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
You must log in or # to comment.
Let’s hope Reddit does something even more blatantly dumb than they’ve already done and start banning porn from their platform. Once that happens, that’s when I think we’ll really see alternatives take off.
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 🍿
This is the best analysis I’ve seen so far. The majority of posts I have seen say “reddit is an inch from death”, which isn’t even remotely close to accurate. A site can be a 3rd tier, boring, corporate-owned collection of content that has non-exciting revenue, but that’s not dead.
facebook is exactly what you described, although I assume it’s still profitable and keeping meta afloat
Tumblr is kinda back imo. But the main reason for it’s death was also that the company that bought tumblr back then thought it would be the new PDF…yes you heard me right… https://qz.com/708295/yahoos-grand-plan-for-tumblr-was-to-turn-it-into-the-next-generation-pdf
My biggest concern when I first came over and had a look at Lemmy was the fact that all the main Lemmy instances had big “No Porn!” rules front and center. Porn is the lifeblood of a free internet, and the foundation of human inventiveness and drive for innovation.
Fortunately that seems to have largely been swamped by the Reddit refugees. Along with the disturbing prevalence of tankies, the second biggest concern I had when I first came over and had a look at Lemmy. Things seem to be well on track now.
There’s legal issues involving hosting, and that includes mirroring, or acting as an aggregator for, porn. Many admins simply don’t want to deal with the headache of that.
It’s fine if the fediverse is (mostly) split into sfw and nsfw sides, after all, most people had different accounts for both on reddit in the first place, and much of the rest should have.
And it’s not like admins are defederating lemmynsfw.com – they’re only blocking nsfw posts, lemmynsfw wisely has a strict “tag everything” policy. Which means that if someone wants to use their lemmynsfw account to engage in discussion on the sfw side, nothing’s stopping them, as long as it’s sfw.
I don’t see how NSFW content can make its place on non-profit fediverse. NSFW is very taxing to moderate, so it makes perfect sense to me that volunteers would refuse to deal with it and outright ban porn (while still being more understanding of non-pornographic nudity than say Instagram, which banned a museum from publishing pictures of nude statues 🤦).
Porn is the lifeblood of a free internet
Your view of the internet must be pretty sad
lemmynsfw.com is an instance specialising in exactly that type of moderation. It’s easier when you specialise and don’t simultaneously have to deal with other stuff, at least in a fine-grained way (that is, more fine-grained than “import standard instance blocklist to not federate with instances full of nazis, griefers, and other types of brigades”)
If you can’t get porn on it, then it isn’t a viable platform.
That’s just how it is, the ability to use a medium for pornography affects the popularity of that medium. Consumers want porn, and if they can’t find it here they’ll go somewhere else.
Wtf? Why are people upvoting this garbage?
Google, Facebook, Tiktok, Youtube, there are TONNES of “platforms” that literally ban porn content from being uploaded to them. What are you talking about? Not viable? The biggest fucking social media site on the internet does not allow porn, the biggest video site on the internet does not allow porn.
Redditors have seriously broken brains and only know how to repeat what they’ve read other broken redditors repeat and upvote ad-infinitum without every actually thinking for 5 seconds about how ridiculous what they’re saying is.
This isn’t Reddit people! Don’t downvote a perfectly good comment just because you don’t agree.
Add a reply (or upvote one that already shares your thoughts) and move on. Keep the discussion thriving. Downvote hate and spam.
It was the last line of their comment that earned a down vote from me.
I’ll never forget the Tumblr titty ban and then the fact everyone’s SFW art got marked as NSFW by their very strange bot.
I agree that not many sites will ever again fumble and fuck it up as large as Digg did.
I guess the months following July we will be able to see how the downfall of reddit goes. It could be like Digg or like Tumblr or somewhere in-between. If it does not get sold off and still somehow manages to exist I think it will just be Spez’s personal cult and soapbox.
Oh he will be the first one out when it goes public. Whatever majority shareholders make up the board will not look favorably on this. Now it is all positioning and planning for future resource extraction. In no profit driven world does spez remain ceo in 6 months. Guarantee it.
Just an FYI tumblr is now owned by Automattic (they own Wordpress), and bought it for a fraction of it’s last inflated price (hahaha). Automattic was looking to join the Fediverse with ActivityPub.
No one knows what it will look like this is an entirely new shift but I do have this feeling that things are at a real turning point right now. The massive rise of AI, the monetization and enshitification of social media and entertainment reaching a peak, bizzare economic conditions, a feverish culture war in the west. I’m sure I’m missing something but there is a strange cocktail of factors mixing right now and the changes happening with Reddit seem like just another piece. I’m optimistic about what it means. I think a lot of people feel like the status quo as it has been is not infinitely sustainable.
My hope is that this is a shift back to a more decentralized internet.
It is for some people like us. But most user don’t care.
