This isn't funny, this isn't me doing a meme, this is me putting on a very temporary Serious Hat.
The recent attempts by staff to make the site profitable are the desperate gasps and grasping arms of a site that is well past the point of no return.
Tumblr was never going to survive very long in our current world. It's not profitable. It was never going to be very profitable. It's vitally important to the history and culture of the social internet (and, really, the world in general, to some extent), but it's been mismanaged, haphazardly-run, and just a general design train wreck for years.
Because here's the important thing to remember about Tumblr:
Tumblr is a bad social media site. More specifically, Tumblr is bad at being a social media site.
I know what you may be thinking -- "but it's better than [Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok], so it can't be that bad!" And that's incorrect. Tumblr is, by any standard measure, much much worse at being a social media site than any of those four sites. And there's one crucial reason for that that people keep overlooking:
See, people think of social media as being about connecting with people, or community, or social blah blah blah whatever and I need you to understand that all of that, all of it, is bullshit. That's not what social media is, and that's never what social media has been.
Social media is about selling your information, mostly to advertisers -- which, on the internet, mostly means to Google. Meta doesn't want you to find art on Instagram or talk to friends on Facebook. Meta wants you to spend time looking at your feed and putting in information. For all Meta cares, if it kept you on the site, you could kill all of your friends and only follow Instagram accounts that posted blank white frames. None of the "content", none of the "community", none of that bullshit is important to them. They just want you on the site so they can get your information -- via ads, trackers, cookies, harvesting your posts and comments, whatever -- and sell it.
I can't be any clearer about this next point:
Social media is bad. Anything that you like about Tumblr, TikTok, Instagram, or whatever, all of the stuff you like about those sites are either incidental or counter to the intention of the people running the site.
Instagram DMs are only there to keep you on the site.
Your TikTok FYP is very carefully curated to keep you on the app.
Twitter shows you exactly the trends it needs to in order to keep you browsing.
Ever wonder why social media makes people so angry? It's because anger keeps you engaged. It's 100% intentional.
All of the most addictive and engaging emotional states -- anger, fear, smugness -- are all really bad for your mental (and often physical) health when taken in large doses, and are also the only thing social media wants from you.
Now we come back to Tumblr.
Why is Tumblr better than, say, Twitter? And it really is -- we don't talk about this enough, but Tumblr is absolutely a better experience than Twitter. Or Facebook, or TikTok, or Instagram, or Reddit, or LinkedIn, or Imgur, or any other successful social media site. But why?
The reason Tumblr is so much better of an experience than other social media is because Tumblr is so much worse than other social media at being social media.
All of the stuff we like about Tumblr -- the crazy, shittily designed, chaotic reblog system? the fact that your dash is basically only chronological? the fact that the tag system is so fundamentally broken that the ways that it's broken have been culturally rebuilt as a part of the way we communicate on the site? the way that reblogs distribute content creation? the culture of crazy fandom people? that one werewolf fucker? the memes? the fact that, by and large, you don't get spoonfed stuff from around the site by an algorithm? mutuals? the lack of censorship, and, in turn, the fact that said lack of censorship drives away advertisers? the weird culture that keeps "normies" from tiktok away? -- all of that is absolutely counterintuitive to being a successful social media site.
Let's compare Tumblr to an actually really well-designed social media: TikTok.
TikTok is a goddamn masterpiece of social media design. If you install TikTok on your phone and give it even the tiniest amount of engagement, it'll nail your interests and dopamine triggers in under a week. Give it a month and it'll have its hooks in your brain. The algorithm is so finely tuned, all the systems are so carefully designed, the goddamn interface is hardwired to trick your brain into scrolling.
Stitches? Duets? Likes? Even cultural things, like trends and sounds going viral? Hell, the idea of TikTok sounds at all? All these are built to drive engagement.
Funny video? Duet your reaction. Someone asked a question? Stitch your answer. Someone singing? Duet for a literal duet! Sound going viral? You can do a TikTok of that sound, easy! Interesting conversation in your comment section? Reply to comments with quick videos!
And vitally, did you miss the last trend? No worries! The next one's coming along! If you joined TikTok today you wouldn't even know about the sea shanty thing. The culture moves at the speed of light.
The camcorder-like nature of recording on TikTok makes making the actual content a snap. The boost given to new accounts tricks you into thinking it's easy, and even in the long run, the distribution algorithms make it much easier than, say, YouTube to get the numbers to go up. Content is easy to make and distribute, trends are so quick that they're easy to follow, and the FYP algorithm gives the illusion of community -- and easy-to-make content and well-designed algorithms makes the numbers go up, and to our monkey brains, numbers = approval = success = dopamine.
Tumblr? Tumblr has none of that shit.
Instead of stitches, duets, or sounds, we have reblogs -- with a post editor that barely works, a following that's 80% porn bots, and a frankly baffling 15-year-old online culture that moves at (for the internet) glacial speeds and has hundreds if not thousands of in-jokes, none of which ever die? Have fun building a following with that, fucker! Numbers? You think we do numbers here? We suffer, and we like it!
Oh, and good luck playing into trends. I wasn't kidding about the glacial speeds and in-jokes. Sure, we have new shit happening -- Tumblr's take on the "your dick cold eeby deeby" meme is new, as is There Are Many Benifits To Being A Marine Biologist, and my Shakespearification posts -- but Colour of the Sky is, I'm pretty sure, older than 50% of TikTok users, and we're still making goddamn Onceler memes, and, for Christ's sake, even the new stuff is blending with the old stuff -- I just did a Shakespeareification of Colour Theory.
There is no algorithm beyond occasional "people you follow liked this". On TikTok, the only two feeds are "random shit you might like" and "random shit you might like from people you follow". On Tumblr, the only feed is "everything from everyone you follow at all times", and the site does not care about whether you want to see it or not.
Because of all this, Tumblr is not, and will never be, profitable.
Which means that, because we live in capitalism, Tumblr will die.
And due to the rise of competent social media sites, the competition is eating away at Tumblr's audience.
Staff is cringe, obviously. But they're also desperate. They're trying to keep this place alive.
It's terrible, it's beautiful, it's chaotic, and it's ephemeral.
And we're never going to have anything like it ever again.
Enjoy it while you have it.
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