the long slow death of a platform

[bramblepatch]

[The bulk of this is crossposted from my tumblr. It seems relevant to have here, too.]

I, obviously, haven’t taken part in the Logoff Protest or whatever people are calling it. I’ve been around today, intermittently, reblogging things.

This is because I have already given up on Tumblr.

Which isn’t to say that I’m immediately bailing. And it doesn’t mean that I expect Tumblr to collapse out from under me in the immediate future. It just means that I have been actively diversifying my social media activity over the last couple of weeks with an eye toward settling down elsewhere, because I don’t believe that anything the tumblr base says or does will have any effect on policy, and if it did, I would not trust it to last. The uproar around Strikethrough made Livejournal backpedal furiously. Boldthrough still happened. A corporate team that will censor content once will try again as soon as they think they can get away with it; if they are making this kind of policy change, it is already too late. It was probably already too late when Yahoo acquired the site, a few years ago; I think a lot of us who lived through other platform collapses have been warily eyeing the exits for a while now.

And in general, I actually think this is natural and healthy. It’s certainly going to be a rough patch for a while, for various internet subcultures, and I have the utmost sympathy for the sex workers and nsfw artists whose livelihoods are impacted by tumblr’s shenanigans. But I think that Tumblr has outlived its relevance as a major social platform; I trust that what we love about Tumblr will inform the new platforms that will come into their own as Tumblr dies down.

I think that those of us who have made this site our home for the past several years deserve a platform that isn’t determined to eat itself from the inside out, and Tumblr has conclusively proved again and again that that is exactly what it intends to do. I’m not sure that any of the sites people are migrating to have shown that they won’t indulge in the same self-destructive site-building choices, but I think it’s good for us to know how to stay mobile online.

So I'll still be around Tumblr to some extent for a while under the same bramblepatch account I've used for years; you can also find me here at dreamwidth, and on twitter at bramble_patch. I may wander elsewhere, I'll let you know if I do.

Comments

[claudeb]

Hey, hey. Fellow Tumblr refugee here. Sorry for barging in. Couldn't help but notice your post in Latest Things, and wanted to let you know you're not alone. Unlike you, I'm taking part in the protest today, not that I expect it to have much of an impact. Was of two minds about it, in fact, but plenty of people seem to be in, so.

Yeah, it's too bad Tumblr is going down. It meant a lot of things to a lot of people, but it grew too big and too toxic. And nothing lasts forever. Besides, we need redundancy. A lot of it.

Last but not least, I love your blog name. Good work there!

[justbolts]

A corporate team that will censor content once will try again as soon as they think they can get away with it; if they are making this kind of policy change, it is already too late.

Basically this. They've shown where their priorities and loyalties lie, and it was never with the user base.