#and also i can empathise with the requirement to be financially profitable and stable

[justepilepsy]

I am glad that you admit that the suggestion "just buy ad-free" comes off as dismissive. If I could afford it, I would buy ad-free for everyone in the epilepsy/photosensitivity community. The utmost I can do is to maybe gift a month every once in a while. Accessibility Features Should Never Be Locked Behind A Paywall. And ad-free isn't an accessibility feature to begin with. It would only fix a tiny scope of the actual problem (only removing the ads, but everything else flashing remains!) Since I have written my Thesis on Photosensitivity, warning labels and their functionality/non-functionality in media, I would like to suggest once more a variety of steps for tumblr, which would all work immensely to make this site more accessible, and by that a possible flagship-pioneer in photosensitivity safety. I would like to stress that e.g. Instagram is incredibly inaccessible in terms of photosensitivity and unsafe. You could simply gather an edge over other sites by striving for the highest possible accessibility of the site. 1. Fix the search function/tagging system. If I search for "epilepsy" i should not get any posts with the tag "epilepsy warning". 2. Implement "disable autoplay" for all animated content on all devices (desktop + mobile) Videos, gifs, ads. profile pictures,... An ad would then have to work simply based on a non-animated basis (e.g. a thumbnail that promotes the product in question instead of any animation when "disable autiplay"). 3. Offer a community label "flashing lights/Eyestrain". This would be one of the easiest way for users to self-moderate in a more accurate fashion and reduce the amount of flashing lights on this site. A lot of times users, especially new users, do not know how to tag flashing lights correctly, since there is a general lack of awareness in society. A community label would remove the struggle of having 20 tags to block in order to curate a safe dashboard and increase epilepsy/photosensitivity awareness by making it a visible option/label to use! 4. Flashing lights video filter (this may be a long-term project) TikTok has, while not perfect, a filter that notices extreme flashing lights in videos. Users can tell the settings to warn them, when there is a flashing lights video up ahead, the video will not play automatically when using the app. Accessibility is deeply tied to UI/UX. So if tumblr wants to increase its profitability and market share, and truly be a positive difference to social media, this is a key aspect that would make you not just attractive for companies who want to place ads, but also attract an even wider userbase and audience The fact that all big social media platforms, including Youtube, fail to provide an actual safe User Experience, is a chance they miss out on. Tumblr has probably the best!!! Epilepsy community I have seen on the web so far. While it is not made up of medical professionals, our community manages to uplift each other, share experiences and show each other again and again, that we are not alone in our struggles. This is the community side of things. If this website would also actually support us and the many other disability communities, who can also be marketed to, btw, it would surely make a difference. If you would like to figure out in how far the disabled community may end up being a profitable market (hurrdurr we live in a capitalistic society) it is worth reading into XBOX/Microsofts research regarding accessibility in Games. There is a huge untapped market in making technology and UX accessible and safe to use.

I watched the live with the CEO, here is the tl;dr

The good news:

Chronological dash is here to stay! Whether you have to toggle it weekly or new users default to “For you” was not elaborated on but at least that’s confirmed.

Custom themes are here to stay! Once again, may be buried for all I know but, for sure will remain an option.

Search updates are in the works!!!!

The neutral news:

Tumblr is seriously in the red financially and needs more support, Ad-free for example is not widely used

They would not comment on the suggestion to bring back NSFW behind a paywall (which we all know would get them a boatload of money)

They’re possibly going to add a donation system like Ao3 and Wikipedia.

They would “rather not” sell data to make up the costs

Most of staff are pre-2010 tumblr users including the CEO who joined in 2007, so they do actually use the site and have for a long time

The bad news:

Condensed reblogs/removing reblog chains is going forward. The reason cited was to meet “certain expectations” of users coming from other social media, which isn’t good.

Disability features (specifically turning off flashing ads for epileptics) was met with a request to purchase Ad-free

Overall it was more chill than I expected, @photomatt and @zingring seem to be far more in tune with the userbase than u/spez.