Good Bye Tumbler: Tumblr Tumbles

I finally pulled the plug entirely on my blog over at Tumblr. I’m not exactly sure what Tumblr has become, but it isn’t a blogging platform any more, isn’t a social media platform.

The first blog I had was over at Tumblr and I was fairly active over there for many years. It was wildly popular at one time, and I liked it over there. It was a unique place. It was simple to write short entries, a few paragraphs long, shovel in some photos, and generally talk about anything you wanted with few, if any, restrictions on content. There were no intrusive ads being shoved in your face. There were a lot of thoughtful, interesting people. A lot of them were friendly, supportive. A lot of us using the service made some very good friends among the inhabitants of Tumblr. It had a commenting system that was easy to use, permitted people to respond easily to comments, fostering lengthy discussions.

Yes, it had it’s problems. It had the usual trolls, jackasses, jerks, etc. But generally speaking it was a fun, informative place to hang out. At it’s peak, Tumblr was seeing over 100 million new posts every day, and almost a quarter of a million new blogs were starting up every day. Now the number of new blogs starting up has fallen by more than half, and the number of new posts has fallen to 35 million.

How many people actually use the service? That’s almost impossible to find out. Tumblr seems to not make the number of active users public. Plus what exactly is a “user”? While I still have an account there, I’m not active any more. Haven’t been for some time. The situation is the same for most of the people I followed over there. Their accounts are still active, but they don’t bother posting anything any more. Considering that the number of new posts has dropped by two thirds, I’d suspect that the number of actual users has dwindled considerably as well.

Now, to make things even more interesting, the founder of Tumblr, David Karp, announced he is leaving.

What happened? Well, a lot of us who have seen the service falling apart blame it on Yahoo. Yahoo bought Tumblr in 2013 for $1.1 billion. Yahoo publicly promised it wouldn’t screw things up. But, of course, it did. Well, Yahoo already had a long track record of buying prosperous companies and running them into the ground through mismanagement, starving them of resources, and operating with a ‘profit at any cost’ philosophy that quickly destroyed the popularity of the services.

The problem with Tumblr was that while it was wildly successful, it also wasn’t making any money. Yahoo planned on changing that. They waited a while for the anger over the sale to die down and lull users into a false sense of security, and then started to tinker with things. They injected ads into people’s dashboards, utterly destroyed the comment system while claiming they were “improving” it, destroyed the messaging system, and even worse, enabled the abuse of the system by allowing people to deploy “bots”, automated systems that had the guise of being regular users but which instead were fake accounts set up by porn distributors, advertisers, etc. It’s added “enhancements” which rearrange the material that shows up on your dashboard so that it is no longer in chronological order, but now places what Tumblr considers to be the “best” content first, which means cute GIFs of kittens will be pushed to the top of your dash while the stuff you really want to see is shoved down to the bottom…

The whole atmosphere became increasingly difficult to deal with, even downright toxic. At the point I abandoned Tumblr entirely about 2/3s of my “followers” were bots because I gave up trying to weed them out. It wasn’t worth the effort.

Well, Verizon now owns the thing, and it doesn’t seem to know what to do with it either. With a declining user base the value of the service as an advertising platform is shrinking fast. The only thing that surprises me, really, is that Verizon hasn’t spun it off into an independent company again or sold it at a loss just to get out from under it.

I think the biggest mistake that was made was they tried to monetize Tumblr at the expense of the people who created the content that kept it going. It was the bloggers, the people who wrote the material, posted the pictures, created the artwork, that made Tumblr popular and who attracted new users to the service. And almost everything Yahoo did to “improve” the service seemed to destroy the atmosphere that had attracted the bloggers to begin with. About all that’s left over there now are “blogs” that are really nothing but thinly veiled advertising sites, the bots, and people who endlessly reblog content created by others.

I knew that Yahoo was not going to deal gently with Tumblr. It’s track record with other acquisitions, some of the things it’s CEO and others at the company said when they thought no one was listening, the pressures Yahoo was facing from investors as it continued to fail at pretty much everything it tried to do, everything was indicating that the future was not bright for Tumblr. The only thing that’s really surprised me is that it’s taken this long for it to get this bad over there.

This morning I was scrolling through my dash, and I realized that of all the blogs I followed over there, only about three are left, and they don’t post very often any longer. I was looking at endless re-blogs of other people’s material, photos I don’t care about, and realized this was pointless. I haven’t posted over there in ages. Why am I bothering?

So I pulled the plug, deleted my account, removed the shortcuts, killed the links. That’s it. I’m not going to put up with it any more.

Author: grouchyfarmer

Yes, I'm a former farmer. Sort of. I'm also an amateur radio operator, amateur astronomer, gardener, maker of furniture, photographer. View all posts by grouchyfarmer