#I still say if automattic expected to make a profit off this place

[shadowmaat]

The CorpSpeak makes it hard to trust anything tumblr is saying right now. Sure, reverse-chrono feeds aren't going anywhere (yet), but given all the hype about algorithmic content I wouldn't be terribly surprised if they pull another tumblr live and make it so you have to "snooze" the FYP feed on a weekly basis. After all, reverse-chrono is an "outdated" way of doing things, right?

Even leaving the feed view aside, though, there are still a lot of issues going on, as mbfgl details above. SO MANY PEOPLE have addressed what's really wrong with tumblr, but I don't trust our corporate overlords to actually do anything about it. Or at least not in a way that actually improves things for the userbase.

Sure, maybe they'll make improvements to the search feature, but is the aim to make results more accurate? Or just more algorithmically curated?

I don't expect accessibility to be fixed at all. They've already shown a complete lack of interest in fixing the pic-resizing issue (I mean the "update") in the app and I really can't see them spending any money to improve readability, access, navigation, etc. for a "small portion" of the userbase.

I also don't expect them to do anything about the hate groups and harassment blogs flourishing on here. Nothing has been done until now, so why start? Especially since hate groups and serial harassers still bring in revenue, and achieving a profit is all that matters. Which is another reason they'll never let us permanently shut off tumblr live even though 98% of us have begged them to do that.

I'll also say that if tumblr starts spamming me with notifications, stuff they (or their algorithm) think I might like, things that are popular outside my bubble, and other such nonsense then I, too, will be blocking the hell out of that crap and using whatever scripts I need to keep it out of my face, out of my inbox, and off my dash.

tumblr also needs to understand that "content" (to use their term) is what we, the users create. We're writing stories, we're making art, we're generating memes and shitposts and taking ridiculous dives into left field. So when they talk about wanting to "deliver high-quality content" and express concerns about users having a "bad content experience" it makes me nervous. Who determines the quality of the content? And what happens if a blog is deemed to contain "bad content?" Are they gonna get throttled? Shadowbanned? Told to shape up or ship out? Tumblr is (or was) a place to relax, not a place where you're obligated to create "good" posts or risk your stuff not showing up anywhere.

Look, tumblr is supposed to be my comfy place. I've been here since 2011 and weathered a shitton of changes, but if the current owners are planning to turn the site into a bland, homogenized version of every other social platform out there (with all their inherent hazards) where I'm expected to sell myself in order to "do numbers," then I'm just gonna finish brushing the dust off my pillowfort blog. It's still safe to be a backwater blog over there and they don't have any corporate overlords or advertising execs to appease.

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.

[suzanneshannon]

<![CDATA[ Nothing Fails Like Success ]]>

A family buys a house they can’t afford. They can’t make their monthly mortgage payments, so they borrow money from the Mob. Now they’re in debt to the bank and the Mob, live in fear of losing their home, and must do whatever their creditors tell them to do.

Welcome to the internet, 2019.

Buying something you can’t afford, and borrowing from organizations that don’t have your (or your customers’) best interest at heart, is the business plan of most internet startups. It’s why our digital services and social networks in 2019 are a garbage fire of lies, distortions, hate speech, tribalism, privacy violations, snake oil, dangerous idiocy, deflected responsibility, and whole new categories of unpunished ethical breaches and crimes.

From optimistically conceived origins and message statements about making the world a better place, too many websites and startups have become the leading edge of bias and trauma, especially for marginalized and at-risk groups.

Why (almost) everything sucks

Twitter, for instance, needs a lot of views for advertising to pay at the massive scale its investors demand. A lot of views means you can’t be too picky about what people share. If it’s misogynists or racists inspiring others who share their heinous beliefs to bring back the 1930s, hey, it’s measurable. If a powerful elected official’s out-of-control tweeting reduces churn and increases views, not only can you pay your investors, you can even take home a bonus. Maybe it can pay for that next meditation retreat.

You can cloak this basic economic trade-off in fifty layers of bullshit—say you believe in freedom of speech, or that the antidote to bad speech is more speech—but the fact is, hate speech is profitable. It’s killing our society and our planet, but it’s profitable. And the remaining makers of Twitter—the ones whose consciences didn’t send them packing years ago—no longer have a choice. The guy from the Mob is on his way over, and the vig is due.

Not to single out Twitter, but this is clearly the root cause of its seeming indifference to the destruction hate speech is doing to society…and will ultimately do to the platform. (But by then Jack will be able to afford to meditate full-time.)

Other companies do other evil things to pay their vig. When you owe the Mob, you have no choice. Like sell our data. Or lie about medical research.

There are internet companies (like Basecamp, or like Automattic, makers of WordPress.com, where I work) that charge money for their products and services, and use that money to grow their business. I wish more internet companies could follow that model, but it’s hard to retrofit a legitimate business model to a product that started its life as free.

And there are even some high-end news publications, such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, that survive on a combination of advertising and flexible paywalls. But these options are not available to most digital publications and businesses.

Return with me to those Halcyon days…

Websites and internet startups used to be you and your friends making cool stuff for your other friends, and maybe building new friendships and even small communities in the process. (Even in 2019, that’s still how some websites and startups begin—as labors of love, fashioned by idealists in their spare time.)

Because they are labors of love; because we’ve spent 25 years training people to believe that websites, and news, and apps, and services should be free; because, when we begin a project, we can scarcely believe anyone will ever notice or care about it—for these reasons and more, the things we make digitally, especially on the web, are offered free of charge. We labor on, excited by positive feedback, and delighted to discover that, if we keep at it, our little community will grow.

Most such labors of love disappear after a year or two, as the creators drift out of touch with each other, get “real” jobs, fall in love, start families, or simply lose interest due to lack of attention from the public or the frustrations of spending weekends and holidays grinding away at an underappreciated site or app while their non-internet friends spend those same hours either having fun or earning money.

Along came money

But some of these startup projects catch on. And when they do, a certain class of investor smells ROI. And the naive cofounders, who never expected their product or service to really get anywhere, can suddenly envision themselves rich and Zuckerberg-famous. Or maybe they like the idea of quitting their day job, believing in themselves, and really going for it. After all, that is an empowering and righteous vision.

Maybe they believe that by taking the initial investment, they can do more good—that their product, if developed further, can actually help people. This is often the motivation behind agreeing to an initial investment deal, especially in categories like healthcare.

Or maybe the founders are problem solvers. Existing products or services in a given category have a big weakness. The problem solvers are sure that their idea is better. With enough capital, and a slightly bigger team, they can show the world how to do it right. Most inventions that have moved humankind forward followed exactly this path. It should lead to a better world (and it sometimes does). It shouldn’t produce privacy breaches and fake medicine and election-influencing bots and all the other plagues of our emerging digital civilization. So why does it?

Content wants to be paid

Primarily it is because these businesses have no business model. They were made and given away free. Now investors come along who can pay the founders, buy them an office, give them the money to staff up, and even help with PR and advertising to help them grow faster.

Now there are salaries and insurance and taxes and office space and travel and lecture tours and sales booths at SXSW, but there is still no charge for the product.

And the investor seeks a big return.

And when the initial investment is no longer enough to get the free-product company to scale to the big leagues, that’s when the really big investors come in with the really big bucks. And the company is suddenly famous overnight, and “everybody” is using the product, and it’s still free, and the investors are still expecting a giant payday.

Like I said—a house you can’t afford, so you go into debt to the bank and the Mob.

The money trap

Here it would be easy to blame capitalism, or at least untrammeled, under-regulated capitalism, which has often been a source of human suffering—not that capitalism, properly regulated, can’t also be a force for innovation which ameliorates suffering. That’s the dilemma for our society, and where you come down on free markets versus governmental regulation of businesses should be an intellectual decision, but these days it is a label, and we hate our neighbors for coming down a few degrees to the left or right of us. But I digress and oversimplify, and this isn’t a complaint about late stage capitalism per se, although it may smell like one.

No, the reason small companies created by idealists too frequently turn into consumer-defrauding forces for evil has to do with the amount of profit each new phase of investor expects to receive, and how quickly they expect to receive it, and the fact that the products and services are still free. And you know what they say about free products.

Nothing fails like success

A friend who’s a serial entrepreneur has started maybe a dozen internet businesses over the span of his career. They’ve all met a need in the marketplace. As a consequence, they’ve all found customers, and they’ve all made a profit. Yet his investors are rarely happy.

“Most of my startups have the decency to fail in the first year,” one investor told him. My friend’s business was taking in several million dollars a year and was slowly growing in staff and customers. It was profitable. Just not obscenely so.

And internet investors don’t want a modest return on their investment. They want an obscene profit right away, or a brutal loss, which they can write off their taxes. Making them a hundred million for the ten million they lent you is good. Losing their ten million is also good—they pay a lower tax bill that way, or they use the loss to fold a company, or they make a profit on the furniture while writing off the business as a loss…whatever rich people can legally do under our tax system, which is quite a lot.

What these folks don’t want is to lend you ten million dollars and get twelve million back.

You and I might go, “Wow! I just made two million dollars just for being privileged enough to have money to lend somebody else.” And that’s why you and I will never have ten million dollars to lend anybody. Because we would be grateful for it. And we would see a free two million dollars as a life-changing gift from God. But investors don’t think this way.

We didn’t start the fire, but we roasted our weenies in it

As much as we pretend to be a religious nation, our society worships these investors and their profits, worships companies that turn these profits, worships above all the myth of overnight success, which we use to motivate the hundreds of thousands of workers who will work nights and weekends for the owners in hopes of cashing in when the stock goes big.

Most times, even if the stock does go big, the owner has found a way to devalue it by the time it does. Owners have brilliant advisers they pay to figure out how to do those things. You and I don’t.

A Christmas memory

I remember visiting San Francisco years ago and scoring an invitation to Twitter’s Christmas party through a friend who worked there at the time. Twitter was, at the time, an app that worked via SMS and also via a website. Period.

Some third-party companies, starting with my friends at Iconfactory, had built iPhone apps for people who wanted to navigate Twitter via their newfangled iPhones instead of the web. Twitter itself hadn’t publicly addressed mobile and might not even have been thinking about it.

Although Twitter was transitioning from a fun cult thing—used by bloggers who attended SXSW Interactive in 2007—to an emerging cultural phenomenon, it was still quite basic in its interface and limited in its abilities. Which was not a bad thing. There is art in constraint, value in doing one thing well. As an outsider, if I’d thought about it, I would have guessed that Twitter’s entire team consisted of no more than 10 or 12 wild-eyed, sleep-deprived true believers.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I showed up at the Christmas party and discovered I’d be sharing dinner with hundreds of designers, developers, salespeople, and executives instead of the handful I’d naively anticipated meeting. (By now, of course, Twitter employs many thousands. It’s still not clear to an outsider why so many workers are needed.)

But one thing is clear: somebody has to pay for it all.

Freemium isn’t free

Employees, let alone thousands of them, on inflated Silicon Valley engineer salaries, aren’t free. Health insurance and parking and meals and HR and travel and expense accounts and meetups and software and hardware and office space and amenities aren’t free. Paying for all that while striving to repay investors tenfold means making a buck any way you can.

Since the product was born free and a paywall isn’t feasible, Twitter must rely on that old standby: advertising. Advertising may not generate enough revenue to keep your hometown newspaper (or most podcasts and content sites) in business, but at Twitter’s scale, it pays.

It pays because Twitter has so many active users. And what keeps those users coming back? Too often, it’s the dopamine of relentless tribalism—folks whose political beliefs match and reinforce mine in a constant unwinnable war of words with folks whose beliefs differ.

Of course, half the antagonists in a given brawl may be bots, paid for in secret by an organization that wants to make it appear that most citizens are against Net Neutrality, or that most Americans oppose even the most basic gun laws, or that our elected officials work for lizard people. The whole system is broken and dangerous, but it’s also addictive, and we can’t look away. From our naive belief that content wants to be free, and our inability to create businesses that pay for themselves, we are turning our era’s greatest inventions into engines of doom and despair.

Your turn

So here we are. Now what do we do about it?

It’s too late for current internet businesses (victims of their own success) that are mortgaged to the hilt in investor gelt. But could the next generation of internet startups learn from older, stable companies like Basecamp, and design products that pay for themselves via customer income—products that profit slowly and sustainably, allowing them to scale up in a similarly slow, sustainable fashion?

The self-payment model may not work for apps and sites that are designed as modest amusements or communities, but maybe those kinds of startups don’t need to make a buck—maybe they can simply be labors of love, like the websites we loved in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Along those same lines, can the IndieWeb, and products of IndieWeb thinking like Micro.blog, save us? Might they at least provide an alternative to the toxic aspects of our current social web, and restore the ownership of our data and content? And before you answer, RTFM.

On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram? Tantek Çelik thinks so, and he’s been right about the web for nearly 30 years. (For more about what Tantek thinks, listen to our conversation in Episode № 186 of The Big Web Show.) Are these approaches mere whistling against a hurricane? Are most web and internet users content with how things are? What do you think? Share your thoughts on your personal website (dust yours off!) or (irony ahoy!) on your indie or mainstream social networks of choice using hashtag #LetsFixThis. I can’t wait to see what you have to say.

published first on https://deskbysnafu.tumblr.com/