this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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It's still around, and doing quite well at least from a community perspective. It's an underdog platform and the users want to keep it that way for the most part. The problem, though, is that the staff don't know how to monetize it properly. The thing they push the most is an ad-free subscriptions service which is already doomed to fail because everyone uses adblockers.
They had a good idea for monetization which was allowing users to buy advertising space for their own posts. The more you paid, the more users would see your post. Tumblr's own community ruined this by sending harassing comments and messages to the posts that were advertised with this feature.
Tumblr's biggest roadblock to monetization isn't their site structure or ideas, it's their community.
You're not wrong. The community does certainly need to lighten the hell up and accept the fact that the company needs to make money somehow.
But I also can't really blame them, either. They see all these other social media sites choking themselves to death in desperate attempts to milk every last drop of money they can, and naturally they want none of that on Tumblr. Finding a balance between making money and not pissing off the community is important.
I don't blame the community for wanting to avoid enshittification. In an ideal world, everyone should.
But that's not what they're doing. They're not making any concrete protests to Tumblr's anti-privacy and anti-user changes. They refuse to search for and create Tumblr alternatives. They only cry (on Tumblr) about how Tumblr is the only site left for them, please don't add this feature my autism and depression can't handle it blah blah blah. They're actively sabotaging monetization strategies that are user-friendly. They are - as a low-tech demographic that would rather have a "free" service than a paid user-friendly one - the reason why Tumblr has to enshittify.
Used Tumblr for 11 years because Tumblr has my favorite microblogging format. No longer frequently. The user quality dropped massively after December 2018.