I found the discussion of the culture of Tumblr interesting, but I was left wondering more about the broken business model of Tumblr. They really don't seem to want to share with their influential users the value they generate. The lack of transparency into Tumblr's actions would also be worrying to me if I was involved in the platform. Watching Twitter drop the ball in similar ways makes me think there is a market opportunity for a social network that gives its users basic rights that we demand in our offline world. I'm growing more to like the "social network at a utility" model that I believe some in Twitter unsuccessfully argued for in its earlier days.
Tumblr treated it's users very poorly in my opinion. They deleted popular blogs with no warning and no recourse. At least give the teens a chance to align themselves with the terms of service by issuing a warning first. It makes me wonder what Tumblrs real motivation was. If hosting blogs that bring fun and interest to the lives of millions of teenagers is not part of their business model, then what is it?
A few months later yes, after they kept repeating how "nothing is going to change for the users". Made me truly grok how talk from a big company is just that, PR, while any sensible person could have guessed what was going to happen at the mere sound of "billion" and "dollar" in the same sentence.
Given how badly Yahoo seems to be doing financially, and considering other high profile "failures" like Parse being shut down by Facebook and Apple being challenged by the state: I wonder whether these big companies can continue to extract rents after open sourcing and retrofitting everything with decentralised protocols, encryption etc.
That seems like a preferable direction from a consumer point of view than forcing society to rebuild everything from scratch, despite the fact that things like GitLab, blockchain and p2p social networks are not inherently inferior. Adoption is hard. "Charity" is the same as PR, so there might be more side benefit than the original speculators hoped for with the failed centralised business models by opening up and decentralising.
> I'm growing more to like the "social network at a utility" model that I believe some in Twitter unsuccessfully argued for in its earlier days.
The problem with a utility is you have to pay for usage. The majority of the internet has shown they aren't willing to pay $.02 for an account.
This being the case the only way to build a business model is to capture as much of the value as possible from your user which creates the Consumer v. Business relationship where both are trying to extract the maximum value they can from the other.
Walmart, Amazon, etc. does the same thing with their suppliers.
Businesses always align with their customer's short term interests [via voting with their cash] in relatively free markets. Long term thinking isn't something consumers do.
> The problem with a utility is you have to pay for usage. The majority of the internet has shown they aren't willing to pay $.02 for an account.
I think users would be more willing to pay if it were easier to pay. You have to break out your credit card to pay for software. Then you have to enter your number, your billing information, etc. It's a question of how badly you want it.
If there were a service like Amazon's 'buy with 1-click' that could be integrated with any website, it could help monetize more sites.
> They really don't seem to want to share with their influential users the value they generate.
And that means they don't want share with their shareholders the value Tumblr generates. It's really mibd-blowing to think that anyone would have thought what Tumblr did was a good idea. I totally agree with their goal of shutting down sketchy and basically fraudulent ways of making money. But at least make a genuine attempt to provide a compelling alternative way for bloggers to make money.
The value of a social network is entirely in the community and their desire to devote time on the site (and not at all in any functionality or technology per se). By killing the vibe in the community they're basically burning money. Tumblr is dying in one of the saddest acts of corporate suicide in the last ten years.
Perhaps these teen sites were a drop in the bucket and not worth the hassle of any association with diet pills? But to just throw away a loyal audience of millions of people who are proving to be profitable customers as well - seems careless.
From the sound of it these kids probably would have gotten into compliance immediately with a warning. You'd think it would be worth tumblr's time. Apparently not though.
"At first you loathe the teens, because you know nothing about them and think they’re idiots, beneath you. Then you love the teens because you figure out they are smarter than you, and you make peace with the death of your cultural relevance, because you know you’ll be in good hands. Finally, you recognize the shape of the adults they’ll become, corrupted by money and vanity and hubris just like everyone else."
I think tumblr excels because, lacking a front page like reddit, the user's that hate each other never interact. And I'm increasingly sure that this is the only method for obtaining non-dysfunctional societies online- non-overlapping tribes of users. Why should the subscribers of /r/stormfront try to coexist with /r/BlackLivesMatter? It's like trying to house wolves and sheep in the same pen. Give each their own echo chamber.
I think tumblr excels because, lacking a front page like reddit, the user's that hate each other never interact. And I'm increasingly sure that this is the only method for obtaining non-dysfunctional societies online- non-overlapping tribes of users.
Yeah, you can tune the front page. But it's filled with popular subreddits by default. You'd have to opt-out of the frontpage by manually pruning your settings.
I didn't find the option to remove all default subscriptions at once in the settings, it might exist though. setInterval is needed because for some reasons ajax communication is throttled by reddit.
I have a feeling nobody really understands Tumblr (definitely not its own staff). Of all the social networks, it's the absolute champion at connecting you to people who think alike. So for you, whoever you are, Tumblr will be a particular thing. And it won't be a bit like that for the person next door. Every variation of "Tumblr is full of ..." just lays bare who it is you choose to find and follow.
> it's the absolute champion at connecting you to people who think alike. So for you, whoever you are, Tumblr will be a particular thing
While this might be true, I believe tumblr definitely has a shared culture.
I am saying this based on me setting up a dozen different tumblr accounts for testing stuff and seeing a lot of similar stuff over and over.
E.g. I am a straight male but the amount of gender identity/LGBTQIA content seems a lot more than elsewhere, presumably because of the "a lot of anonymous teenagers" user base.
It connects you to people who think like you. Not necessarily to people who are identical to you. You evidently follow people who follow people who support trans and queer politics. If you followed Trump supporters, or, I dunno, people into knitting or SCUBA, you'd get a different mix.
I failed to express myself: I meant that I setup a lot of accounts but I am not using them actively, so mostly they are just setup with random stuff, yet the sort of things that comes out is quite homogeneous.
I also loved it, and I'm not a big fan of parallax. But this story, for the first time, made me see how it could be kind of useful. The parallax sets the mood for each section...which is great for a story this long. Yes, you could do the same by breaking up the sections with a large header image...but given the tone of the story -- that is, of trying to describe a bizarro digital world -- the parallax worked incredibly well. Both on iPad and on the desktop.
It is terribad in IE11, the background lags behind and leaps ahead at 10Hz or so as I scroll. If I were seizure prone, I would be having one right now.
Actually, this third stage of life between childhood and adulthood is new phenomenon.
(Broad generalization incoming) Before the industrial revolution, teens would have spent most of their time around adults (like their parents), and very little time exclusively around people their own age.
Populations were distributed more broadly...kids were expected to work at a younger age...no phone or Internet...apprenticeships at a young age were common...
I guess they still had a few other opportunities...school, picnics, sports, swimming down at the creek, church, civic youth groups, summer camp, etc...
> I guess they still had a few other opportunities...school, picnics, sports, swimming down at the creek, church, civic youth groups, summer camp, etc...
Most of these are also pretty modern things. Long education and leisure time did not exist for most people until somewhere around ons hundred years ago, depending on where you lived. Stuff like boy scouts was not invented until the beginning of the 20th century and it took time for them to become popular across social classes.
Some historian argue that even childhood is a modern invention.
I'm pretty sure this "babying" is a relatively new thing. I've read a few books written by and/or about people growing up in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and once you were a teenager, you were treated like an adult by all other adults. Sure, a "young adult", but an adult nonetheless. You matured pretty quickly, because you had to in order to survive. But a college degree wasn't necessary back then to make a living on your own income; you could get a job and support yourself through manual labor, and live pretty comfortably. Today you have to go through at least 4 years of college if you want to do that, so you don't really have to grow up until you're in your mid twenties. Plus it's easy to get a high-interest credit card to buy your adult-starter-kit expenses. The result is that you end up with a lot of 30 year old adults who are just starting to grow up, who've only been working for a few years, and who now have massive debt, because they didn't really have to work hard to earn anything until now, and now they're just starting to learn how to work hard in order to pay off all that debt. Source: just making stuff up off the top of my head, ignore me.
While it might be less pronounced, and maybe it requires some level of urbanization or a critical mass of population within a society, you can definitely see distinct cultural struggles between generations at various points going way, way back in history. For example, there are Roman accounts of elder Senators bemoaning the diminished values of the upcoming generations and distinct youthful cultures forming.
Not being flippant here, at all...I think what you're referencing has been with humans forever...
Older generations doubt the ability of the young to "get things right"...to keep the society they are familiar with on track...
Younger generations, with fresh eyes, wonder how older generations let things "go so wrong"...with an eye toward improving the society they've inherited...
An excellent book, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, by Robert Pirsig, explores this and other phenomena in great depth...
It's a semi-sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...
Teens need a "hangout"...some place to be themselves, away from adults, with like-minded friends...a place where they are "understood"...
Just because they feel like that, doesn't mean that's what they really need. But if you erased "away from adults" from the above, I might completely agree with you.
One of the best articles I've read about modern Internet culture I've read in a long while. I enjoyed Tumblr as a place to post photos...I've stopped using it but I'm glad I at least tried it because I don't think there's any other way to understand Tumblr than to just jump in and use it. This article reminded me of the kinds of articles that were written when the Web was new, about teens making worldwide reputations and untold thousands of dollars doing some nichey tech thing while their parents were completely unawares.
Good to know that kind of thing can still exist in today's Facebooked world.
This reminded me of both the amazingness of the culture of Tumblr and a lot of the reasons about why I left. I could create useful, informative, viral things there, but there was no way I could make a decent amount of income on the large amount of work I was putting in.
I never went so far as to do any of the things mentioned in here—no raspberry ketone treatments ever came from ShortFormBlog—but the closest I got was a one-time sponsored post deal I did with Federated Media. That was nice—and the advertiser was also legitimate and high-profile—but it was just a one-time thing.
By choosing for years not to do anything to help creators make money off their websites, Tumblr created a situation where some of their best users did questionable things just to make money from their websites. It's too bad—had Tumblr been more decisive, it could have been a YouTube-type situation—allowing both them and their users to make lasting revenue.
One thing I'll say is that on Tumblr, you don't give up ownership of the content, you just give them the right to reproduce it anywhere. So you don't lose ownership; you allow virality.
But that said, I agree that building your own way is the better route. It took me a while to get to that point, admittedly. But you have to remember as well that Tumblr offers something that's really hard to get in other places without a lot of work: A way to quickly build an audience.
Now I'm not saying that I was completely in this to get paid—I also wanted to have something I could point to in interviews and say, "hey, this is what I do with my free time." (That part of the equation worked, by the way.)
But the thing is, ShortFormBlog would've never survived without Tumblr. It dealt with short, blurby pieces of news—perfect in length for Tumblr, but not something with a long lifespan. So building SEO was a no-go, and it was hard to build an audience outside of Tumblr with a strategy like that.
My current website and newsletter where I build stuff is way more focused on evergreen stuff—and it offers a lot of the creativity that Tumblr did for me, but on a smaller scale. I'm happier with the result—I don't feel like I'm building stuff just to get a bajillion likes or reblogs anymore, but instead things that make sense as creative projects.
Tumblr always seemed to me like IRC in the 90's or BBS's in the 80's. It exists as its own subculture. It's not influentially creative - there's very original works - but just exists as more of a commentary subculture.
Completely agree. I have tried to use tumblr on so many occassions, but have poked around for a while, become overwhelmed and gone back to reddit or similar..
I didn't mean tumblr is complicated, I meant explaining what tumblr means for people is complicated. It's the ultimate long tail site which means it serves very different purposes for different groups of people.
I was thinking about a decentralized social network. Syndication is easy ( RSS ) , communication between 2 websites in a secure way is tougher (ping backs?). RSS + ping backs + openid, open techs should be enough to setup a network or websites without a central authority. Obviously it's neither in Facebook, Twitter or Google's interest since they want people to visit their website in order to build an audience. But the tech is there.
Yeah, absolutely. I think you could do a circle of trust thing with other networks so that if A trusts B and B trusts C then messages could flow from A to C and back again. That could mitigate the pingback spam problem: not just anybody could pingback, they have to be trusted. And if your enclave gets too big then you can splinter it out and web it back together.
If it's small enough it could sneak under the free limits of most PaaSes. And despite needing some kind of techy admin I think the shibboleth thing could provide a layer of cool needed to sell the thing.
As a friend of many of the people in the original thread, I find it hilarious that the New Republic assumes they're all 'teens', especially when one has an icon in which he's holding his child.
