genuine question for Tumblr: Is it more in the site’s best interests if users posting a gif upload their own, or share one of the ones already uploaded?

the obvious, intuitive answer is that it’s better to share one already uploaded, because that accomplishes the same engagement and activity without adding more megabytes of image data for the website to have to store

But the website seems to be actively discouraging that

Search function in the “use an already uploaded gif” option used to turn up relevant gifs pretty quickly. But now you can try any keywords, scroll until your app crashes and not find anything near what you want a gif of

Is it just the users recently getting worse at putting relevant text information in the post and/or the gif description?

Or the staff recently making the search function actively worse?

Or both?

Anyway that’s why my previous post doesn’t have a simple gif of the Master Control Program screencapped from Tron (1982), but instead has the only MCP image I could find in my phone’s stored images… which is a deeply unsettling panel from the “Tron: Ghost In The Machine” comic in which the MCP winks at Jet Bradley and says “was it good for you, big boy”

this site fucked around and it’s gonna find out

>:(