This article wholly ignores the rampant technical problems with Tumblr and the way that every "fix" for them makes the platform worse. Whether it's removing the ability to post reply chains, the completely broken Web and mobile interfaces, the haphazard rollout of new features, the sudden and unhelpful modifications to the search function's behavior, or the continuous useless pushes for people who are just reading blogs to instead make a Tumblr of their own, the site is far, far off track from where it should be development-wise. Yeah, ads are annoying, and I can't imagine Yahoo has helped matters, but I think the feelings of Tumblr's user base on how it's being modified are a large contributing factor in its decline.
Another factor is the failure of Tumblr's staff to appreciate the diversity of ways Tumblr can be used: as a picture blog, as a server status log, as a way of communicating person to person, as a way of communicating person to corporation, as a way of creating funny writing projects or online roleplaying, or just as a content aggregator. All of these are valuable uses of the platform. Not all of them are ever accepted or catered to, in fact, most of them are ignored.
I'd like to see more on why Tumblr's dev team does what it does than on why its ads team sucks.
This comment is just plain false. Pretty much every feature has been objectively improved since Yahoo acquisition.
- search is actually usable now, was completely useless before acquisition
- new messaging features are better than stuff they had before
- rich text editor better than the one they had before (except if you want to edit in HTML or Markdown in which case it completely sucks now, but very few people probably post in HTML or Markdown)
- replies, I have hardly ever seen them used before they were removed. in any case, the new implementation is much better
- should I even mention the freaking video player?
Of course the users will complain, but I mean this is Tumblr, the userbase will complain about everything.
You didn't address most of the items I listed, but I will note for fairness' sake that as I said, I'm a former user. I left in November or so. I've heard good things about messaging, but not anything else you mention.
Replies were HEAVILY used by my part of the Tumblr community, and the changes to them really screwed things up for us. Like I said, lots of use cases for the site.
I certainly don't feel on the whole that tumblr was better when I stopped using it than it was when I started. Even if that is true now, it wasn't true for a long time, so my argument remains the same: its decline is due to inadequate tech work for a long period of time.
> replies, I have hardly ever seen them used before they were removed. in any case, the new implementation is much better
How are so you sure that a feature you never used is better than it was before it changed? Even if I'd never used tumblr, I would find this response to be incredible, in the original sense of the word.
Replies are so bad that I don't use tumblr anymore. They used to just load in a normal HTML page, but now you get a page with lots of suggested posts, and some sort of pop-over with replies that's too slow to really be usable even on my brand new iPhone. It's usable on desktop if you want to wait a few seconds for enough CSS and javascript to load that the pop-over shows up, and then scroll through and read a long list of replies.
Tumblr's founder is strongly involved in the product decisions there. Prior to the Yahoo! acquisition... there were still a ton of head-scratchers in product, marketing, and operations over there. Staffing rumors indicated the young founder built a very close team on the executive side & had a number of sympathetic early investors on the ownership side.
These are not inherently evil people, but they were allowed to impose terrible, deep mistakes on the staff and users for a very long time. No one was in a position to stop the unforced errors, not for years. Which is why Yahoo! was a fitting acquirer. (The sale to Yahoo! probably prevented the platform from foundering)
The core product is still extremely useful to the web (especially because it's free). The demand for such services, and a capital market that rewards any kind of operation as long as it's acquiring ~u s e r s i n t h e d e m o~ - it gives a very long runway to digital publishers like these.
But 9-10 years is a long time to be around without a stable business model. And, as a very worrisome problem, you would not be able to persist your user data or your established URLs if the platform foundered. A shutdown of Tumblr would be a terrible single-day source of Internet linkrot.
But, same for Flickr, which is a much more admirable (and longer-lasting) product run by capable people but faces the same existential threat. Sad, because Flickr should have been Facebook (eventually).
I don't know. Flickr is optimized around sharing photos (at full resolution if desired) to a broad audience. There is a largely optional community angle but a lot of us barely participate in that.
I have a short list of things that I wish flickr did better and there are doubtless things it could have evolved into without harming the store/display-photos use case. But, although it's been pretty stagnant I'm honestly not sure what more I really want it to do.
I agree it would be very unfortunate if flickr were to either shutdown or do something like turn off non-paid accounts. I find it a useful source of CC images and I am contacted from time to time by people wanting to use photos of mine.
Flickr could have been Instagram and more if it hadn't been neglected for so long. I've renewed my Flickr Pro subscription for a year - it's an acceptable gamble at this point. I have no alternative for the service.
Except that's sort of my point. I don't much care about Instragram. I just accept that there's no unicorn photo service for people like me. If flickr goes down, I'd probably switch to Smugmug.
Another factor is the failure of Tumblr's staff to appreciate the diversity of ways Tumblr can be used: as a picture blog, as a server status log, as a way of communicating person to person, as a way of communicating person to corporation, as a way of creating funny writing projects or online roleplaying, or just as a content aggregator. All of these are valuable uses of the platform. Not all of them are ever accepted or catered to, in fact, most of them are ignored.
I'd like to see more on why Tumblr's dev team does what it does than on why its ads team sucks.