A few days ago, Tumblr accidentally posted their shareholder speech to their public account. Well, "accidentally"—insofar as the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade was "accidentally" leaked. Whatever. It outlined a plan to bring the website more in line with "current industry standards", which I can only assume means they're trying to be Twitter. Or X. Or ElonNet. Or whatever they call it these days. Indeed, a lot of people started noticing a new dashboard design had been implemented that was a near-copy of Twitter. Navigation down the left side, main content in the centre, elevated content down the right side. Even the order that all the options appeared in was similar. Obviously, Twitter and Tumblr have differently-named options, but their analogues to each other were arranged, basically, the same. As predicted there's a Tampermonkey userscript that undoes the changes, and XKit has already moved to de-evolve the new dashboard. The prevailing logic is that Tumblr is attempting to make itself more attractive for the companies that formerly advertised on Twitter. "Hey, look! We're the same layout as Twitter so you should definitely come here!"
Right now, it seems like half the users are trying to resist the changes at all cost and the other half are asking what has really changed. And that's true; Twitter never strayed much from their original layout because it was reasonably efficient. You didn't need to open menus here and there in order to see all the options you had available to you at a given time because they were all right there on your sidebar, and now Tumblr is just trying to duplicate that same efficiency. Maybe. The site's defenders say it's just the direction that all websites gravitate in. The detractors say that all websites looking the same is not the ideal condition for the internet. Indeed, a boilerplate homepage, designed for constant dynamic content changes, is not the best layout for every website. Even Wikipedia, to a certain degree, has laminated their website in this manner. On any given article on the English Wikipedia right now, you have a table of contents on the left side, the article's content in the middle, and an information digest on the right side. GUI designers refer to this as "enshittification". It used to be that Facebook was the origin of enshittification, but then they adopted Twitter's layout, so now Twitter is the origin point. With designers and indie web developers, the problem is that new ideas are not necessary when everyone in class is just copying off each other. Tumblr user, innerlmnt, said it best in a modified Sonic the Hedgehog meme: "I want the difference between website layout to be as large as the difference between Helvetica and Curlz MT, and I'm not kidding." Why bother thinking independently when there's a groupthink you can join?
The fact of Tumblr's status as a corporate entity has been brought up in relation to the changes; Tumblr is a business and businesses need money to continue operating. There is even an initiative in place for every active user to buy Crabs (a gimmick that was instituted as a bonus feature after April Fool's Day 2023) on a particular day this week, in an effort to raise money to keep the website online for, what? Another 2 hours? Whatever. The root of Tumblr's financial difficulties can be traced back to its acquisition by Yahoo! in 2013; for some reason, at this time, all the advertising consultants started to say to their clients, "Tumblr is not profitable, do not advertise there." The site had done nothing but get bought by a larger website, but all the companies advertising there all left. All of them. Not a single Fortune 500 company remained on Tumblr after its acquisition. Prior to this, advertisers would not "advertise" in the traditional sense, insofar as there were no ad banners or popups; they would advertise like... well... like Twitter. The company would establish a business account, pay Tumblr, Inc. a certain amount in subscription fees every month, and for the privilege, Tumblr would elevate their content by injecting it into everyone's dashboards. Reblogs, likes, and permalinks were not disabled, so users could interact with the posts like any other post. So far as I know (with my ad-blockers and general hatred of mobile apps), no one has ever attempted to resume this process. Of course, the scope of advertising has changed somewhat since 2013; internet billboards are not enough for the corporate feudal state anymore. Now, they require targeted advertising that they can pick a single person out of a crowd and put a bottle of Tide in his hands. Site-wide advertising is no longer profitable enough for companies that exist to please their shareholders and no other reason.
Tumblr's detractors also have another axe to grind with the website, which is being completely ignored by the half of the website clamouring for Crab Day: the website's moderation staff have a troubling habit of suppressing content posted by transgender women. Since at least 2017, trans-women have had their selfies, artworks, and text-only biographies wholly censored by Tumblr, who continue to hide behind their automated process and claim it was all the work of a bug in the system. At the same time, their Blaze system—a curated system wherein users pay a certain amount to have their content injected into everyone's dashboards—continues to be used for Catholic proselytising and neo-nazi propaganda. It is important to say that Blaze is "curated"; by its own admission, Tumblr weeds out blazed posts that the staff claim break the rules, and these posts are not accepted for Blazing. By Tumblr's own terms of service, evangelism and hate-speech are not allowed on the greater whole of the website, let alone Blazed posts, yet both seem to continue unbothered while anything created by trans-women is censored as sexually-explicit.
I've been trying to come down on one side or another of the issue on my own account there, but every time I go to reblog something having to do with it, I decide it's not worth my time. The same with opinion posts. I haven't posted my own opinion about the changes beyond simply, "@staff better be careful or Elon's gonna take a wrong turn one day and think this is his website". That's why I made an entire HTML document about this on a different website; I needed to address it, but there was no point in doing it on Tumblr, itself. After a while, I realised it's because I simply don't care. Social media of all kinds has shown a proclivity for becoming a stronghold of the far-right, and Tumblr is the only website it hasn't managed to corrupt yet; but it will happen. Somewhere on the order of 95% of the world's money lies in the pockets of someone with fascist leanings, either because they inherited a bunch of money from an apartheid emerald mining operation, their daddy founded DARPA and they want to start a company town, or they flunked out of Harvard and own a hollowed-out volcano in Hawaii. Eventually, Tumblr is going to be put up for sale again, and there's no reason to believe that Elon Musk will stay at home that day. The corporate feudal state is going to succeed in destroying Tumblr, just like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace before it, and everyone will either attempt to coexist with a large contingent of neo-nazis or scatter to Neocities and the smaller-time Tumblr-like websites until they, too, get shut down.
I don't have much hope for the future of the internet. We'd all be better off going back to message boards, hosted by someone's Apple II.
--24 July 2023--