Even in its prime, Tumblr was never profitable. It was sold and resold to several companies who never had a clear vision for what to do with it, other than run ads to generate revenue. Its main draw was its users. For several years it was the social media platform for LGBTQ and fandoms, along with many niche interests.
Like Reddit, many users had a love-hate relationship with it, and as its policies grew more and more at odds with its power users, the communities which existed fell apart. Banning NSFW content and the heavy-handed automated moderation meant to enforce it was the final straw for me. AI was used to try to detect images of nudes, but tagged a huge amount of false positives such as pictures of animals or even sand dunes. I had my main blog incorrectly tagged as NSFW which made it harder to keep in contact or be discoverable by other users, so I quit. Reddit’s over-reactions to large subs being set to NSFW shows this is a pain point for them. u/spez has made it clear that he will push through whatever policies he wants, regardless of vocal feedback for the actual users of the site.
Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self. I check in every so often. Only a handful of the blogs I followed are still active, mostly ones that didn’t interact much with others to begin with. Trending content is incredibly generic, even moreso than /all. Very few of these posts hit more than a few thousand “notes” (for comparison I, a fairly obscure blogger, had about 80,000 notes on my most viral post). When July 1 rolls around I expect Reddit will start to follow a similar pattern. The power users who haven’t left already will drop off the grid one by one until Reddit loses its center of gravity.
Further reading, first one with NSFW-ish photos
https://boingboing.net/2018/12/03/the-death-of-tumblr.html
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No one knows what it will look like this is an entirely new shift but I do have this feeling that things are at a real turning point right now. The massive rise of AI, the monetization and enshitification of social media and entertainment reaching a peak, bizzare economic conditions, a feverish culture war in the west. I’m sure I’m missing something but there is a strange cocktail of factors mixing right now and the changes happening with Reddit seem like just another piece. I’m optimistic about what it means. I think a lot of people feel like the status quo as it has been is not infinitely sustainable.
My hope is that this is a shift back to a more decentralized internet.
I want small personal home pages back.
Except the midi and custom cursor elements.
what’s wrong with MIDIs? :)
Imagine visiting a random site and some cutesy midi music starts playing on your cheap desktop speakers or earphones, you look for the controls to mute it but the site owner didn’t make one so you’re forced to turn off the entire volume. It was just annoying.
Luckily browsers can mute tabs now!
And don’t forget under construction gifs.
And don’t forget under construction gifs.
I got you covered: http://textfiles.com/underconstruction/
TEXTFILES! WOW! What a blast from the past! I can’t remember the last time I saw that site! Isn’t that the site that just outright hosts a copy of the anarchist’s cookbook and other similar stuff?
I remember it was all blue and I would visit it on the School computers thinking I was so edgy, but then school shootings weren’t common at all yet, and when they started, I sort of moved away from visiting sites like that entirely.
But man. MAN… I kind of want to see if it’s still there, just for the old times, but… I feel like the fbi takes stuff like that a LOT more seriously now :|
What to do, what to do…
Edit: Jfc yeah that’s the one - annnnd I’m on a list now, great :/
Ugh, my childhood. That gritty, black and white one just under the huge batch of roadsigns has to be from 2004. That seems to have been a very era-specific font that I’ve just never seen since.
I don’t know if it was common in the west but in Japan you’d see sites that required you to read and agree to a term before entering the site. Just the usual “don’t be an asshole” type of netiquette. However when you clicked on “Enter/Agree”, you’d be redirected to Yahoo. Reading the terms more carefully you’d see it says, about 2/3 in, “if you agree, click here”. It was mildly annoying.
Mildly, but honestly that feels like a good thing.
Reminds me of those paper tests or quizzes in school where there’d be a paragraph of instructions in the beginning, and halfway through, it would say if you wrote your name on it and turned it in after ten minutes and wrote “potato” as the answer to #4 and just turned it in, you would get 100%, or if you just did something specific you’d get some extra credit.
The number of people that don’t read instructions is insane. Teachers were complaining about students not writing dates on stuff or some other aspect of laziness and would use this to incentivize kids to read instructions.
I started messing around with gemini a while back, it’s a little involved to set up, and intentionally-limited feature-wise (it’s heavily inspired by Gopher). Very fun messing around with it though, and customizing my HTTP proxy was pretty satisfying. You could access my site either through a gemini browser or a normal one, and the normal site had a few extra bells and whistles that made browsing it a little better
It is for some people like us. But most user don’t care.
That was well said. I think it is a sign of a larger shift in attitude for many facets of modern day life, that many of us have struggled to really come to terms with. Social media is just more in our control to do something about and I hope to see it shift to other things as well, as we all realize we control our own fate.
Perhaps the end of the long September?
I don’t think eternal September will ever end, outside of platforms that are small enough not to attract those sorts of users.
Once you hit a certain level of popularity, it’s going to be September no matter what unless you’re very strict with moderation to keep things from going off the rails.
Tumblr is kinda back imo. But the main reason for it’s death was also that the company that bought tumblr back then thought it would be the new PDF…yes you heard me right… https://qz.com/708295/yahoos-grand-plan-for-tumblr-was-to-turn-it-into-the-next-generation-pdf
Tumblr CEO David Karp reported to Yahoo’s Simon Khalaf, founder of the analytics platform Flurry (also acquired by Yahoo). In an anecdote from an unnamed former employee, Khalaf walked into one team meeting about Tumblr saying the popular blogging platform was “going to be the new PDF.”
“It didn’t make any sense,” the employee recounted. “We’d walk away scratching our heads.”
I’m with them on this. That makes zero sense.
The CEO heard someone say PDF and decided it was the in buzz word.
yeah it does make zero sense, shows that they neither understood PDFs nor Tumblr
PDF
PDF Files
Paedophiles
They heard him wrong.
Yeah I agree Tumblr is a good example of the mistakes Reddit is likely to make.
Yahoo started the mess with Tumblr by trying to contain “NSFW” content both by restricting access for users and making it harder for content makers. Then Verizon took over and they banned it outright in some bizarre moralising. Ultimately its very hard to keep shareholders and advertisers happy - for advertisers it’s difficult to guarentee their ads wot appears next to nsfw content. Their focus wasn’t they users, it was their shareholders and customers - the advertisers they were seeing their users to.
Reddit is making the same mistakes. It forgets it is nothing more than a host for content. The users make the content, the users moderate the content and the users want the content. The users are the entire value of the company. When you start messing around with that to monetise it and to keep shareholders and advertisers happy you’re on a road to self destruction. Reddit thinks the content it hosts has value - it does but that content mostly has value when it’s current and if you lose the users you lose the content.
Power users including many moderators seem to be the first out the door. Those are amongst some the highest value users in terms of generating and maintaining content on the site. It started a couple of years ago when Reddit started banning whole communities - some of that made sense, particularly more extreme communities but I suspect NSFW content will be next.
Ultimately there is cognitive disonnance in social media. Banning NSFW content to “protect children” and to make it easier for keeping advertisers happy seems like an “easy” choice, but ultimately adult users don’t want to be stuck in censorship black zones, restricted by over zealous rules and rule keeps or frustrated by being caught up in the unintended consequences. Reddit is a site for adults, made by its users - damage that and you don’t have a website.
This is the best analysis I’ve seen so far. The majority of posts I have seen say “reddit is an inch from death”, which isn’t even remotely close to accurate. A site can be a 3rd tier, boring, corporate-owned collection of content that has non-exciting revenue, but that’s not dead.
facebook is exactly what you described, although I assume it’s still profitable and keeping meta afloat
My biggest concern when I first came over and had a look at Lemmy was the fact that all the main Lemmy instances had big “No Porn!” rules front and center. Porn is the lifeblood of a free internet, and the foundation of human inventiveness and drive for innovation.
Fortunately that seems to have largely been swamped by the Reddit refugees. Along with the disturbing prevalence of tankies, the second biggest concern I had when I first came over and had a look at Lemmy. Things seem to be well on track now.
Porn is the lifeblood of a free internet, and the foundation of human inventiveness and drive for innovation.
I’ll take “true things they’ll never teach in school” for $200, Alex.
My hope is that federation will be a good solution to these issues. Users can choose a home instance based on the types of content they do or don’t want to see. Instances with conflicting focuses or policies can defederate from one another.
Instances with conflicting focuses or policies can defederate from one another.
Or a death match. Idk. Just thinking out loud here.
There’s legal issues involving hosting, and that includes mirroring, or acting as an aggregator for, porn. Many admins simply don’t want to deal with the headache of that.
It’s fine if the fediverse is (mostly) split into sfw and nsfw sides, after all, most people had different accounts for both on reddit in the first place, and much of the rest should have.
And it’s not like admins are defederating lemmynsfw.com – they’re only blocking nsfw posts, lemmynsfw wisely has a strict “tag everything” policy. Which means that if someone wants to use their lemmynsfw account to engage in discussion on the sfw side, nothing’s stopping them, as long as it’s sfw.
If there’s no porn how come I had to get a user script to block all the god-damned porn?
The infinite feed bug kept forcing porn into my face so often i still don’t feel comfortable looking at lemmy at work.
As I said, the no-porn rules appear to have fallen by the wayside once the surge of Reddit refugees started arriving. Before then, though, all the major instances had no-porn rules.
I don’t see how NSFW content can make its place on non-profit fediverse. NSFW is very taxing to moderate, so it makes perfect sense to me that volunteers would refuse to deal with it and outright ban porn (while still being more understanding of non-pornographic nudity than say Instagram, which banned a museum from publishing pictures of nude statues 🤦).
Porn is the lifeblood of a free internet
Your view of the internet must be pretty sad
Your view of the Internet is naïve and unrealistic.
This isn’t Reddit people! Don’t downvote a perfectly good comment just because you don’t agree.
Add a reply (or upvote one that already shares your thoughts) and move on. Keep the discussion thriving. Downvote hate and spam.
It was the last line of their comment that earned a down vote from me.
lemmynsfw.com is an instance specialising in exactly that type of moderation. It’s easier when you specialise and don’t simultaneously have to deal with other stuff, at least in a fine-grained way (that is, more fine-grained than “import standard instance blocklist to not federate with instances full of nazis, griefers, and other types of brigades”)
If you can’t get porn on it, then it isn’t a viable platform.
That’s just how it is, the ability to use a medium for pornography affects the popularity of that medium. Consumers want porn, and if they can’t find it here they’ll go somewhere else.
Wtf? Why are people upvoting this garbage?
Google, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube, there are TONNES of “platforms” that literally ban porn content from being uploaded to them. What are you talking about? Not viable? The biggest fucking social media site on the internet does not allow porn, the biggest video site on the internet does not allow porn.
Redditors have seriously broken brains and only know how to repeat what they’ve read other broken redditors repeat and upvote ad-infinitum without every actually thinking for 5 seconds about how ridiculous what they’re saying is.
Porn was one of the things that drove development of many of the tools of the internet. It just happens that those innovations have non-porn benefits as well. Things like video and audio compression rates that allowed low-bandwidth streaming. I still find it amazing that I can watch moving video with synchronized audio at speeds barely faster than dialup.
In a post T1 world, we sometimes fail to see what our ingenuity and our desire for certain outcomes created.
We can always debate whether or not the normalization of nudity and sexual experience is good or bad for a community or society. But it can’t be denied that the American desire for pornographic materials was a significant factor (if not the defining factor) in the development of consumer-driven internet.
I’ll never forget the Tumblr titty ban and then the fact everyone’s SFW art got marked as NSFW by their very strange bot.
The infamous nipple bot. Boldly finding nipples where no nipples were found before.
Sfw art? I remember it flagging a picture of the Sahara. Although my favorite was the one that said something like “How far can I zoom in on my elbow before it’s flagged,” and it never even made it past the first photo. Those were entertaining days
“The Sahara? You mean sand tiddies”
I agree that not many sites will ever again fumble and fuck it up as large as Digg did.
Let’s hope Reddit does something even more blatantly dumb than they’ve already done and start banning porn from their platform. Once that happens, that’s when I think we’ll really see alternatives take off.
I went from fearing the worst in reddit to wishing the worst in reddit.
Knowing that people can rebuild another platform at a whim, as such the community here, restores my faith in humanity.
It’s beautiful to watch Reddit burn, I’ve been going on it near daily for about 10 years now, it was my morning news paper, and now it’s becoming more obsolete than ever.
I give thanks to all the rebels, developers/programmers, innovative thinkers and the people who are truly serious about restoring the true beauty of the internet.
Fuck Reddit and fuck its malware and the dystopia it has become. Its a beautiful dumpster fire, and we all here have the best seats in the house 🍿
Tumblr is only good for extremely small and niche fandoms similarly to reddit. If I could mass exodus everyone from some of those smaller fandoms to an alternative like the fediverse I would, but most of them aren’t techy (or stubborn) so it’s difficult!
I guess the months following July we will be able to see how the downfall of reddit goes. It could be like Digg or like Tumblr or somewhere in-between. If it does not get sold off and still somehow manages to exist I think it will just be Spez’s personal cult and soapbox.
Oh he will be the first one out when it goes public. Whatever majority shareholders make up the board will not look favorably on this. Now it is all positioning and planning for future resource extraction. In no profit driven world does spez remain ceo in 6 months. Guarantee it.
Just an FYI tumblr is now owned by Automattic (they own Wordpress), and bought it for a fraction of it’s last inflated price (hahaha). Automattic was looking to join the Fediverse with ActivityPub.
I actually use Tumblr mostly everyday, I just check it like 5 minutes but I do enjoy the people there and Tumblr culture. I think it’s getting better the last couple of years
Did tumblr reach a reddit-like threshold?
I tried to look up Tumblr’s present and past Alexa rankings, but it turns out that Alexa was closed last year.
