i-am-joseph-dunphy

[i-am-joseph-dunphy]

I’m going to read this later, but whenever people at a provider start sounding like the Marketing Department, experience tells me to worry. Usually, this is followed by a lot of forced “upgrades” that take away the user’s creative freedom, bit by bit, while making the system harder, not easier, to use.

This is a cliche for a reason: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. No, not being the largest community online is not evidence of anything being broken. Not every restaurant needs to be McDonald’s, not every store needs to be a WalMart. Some things are smaller - no small, smaller - because they’ve been serving a particular niche and been serving it well, profitably. I think that you will find that in the end, everybody finds that he has a niche, and that any attempt to become the McDonald’s or the WalMart of the Internet is a shortsighted choice that will leave one’s company suffering the fate of Yahoo, at best.

The entire point of the the Internet is that it IS NOT a mass medium in the sense that broadcast television is, and that it can serve those smaller niches. When a company forgets that, it hasn’t just sold its soul to the slugs in marketing, it has done so to the dumbest, slowest slugs in the group, the ones who have failed to understand even in the cable TV era, trying to get everybody to enjoy the same media was an outdated concept. The way forward is toward more choice, not less, and audiences will punish those who forget that, unforgivingly.

If Automattic (or whoever owns Tumblr, now) wants to grow, the answer isn’t to try to make Tumblr be all things for all users. The answer is to tell the people in Marketing to sit down, shut up and meditate on the reality that the mid 20th century ended quite some time ago, is not missed, and will not be coming back. If you want to grow, don’t abandon the niche you’ve been serving, and don’t dumb down or homogenize the product you’ve been giving it. Instead, find other niches to serve as well, create new products for them, and stop trying to be WalMart.

Everybody hates WalMart.

Tumblr’s Core Product Strategy

Here at Tumblr, we’ve been working hard on reorganizing how we work in a bid to gain more users. A larger user base means a more sustainable company, and means we get to stick around and do this thing with you all a bit longer. What follows is the strategy we're using to accomplish the goal of user growth. The @labs group has published a bit already, but this is bigger. We’re publishing it publicly for the first time, in an effort to work more transparently with all of you in the Tumblr community. This strategy provides guidance amid limited resources, allowing our teams to focus on specific key areas to ensure Tumblr’s future.

The Diagnosis

In order for Tumblr to grow, we need to fix the core experience that makes Tumblr a useful place for users. The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience. 

Tumblr’s competitive advantage lies in its unique content and vibrant communities. As the forerunner of internet culture, Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content. 

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content. This involves attracting and retaining new users and creators, nurturing their growth, and encouraging frequent engagement with the platform.

Our Guiding Principles

To enhance Tumblr’s usability, we must address these core guiding principles.

Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Retain and grow our creator base.

Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Improve the platform’s performance, stability, and quality.

Below is a deep dive into each of these principles.

Principle 1: Expand the ways new users can discover and sign up for Tumblr.

Tumblr has a “top of the funnel” issue in converting non-users into engaged logged-in users. We also have not invested in industry standard SEO practices to ensure a robust top of the funnel. The referral traffic that we do get from external sources is dispersed across different pages with inconsistent user experiences, which results in a missed opportunity to convert these users into regular Tumblr users. For example, users from search engines often land on pages within the blog network and blog view—where there isn’t much of a reason to sign up. 

We need to experiment with logged-out tumblr.com to ensure we are capturing the highest potential conversion rate for visitors into sign-ups and log-ins. We might want to explore showing the potential future user the full breadth of content that Tumblr has to offer on our logged-out pages. We want people to be able to easily understand the potential behind Tumblr without having to navigate multiple tabs and pages to figure it out. Our current logged-out explore page does very little to help users understand “what is Tumblr.” which is a missed opportunity to get people excited about joining the site.

Actions & Next Steps

Improving Tumblr’s search engine optimization (SEO) practices to be in line with industry standards.

Experiment with logged out tumblr.com to achieve the highest conversion rate for sign-ups and log-ins, explore ways for visitors to “get” Tumblr and entice them to sign up.

Principle 2: Provide high-quality content with every app launch.

We need to ensure the highest quality user experience by presenting fresh and relevant content tailored to the user’s diverse interests during each session. If the user has a bad content experience, the fault lies with the product.

The default position should always be that the user does not know how to navigate the application. 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.

Being a 15-year-old brand is tough because the brand carries the baggage of a person’s preconceived impressions of Tumblr. On average, a user only sees 25 posts per session, so the first 25 posts have to convey the value of Tumblr: it is a vibrant community with lots of untapped potential. We never want to leave the user believing that Tumblr is a place that is stale and not relevant. 

Actions & Next Steps

Deliver great content each time the app is opened.

Make it easier for users to understand where the vibrant communities on Tumblr are. 

Improve our algorithmic ranking capabilities across all feeds. 

Principle 3: Facilitate easier user participation in conversations.

Part of Tumblr’s charm lies in its capacity to showcase the evolution of conversations and the clever remarks found within reblog chains and replies. Engaging in these discussions should be enjoyable and effortless.

Unfortunately, the current way that conversations work on Tumblr across replies and reblogs is confusing for new users. The limitations around engaging with individual reblogs, replies only applying to the original post, and the inability to easily follow threaded conversations make it difficult for users to join the conversation.

Actions & Next Steps

Address the confusion within replies and reblogs.

Improve the conversational posting features around replies and reblogs. 

Allow engagements on individual replies and reblogs.

Make it easier for users to follow the various conversation paths within a reblog thread. 

Remove clutter in the conversation by collapsing reblog threads. 

Explore the feasibility of removing duplicate reblogs within a user’s Following feed. 

Principle 4: Retain and grow our creator base.

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.  

Being a new creator on Tumblr can be intimidating, with a high likelihood of leaving or disappointment upon sharing creations without receiving engagement or feedback. We need to ensure that we have the expected creator tools and foster the rewarding feedback loops that keep creators around and enable them to thrive.

The lack of feedback stems from the outdated decision to only show content from followed blogs on the main dashboard feed (“Following”), perpetuating a cycle where popular blogs continue to gain more visibility at the expense of helping new creators. To address this, we need to prioritize supporting and nurturing the growth of new creators on the platform.

It is also imperative that creators, like everyone on Tumblr, feel safe and in control of their experience. Whether it be an ask from the community or engagement on a post, being successful on Tumblr should never feel like a punishing experience.

Actions & Next Steps

Get creators’ new content in front of people who are interested in it. 

Improve the feedback loop for creators, incentivizing them to continue posting.

Build mechanisms to protect creators from being spammed by notifications when they go viral.

Expand ways to co-create content, such as by adding the capability to embed Tumblr links in posts.

Principle 5: Create patterns that encourage users to keep returning to Tumblr.

Push notifications and emails are essential tools to increase user engagement, improve user retention, and facilitate content discovery. Our strategy of reaching out to you, the user, should be well-coordinated across product, commercial, and marketing teams.

Our messaging strategy needs to be personalized and adapt to a user’s shifting interests. Our messages should keep users in the know on the latest activity in their community, as well as keeping Tumblr top of mind as the place to go for witty takes and remixes of the latest shows and real-life events.  

Most importantly, our messages should be thoughtful and should never come across as spammy.  

Actions & Next Steps

Conduct an audit of our messaging strategy.

Address the issue of notifications getting too noisy; throttle, collapse or mute notifications where necessary.  

Identify opportunities for personalization within our email messages. 

Test what the right daily push notification limit is. 

Send emails when a user has push notifications switched off.

Principle 6: Performance, stability and quality.

The stability and performance of our mobile apps have declined. There is a large backlog of production issues, with more bugs created than resolved over the last 300 days. If this continues, roughly one new unresolved production issue will be created every two days. Apps and backend systems that work well and don't crash are the foundation of a great Tumblr experience. Improving performance, stability, and quality will help us achieve sustainable operations for Tumblr.

Improve performance and stability: deliver crash-free, responsive, and fast-loading apps on Android, iOS, and web.

Improve quality: deliver the highest quality Tumblr experience to our users. 

Move faster: provide APIs and services to unblock core product initiatives and launch new features coming out of Labs.

Conclusion

Our mission has always been to empower the world’s creators. We are wholly committed to ensuring Tumblr evolves in a way that supports our current users while improving areas that attract new creators, artists, and users. You deserve a digital home that works for you. You deserve the best tools and features to connect with your communities on a platform that prioritizes the easy discoverability of high-quality content. This is an invigorating time for Tumblr, and we couldn’t be more excited about our current strategy.

[i-am-joseph-dunphy]

Not terribly reassuring :)

I already have 15 followers, which I guess wouldn’t be bad a blog on which I have posted almost no content, so far. “They must like my work, elsewhere,” I’d like to think, but out of the 15, only two users are visible to me, and they both run porn accounts.

What I’m gathering from this in that the Internet thinks I’m an incel, maybe because I’ve never posted a photo of myself online? Not that I’m going to, with the number of death threats I’ve gotten. Not that I suppose that I should take this personally, anyway, given how many incels are online, but no, I am never going to knowingly follow a porn account. I might be tricked into it if the porn peddler carried a lot of non-porn content for a while, but I’d never seek something like that out.

The only two people I want to see having sex are me and the woman I’m dating at the time. Who would be nobody at the moment, but that has changed before and it will change again, so please, no more shaking bosoms or squirting liquid. Porn makes ugly that which nature made beautiful, in a way that at time seems to suggest deep hatred on the part of the viewer toward she who is the inaccessible object of his desires.

This is not something I’d ever want to see. Is there any way to get these people to go away?

[i-am-joseph-dunphy]

Is it wrong that I’m cheering for the shark?

Jaws, Still Hungry - Update

There aren’t too many places where I posted this updated version of my original piece, figured I’d start sending it out.

[i-am-joseph-dunphy]

Oh, that’s strange

The titles for my blog posts aren’t visible. I must have accidentally removed something that I meant to leave in.

Good thing the minimal theme is still offered. When I have time, I can re-install it and get the look and feel I intended.

Note: Post relocated from here.

[i-am-joseph-dunphy]

I have followers?

Cool. I’m still deciding what to do with my blog. About the only thing I’ve firmly decided (with some unhappiness) is that no static homepage will be associated with it. This is going to result in a real loss of creative freedom for me, but there was nothing else to do. I’ve had homepages vanish for no good reason, over and over, and every time I end up having to move, I get to read through a large number of 60 page long lawyer written user agreements that, in the end, the companies ignore anyway, as they go ahead and do any destructive thing they feel like.

Listen to my mood. I’ll be back in a few weeks, when I can do something other than complain. Meanwhile, I’m going to be out enjoying the weather and hope you are doing the same. We’ll have plenty of time to be indoors in a few months. Unless you live in Australia, in which case, sorry, but that’s what you get for living in the wrong hemisphere.

Note: Post relocated from here.

[i-am-joseph-dunphy]

Not to complain ... actually ...

Yes, to complain. Tumblr keeps asking me about blogs and whether or not I’d like to follow them. The problem is that they keep asking me about porn. I’m not a fan.

I’ve got to see what I can do to put an end to this.

Update: I found the problem. One of the users Tumblr had first asked me about was mrugen84. The moment I stopped following that person, my dashboard became a lot less stomach turning.

Note: Post relocated from here.

[i-am-joseph-dunphy]

Not sure, yet

This is the plan: I’m setting up a number of blogs which I’m going to put into a Darwinian struggle against each other. All of these blogs will be based some of my interests, the mix of interests been seen and the approach to the material varying from blog to blog. Each would be something I could be excited about writing for a while, but I’m not going to be posting to all of them on a regular basis, indefinitely. There aren’t enough hours in the day.

What I’m going to do is develop each blog, give it its own personality, and then see what people link to. In this way, in this sense, I’ll let the readership decide which of my efforts will become priorities and which will fall by the wayside. Some things are a given, because I’m the one writing this: Mathematics, Cooking, Fiction Writing, Photography, Theater and Judaism come to mind. Some things will probably be absent: Politics and Internet Drama. Also, you won’t be hearing much about my personal life. If you know me in the real world, you know about all of that already, and if you don’t, why would you care?

Not that I’ve absolutely never raised the matter online, but in blogging, I try to stick with matters of more general interest than the evil that my relatives do. Not that I have anybody in mind, and she knows who she is, anyway. This way, even the hosting companies for the blogs that I end up posting to very infrequently will still see some return on their investment. They’ll be left with a body of writing of what I hope will be some merit, about matters of enduring interest. If they have the sense to put some sort of advertising on the site, they should be getting clicks and revenue. If they find some other way of monetarizing the site, and there’s something else I need to do to play my part in making that happen, perhaps we can talk about that, too.

I’m not sure what this blog is going to be about, yet. Conditions are chaotic in my life, at the moment, and I’m still organizing my notes, but this will pass. I am amused to see that even before my first post, I had three followers. I hope they will not be disappointed.

Note: Post relocated from here.