Tumblr, a service mainly used by teenage girls is unmonetizable? You don't say...
You Win or You Learn
61–70 of 220 posts
Re: You Win or You Learn
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Didn't Tumblr do a whole "alienate your user base" thing like Reddit did recently? They got rid of all the racey hot content and basically made it super boring no? This always seems like a really bad idea.
They did, but that was a while ago. Things are still pretty bad -- if your blog gets flagged for racy content, you lose the ability to have a custom avatar, for example. (Even more, and you get banned.) They've also had quite transphobic moderation policies (really strange considering their userbase!) -- normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now, which'll get your account flagged or banned. They've bee…
Tumblr users are rabidly against all the user-hostile stuff other large free sites do. I think they probably could have put the site behind a $1/mo paywall two years ago and people would have gone for it, if they changed nothing else. There's a general "we're fucked" atmosphere on the site because we all know they're trying to wring money out of their users and the enshittification has begun. It doesn't seem like anyone in charge understands their users.
Re: You Win or You Learn
#63Tumblr, a service mainly used by teenage girls is unmonetizable? You don't say...
How do you know it’s mostly teenage girls? Also, teenage girls buy a lot of stuff as well as heavily influence what teenage boys buy/like…
I know it’s cool to bags on teenage girl tastes but in reality it’s not very accurate. The youth demographic is one of the most important for many consumer businesses.
Re: You Win or You Learn
#64Automattic's product catalogue kind of comes across as an elephant graveyard of formerly important services well past their prime, so this doesn't seem terribly surprising.
Re: You Win or You Learn
#65It was like a somewhat more positive counterpart to 4chan, it was full of madness, toxicity and vice, and also a space for creativity like few others.
It was also one of the walled gardens, even if it always felt more open than the rest, but the web continues to weaken as content creation and delivery continues to be consolidated in the exploitative platforms of Meta, TikTok, and now to a smaller degree, X, with their recommendation algorithms fine tuned to make you an addict to parasocial relationships and negative emotions.
Re: You Win or You Learn
#66From a live-stream from the Tumblr staff convention this year, their CEO: > Yeah, so right now, we're burning. Which means spending more than we make. About 30 million per year more than we make. > So, that's a lot. We can't do that forever and so that's why we're really trying to figure out things that y'all would value. Whether that's merch or upgrades or badges or gifts or Blaze or other things. Every little bit h…
This isn't true at all, Blaze was a huge success, scrolling through Tumblr you see people with silly numbers of checks, lots of people pay to remove ads, it's just that that the successes aren't massively revenue generating in the way that ads are.
Trying to monetize user generated content is hard because both the users and creators believe that it's their content (which it is that's how community works) and so locking it away and taking a non-trivial cut is going to be met with insane vitriol and there's not much value to add over the base experience. Tumblr's patron thing you should of think like Hashicorp re-licensing Terraform.
And worse is that sometimes creating true value-adds naturally perverts incentives. Like for example a true value-add would be "bubble-as-a-service" because Tumblr has some really nasty subcultures which is why posters don't like when posts "break containment." It would be the easiest money ever to just pay and get a huge blocklist without having to go through the effort of making one yourself but then you kinda need those nasty communities to justify the value.
Re: You Win or You Learn
#67As an early Tumblr user, godspeed. You were fun while you lasted.
Re: You Win or You Learn
#68From a live-stream from the Tumblr staff convention this year, their CEO: > Yeah, so right now, we're burning. Which means spending more than we make. About 30 million per year more than we make. > So, that's a lot. We can't do that forever and so that's why we're really trying to figure out things that y'all would value. Whether that's merch or upgrades or badges or gifts or Blaze or other things. Every little bit h…
This isn't true at all, Blaze was a huge success, scrolling through Tumblr you see people with silly numbers of checks, lots of people pay to remove ads, it's just that that the successes aren't massively revenue generating in the way that ads are. Trying to monetize user generated content is hard because both the users and creators believe that it's their content (which it is that's how community works) and so locki…
From the CEO’s blog today:
> You mention Blaze and Ad-free doing well, but their adoption is so small relative to the use of Tumblr their revenue couldn't support a fraction of the ~1,000 servers it takes to run Tumblr, much less any salaries.
Re: You Win or You Learn
#69Is there any alternative for having a gallery of text&photo posts without forced login and exploitative social media distractions? (except for self-hosting)
When I looked for this 11 years ago, tumblr was the only platform ticking these boxes. I just wanted to share a link to photos of what we are up to with family and friends without asking them to register at another platform, and only tumblr allowed that and did not look as if it would close shop within two years.
Looked again recently and it still seems to be the only platform filling that overall „niche“. Also it has a clean and good user interface, and is customizable to the point of changing the HTML. I hope they can save or otherwise sustain it.
Other social media attempts to constantly distract and emotionalize me to keep me hooked. Looking at a good art or photography Tumblr feels like relief now honestly.
Re: You Win or You Learn
#70It was like a somewhat more positive counterpart to 4chan, it was full of madness, toxicity and vice, and also a space for creativity like few others. It was also one of the walled gardens, even if it always felt more open than the rest, but the web continues to weaken as content creation and delivery continues to be consolidated in the exploitative platforms of Meta, TikTok, and now to a smaller degree, X, with thei…
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