don't have to log into a social media account to advertise your products, use a second-party integration, or even pay another service to manage your social media ads. It's all baked right into your business's website.

THIS is their planned money-maker, folks, not the rainbow checkmarks or crab armies. And the reason why Automattic would do this kind of thing is simple: Businesses are wealthier than individuals. By implementing a B2B service, Automattic can make more money off of Tumblr than user subscriptions and shoelaces will ever provide.

It's all the same song and dance. Businesses can now shove more ads into your face in a new, convenient fashion. It'll be ads that don't look like ads disguised amongst ads that do look like ads, just like it is with Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and literally every other marketing media service that calls itself a "social" media.

(Tumblr's new video feature? My guess is that it's there to prepare for video-format Blaze campaigns. Influencer-style videos are the only kind of ad format Gen-Z is receptive to, which is why you're suddenly seeing videos on every platform.)

All they really gotta do now is make Tumblr look appealing to the normies so they can draw in a userbase that isn't trying to escape the onslaught of commercialism that plagues other sites.

My sweet summer children, the issue is not whether you see Blazed content or not. It's about Tumblr becoming a marketing media platform, which will give you a completely different and far less fulfilling user experience than a social media one does.

Everything Tumblr's current userbase loves about Tumblr has to do with the fact it provides real human connection. People make jokes, goof around, have meaningful conversations, read crazy tales from other people's lives, and form oddball holidays about Caesar getting stabbed. You see content you opt into seeing and don't see content you haven't, and any content that becomes popular does so because it's interesting, not because you managed to hit the jackpot on the algorithm slot machine.

You know what Tumblr has? Culture. Tumblr is one of the very few websites where a public-facing culture grows organically out of human interaction. I get to see people being people rather than the idea of being people.

But this will all gradually dissolve as Automattic adds more features on Tumblr that cater to the needs of businesses. Why? Because the marketing needs of businesses and the social needs of people are inherently incompatible. You can't have a hybrid marketing-social media website without it being kind of shitty at both, and "being kind of shitty at conversions" is not what gets businesses to shell out for your ad services.

I've love to be wrong, by the way.

It's possible this is why we're seeing so many different avenues of revenue from Tumblr; it's an attempt to try to retain this site's culture while providing some kind of competitive edge in the (critically out-of-control) advertisement market. (There's literally too much content out there to make SEO work for everyone and it's only going to get worse as time goes on.)

i mean... yeah, this.

like, as much as i love the chaos of this site, it cannot survive without a revenue stream. and it appears that they're doing everything they can to make this site profitable without mining critical data from the users. the "for you" tab pretty clearly bases its "algorithm" on the things that i have liked and/or reblogged, as well as the things people i follow have liked and/or reblogged, and that's... pretty tame, in today's environment. its assumption is that if someone i follow likes this thing, then probably i like it too. (it is often wrong.)

but it doesn't seem engineered to make you feel an emotion, unlike facebook's infamous algorithm which is explicitly designed to make you as outraged as possible. it seems to be -- at least at this stage -- an ai version of looking through an author's bookmarks on ao3. and as long as it stays like that -- and stays optional, which is extremely key -- i'm okay with it!

the thing is, tumblr is a relic of a past version of the internet. people don't really blog anymore. it doesn't appeal to the youngsters whose entire internet experience has been curated and algorithm-ed to death. we joke about this site's aging userbase, but it's aging because this site is the last bastion of the time when the internet was the community of the weird. the era of webrings and message boards and livejournal communities, where "the internet" was where the weird kids who had nothing in common with their peers went to talk to people who actually understood them.

and that's great, and wonderful, and makes this site a bizarre, inexplicable, fun place to be -- but servers are expensive and maintaining huge sites with heavy traffic costs a lot of money.

do i think that automattic -- or any corporation -- genuinely has anyone's best interests at heart except their shareholders? no. but i do feel like they are trying to find a balance between letting tumblr be itself and making enough money to sustain the site, because they know that tumblr is not ever going to be tiktok and the only way to keep the userbase is to let it keep being weird? yeah, okay, i can buy that.

it's like a less-insanely-dystopian version of disney buying out marvel -- is it a soulless cash grab? yes. are they watering things down to make them more palatable to a larger audience? obviously. is this horrifyingly indicative of a larger societal problem with corporations, the internet, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and human nature? absolutely. but will they try to fundamentally change the nature of the stories that drew people to them in the first place? not unless they're incredibly fucking stupid, they won't.

look, i would love to keep tumblr being the home of the anti-capitalist unprofitable weirdos with our own culture that the rest of the internet finds both deeply incomprehensible and incredibly magnetic. i would love for us to always be unmarketable. but the sad and horrific reality is that we live in a world now where nothing is allowed to be unmarketable. and for tumblr to survive, it must evolve.

and as long as they're not doing that by mining my data from other sites i visit, or from my personal information, or from me having my location turned on so i can use gps to not get lost -- i can live with that. sure, it's shoving ads in my face and that's fucking annoying, but it's not tailoring those ads to information extrapolated from whose phone was near mine for an extended period of time, or which headlines pissed me off enough to get me to click on the link, or the random question i googled, or the store i visited.

does it suck absolute fucking ass that we live in a world where "hey, at least these insufferable ads being shoved in my face weren't selected by an artificial intelligence that has somehow accessed my entire personality based on my interactions with people and articles and products in completely different spheres that i didn't even know the site knew about" is the best social media experience available right now? absolutely!!!!! it's objectively insane!!!!! how the fuck has it gotten this bad!!!!!

The tl;dr is that, from the looks of it, Automattic absolutely has every intention of turning Tumblr into a marketing media platform.

I work for a marketing company. I build websites.

Specifically, I build websites on Wordpress.org, which is operated by the Wordpress Foundation.

The Wordpress Foundation is the non-profit counterpart to the for-profit company Automattic.

Automattic, as we know, is the company that currently owns Tumblr.

Now, the thing about Wordpress.org (not to be confused with Wordpress.com) is that it's very, VERY popular amongst small businesses. Not only can you build a fully-customizable website with relative ease, you can also add an online shop using another Automattic product: Woocommerce.

Not too long ago, I noticed a new feature was added to Woocommerce: A button next to each Woocommerce product which allows you to Blaze them to Tumblr right from the comfort of your dashboard:

This is what I get when I click that little "Blaze" button...

As someone who understands these tools, I understand the potential implications of these features:

The Blaze feature is basically an up-and-coming ad campaign system that's directly integrated with Woocommerce websites, which I think is the first ad marketing system of its kind. You don't have to log into a social media account to advertise your products, use a second-party integration, or even pay another service to manage your social media ads. It's all baked right into your business's website.

THIS is their planned money-maker, folks, not the rainbow checkmarks or crab armies. And the reason why Automattic would do this kind of thing is simple: Businesses are wealthier than individuals. By implementing a B2B service, Automattic can make more money off of Tumblr than user subscriptions and shoelaces will ever provide.

It's all the same song and dance. Businesses can now shove more ads into your face in a new, convenient fashion. It'll be ads that don't look like ads disguised amongst ads that do look like ads, just like it is with Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and literally every other marketing media service that calls itself a "social" media.

(Tumblr's new video feature? My guess is that it's there to prepare for video-format Blaze campaigns. Influencer-style videos are the only kind of ad format Gen-Z is receptive to, which is why you're suddenly seeing videos on every platform.)

All they really gotta do now is make Tumblr look appealing to the normies so they can draw in a userbase that isn't trying to escape the onslaught of commercialism that plagues other sites.

My sweet summer children, the issue is not whether you see Blazed content or not. It's about Tumblr becoming a marketing media platform, which will give you a completely different and far less fulfilling user experience than a social media one does.

Everything Tumblr's current userbase loves about Tumblr has to do with the fact it provides real human connection. People make jokes, goof around, have meaningful conversations, read crazy tales from other people's lives, and form oddball holidays about Caesar getting stabbed. You see content you opt into seeing and don't see content you haven't, and any content that becomes popular does so because it's interesting, not because you managed to hit the jackpot on the algorithm slot machine.

You know what Tumblr has? Culture. Tumblr is one of the very few websites where a public-facing culture grows organically out of human interaction. I get to see people being people rather than the idea of being people.

But this will all gradually dissolve as Automattic adds more features on Tumblr that cater to the needs of businesses. Why? Because the marketing needs of businesses and the social needs of people are inherently incompatible. You can't have a hybrid marketing-social media website without it being kind of shitty at both, and "being kind of shitty at conversions" is not what gets businesses to shell out for your ad services.

I've love to be wrong, by the way.

It's possible this is why we're seeing so many different avenues of revenue from Tumblr; it's an attempt to try to retain this site's culture while providing some kind of competitive edge in the (critically out-of-control) advertisement market. (There's literally too much content out there to make SEO work for everyone and it's only going to get worse as time goes on.)

#whitelivesmatter #alllivesmatter #bluelivesmatter