#platform economics

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

In “Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare: An Empirical Investigation,” a trio of business researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Pamplin College investigate the difference between the goods purchased through highly targeted online ads and just plain web-searches, and conclude social media ads push overpriced junk:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4398428

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/08/late-stage-sea-monkeys/#jeremys-razors

Specifically, stuff that’s pushed to you via targeted ads costs an average of 10 percent more, and it significantly more likely to come from a vendor with a poor rating from the Better Business Bureau. This may seem trivial and obvious, but it’s got profound implications for media, commercial surveillance, and the future of the internet.

Writing in the New York Times, Julia Angwin — a legendary, muckraking data journalist — breaks down those implications. Angwin builds a case study around Jeremy’s Razors, a business that advertises itself as a “woke-free” shaving solution for manly men:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/opinion/online-advertising-privacy-data-surveillance-consumer-quality.html

Jeremy’s Razors spends a fucking fortune on ads. According to Facebook’s Ad Library, the company spent $800,000 on FB ads in March, targeting fathers of school-age kids who like Hershey’s, ultimate fighting, hunting or Johnny Cash:

https://pluralistic.net/jeremys-targeting

Anti-woke razors are an objectively, hilariously stupid idea, but that’s not the point here. The point is that Jeremy’s has to spend $800K/month to reach its customers, which means that it either has to accept $800K less in profits, or make it up by charging more and/or skimping on quality.

Targeted advertising is incredibly expensive, and incredibly lucrative — for the ad-tech platforms that sit between creative workers and media companies on one side, and audiences on the other. In order to target ads, ad-tech companies have to collect deep, nonconsensual dossiers on every internet user, full of personal, sensitive and potentially compromising information.

The switch to targeted ads was part of the enshittification cycle, whereby companies like Facebook and Google lured in end-users by offering high-quality services — Facebook showed you the things the people you asked to hear from posted, and Google returned the best search results it could find.

Eventually, those users became locked in. Once all our friends were on Facebook, we held each other hostage, each unable to leave because the others were there. Google used its access to the capital markets to snuff out any rival search companies, spending tens of billions every year to be the default on Apple devices, for example.

Once we were locked in, the tech giants made life worse for us in order to make life better for media companies and advertisers. Facebook violated its promise to be the privacy-centric alternative to Myspace, where our data would never be harvested; it switched on mass surveillance and created cheap, accurate ad-targeting:

https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1128876?ln=en

Google fulfilled the prophecy in its founding technical document, the Pagerank paper: “advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They, too, offered cheap, highly targeted ads:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Facebook and Google weren’t just kind to advertisers — they also gave media companies and creative workers a great deal, funneling vast quantities of traffic to both. Facebook did this by cramming media content into the feeds of people who hadn’t asked to see it, displacing the friends’ posts they had asked to see. Google did it by upranking media posts in search results.

Then we came to the final stage of the enshittification cycle: having hooked both end-users and business customers, Facebook and Google withdrew the surpluses from both groups and handed them to their own shareholders. Advertising costs went up. The share of ad income paid to media companies went down. Users got more ads in their feeds and search results.

Facebook and Google illegally colluded to rig the ad-market with a program called Jedi Blue that let the companies steal from both advertisers and media companies:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/google-meta-jedi-blue-eu-uk-antitrust-probes/

Apple blocked Facebook’s surveillance on its mobile devices, but increased its own surveillance of Iphone and Ipad users in order to target ads to them, even when those users explicitly opted out of spying:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Today, we live in the enshittification end-times, red of tooth and claw, where media companies’ revenues are dwindling and advertisers’ costs are soaring, and the tech giants are raking in hundreds of billions, firing hundreds of thousands of workers, and pissing away tens of billions on stock buybacks:

https://doctorow.medium.com/mass-tech-worker-layoffs-and-the-soft-landing-1ddbb442e608

As Angwin points out, in the era before behavioral advertising, Jeremy’s might have bought an ad in Deer & Deer Hunting or another magazine that caters to he-man types who don’t want woke razors; the same is true for all products and publications. Before mass, non-consensual surveillance, ads were based on content and context, not on the reader’s prior behavior.

There’s no reason that ads today couldn’t return to that regime. Contextual ads operate without surveillance, using the same “real-time bidding” mechanism to place ads based on the content of the article and some basic parameters about the user (rough location based on IP address, time of day, device type):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#contextual-ads

Context ads perform about as well as behavioral ads — but they have a radically different power-structure. No media company will ever know as much about a given user as an ad-tech giant practicing dragnet surveillance and buying purchase, location and finance data from data-brokers. But no ad-tech giant knows as much about the context and content of an article as the media company that published it.

Context ads are, by definition, centered on the media company or creative worker whose work they appear alongside of. They are much harder for tech giants to enshittify, because enshittification requires lock-in and it’s hard to lock in a publication who knows better than anyone what they’re publishing and what it means.

We should ban surveillance advertising. Period. Companies should not be allowed to collect our data without our meaningful opt-in consent, and if that was the standard, there would be no data-collection:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/22/myob/#adtech-considered-harmful

Remember when Apple created an opt out button for tracking, more than 94 percent of users clicked it (the people who clicked “yes” to “can Facebook spy on you?” were either Facebook employees, or confused):

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-privacy-change-will-cost-10-billion-this-year.html

Ad-targeting enables a host of evils, like paid political disinformation. It also leads to more expensive, lower-quality goods. “A Raw Deal For Consumers,” Sumit Sharma’s new Consumer Reports paper, catalogs the many other costs imposed on Americans due to the lack of tech regulation:

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/A-Raw-Deal-for-US-Consumers_March-2023.pdf

Sharma describes the benefits that Europeans will shortly enjoy thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, from lower prices to more privacy to more choice, from cloud gaming on mobile devices to competing app stores.

However, both the EU and the US — as well as Canada and Australia — have focused their news industry legislating on misguided “link taxes,” where tech giants are required to pay license fees to link to and excerpt the news. This is an approach grounded in the mistaken idea that tech giants are stealing media companies’ content — when really, tech giants are stealing their money:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/18/news-isnt-secret/#bid-shading

Creating a new pseudocopyright to control who can discuss the news is a terrible idea, one that will make the media companies beholden to the tech giants at a time when we desperately need deep, critical reporting on the tech sector. In Canada, where Bill C-18 is the latest link tax proposal in the running to become law, we’re already seeing that conflict of interest come into play.

As Jesse Brown and Paula Simons — a veteran reporter turned senator — discuss on the latest Canadaland podcast, the Toronto Star’s sharp and well-reported critical series on the tech giants died a swift and unexplained death immediately after the Star began receiving license fees for tech users’ links and excerpts from its reporting:

https://www.canadaland.com/paula-simons-bill-c-18/

Meanwhile, in Australia, the proposed “news bargaining code” stampeded the tech giants into agreeing to enter into “voluntary” negotiations with the media companies, allowing Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp to claim the lion’s share of the money, and then conduct layoffs across its newsrooms.

While in France, the link tax depends on publishers integrating with Google Showcase, a product that makes Google more money from news content and makes news publishers more dependent on Google:

https://www.politico.eu/article/french-competition-authority-greenlights-google-pledges-over-paying-news-publishers/

A link tax only pays for so long as the tech giants remain dominant and continue to extract the massive profits that make them capable of paying the tax. But legislative action to fix the ad-tech markets, like Senator Mike Lee’s ad-tech breakup bill (cosponsored by both Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!) would shift power to publishers, and with it, money:

https://www.lee.senate.gov/2023/3/the-america-act

With ad-tech intermediaries scooping up 50% or more of every advertising dollar, there is plenty of potential to save news without the need for a link tax. If unrigging the ad-tech market drops the platforms’ share of advertising dollars to a more reasonable 10%, then the advertisers and publishers could split the remainder, with advertisers spending 20% less and publishers netting 20% more.

Passing a federal privacy law would end surveillance advertising at the stroke of a pen, shifting the market to context ads that let publishers, not platforms, call the shots. As an added bonus, the law would stop Tiktok from spying on Americans, and also end Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft’s spying to boot:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/30/tik-tok-tow/#good-politics-for-electoral-victories

Mandating competition in app stores — as the Europeans are poised to do — would kill Google and Apple’s 30% “app store tax” — the percentage they rake off of every transaction from every app on Android and Ios. Drop that down to the 2–5% that the credit cards charge, and every media outlet’s revenue-per-subscriber would jump by 25%.

Add to that an end-to-end rule for tech giants requiring them to deliver updates from willing receivers to willing senders, so every newsletter you subscribed to would stay out of your spam folder and every post by every media company or creator you followed would show up in your feed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

That would make it impossible for tech giants to use the sleazy enshittification gambit of forcing creative workers and media companies to pay to “boost” their content (or pay $8/month for a blue tick) just to get it in front of the people who asked to see it:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

The point of enshittification is that it’s bad for everyone except the shareholders of tech monopolists. Jeremy’s Razors are bad, winning a 2.7 star rating out of five:

https://www.facebook.com/JeremysRazors/reviews

The company charges more for these substandard razors, and you are more likely to find out about them, because of targeted, behavioral ads. These ads starve media companies and creative workers and make social media and search results terrible.

A link tax is predicated on the idea that we need Big Tech to stay big, and to dribble a few crumbs for media companies, compromising their ability to report on their deep-pocketed beneficiaries, in a way that advantages the biggest media companies and leaves small, local and independent press in the cold.

By contrast, a privacy law, ad-tech breakups, app-store competition and end-to-end delivery would shatter the power of Big Tech and shift power to users, creative workers and media companies. These are solutions that don’t just keep working if Big Tech goes away — they actually hasten that demise! What’s more, they work just as well for big companies as they do for independents.

Whether you’re the New York Times or you’re an ex-Times reporter who’s quit your job and now crowdfunds to cover your local school board and town council meetings, shifting control and the share of income is will benefit you, whether or not Big Tech is still in the picture.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: freeimageslive.co.uk (modified) http://www.freeimageslive.co.uk/free_stock_image/using-mobile-phone-jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

[Image ID: A man's hand holds a mobile phone. Its screen displays an Instagram ad. The ad has been replaced with a slice of a vintage comic book 'small ads' page.]

[myblogspro]

Platform Economics

Platform Economics is based on a series of contributions the author made to the new field of multisided platform economics, and its application to business strategy and antitrust economics, between 2002 and 2011. After presenting the general framework and empirical evidence on the scope of platform businesses in the economy the book presents detailed applications to the digital economy, payment systems, and software platforms.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Transphobia is hate speech.

We do not use the phrase ‘hate speech’ lightly. When we describe something as ‘hate speech’ we are talking about speech qualitatively different from mere bigotry, prejudice or ignorance. Hate speech is a weapon, wielded against the marginalised. Hate speech serves, constructs or reinforces systems of oppression that operate upon its targets. Hate speech is characterised by an attempt to dehumanise and delegitimise the very existence of its target, and in this sense it is ultimately eliminationist. By dehumanising its targets, hate speech encourages and supports further violence, marginalisation and oppression.

At its core, transphobia denies the legitimacy and reality of sex and gender diverse peoples’ experience of gender. It is worth highlighting the extreme consequence of this denial. Trans people face extremely high levels of homelessness, poverty, physical and sexual violence, and social ostracism. Other systems of oppression, such as sexism and racism, deny the humanity, intelligence and worth of their targets. Transphobic attacks, in denying the reality of trans peoples’ experience of gender, in effect deny that trans people even exist.

Transphobia is advanced in our midst by those claiming to be radical feminists. Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists portray trans people as gender ‘imposters’ and argue that they undermine feminist organising. This is often accompanied by the intentional misgendering and involuntary outing of individual trans people. Through their actions and ideas, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists promote discrimination, bullying and create the ideological basis for the further oppression of an already marginalised group of people

While these ideas are often put forward under the guise of feminism, they are no part of a genuinely libertatory feminist or anarchist movement. Those advocating transphobia must be confronted and rejected in the same manner we should confront and reject racists, homophobes and misogynists. We must deny those advocating hate speech any legitimacy in our midst.

Anarchist Affinity calls on all other anarchist groups and individuals to join us in rejecting transphobia by refusing to provide a platform to any person or group advancing transphobic hate speech, and by refusing to share a platform with persons perpetuating transphobia.

[trendynewsnow]

Concerns Over Kamala Harris's Political Strategy Among Democrats

Kamala Harris’s Political Strategy Raises Concerns Among Democrats As Vice President Kamala Harris seeks to broaden her appeal toward the political center, a growing number of Democrats express unease about her approach. They worry that in her quest to win over moderates who remain skeptical of former President Donald J. Trump, she may be risking the enthusiasm of progressive and working-class…

[somerandomg33k]

Do you know that you need money for Gas and Groceries? Well, yea, you do. And the Democrats isn't going to change that. Maybe they will help you if you need help. But only if you past the "means testing." That is usually the Democrats plan.

[faaun]

oh my god ! haha . anyway a bit buzzed perhaps. anyway here's what happened on the date

[elbiotipo]

this is more of a musing rather than a take, but this whole US vs. TikTok thing is rather revealing to me as of why all the major social media and tech companies are US based. Because if competitors arise elsewhere, they do their best to choke them.

It's interesting that in a supposed global and decentralized internet, we are all beholden to US companies and laws.

[divinekangaroo]

I didn't expect studying MBA level economics would suddenly make me madly interested in politics. It's like the only thing I've ever read/considered that has given politics the contextual layer and reality to make it real and interesting to me.

[gigantic-spider]

November 2023 TTRPG Crowdfunding Retrospective

I recently became curious about the state of TTRPG crowdfunding (full transparency, it's partially because I am gearing up for a ZineMonth 2024 project *shameless plug*). How much money is actually being made? Who's making it? What are they making? And how many people are backing?

I know that this information is tracked for ZiMo by a variety of people (scroll down for the credits), but what about the rest of the year? What about bigger projects?

Essentially: what about the real money being made?

Well here's the quick stats:

175 campaigns

10 Backerkit

1 Crowdfundr

164 Kickstarter

$10,275,932.48 raised

$1,256,857.98 on Backerkit

$455.00 on Crowdfundr

$9,018,619.50 on Kickstarter

Types of campaigns

7 accessories

2 Actual Play shows

41 adventures

2 advice books

8 campaign settings

1 magazine

58 supplements/expansions

56 systems

39 distinct systems used across all campaigns

66 campaigns (37.71%) used D&D 5e and raised $5,621,468.60 (54.71% of all money raised in November)

43 campaigns (24.57%) developed original systems and raised $751,587.43 (7.31% of all money raised in November)

To read the rest, check out my latest blog post (yes, on a different blog lol) or look at the raw data here.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

A quick read of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Wall Street Journal op-ed touting his recent elimination of the Walt Disney Co.’s self-governing status might leave you with the impression that the Florida Republican is a stout defender of the free market and the impartial rule of law.

The legislation he signed took down “an indefensible example of corporate welfare,” DeSantis wrote. It put an end to unfair state favoritism secured by “the company’s unrivaled political power,” broke with “old-guard corporate Republicanism” that “confer[red] special benefits on entrenched corporate interests” at the expense of the public, and will force Disney “to live under the same laws as… every other company in our state.”

But a closer look reveals that freeing Florida’s markets and leveling the legal playing field—as his defenders have framed the change—are not DeSantis’ concern here. By his own account, this isn’t a principled stand against corporatism, nor is his move against Disney primarily an economic project. His ends are explicitly political, and his means create market conditions just as unfair as the old corporatist dispensation he’s undone.

Disney’s previous arrangement, called the Reedy Creek Improvement District, began in 1967—a date whose relevance will become apparent momentarily. It let the company function as its own county government, administering local services (like road maintenance and sewage) and regulations (like zoning decisions and building codes) for roughly 39 square miles consisting mostly (but, technically, not entirely) of Disney properties. The district has the power to tax (which generally means levying taxes on Disney itself) and even to use eminent domain outside its own boundaries.

The bill DeSantis signed did make some substantive changes to how this district will function. It “ends Disney’s exemption from state regulatory reviews and approvals that other companies must go through,” as a Journal report summarized. “It also eliminates the company’s ability, under existing law, to build nuclear facilities, airports and toll roads, as well as to unilaterally make boundary changes to the company’s property.”

Some of this won’t matter much—Disney never exercised its right to build a nuclear reactor, and it retains the right “to build a fifth theme park, two additional water parks, and thousands of hotel rooms on 850 acres” between now and 2032. But after the law takes effect in June, the company will face higher costs and a greater regulatory burden. And local taxpayers will have to pay for infrastructure maintenance and other local government services like policing that previously went on the company’s tab.

But the most significant part of this legislation isn’t about infrastructure or economics. It’s about political power.

The new law doesn’t eliminate Disney’s special district. It renames it, and it takes authority to appoint the district’s five-member board of directors away from Disney—and gives it to Ron DeSantis.

Predictably, DeSantis promptly populated the board with political allies, and though their legal purview is mundane local services stuff, he openly envisioned them using the power they now wield over Disney to coerce the company into culture war concessions. “When you lose your way, you’ve got to have people that are going to tell you the truth,” DeSantis said. “I think all of these board members very much would like to see the type of entertainment that all families can appreciate.”

He emphasized that political logic in his op-ed, too. The “woke ascendancy” in American corporations is what forced him to reject the old GOP corporatism, DeSantis explained. “When corporations try to use their economic power to advance a woke agenda, they become political” actors, he said, and must be fought with political weapons.

The details of the new legislation reiterate how little this has to do with freedom or equality before the law despite DeSantis’ lip service to those ideas. When he first floated the idea of changing Disney’s status last year, he spoke of the state legislature terminating “all special districts that were enacted in Florida prior to 1968”—and Reedy Creek, recall, dates to 1967.

But as it turns out, terminating all pre-1968 special districts would affect a lot more than Disney.

As DeSantis acknowledged in the Journal op-ed, “special districts are common in Florida.” In fact, the state has more than 1,900 active special districts per the list currently available from the Florida Department of Economic Opportunity. Around 300 of them were created in 1967 or earlier, which is likely part of why the final legislation didn’t proceed along the lines DeSantis initially sketched.

On the contrary, the new law terminated exactly zero special districts, not even Disney’s. “Reedy Creek Improvement District shall continue to be a public corporation of this state and have perpetual existence,” the legislation declared. It simply reapportioned power away from Disney and to the state of Florida.

This isn’t a shift from bigger government to smaller, from control to freedom, from special privileges to fair play.

Maybe it’s accurate to say it’s a step away from corporatism, as Disney does seem to have enjoyed an easier path to development than nearby competitors. But it’s not a step toward any clear principle of liberty—the chosen solution wasn’t to give those competitors the same right to self-regulate—nor even toward meaningfully unmaking this weird public-private amalgam which half a century of Disney-Florida relations has birthed. If anything, should the new board successfully use its power of the purse to manipulate Disney programming, the state-corporate link will be stronger than ever.

You don’t have to disagree with DeSantis on culture war issues, or care about free markets, or, in the Governor’s phrase, return to “reflexively deferring to big business” to see the risk that entails.

As another GOP Governor, New Hampshire’s Chris Sununu, warned, if Republicans are “trying to beat the Democrats at being big-government authoritarians, remember what’s going to happen. Eventually, [Democrats will] have power… and then they’ll start penalizing conservative businesses and conservative nonprofits and conservative ideas.”

So they will. And nothing in this episode suggests DeSantis has real qualms about big, authoritarian government. He just wants it to do his bidding.

[drcyan]

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.

[revenuewiz]

RevenueWiz First Blogpost / Who are we? [EN]

Welcome to the RevenueWiz blog! 🚀✨

We're thrilled to have you here as we embark on our journey to empower individuals with the knowledge and tools necessary for achieving financial freedom. Founded in 2024, RevenueWiz has been dedicated to helping you navigate the complex world of affiliate marketing and trading, providing you with top-notch strategies and insights that can transform your financial future.

Who are we? 🤝

RevenueWiz is a small yet ambitious team, driven by curiosity and a passion for innovation. Though we may be few in number now, our sights are set on growth and expansion. We believe in the power of collaboration and are excited to grow together with you, our readers, and partners. 🌟

Our Expertise 📚

At RevenueWiz, we specialize in a diverse range of areas, ensuring that our affiliates can find the perfect niche for their interests and strengths:

Affiliate Marketing 📈: This is the cornerstone of our operations. We provide you with the best strategies to maximize your earnings through effective affiliate marketing techniques.

Trading 💹: From investment strategies to trading tips, we cover a wide array of topics designed to boost your earning potential and financial acumen.

Technology 💻: Stay ahead with the latest trends and innovations in the tech world, from gadgets to software.

Home and Decor 🏡: Explore stylish and practical solutions for your home, enhancing both functionality and aesthetic appeal.

Laptops and Gadgets 🖥️: We review and recommend the best tech products, ensuring you make informed decisions for your tech needs.

Outdoor Gear ⛺: From gardening tools to camping equipment, we have you covered for all your outdoor adventures.

Our Mission 🌐

To lead you on the path to financial freedom by providing reliable, actionable information and support. We believe that with the right knowledge, anyone can achieve their financial goals. We are committed to sharing valuable insights and the latest trends, all to help you stay informed and make the best decisions for your future.

Join Us on Our Journey 🚀

As a small, curious, and aspiring team, we're excited to grow and evolve with you. Our goal is to build a community where everyone can learn, share, and succeed together. Whether you're just starting out or are an experienced professional, RevenueWiz is here to support you every step of the way. 🤝

We believe in the power of collaboration and are looking forward to expanding our team and reaching new heights. Together, we can achieve great things and pave the way for a prosperous future.

Stay Tuned and Stay Empowered 🛤️

We’re excited to have you on this journey with us. Stay tuned for regular updates, insightful articles, and valuable resources that will help you stay ahead in the ever-evolving financial landscape. Connect with us, engage with our community, and let's journey together towards prosperity. 🌟

Thank you for joining us at the RevenueWiz blog. We’re excited to be part of your financial journey and can't wait to share more with you. 💬

[fieryfalcon]

When you look through the reams of slop across the internet, AI seems less like a terrifying apocalyptic machine-god, ready to drag us into a new era of tech, and more like the apotheosis of the smartphone age — the perfect marketer’s tool, precision-built to serve the disposable, lowest-common-denominator demands of the infinite scroll.

[todayworldnews2k21]

Analysis: The US economy could depend on McCarthy corralling his extremist Republican troops | CNN Politics

CNN  —  Millions of Americans could face massive consequences unless Speaker Kevin McCarthy can navigate out of a debt trap he has set for President Joe Biden that is instead threatening to capture his House Republicans. The California Republican traveled to Wall Street on Monday to deliver a fresh warning that the House GOP majority will refuse to lift a cap on government borrowing unless…

[somerandomg33k]

Small Businesses…. I have my opinions of Small Businesses as an Anarcho-Syndicalist. And I give said opinions as I read the Democratic Party Platform 2024 in their section on Small Businesses.

[esselte974]

The rise of teleworking and teletravel

The travel sector has been a major driver of change in recent years thanks to technology. It’s in these innovations that artificial intelligence, virtual reality and blockchain have been absolutely central to redefining travel. Platforms powered by artificial intelligence now offer personalized travel recommendations and carry out bookings while guaranteeing an exceptional experience. Thanks to…