Tumblr’s core product strategy
staff.tumblr.com
staff.tumblr.com
It’s literally a case study of how to drive a social network into the ground. It was sold for 1 billion in 2013 and for 3 million in 2019
They banned most of their artists and content creators when the new owners started their neo-puritan war on porn. Thousands of artists used it to get commissions of fan-art. They suddenly found their income disappear and didnt know why - they were getting shadow banned, often in error.
In this announcement I see no indication that they’ve learned anything
Once the creators leave, they are not coming back. Quality content is gone. The social network only lives so long as they can re-market someone else’s work. It’s a predatory business.
To be fair, it was Yahoo that banned NSFW but Automattic are the current owners of the property.
Though on the other hand, they're also the WooCommerce people - with such a name, who knows...
The underlying problem is actually two fold:
1. They didn't understand their own customers need (which was, to be frank, share porn) 2. That they quite simply lost momentum
The first one is addressable. Just say you're going to allow porn again. The second one... Well, that's harder to address.
Twitter and Reddit have kind of built legitimate businesses on porn hosting, but they also host a lot of non-porn that makes them seem more legit. Tumblr wouldn't have that.
All we can do is make the tools work really well, and then people can choose how they want to use them or not.
That's a great idea, I'd love to see a company try it some day.
- Porn was quarantined reasonably well
- Twitter was "too big to ban"
Those factors are rapidly disappearing, so it will be interesting to see if Twitter lasts...
> If you wanted to start an adult social network in 2022, you’d need to be web-only on iOS and side load on Android, take payment in crypto, have a way to convert crypto to fiat for business operations without being blocked, do a ton of work in age and identity verification and compliance so you don’t go to jail, protect all of that identity information so you don’t dox your users
The verification part makes sense¹, but the rest of it... this is why I try to be conscious of what kind of payment methods and app stores I use and incentivize... (that is, no paypal/creditcard if avoidable; f-droid or install directly from developer's own site if they publish it)
¹ though I don't see why you couldn't rm -rf verification data upon setting verified=1 on the account, with a SFW picture in case you need to later check that the person being shown is the one on the material; or keep a provably random 1% of each year in an offline vault to prove that guidelines were followed; or... there are options here
Internet is great these days
Sorry, but you're missing the point. The problem isn't that all art is porn. It's that all porn is art.
A drawing or a photograph is not magically less of a creative endeavor because there's a dick in it, or two people fucking. It does create some complications for cultural or other human reasons, but it changes squat about the actual creative input. It sparks emotions, and why anyone ever thought appealing to the emotion of lust was any less valid than any other emotion is confusing as hell to me.
Constraints and limitations sometimes breed a level of creativity, but when you just suddenly limit expression to the degree that Tumblr did, it's a smack in the face to artists, even ones that do not necessarily produce pornography at all. I know they had their reasons, but still.
Of course, you can still have an art community with no porn. Obviously. But what they did was cut off a lot of people's existing avenues for expressing things, and that is not something that people tend to take lightly. It feels very personal.
You learn to draw a human body naked. You learn how to draw muscles correctly, each of them, then you add clothes.
And the rancid algorythm would shadowban people for like a drawing of an elf showing a boob. You didnt need to share hardcore porn to get banned.
It’s great to see the Richard Rumelt format of strategy with diagnosis/guiding principles, I’m a fan of this format but it also feels a bit like strategy-by-committee and just a laundry list of things.
Reading though this I get the sense that no one at tumblr has great insights around the pain points of their own product. I think they need to take a step deeper in their diagnosis and ask “how did we end up with a platform that’s so hard to use?” Otherwise they won’t make progress on the actual underlying issues.
I experience this with every platform that utilizes infinite scroll. Infinite scroll seems deliberately unsearchable in favor of slot machine style "who knows what's next" scrolling. Pretty degenerate.
I'm on tumblr mostly to keep in touch with a circle of friends from 10 years ago. I don't want to "grow my blog" and I don't want content from people I don't follow.
The fediverse would be my answer but I'm curious what others think.
[1]: https://havenweb.org
[2]: https://micro.blog
Sorry, couldn't resist!
$ sudo touch grassThis is the unfortunate consequence of an advertising-based business model. It offers you a shortcut to growth - a panel with a buttons labeled "More". More ads. More obnoxious ads. More sneaky ads. More manipulative ads. More people exposed, and exposed more often. There are many ways to grow that involve actually improving the product and user experience. But pressing one of the "More" buttons on the ad-panel is always easier, and gives you more money faster.
If it's clearly delineated, like "You may also be interested in...", it may be fine and actually helpful. If it's mixed into your regular feed, much less so.
Having dropped a 10+ year Reddit account for Lemmy, I'm still very much in the phase of finding new content sources, so I spend much more time in firehose modes than "stuff I've explicitly selected to follow", but the button makes it explicit.
Cool, I wonder if whoever is writing this understands the reason those communities are like that?
>The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”)
...And there it is.
The thing that makes Tumblr unique among social media is the fact that it has a non-algorithmic feed, and is centered on people you like sharing posts they enjoy. By default, you never see a post unless someone you follow either authors it or vouches for it.
If they try and change that, and shove an FYP-style page in front of the user by default, they're going to lose that distinguishing feature.
I personally support adding some algorithmic feed in (tumblr's discoverability does kind of suck), but a vast majority of the active users are very opposed to even the features they've added so far (like "best stuff first"). They need to be very careful about how they proceed here.
Also:
>Creators are essential to the Tumblr community. However, we haven’t always had a consistent and coordinated effort around retaining, nurturing, and growing our creator base.
Yeah, it's almost like you drove half the creators off of your site with one fell swoop.
>Additionally, we need to ensure that when people search for content related to their interests, it is easily accessible without any confusing limitations or unexpected roadblocks in their journey.
Coming from a website that is known for having the second-worst search function in social media (after reddit, which at least is easily parsed by google), this is almost laughable.
On the other hand: they seem woefully tone deaf on how to do that attending without royally botching the things that appeal to Tumblr users.
Good luck to them, but I'd suggest they scrap this whole plan and go with something drafted by a team who hasn't drank the engagement kool-aid.
What teams come to mind for you?
I feel like some form of active involvement from users and creators as stakeholders would be nice to see, shouldn't be that hard, and for some reason seems forever off the table. The idea that a bunch of people created all the content on your social network, and their continued (often free) labor is part of the reason new people would become engaged and so keeping them happy is important seems foreign to insiders, and I don't understand why. Not as "user group research" but as collaborators who you are already in a de facto partnership with, because they create all the stuff people look at.
I really wish tech companies would stop designing apps for this mythical moron user who's apparently seeing a software application for the first time ever. Everyone knows how to use these apps. Think about it, kids can figure it out.
Modern UIs have become so oversimplified that they're counter-intuitive to average users and useless to power users. When you try too hard to make an app for everyone you just end up with an app the doesn't work for anyone.
Also, the pattern of "diagnosis, guiding policy, coherent action" is copy-pasted from the book "Good Strategy, Bad Strategy"[1]. I've seen this internally at companies and even though the article is a great read, the application leaves much to be desired.
[1] https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...
This one is a tricky one. I understand the intent, but I think platforms need to shy away from trying to optimize this in particular.
One reason is you can't define "high-quality content". Thinking in terms of Tumblr's userbase, there are users who have very specific things they want to see, and if you try to focus on some measure of "quality" (how? engagement? bad idea!) you may just frustrate and alienate them by making it hard to do this curation. That means it's important to make sure you DON'T force an algorithmic feed, even if you're not doing the Threads thing and making it basically a giant sponsored post section in the timeline.
Another reason is that's not what people actually like about the internet. The internet is fun because it's a mixed bag: you get a lot of everything. Seeing only the best things every day is neat, but after a while you just get numb to it. What you want is something enticing and interesting. A good example here is YouTube in say, 2008 or so. That was crazy. There was not much of an "algorithm" to speak of: your homepage was just surfacing your followers and their interactions with others. This made a natural social graph of content for you to explore, and you could find stuff that people you like thought was interesting. The experience of crawling through this web of content is enticing in a difficult to explain way, but it would certainly be made worse if you just select stuff that an ML algorithm thinks I would like. Case-in-point, YouTube's recommendations for me are horrible, because it more often than not finds superficially relevant content that doesn't actually scratch the same itch as the stuff I do like.
Worse, I think over time having systems like this cause lots of feedback loops. People discover ways to game the algorithm and suddenly everybody is playing the game. Content that is de-prioritized by the algorithm becomes less visible, and makes discoverability of things that people would like to see much harder.
I suspect most people who sign up for Tumblr have a specific entrypoint: another person or account that they came there for. The focus on discoverability should, in my opinion, focus on moving outward from there rather than trying to push a bunch of viral content on the user in hopes that it will appeal to them. Same goes for a lot of other social networks that do literally the same thing.
It will help your metrics in the short term, but you may very well bleed even more dedicated users. Metrics can obscure a lot of important things...
On the other hand, the algorithm, for all its flaws, has introduced my to a whole world of music I would have never found otherwise. Though then I watch one video about the Ukraine conflict and YouTube suddenly thinks that's all I ever want to watch. Luckily a friend told me about the incognito switch, so now whenever I watch a video I don't want to influence the algorithm, I use that. Not ideal, but better than nothing.
On a social media site, on the other hand, I don't want an algorithm deciding what I see. I follow my friends, I don't follow celebrities. Just show me what I want.
Okay it's not the front page, but this view does exist. On the left sidebar, click "Subscriptions" to go to a chronological view of only videos uploaded by who you're subscribed to: https://www.youtube.com/feed/subscriptions
I feel there's a dead-obvious solution to this: split the difference. Give users granular control over parameters of the recommendation algorithm, and then use that to populate half of the feed. The other half, do what is done today. Maybe even make the user-controlled half of the feed a negative input into the platform-controlled recommender. And sure, even mix in all the commercial prioritization into that second half.
This way, each user gets to enjoy both precise control and serendipitous discoveries; they get to suffer both stewing in their own filter bubble and getting exposed to random shit content - but no more than 50% of each. A good balance could be achieved.
It would definitely be better than what we have today, where, unless you're working hard to carefully tune your experience, getting drowned in random shit content mixed with advertising is the good outcome - the bad outcome is ending up stuck in a filter bubble made of... shit content reinforcing your particular inclinations (and still mixed with advertising). I feel it would even be better for platforms, too.
Then they screwed up by surfacing likes and never adding an option to make them private. Very dumb.
Of course, any such attempt will stay somewhat obscure - it can't get popular, because in the wider world of users being seen as cattle, the system will get immediately gained and/or bought out and/or sued - but it could work as a proof of concept. Perhaps lead to a bunch of scientific papers, a Wikipedia page, an interesting anecdote - but also a capability demonstrator for a better future. So where is it? I'd expect at least the torrent crowd would have something like it by now. But then maybe it exists, and I'm just not privy to it.
Anyway, with all the research that's been going on ever since Netflix award, and maybe earlier, with all the systems in use, some of which probably not initially designed to be malicious - it feels to me that it should be possible, and the missing ingredient is treating end-user as a partner, not an idiot.
It feels like the community wants it, but Tumblr themselves don’t understand what people actually want.
I’ve been working on a side project in my off time, and my wife tells me that what I’ve built is like a “Tumblr” lol.
What do you think? Is this something worth pursuing?
(I'm working on a project that started as a Tumblr replacement... it's kinda gotten out of control and I'm rapidly trying to get it shippable... ^_^;; https://github.com/smolblog/)
They could capitalize on all the weirdness and discontent from twitter and reddit like zuckerberg is doing.
Even if a waiver is signed, there's significant duress in many cases. There's a lot of pain and evil enabled by allowing porn to spread on an algorithmic newsfeed.
[1] https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/2022-02/CCHT%20Annua...
How confident do you feel that your religion, or people acting on behalf of it, have not engaged in violent acts of revenge, torture, child abuse, or human trafficking? Does it not cause significant duress in many cases to teach people to feel shame, to tell them normal feelings are sinful, that they will suffer for eternity if they break the rules? No one needs to worship any particular religion—there are plenty of other ones, after all—so perhaps yours should not be allowed because it’s associated with bad things?
Do you eat meat from industrial farms? Use electronics containing conflict minerals? Wear clothes made overseas? Play video games from studios notorious for crunch? All these industries cause significant amounts of suffering and many are exploitative. They fund wars, genocides, slave labour, child labour[0][1], human trafficking, and animal abuse. They cause duress, evil, and pain. Shall we disallow them? We don’t need to eat meat and it would be healthier for most people and the planet if they didn’t. We can go back to buying only domestic clothing, or just make our own. We all lived without smartphones until 15 years ago, so those can go. Games are just like porn—merely diversions—so if we discount all the joy they bring to people, they really have no value to society at all. Should we get rid of these things, too, because they are associated with bad things?
Allowing books aids a probabilistic percentage of people who want to promote violence and hatred toward others, deliberately spread falsehoods, advocate for and explicitly describe abuse, and give instruction on how to cause harm. Even when there are disclaimers, sometimes they cause significant duress to readers. There’s a lot of pain and evil enabled by allowing books to spread… do you get the picture?
All human enterprise has problems, and inductive fallacies like these are no way to judge what should or should not be allowed.
For a little while, Tumblr was a mainstream social network. This was at a time when Twitter didn't even have built-in photo functionality yet, and both Instagram and Pinterest were still tiny / widely unknown.
Those mainstream users probably aren't coming back. Say what you will about having a ton of "normies" and brands on your platform, but it's not clear if a social network can be profitable (and therefore sustainable) these days without them.
Not in the current market environment, no. But it's not "normies" that are the problem - it's the "free service, make money on ads" business model that's the root of the issue. It will, by its very nature, always lead to the so-called "enshittification". And, it's also near-impossible to compete with at scale. So paid social networks just can't work, because a "free with ads" service will trivially outcompete it before it starts to visibly rot.
I say current market environment, because there's always that slight hope that some sort of regulatory intervention will kill the "free with ads" model, or at least severely restrict it to level the playing field.
The "free with ads" service will "outcompete" by immediately being in basically-infinite debt, right? Is that really still "competing"?
https://www.tumblr.com/staff/699744158019190784/this-is-not-...
I remember when Tumblr was the place to find individuals posting passionately about all kinds of super-niche topics. It had more personality than any of the other mainstream social media services. What the hell happened?
It's such a shame that we probably won't have another website like this again. I guess some of that stuff has moved to Discord now or sub-communities within Twitter, Reddit, etc but it's just not the same.
Now, more than ever (Twitter/Reddit), is the perfect time to re-launch Tumblr.
reddit is at war with its users, twitter is being scuttled in live view, Threads is a newborn baby. chaos?
Internally, the mysql database schema was called "tumblr3" as an artifact from that. Or at least that's the explanation I heard when joining the company in 2010.
I don't think anything was ever versioned after v3. So that means if you're saying this is now 4.0, I guess we should expect the biggest change in 16 years :)
I'm not sure any of this is actually coherent or makes sense. They're all points that could be applied to any social network.
Maybe Tumblr itself no longer knows who it's serving.
The UX is all weird and always has been. Maybe the hardcore users like it, but I personally hate having to "quote tweet" every response. Replies are there now, great, but they are a completely different post type and are unthreaded. You can't have multiple videos in a post. You can't use videos in a reblog. There are so many "what the hell why would it be like this" moments.
But the user base is pretty cool.
Besides: What happened to the ActivityPub plans?
I think it's great that y'all are thinking about this. If you succeed (hopefully without angering the current user base too much), Tumblr could house a lot of Twitter/Reddit refugees.
Sexually Explicit Material. Visual depictions of sexually explicit acts (or content with an overt focus on genitalia) are not allowed on Tumblr. That includes pictures, videos, GIFs, drawings, CGI, or anything similar. Historically significant art that you may find in a mainstream museum and which depicts sex acts—such as from India’s Śuṅga Empire—are now allowed on Tumblr with proper labeling.
Nudity and other kinds of adult material are generally welcome. We’re not here to judge your art, we just ask that you add a Community Label to your mature content so that people can choose to filter it out of their Dashboard if they prefer.
You have the option to add a community label when making a new post, reblogging a post, or editing an existing post. Depending on your content, you can label it as generally mature or choose a specific category such as “Sexual Themes” if your post contains sexually suggestive subject matter.
Blogs which have a focus on mature content may not be eligible for certain Tumblr features, including monetization options. We need to consider the policies of our partners in the payments space, so the rules there are a bit different.
For more information about this guideline, and how to appeal decisions about sexually explicit material, check out our Help Center article.
Tumblr had a huge content moderation issue where (based on my personal experience) I’m guessing there are incentives in place around flagging explicit content. I’ve never posted or reblogged anything that would break this policy, but every single post I make on my main blog is automatically flagged as explicit/adult content (eg a photo of my cat) and going though a content appeal I’d say 50% the human-reviewed content appeal fails and my post gets hidden.
I ended up creating a separate blog that I now post content to, and then reblog to my main account.
It’s impossible to get a hold of any support to try and resolve.
Despite non-existent support and increasingly buggy apps, it’s still the best online community I’ve found and I love it :)
[1] https://wip.tumblr.com/post/721930712517853184/rss-feeds-nee...
I guess we can't have nice things because what those websites are traditionally good at isn't profitable. I can't really be surprised that monetizing tumblr proves challenging, when it seems to consist of like half starving artists, half anti-capitalist shitposters, and half young adults talking about fanfic. I remember monetizing blogging being a running joke on the site over a decade ago, and I can't imagine it's gotten easier with, you know, the economic situation impacting those demographics.
The forerunner?
Woah. That's some serious smug
It’s gone though. I know it isn’t Automattics fault, but the high-water mark was almost a decade ago now. Then it was taken behind the shed and put down by Verizon lol