#ripblr rambles

Why am I participating? A lot of people I know don’t believe the protest will do anything. They’ve ignored us before, so why won’t they ignore us again? It’s easy to give up and feel like that, but frankly, I’m tired of sitting back and letting tumblr management walk all over us. It’s worth doing, even if they don’t listen, because of the people who are. I know there are a lot of people on here that have been harmed by the new policies unjustly, and I’d rather not stay compliant when I could be supporting them. And it’s worth saying it, again and again and again until you’re sick of it and I’m sick of it and we’re all sick of it, because it doesn’t deserve to be shoved under the rug. I’m not going to stop talking about this until it’s no longer a problem. It might not work. It might fail miserably. It might have zero effect on Tumblr. But I’m sick and tired of being a bystander.

Why do I think this could work? I know it’s easy to be the pessimist (or realist, depending on your point of view). It’s easy to say that it hasn’t worked before, so it’ll hardly work again. But I want to point out something about Tumblr, and the model they work on, which was key in convincing me that this would have half a chance at working. For Tumblr, we are the product, not the customer. I’m not going to pretend I know jack sh*t about how advertising companies work or how you sell to one, but Tumblr makes money off adverts, and so the needs of the advertiser (customer) come before the needs of the user (product). Therefore, the power we hold in the equation is our attention; if we’re on Tumblr, we’re part of Tumblr’s product, and if we’re offline, we aren’t, because they can only boast about us if we’re actually consuming the ads they put out. Advertising will want as many people as possible, and if we can present a sharp decline, Tumblr will be in hot water. I believe that this is the best way to get their attention; working together, logging off, and being as loud and obnoxious as possible about what Tumblr should do to prevent the mass exodus happening tomorrow becoming permanent.