Because community management is hard
A week ago, an artist I know had their blog deleted. This artist was an almost entirely clean artist. They weren’t the type of person Tumblr is supposedly targeting. Tumblr didn’t actually care. Tumblr nuked their blog anyway.
The problem Tumblr is that it’s designed primarily to extract ad revenue, and that inevitably leads to a terrible user experience. Internet advertisers want you to be engaged with the places they advertise in the worst possible way. In TV advertising, where the advertiser wants you to be highly engaged with a show so that you associate those positive feelings with the ads that play during the breaks. Internet advertisers only want immediate clicks—short-term, instant payoff. If you’re engaged with the website, you won’t want to leave it, and you won’t click an ad. So an internet advertiser wants you to be on a website out of social obligation only.
It’s why Facebook is so successful. You need to go on Facebook to keep up with people. When you keep up with people, you see that they have a lot of nice stuff. You feel bad for not having that nice stuff. But look! All these ads where you can buy nice things. Then you’ll feel good about yourself, right?
Tumblr has spent enough money at this point that they need to maximize ad revenue, and that means they can’t give a shit about artists anymore. In fact, it is to their advantage to actively minimize that kind of content on their platform, because art can reduce the social pressures that they’re trying to cultivate. So why wouldn’t they delete that artist’s blog? If they had some kind of controversial content, it could cause harm to their advertisers—and, more crucially, delivering good artistic content at all is already a negative for them. Nuking that blog on the slightest suspicion of controversial material is a win-win.
I’m tried of this cynical, ad-revenue-based approach to content cultivation. Internet advertisement actively works against the creation of content that people want to engage with. And, frankly, it produces websites that mostly suck.
After that artist got their blog nuked, they got to talking. Talking with me, and talking with other artists. Together, we decided to try to make something new.
That’s what the link up there is. It’s not a fully-featured website. It’s not even close to being finished. But Tumblr is introducing new rules that are going to be selectively-applied to make their experience even worse, and some kind of alternative needs to exist.
ArtWorkDraft isn’t designed to be sold for a billion dollars to Yahoo. It’s designed to be a good place to post stuff. It’s run by a group of people, not a corporation. We develop it based on what people actually ask for. Hell, it’s even open-source, so you can actually look at the code behind it, and change it if you think you have a good idea.
I’m kind of sick of “transparency” because it implies a window: you can look, but you can’t get through it. You can’t actually change anything, you can only observe.
ArtWorkDraft is supposed to be a door. I’m not sure if it will work, but I feel compelled to try.
Art is too important not to.
