Even in its prime, Tumblr was never profitable. It was sold and resold to several companies who never had a clear vision for what to do with it, other than run ads to generate revenue. Its main draw was its users. For several years it was the social media platform for LGBTQ and fandoms, along with many niche interests.

Like Reddit, many users had a love-hate relationship with it, and as its policies grew more and more at odds with its power users, the communities which existed fell apart. Banning NSFW content and the heavy-handed automated moderation meant to enforce it was the final straw for me. AI was used to try to detect images of nudes, but tagged a huge amount of false positives such as pictures of animals or even sand dunes. I had my main blog incorrectly tagged as NSFW which made it harder to keep in contact or be discoverable by other users, so I quit. Reddit’s over-reactions to large subs being set to NSFW shows this is a pain point for them. u/spez has made it clear that he will push through whatever policies he wants, regardless of vocal feedback for the actual users of the site.

Tumblr still exists, but it’s a shell of its former self. I check in every so often. Only a handful of the blogs I followed are still active, mostly ones that didn’t interact much with others to begin with. Trending content is incredibly generic, even moreso than /all. Very few of these posts hit more than a few thousand “notes” (for comparison I, a fairly obscure blogger, had about 80,000 notes on my most viral post). When July 1 rolls around I expect Reddit will start to follow a similar pattern. The power users who haven’t left already will drop off the grid one by one until Reddit loses its center of gravity.

Further reading, first one with NSFW-ish photos

https://boingboing.net/2018/12/03/the-death-of-tumblr.html

https://mashable.com/article/how-tumblr-lost-its-way

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/opinion/tumblr-sold.html

  • Drops_of_dew@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I went from fearing the worst in reddit to wishing the worst in reddit.

    Knowing that people can rebuild another platform at a whim, as such the community here, restores my faith in humanity.

    It’s beautiful to watch Reddit burn, I’ve been going on it near daily for about 10 years now, it was my morning news paper, and now it’s becoming more obsolete than ever.

    I give thanks to all the rebels, developers/programmers, innovative thinkers and the people who are truly serious about restoring the true beauty of the internet.

    Fuck Reddit and fuck its malware and the dystopia it has become. Its a beautiful dumpster fire, and we all here have the best seats in the house 🍿