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Tumblr says it's going to "fix" its "core experience" to appeal to new users
A couple of weeks ago, an update from Tumblr caused a stir among its users. It wrote that, to grow, it needed to fix the core experience on the site. Tumblr is a bit of an aberration in that it's tenaciously held on to its way of doing things: users are expected to curate their own feed by the people and blogs they follow.
This is the way things used to work on social media, because it's notably user-friendly. Follow your friends, and interesting people. Get their posts or whatever in the order they were created.
Great, right? Well, maybe if you're a user. If you're a social media company, you've got to make money, and you've got a limited number of ways of doing it. You can ask users to pay, as Twitter and Cohost do; or you can go the usual route involving ads, data collection, and an algorithmic timeline.
The problem with asking users to pay is that they generally won't. On Musk's Twitter, "verified" (really: paid) accounts have access to some perks, the most unusable of which involves forcing their replies to the top of every threads, an incredibly obnoxious practice not helped by the fact that most of the people who seem to actually want to pay for Twitter are dull, or self-absorbed, or both, the sort of people who can't get an audience and figure the best way to remedy that is to pay to make people see them. It's been going about as well as you expect. Most of the top replies have very little interaction, and personally, I block them all. You can't, it seems, force people to like you.
Cohost is an interesting comparison: the site tilts heavily queer and anti-capitalist, and many of those who pay for Premium (which has a few perks, the main one being larger per-post upload limits) love the site and want to see it succeed. For the record, I'm there, but don't very often anymore. I still buy premium. I love the site and I want to see it succeed.
Cohost is interesting because, up until Tumblr's recent announcement, the two of them were maybe the only major social media sites devoted to giving the users what they want, rather than presenting things to the user based on what they think the user would like, or, if we're being honest, what would make the site the most money.
How Tumblr Became Popular for Being Obsolete
Tumblr's announcement hasn't gone over particularly well. Tumblr's users were not amused. They'd weathered all kinds of ownership changes (Yahoo, Verizon, Automattic); they'd seen the porn taken down; they'd seen the site sold for a billion at its peak and then again a few years ago for only $3M. They knew the site was running on all kinds of borrowed time, and they knew Tumblr was something of an anachronism, younger than Facebook, but in some ways feeling older, a part of that internet that included LiveJournal, blogs, and longer-form writing. It might be a trash heap, but it was their trash heap.
My Cohost feed got lit up. Lots of former and current Tumblr users it seems, each of them tearing into the company for betraying what many of them saw as the central feature of the platform: the ability to build your own home, the way you want it. This is the feel I get from Cohost right now, and as well from Mastodon, where I can choose who to follow, which tags to bookmark and return to (Cohost), which hashtags to include in my feed (Masto). And I appreciate this, because it means I am solely responsible for what I see on the site.
Twitter is in flux right now. Its rate limits, which went in place at the start of the month, are still in place, just with higher values. This is user-hostile behaviour, and people are understandably starting to look elsewhere. It takes a long time to establish a platform, and very little time to kill it. Just ask Friendster, MySpace, or Digg.
Twitter traffic sinks in wake of changes and launch of rival platform Threads
Although there's been a renewed interest in Twitter users to migrate away and find something better, according to Cloudflare this has been the case for a while: at least since early 2023. Anecdotally, that's when my own usage dropped off, too. I went quiet - blanked my avatar, cleared my info, went private, and stopped reading. I hoped this would be for good, though it was only "for now", as in the end, I got drawn back in by a handful of people I care for that refused to leave the platform.
But now, it seems, people are actually starting to leave. Threads, Meta's Twitter knockoff which I've best heard described as "the parody social media in a video game", is apparently up to 100M users. I don't know if I believe Meta's, but some of my mutuals _have_ been posting their Threads info. And, ugh. From everything I've heard, it's awful. Very much "Twitter by Instagram". "Welcome to gay twitter!" Ellen DeGeneris writes. "Grimace says hello say it back plsss" says McDonalds.
Fucking awful. Twitter, but devoid of the smoking-behind-the-school atmosphere that made up the best of Twitter. Twitter for brands, for influencers. Scrubbed clean, in that very Western media prudish kind of way. No tits or cocks, that drives advertisers away (and requires more moderators).
You will absolutely not find me there.
It's interesting to note that Threads, like Instagram, like Facebook, doesn't have a chronological timeline, only an algorithmic one. It feels very much like we're living through the collapse of social media, or maybe just a convergence, where it doesn't matter which platform you pick, they're all owned by awful, moneyed men, they all have algorithmic timelines, and none of them are really interested in what you want, only in what you represent for them.
So I think that's the anger that's driving Tumblr users right now: the feeling that this is not just a betrayal but a loss, that something weird and sorta bad but still sorta good is changing, because capitalism dictates that products must have forever-growth, that every interaction should represent a monetizable point in time, and that it doesn't matter how you spend your hours, not really, as long as you actually spend them.
Cohost: June 2023 Financial Update
It's worth pointing out that Cohost is on precarious ground, but it's hanging around. People actually like the platform. They like the team running it. Those who can afford to pay for it often do. And Mastodon, being not a single service but a federation of servers, is in a similar situation: it's not cheap to run a Mastodon server, at least one of the bigger instances, but people seem willing to chuck in some money for server costs. Crucially, brands can't pay to get inserted into everyone's feed. It's not worth it to them, so they stay away. And by doing so, they make it worth it for us.
As social media collapses towards variations on a single, undistinguishable product, I find it hard to be enthusastic about starting over again, particularly when ownership is awful, and what's offered is at best a variation on the same. I'm not interested in Bluesky. I'm really not interested in Threads. I'm not interested in starving twenty-somethings being given the social media keys to major brands. I'm not interested in parasocial relationships with people from the TV. What I'm interested in, as ever, is meeting interesting people in the dive bars at the edge of cyberspace, even if just briefly, if only for the barest moment. At Cohost, Mastodon, here, and on the small web. If it's good, it's only because of us.