The secret lives of Tumblr teens
newrepublic.com
newrepublic.com
That seems like a preferable direction from a consumer point of view than forcing society to rebuild everything from scratch, despite the fact that things like GitLab, blockchain and p2p social networks are not inherently inferior. Adoption is hard. "Charity" is the same as PR, so there might be more side benefit than the original speculators hoped for with the failed centralised business models by opening up and decentralising.
The problem with a utility is you have to pay for usage. The majority of the internet has shown they aren't willing to pay $.02 for an account.
This being the case the only way to build a business model is to capture as much of the value as possible from your user which creates the Consumer v. Business relationship where both are trying to extract the maximum value they can from the other.
Walmart, Amazon, etc. does the same thing with their suppliers.
Businesses always align with their customer's short term interests [via voting with their cash] in relatively free markets. Long term thinking isn't something consumers do.
I think users would be more willing to pay if it were easier to pay. You have to break out your credit card to pay for software. Then you have to enter your number, your billing information, etc. It's a question of how badly you want it.
If there were a service like Amazon's 'buy with 1-click' that could be integrated with any website, it could help monetize more sites.
https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
You'd need to use a service like that.
And that means they don't want share with their shareholders the value Tumblr generates. It's really mibd-blowing to think that anyone would have thought what Tumblr did was a good idea. I totally agree with their goal of shutting down sketchy and basically fraudulent ways of making money. But at least make a genuine attempt to provide a compelling alternative way for bloggers to make money.
The value of a social network is entirely in the community and their desire to devote time on the site (and not at all in any functionality or technology per se). By killing the vibe in the community they're basically burning money. Tumblr is dying in one of the saddest acts of corporate suicide in the last ten years.
From the sound of it these kids probably would have gotten into compliance immediately with a warning. You'd think it would be worth tumblr's time. Apparently not though.
I have never understood why tumblr doesn't simply offer optional ads for blogs, and revenue share with the authors.
"At first you loathe the teens, because you know nothing about them and think they’re idiots, beneath you. Then you love the teens because you figure out they are smarter than you, and you make peace with the death of your cultural relevance, because you know you’ll be in good hands. Finally, you recognize the shape of the adults they’ll become, corrupted by money and vanity and hubris just like everyone else."
And so the world goes 'round.
click on https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/
then open the console in your browser and type this :
setInterval("$('a.option.active.remove.login-required').first().click()",400)
The same is true for offline societies.
[*] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam#Diversity_and...
While this might be true, I believe tumblr definitely has a shared culture.
I am saying this based on me setting up a dozen different tumblr accounts for testing stuff and seeing a lot of similar stuff over and over.
E.g. I am a straight male but the amount of gender identity/LGBTQIA content seems a lot more than elsewhere, presumably because of the "a lot of anonymous teenagers" user base.
There's nothing wrong with that...it's been a need for that age group for centuries...
Let them breathe...
(Broad generalization incoming) Before the industrial revolution, teens would have spent most of their time around adults (like their parents), and very little time exclusively around people their own age.
Populations were distributed more broadly...kids were expected to work at a younger age...no phone or Internet...apprenticeships at a young age were common...
I guess they still had a few other opportunities...school, picnics, sports, swimming down at the creek, church, civic youth groups, summer camp, etc...
Most of these are also pretty modern things. Long education and leisure time did not exist for most people until somewhere around ons hundred years ago, depending on where you lived. Stuff like boy scouts was not invented until the beginning of the 20th century and it took time for them to become popular across social classes.
Some historian argue that even childhood is a modern invention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emerging_adulthood_and_early_a...
Older generations doubt the ability of the young to "get things right"...to keep the society they are familiar with on track...
Younger generations, with fresh eyes, wonder how older generations let things "go so wrong"...with an eye toward improving the society they've inherited...
An excellent book, Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, by Robert Pirsig, explores this and other phenomena in great depth...
It's a semi-sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...
I recommend it...
Just because they feel like that, doesn't mean that's what they really need. But if you erased "away from adults" from the above, I might completely agree with you.
Good to know that kind of thing can still exist in today's Facebooked world.
I never went so far as to do any of the things mentioned in here—no raspberry ketone treatments ever came from ShortFormBlog—but the closest I got was a one-time sponsored post deal I did with Federated Media. That was nice—and the advertiser was also legitimate and high-profile—but it was just a one-time thing.
By choosing for years not to do anything to help creators make money off their websites, Tumblr created a situation where some of their best users did questionable things just to make money from their websites. It's too bad—had Tumblr been more decisive, it could have been a YouTube-type situation—allowing both them and their users to make lasting revenue.
But that said, I agree that building your own way is the better route. It took me a while to get to that point, admittedly. But you have to remember as well that Tumblr offers something that's really hard to get in other places without a lot of work: A way to quickly build an audience.
Now I'm not saying that I was completely in this to get paid—I also wanted to have something I could point to in interviews and say, "hey, this is what I do with my free time." (That part of the equation worked, by the way.)
But the thing is, ShortFormBlog would've never survived without Tumblr. It dealt with short, blurby pieces of news—perfect in length for Tumblr, but not something with a long lifespan. So building SEO was a no-go, and it was hard to build an audience outside of Tumblr with a strategy like that.
My current website and newsletter where I build stuff is way more focused on evergreen stuff—and it offers a lot of the creativity that Tumblr did for me, but on a smaller scale. I'm happier with the result—I don't feel like I'm building stuff just to get a bajillion likes or reblogs anymore, but instead things that make sense as creative projects.
If it's small enough it could sneak under the free limits of most PaaSes. And despite needing some kind of techy admin I think the shibboleth thing could provide a layer of cool needed to sell the thing.
Not that I think this could make money. ( =