tumblr – grouchyfarmer

Tumblr, and the Ever Popular Misc. Stuff

I have to admit that I haven’t been keeping track of what’s been happening on the blogging/social media platform since I abandoned it years ago. I just completely lost interest in it. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the service had simply disappeared because I’d heard little about what was going on over there following Verizon’s decision to eliminate “adult” content on the service. Since probably 60% of the content on Tumblr might be considered “adult” in one way or another, it didn’t bode well for the survival of the service, so I just assumed it was going to go the way of dozens of other social media services and gradually fade away into nothing.

But Tumblr is once again back in the news. Verizon just sold Tumblr to Automattick Inc., the parent company of WordPress. When Yahoo bought Tumblr originally they paid $1.1 billion for the company. Automattick bought it off Version for — wait for it — less than $3 million according to The Verge.

How the hell does a company go from a value of over a billion dollars to less than three million? Well, it wasn’t easy. Yahoo did the best it could to kill the service off, and Verizon tried to nail the coffin shut and bury it.

“Tumblr is a marquee brand that has started movements, allowed for true identities to blossom and become home to many creative communities and fandoms,” Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan said in a statement. “We are proud of what the team has accomplished…”

Well, I’d be proud too. It isn’t everyone who can take a billion dollar company and drag it’s value down to the point where it’s worth less than a fancy house. Takes real talent to do that. (We really need a sarcasm font)

As for what WordPress is going to do with the thing, that’s anybody’s guess. From what I’ve been hearing even they aren’t sure what they’re going to do with it. I think they bought it more because it was cheap. Sort of like when you go to a garage sale and find that $500 piece of electronics you really wanted way back when being sold for $1 and you can’t resist buying it even though its obsolete and you don’t know what you’ll do with it.

Hemp

The whole hemp situation is just getting more and more silly. When it comes to hemp and agriculture I don’t think I’ve ever seen this much hype and nonsense being spouted by people who really should know better. I hear a lot of people proclaiming that hemp is going to “save” agriculture, despite the fact that no one seems to be able to actually make any money at it. At least not here in Wisconsin. Everyone I’ve heard of who has tried raising hemp here in Wisconsin so far has lost money on it. In some cases, they lost a lot of money on it.

And speaking of CBD, what a fiasco that’s turned into. Cannabidiol, or CBD, is being sold everywhere it seems. People are selling edible products laced with CBD (or what they claim is CBD) all over the place. There are supplements and food products and oils and lotions, even CBD products for pets for heaven’s sake. And all of them make various health claims. Depending on who you talk to, the stuff will cure everything from dandruff to cancer. And almost none of those claims are actually true. CBD seems to have some benefits for some types of epilepsy, and may be beneficial to help alleviate symptoms of arthritis, and that’s about it. Every other health claim you hear is unproven and quite probably an outright lie.

The other thing about CBD is that it isn’t legal to sell. At least not as it’s being sold by most places. Seriously. That link up there will take you to the FDA page that explains it. But to give you a summary, it is illegal to sell any food product, supplement or other product intended for human or animal consumption that contains CBD. The only exceptions are FDA approved drugs that contain the substance as part of their makeup, and there are only about three of those at the moment.

Why haven’t the feds gone after the places selling it? Well, they have, at least the more outrageous violators. But the rest, the FDA doesn’t have the money and other resources to go after everyone, especially when it’s being sold at every gas station, every convenience store, tattoo parlors, hardware stores…

The other problem is that you don’t know what the hell is actually in that CBD laced product you’re buying. There are no standards, no testing programs, no inspections, no nothing. So basically you have absolutely no idea what is actually in that stuff.

Antenna Update

If you remember from last time, I finally got the Gap Titan-DX vertical antenna up, but still didn’t have it functional because I didn’t have the right connectors for the coax. A trip down to the local Radio Shack (well, I call it that even though it isn’t really technically a Radio Shack any more) and a rummage around in the parts bins turned up the adaptor I needed, and it is officially on the air.

It still needs some tweaking. The SWR on some bands is higher than I really like, but I expected that. I haven’t yet tried to actually tune it by adjusting the stubs and it’s located right alongside of the garage and it’s aluminum rain gutters, which I’m sure isn’t helping things. Does it work? Oh, yeah! I hooked it to the Kenwood TS-990 with a Palstar auto-tuner, and it most definitely works very, very well. Mostly I’ve been using it with FT8 and holy cow, it gets out. It’s been giving me much better results than my OCFD antenna. I’ll put together a post specifically about the antenna with more details in the future.

ASF China Update

ASF (African Swine Fever) is sweeping through China no matter what they try to do to stop it. According to Rabobank (a huge multinational financial services company that specializes in agriculture) China will probably lose half or more of its pork production by the end of the year because of the disease. Just think about that for a moment – China is the largest producer of pork in the world, and it is facing losing half or even more of it’s pig population because of this disease. That’s going to have huge repercussions through the country’s entire economy.

Why is ASF so hard to stop? Because it is highly contagious (fortunately it doesn’t harm human beings), the virus can survive for a long time outside of the host animals, there is no treatment for it, there is no vaccine for it, and it kills almost all the pigs that come down with it. The only way to try to combat the disease is to try to prevent it from spreading, which is extremely hard to do.

That’s about it for now. Frankly I’m getting bored. It’s nice out and I could be out on the bike or puttering in the garden or playing radio, so I’m out of here 🙂

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.

Generic Stuff and Irritations

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Tumblr: Pulling the Plug At Last – I’ve had a blog over there for ages. I’ve put up with all of the nonsense they’ve pulled for far too long now. The company’s various attempts to make money off the service have done little except alienate the bloggers who made the service successful in the first place. Things have gotten much worse over the past year. Advertising is so invasive I can’t even read my dashboard without my ad blockers running full on. The service now seems to be in the process of being taken over by fake automated blogs that don’t have an actual person behind them. Most of these seem to be automated systems that “harvest”, so to speak, cute photos from Tumblr or other internet services, then offer them up on the blog, interspersed with dozens and dozens of fake posts that are links to advertising. The porn bots, the automated porn blogs that were “following” random blogs in the hopes of generating page hits were bad enough, but these new fake blogs are even worse. I’ve had about 50 new followers over there in the last couple of weeks and every single one of them has been one of these automated advertising systems.

I’ve had it with the whole mess over there. I’ll keep reading the blogs of people I follow over there, but I’m not going to be posting anything there any more.

Not sure what that means for this blog. You’ll probably see an increase in activity here. Maybe?

Amateur Radio Irritations Part One: “Contesting” or “Radio Sport” – The first time I heard someone use the term “radio sport” in amateur radio I almost fell over laughing. Until I realized they were serious. What they are trying to do is rebrand various contests as some kind of sport, and failing miserably. But I wanted to talk about contesting, didn’t I? So let’s get on with this.

Let me explain what contesting is in the amateur radio world for those of you who aren’t familiar with it. The basic idea is you have a limited amount of time, 48 hours, let us say, to contact as many other amateur radio operators as possible using a specific mode of operation; CW, SSB, digital, etc. The rules vary from one contest to another. Some are restricted to specific frequency allocations, some restricted to specific operators like the Rookie Roundup, etc. You get points for every contact, with some types of contact being points multipliers. And it’s just – well, it’s just silly. I’m sorry, but it just is.

The two print publications still catering to the amateur radio market, QST and CQ, make a Big Deal out of contesting. They claim it is wildly popular, fun, etc, etc, etc. And while it may be fun for those who enjoy that kind of thing, popular it is definitely not. One of the “big” contests was just reported on in the last QST magazine. They devoted four pages to the thing. How many participants did it actually have? About 4,500 if I remember right.

Now, there are something like three quarters of a million amateur radio operators in the US alone, so 4,500 participants world wide when there are around 750,000 operators in the US alone isn’t exactly popular by any stretch of the imagination. That’s a participation level of – what? About 0.006%?

Now don’t get me wrong. Contests are just fine and dandy if you get into that kind of thing. I can certainly see how someone might even enjoy it. But popular? I’m sorry, it just isn’t. When less than one percent of the total number of a particular group of people do an activity, it is not “popular” by any stretch of the imagination.

Amateur Radio Irritations Part Two: Own Worst Enemy – If you get on the amateur radio websites or read the letters in the magazines, there seems to be one question: Where the hell are all the new amateur radio licensees? We know they’re out there. People are getting licensed in droves. But you never hear any of them actually on the air. So where are they?

If my own experience is any indication, the biggest problem is that the amateur radio community isn’t exactly very welcoming to newcomers. I know there are many exceptions to this, but first impressions count, and when your first experiences are as difficult as mine were, well, you have to have a thick skin to deal with it.

Join a club, they tell you. Well, first of all, good luck even finding one. And if you do, chances are good you’ll have the same experience I did when I joined the Fox Valley club. I dutifully sent off my check, my email address, call sign, and all the other stuff they wanted, and heard — nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even a confirmation they got the check. The only reason I know they got it was because it was cashed. No email reply, no information about membership, nothing. Meetings were scheduled when I was working so I couldn’t get to those. Emails to them asking about my status never got a response.

The local ARES group was more responsive and more helpful. But the only thing they care about is emergency communications, an area where amateur radio is increasingly irrelevant and unwelcome, only ARES hasn’t figured that out yet.

If you dare to get on the air, especially down on HF, watch out. The very first contact I made on 10 meters was to someone out in California who spent ten minutes telling me I was an idiot, I was doing everything wrong, that I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, all because I hadn’t been required to learn morse code. A few days later I was talking to someone down on 75 meters when someone jumped in and launched into a long rant about how people like me were ruining amateur radio, how I was an idiot, didn’t know a resistor from a capacitor, how all us new operators couldn’t repair a piece of equipment to save our lives and had to buy everything we used. We dropped down to a different frequency and let him rant. He was still at it twenty minutes later.

I’ve been told that most newcomers don’t run into that kind of nonsense, that amateur radio is generally very welcoming. I was probably just very unlucky, at the wrong place and the wrong time. Perhaps. But it only takes one or two unsavory encounters like that to make people wonder if they should be looking at a different hobby.

The Future – So, what’s going to happen here at grouchyfarmer now that my other blog on Tumblr is no more? I’m not really sure yet. There will probably be more activity here in the future. Other than that I don’t know. yet.

Procrastination, Political Posts, Catching Up, Tumblr…

Procrastination

The problem with a non-commercial, privately funded blog like this, one that is as unfocused and rambling as this one is, is that there are no deadlines, no sense of urgency to get something written and posted. Don’t feel like writing? Fine. Don’t. No worries…

But it also means I tend to procrastinate terribly. This poor blog has sometimes sat here for weeks, maybe even a month or more, with nothing new appearing. And the only thing urging me to write something are feelings of guilt. Especially when the annual bill for keeping this thing up and running turned up in my email the other day. That’s always a shock. (Wait, what? How much am I paying for this thing? Why did I opt for the ‘business platinum’ package in the first place? Sheesh…)

The thing is, I hate deadlines. Decades ago I was a writer and editor for small market (very small) computer magazines and I came to loathe deadlines. But they were a fact of life. There were notes taped all over my computer with various dates and times, “drop dead” dates that had to be met or the magazine wouldn’t get to the printer in time, writers I had to call to find out where the article they’d promised was, last minute rewrites, getting the new ad from that software company and finding out it’s .25 inches taller than last month’s and having to scramble to try to cut two lines from an already dense technical article to try to make room…

No, I do not like deadlines. But they are sometimes necessary. Maybe I should set deadlines for this thing…

Dear mother of milk of magnesia, no. No no no no…

Political Posts

With the entire country having apparently gone stark, raving mad, I must admit that the temptation to join what seems to be about four hundred million self-appointed political experts and launch into lengthy and impassioned political rants is indeed lurking in the back of my head.

But, well, why? What good would it do to join the ranks of the outraged and turn this into yet another toxic and ultimately useless political blog? None, of course. All it would do is ratchet up my blood pressure, irritate you, attract trolls and other undesirables, and, in the long run, do absolutely no good at all.

screen-shot-2017-01-31-at-7-21-41-am — A Political Post

If you want political posts, here’s one for you. It’s a post. It’s political. Well, I think it’s political. I questioned this post very carefully and from various comments I suspect it’s an ardent supporter of the Bull Moose party. But it’s answers were very confusing. Mostly it was complaining about birds pooping on it.

Oh, wait, it’s not in the Bull Moose party, it was complaining about a bull moose that was using it to scratch its butt last week…

To be blunt, I am not going to turn this into a political rant. I hereby declare this to be a political free zone.

Maybe.

Tumblr

Ah, Tumblr, the blogging service I love to hate. Or hate to love. Or hate to hate. Or something like that.

Do you mind if, for a moment, I use strong language? No? Thanks

Tumblr is really pissing me off.

There, I said it. I’ve been reduced to expressing my irritation with vulgarity.

It seems like I’ve been on Tumblr since the end of the last ice age. I think I’m up to over 6,000 posts over there or something equally ridiculous. But it’s become so irritating…

I’ve had 30 new followers of the Tumblr blog over the last week. Of those, 21 were hard core porn blogs, almost certainly part of the infamous “pornbot” system operating on Tumblr. Eight were blatant advertising scams, filled with post after post of links leading to commercial advertising sites.

And one actual real person.

Seriously, only one was an actual real person.

And then there’s the advertising. Dear lord… I run ad blockers, security software, firewalls, etc. so when I’m on Tumblr about 99.9% of that crap is blocked before I can see it. But every once in a while I’ll have the blockers turned off for some reason and, oh, dear lord, it’s horrible. It’s like every scam, fraud and fly by night outfit in the world is advertising over there now. Ads for ambulance chasing “legal services”, ads for fraudulent “alternative” health products, ads for dietary supplements that claim to cure everything from bad breath to cancer…

Then there are the bots… A lot of us are convinced that the ten gazillion users Tumblr claims it has are a wee bit exaggerated. In actual fact there are only about 300 accounts by actual real people and all of the others are pornbots and spambots.

Some of us suspect that’s how Tumblr makes money, the bots serving up advertising to other bots, which in turn serve up ads to still more fake accounts, with Tumblr’s counters ticking them all off and counting them as legitimate hits when in actual fact it’s just an unending circle jerk of bots botting other bots…

And I’ve just run out of things to say

I suppose at this point I should come up with some pithy, insightful, thought provoking comment that would make you all nod and go “oh my I wish I’d thought of that” to wrap this all up. Sorry. Can’t think of one.

The Decline and Fall of Yahoo and The Death of Tumblr?

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If you follow the business news, you’ve probably heard about the problems of YaHoo, the former internet giant that has, through an extensive series of bad management decisions, questionable, high cost acquisitions and other problems, driven itself into the toilet. Once valued at over $120 billion, Yahoo ended up selling itself, or at least large parts of itself, for just $4.8 billion.

Apparently unable to come up with new products, new technology or new business models to keep itself functional, YaHoo instead tried to buy itself out of trouble. It embarked on a spending spree, snapping up high profile start up businesses, often at premium prices.

Sometimes this works. If done correctly. Microsoft, Apple and other successful companies do this frequently. They discover a new company with new technology or new business models that would fit in with their core business plans, buy it or invest in it heavily, nurture it, foster it, and develop it into a successful part of the new parent company.

Unfortunately Yahoo didn’t seem to have either the expertise or the motivation to do that in many cases. A few were successful, but not many. Most performed poorly at best. At worst, Yahoo’s incompetent management and corporate policies quickly drove them into the dirt and many failed completely. If you scrounge around on the net and look at sources like Forbes, Bloomberg and other financial media organizations, you can find entire lists of the companies Yahoo bought, and ruined over the years for one reason or another.

How did they ruin them? Mainly through mismanagement, poor decisions, and often attempts to squeeze as much cash out of them as they possibly could while investing as close to nothing in them as possible. I know a few people who worked in ‘silicon valley’ over the years, and a lot of them were terrified about the possibility of being acquired by YaHoo because it meant they’d be looking for jobs in a very short time. An acquisition by Yahoo became regarded as sounding the death knell. It was automatically assumed, justifiably or not, that acquisition by Yahoo meant mass layoffs as it tried to squeeze as much cash out of it as possible, or being mismanaged into extinction.

But let’s talk about Tumblr… I’ve been on the service for more years than I care to think of now. By and large I’ve enjoyed it. Yes, I have other outlets if I want to blog, put photos or stories or bad jokes or whatever up for public view. This is one of them, after all. Most of those outlets are, frankly, a lot more flexible, more useful, and allow far more creative outlet than Tumblr ever did. Nor is the fact Tumblr is free much an incentive. There are, frankly, a lot better, much easier to use free services out there which allow far more creative freedom.

What Tumblr had going for it was a sense of community. It was as much a social network as it was a blogging service. A lot of the users developed friendships with other users of the service. The people reading your blog were almost certainly other Tumblr users themselves, with their own blogs, and you quickly accumulated an enormous collection of other Tumblr users you read, followed, and exchanged thoughts with. Some of us became pretty good friends. I know maybe a dozen people over there that I now consider friends because our interactions through the system. I’ve even visited some of them.

When Yahoo bought Tumblr for the utterly ridiculous price of $1.1 billion, a lot of us regular users over there saw, frankly, doom on the horizon. And not just because of Yahoo’s well deserved reputation of driving their acquisitions into the toilet.

Tumblr was a ridiculously popular service. But it had a serious problem. No one was able to figure out how to make money off it. The system that made it so popular made it very difficult to try to monetize it without destroying the very features that made it popular.

Tumblr’s main way of making money seemed to be silly things like trying to sell users stuff like ‘premium’ templates, fancy, pretty formatting for their blog’s home page. That’s fine, but I haven’t even seen my home page over there since I set up my account for the first time. Nor have I ever seen the home pages of any of the blogs I follow there. One of Tumblr’s features is that registered users have a dashboard, a more or less bare bones, distraction free system that aggregates all of the posts from the blogs you follow into a single page. Since virtually all of the readers of Tumblr blogs are also Tumblr users, we all have dashboards, and we do everything from them, reading, posting, commenting, everything. I follow a lot of blogs over there and I’ve never even seen the home pages of any of them. So why waste the time and money setting up a fancy premium template when no one’s going to see it anyway?

Tumblr survived largely by infusions of capital from outside investors. I’m not sure if it ever made a profit to be honest.

At the time Yahoo bought Tumblr, well, we figured that was going to be the end of it. Yahoo, with it’s reputation of running new businesses into the dirt, mismanagement, laying off the very people who had created the startup to begin with to save money, and above all, it’s desperate need to make money any way it could because the CEO was under pressure to resign or be fired and stockholders were up in arms, well, we figured this was going to be it. Yahoo would either utterly wreck the service, or gut it and turn it into a ghost town.

Yahoo did indeed try to do just that, but the enormous backlash from users forced them to pull back or at least make it’s attempts at monetizing the system less obnoxious. Attempts at censoring the massive amount of outright porn on the service pretty much failed as Tumblr users fought back, left in droves and otherwise forced the company to back down. They did a lot of annoying and damaging things that often made no sense at all, like completely removing the ability to comment on posts, one of the things that had turned Tumblr into a successful social network. Eventually they brought it back, but in ways that made it harder to use, more difficult to follow and extremely irritating. “Improvements” they promised either never materialized, or were completely useless, and often made the system more difficult to use.

They made a real dog’s breakfast of it, but somehow managed to keep from completely destroying it. Barely.

But now… YaHoo just sold off almost all of it’s internet businesses to Verizon. The CEO will get a $53 million buyout. I suspect she’s the only one actually making money off the deal.

As for those of us who use the service…

We just got word now that they are going to be injecting ads into blogs. In order to make this less painful, less obnoxious, they’re even offering to actually pay the bloggers. With real money! Ooo, be still my beating heart…

Well, maybe they are. They’re “still working out the details” about exactly how they’re going to pay the bloggers, how much they’re going to pay, But we all know that any amount that eventually filters down to us, the people who actually write the content, well, we will be lucky if we make enough for a cup of really, really bad coffee. All we know for sure is that they are going to start injecting advertising now, and later, maybe, they’ll figure out a payment system for the actual bloggers. Yeah, right.

The advertising can, they claim, be turned off if you wish. We’ll see how that goes. A dozen or more people I’ve talked to are claiming that as soon as they turn it off in the settings, it somehow mysteriously turns itself back on again… sigh. Mine is turned off. We’ll see if it stays that way. Or if it does any good.

Some will probably do pretty well. Like the porn blogs, the spam blogs, the scam blogs. They’ll probably do very well indeed. They have tens of thousands of followers, largely due to the use of bots that tamper with, manipulate the system. I’ve heard rumors that something like half of the “users” of Tumblr are actually bots that fish through the system, following random bloggers in the hopes that it will lure them back to follow some automated porn or spam site.

Most of us, though? We’re lucky if we have a few hundred. Any money that would filter down to the majority of us would be little compensation for putting up with the advertising, and quite possibly could prove to be an enormous headache.

I took a look at the comments attached to the announcement from Tumblr’s staff, and they were about what I expected; Lots and lots of cursing, frustration, anger, outrage, and a nearly universal impression that this was the beginning of the end. This time for real.

Is this the end of Tumblr? Well, that’s why there’s a question mark up there in the headline. I really don’t know. I suspect not, but I do know I’m not really happy with what’s going on over there. Neither are most of the other users I know.

I’m not going to leave Tumblr. I have too many friends over there. But I don’t think I’m going to be over there as much.

Tumblr is — comfortable, like an old pair of shoes. Easy to slip into, kind of ragged around the edges, but who cares, it feels good. But sometimes you have to admit that it’s time for them to go live in that great dumpster in the sky.

I don’t think Tumblr has reached that point. Yet. But it’s getting close.

I’ve often asked myself why I didn’t switch over to this forum completely. It’s easier to use, I have an excellent off-line editor that let’s me write, edit, proof-read material easily. Grouchyfarmer is easier to use, give me more creative freedom over formatting, I don’t have to deal with Tumblr degrading my photographs, don’t have my drafts mysteriously disappearing (that’s happened a dozen or more times over the past year, so often I don’t even bother to try to save anything as a draft over there any more). The commenting system here is light years better than Tumblr’s… I have wonderful tools here that let me quickly refer to outside websites and sources. Basically this system here is light years beyond anything Tumblr has to offer.

I suspect that as time passes, as the ads start to become more obtrusive over there, as the service continues to degrade as the new owners try desperately to make it profitable, I’ll be turning up over here more often than there.

We’ll see…

The Future of Tumblr

You may not be aware of it, but I’ve had a blog over at Tumblr for years now, and I’m far more active over there than I am here for a variety of reasons. But that is probably going to be changing in the near future.

Tumblr was bought up by Yahoo a while back, and they have not exactly been kind to their new toy. They’ve made a number of questionable decisions that have seriously annoyed many of it’s long time users. Advertising has become far more intrusive, paid, commercial blogs are being injected into our feeds over there. They’ve tampered with the user interface, adding features that no one seems to want, while removing features that people liked.

A few months ago they removed the “Reply” function, replacing it with some kind of messaging function so you can send a message to the author of the blog, but not make a public comment. They really hyped up the message function. And hype was exactly what it was. We always could send messages to the author of a blog if we wished to. It was already part of the system. All their “new” version did was add an icon to the bottom of each post to make it easier to do.

Meanwhile, the Reply function, which was widely used and widely liked, was eliminated, causing such a storm of protest that they’ve been promising to bring it back RSN (Real Soon Now).

The biggest problem with Tumblr, though, is it’s parent company, Yahoo. Yahoo hasn’t had a very good track record. It’s been losing money for years. It’s only really profitable venture is Alibaba, and there is ever increasing pressure on the company to reorganize itself, shed it’s unprofitable ventures and try to become something it hasn’t been in a long, long time, a profitable business. It’s CEO is under fire constantly, with increasing pressure to either resign, or attempts to force the board of directors to fire her. There is even pressure now from some of the bigger stockholders to fire the entire board. And to be perfectly honest, there seems to be considerable justification for both of those actions.

Shortly after buying Tumblr, Yahoo announced some sweeping changes. There would be new terms of service which would regulate what content could be posted to try to eliminate ‘offensive’ material in an effort to make the service more attractive to advertisers. Censorship/filtering software to weed out ‘unsuitable’ content would be installed. Advertising would be injected into people’s dashboards. Paid blogs would be injected into people’s dashboards. Etc. etc. etc…

There was such an enormous outrage over these new policies that they were forced to back off. While the injection of advertising into the service did take place, they backed off on the threats of censorship and other types of content restrictions. I won’t go into all of the other attempts they’ve made to “improve” the service that have irritated and alienated it’s users. While they’ve backed off on some of the more potentially destructive changes they wanted to make, they’ve continued to do things that have irritated it’s users.

But to return to Yahoo and it’s problems…

Right now Yahoo has announced it’s drastically cutting staff, firing people left and right. It’s trying to either sell off or spin off different units of the company in order to shed it’s unprofitable ventures. One of the ideas the CEO put forward was that they’d spin off everything except Alibaba. Basically Yahoo would become Alibaba, and everything else would be dumped into a company that would immediately go bankrupt because all of Yahoo’s less than successful ventures would be rolled up into that new business.

That plan got shot down. Now they’re trying to sell off various parts of the business. If they can find buyers for the stuff. In any case, the handwriting is on the wall. Yahoo, as it is known today, is not going to exist for much longer.

What’s going to happen to Tumblr? I have no idea. Tumblr isn’t all that profitable, to be honest. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to monetize it to the extent they would like because doing so would drive away the people who create the content that draws viewers to the site in the first place, as Yahoo quickly discovered when it took over the service.

I think it’s highly likely that Tumblr will not remain the property of Yahoo for much longer. Whether they sell the service or spin it off into an independent company is something I don’t know. (Frankly, from what I’ve been reading in the financial press, I don’t think anyone at Yahoo knows what the hell they’re doing.)

My dissatisfaction with what’s going on at Tumblr and the uncertainty about the future of the service means I’m going to try to move more content over to grouchyfarmer.com in the future. Over here I don’t have to worry about injected advertising, dealing with the ridiculous way they keep changing the user interface, etc.

So this, apparently, is what all the hype has been about at Tumblr

Screen Shot 2015 11 11 at 11 09 09 AM

This thing, the fourth from the left, the weird blobby thing that looks like some kind of mutated Pac-Man ghost. That’s it. That’s why Tumblr has pissed off about half of it’s users, pushed thousands of people to start looking for alternative blogging systems and social networks…

What is it? A messenger service. That’s all. You can send a message to someone.

Ooo, be still my pounding heart! Oh, the excitement! Oh, my blood pressure! Oh brother…

Yes, the staff at Tumblr is wetting their collective knickers over — over what, exactly? A brain dead, featureless and totally useless rethread of Instant Messenger or ICQ straight out of the 1990s… For this they alienated tens of thousands of users. For this the removed the “reply/comment” function…

Oh, come on… Seriously, are they deliberately trying to kill the service? If that’s their goal, just do it. Don’t just whittle away changing features, removing features, becoming increasingly annoying until you end up as another MySpace (remember them?)

Tumblr Driving Me Nuts

Tumblr is well known for pulling crap on it’s users. Crap like drastically altering the way it works without bothering to tell anyone what the hell it’s doing.

We’re going through that now over there. They recently pulled the comment/reply function, making it difficult if not impossible to comment on or reply to postings by other people without re-blogging the entire post.

Since a lot of people over there, including me, enjoy the interaction of the comments system, like getting feedback and comments form people, we’re more than a little irritated.

Tumblr says ‘big changes’ are coming. Well, so far the ‘big changes’ have been the introduction of a brain dead, barely functional instant messaging system that no one wanted and no one cares about, along with the removal of the ‘comments’ functions.

Tumblr says comments are coming back ‘real soon now’, but it’s been a week or more now, and with no announcements, and not even the support staff able to tell us what the hell is going on, well, we’re jumping ship.

A lot of us are moving off Tumblr to alternative services.

Me? I’ve had Grouchyfarmer.com in place for ages now. I started the site because of the last time Tumblr ticked me off with something they did. But things changed over there, and I missed the old crowd over there, and I’ve been spending most of my time there.

But now… This may be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. I’m so tired of Tumblr ignoring what the users want, failing to respond to questions, and taking a ‘the hell with you, we’re going to do whatever we want’ attitude.

So watch this space. I’ll be posting more and varied material here in the near future, and possibly abandon Tumblr entirely.