astercontrol:

the thing that always gets in my way when i try to imagine what’s the best method for changing how Tumblr is run

is that i don’t actually know what motivation has been keeping it going so far.

And getting reliable answers when looking this sort of thing up is practically impossible, especially these days

It’s not necessarily money, at least not in the sense that comes most naturally to the mind

Because from what I’ve always read about social media companies, they have an extraordinarily hard time actually making any profit

like, the business model might be “sell ads on people’s social media pages” but that doesn’t bring in enough money on its own. advertisers won’t pay much per page they advertise on, because ads don’t really bring them much profit per view

And running any website costs money, especially if there’s a lot of people using it (especially if they’re making posts, which someone has to moderate)

And if the ads don’t bring in more money than that costs, you gotta branch out into selling other things

which i guess often includes selling user data (whatever kind of data someone will pay for– again the value of that seems kinda variable and uncertain, and it tends not to be talked about as publicly as other stuff, so idk how much profit that brings)

And then there’s selling premium memberships, which i would suppose only becomes viable if enough of your userbase 1. has the money for it, and 2. considers the premium features worth paying for, and 3. doesn’t hate your management enough to want to boycott paying you for anything

And it really kinda seems to me that Tumblr fails on all of these possible revenue sources. We are not, in general, a profitable userbase– either to be sold to, or to sell access to anything we have

now of course I don’t know all of Tumblr, and there may be parts of it that are more profitable than anything I see

Or there may be other sources of revenue, like rich investors somewhere, pouring loads of money into it, in hopes it’ll someday pay off (like what’s going on with Uber and Lyft) …but really i doubt it, for Tumblr

And I’m not convinced that it is supporting itself, in any way. Last I heard, Facebook did become actually profitable, but it took years of operating at a loss, solely on investor funds, to figure out how to get to that point (via sales of ads and user data). Tumblr is nowhere near Facebook’s level of corporate efficiency.

Which makes it a much more tolerable site, but much less understandable how it still exists.

What is supporting it right now? And just how precarious is that, whatever it is?

Anyway, whatever is keeping it alive, something about the backlash to this particular recent update threatened it enough to convince the owners to change course, at least for now

But… was it because Tumblr users themselves bring profit by staying here (through ads, personal data sales, premium subscriptions)?

Or because the reputation of having a site full of satisfied users is valuable to … whoever else they’re getting actual non-negligible amounts of money from?

Or something else?

None of the possibilities seem to add up, as far as I can understand.

….but I admit I’m not an expert on adding up this kind of BS. And so I don’t really know.

Not sure why I’m even going on about this.

Except…. whenever I see people talking about the motivations behind all this, they always seem to be talking from the assumption that Tumblr makes a ton of profit, and that this comes mainly from advertising to us.

And I don’t have enough information, or even know how to get enough information, to figure out how true or untrue that may be

But there’s something about it that just… feels to me like it’s a dangerous assumption to make.

Also I think this assumption kinda plays into the debate about how we should be responding to their current rollback of the policy (and their apparent surge in bigoted and retaliatory banning, along with it)

Because right now, being on Tumblr is kinda like living in someone else’s house who isn’t charging you any rent, but is probably making money off you in various sketchy ways.

Like maybe selling videos from secret cameras in your bedroom, or something.

And on top of that, they don’t exactly seem to like you. They make you follow all sorts of unreasonable rules, and they rearrange your living space all the time in the most awful ways without even asking. And they’ve mean-spiritedly evicted a bunch of your friends who were also staying here.

But… you don’t have any better options for a place to live or a place to meet with your remaining friends. This is the least bad of all the possibilities. If you believed there was a better option, you and your friends would have gone there already. But clearly there isn’t.

So if you ever get evicted from this house, or if it ever gets destroyed, then you’re gonna lose all or most of your current social support system and you’ll be screwed.

So, realistically, the choice of “should I thank them for rolling back the bad decision, or should I keep complaining?” isn’t the kind of decision you can make based on what they deserve.

It’s the kind of decision made by desperate people who are trapped in a living situation they hate and didn’t choose but are still not free to leave.

It’s the kind of decision that, realistically, you make based on how bad you think their response would be. Or what you think you could survive, if the worst possible response happened.

And in this kind of setting, the right decision often depends on how much leverage you have.

How much do they want to keep us here? How much do they actually care if we all leave? We’ve seen one instance of mass protest on our part accomplishing a change in their behavior… But how far could that go?

How much protest would they tolerate? How much would they be willing to change for our sake? At just what point would they say “this is too much,” and shut the place down, cut their losses and kick us all out?

How valuable are we to them?

And since we’re not paying rent, and whatever money they are making off us is done in secret… all of this depends on stuff we can’t even know for sure.

like, “just how profitable are the videos they’re selling from those hidden cameras in our bedrooms?”

… I don’t know the right answer.

But I know better than to think there’s anything sustainable about this arrangement.

Which is why my pinned post says where to connect with me besides here (and I very much hope at least some of you have that saved for when that post eventually isn’t there anymore).

I think I could survive losing this site. I could reconnect with some of my friends elsewhere. I could stay alive for an extended time without any connection to any of you, although it would be miserable.

I don’t think everyone could.

So maybe it’s not my place to make decisions about this.