I guess I finally took sides on the issue of Tumblr becoming Twitter. This picture currently has 500 notes on Tumblr, despite my not having given it any tags. It was sort of an offhanded comment I'd been trying out different phrasing for over the past couple of weeks; I even posted it once before, but it only took 5 minutes for me to decide I didn't care enough to post it.
The fact of the matter is, Tumblr made $68,000,000 last year. Just Tumblr; not WordPress, not Automattic, just Tumblr. I don't know how much money Automattic as a corporate entity made last year and, honestly, I don't care. It's a vulgar amount of money, regardless; sixty-eight million of something is incomprehensible to the human brain at this stage in its evolution. I personally have trouble comprehending even a thousand of something. Yet, corporations rake in all this money and more, every single day, without truly comprehending the magnitude of the amount. $68 million, $250 million, $540 million, $1 billion. These are unnatural, unquantifiable numbers.
Like it or don't, Tumblr is a corporation, and this corporation made tens of millions of dollars last year alone. How much did I make? All year, all told, how much? $250. Not $250 million--two hundred and fifty dollars. That was my total income for the entire 2022 fiscal year. Nonetheless, I consider myself secure; I have food stamps and my mum has food stamps, my mum has enough retirement pension she can afford to pay the rent and the bills. I have this, but loads of people whose posts I reblog on Tumblr don't even have that. They come onto Tumblr and advertise they have art commissions open, or they just need such and such amount to get through until payday, or they don't have the ability to work and the government is cutting back their welfare in order to pressure them into getting a job. They have no other options but to look for help from the community. Well, the community right now is more interested in keeping large websites afloat for another few hours. This community can afford to give money to AO3 for server maintenance, then they can afford to turn around and buy a useless ornament for their Tumblr dashboards, but when it comes to actually helping people--suddenly, they can't afford it. "Oh, you want too much." "Oh, it's against the rules." "Oh, just apply for welfare."
Like I said in my other post, Tumblr moderators have a troubling habit of censoring transgender women. Well, how many transgender women are there on Tumblr right now who just need a couple hundred quid to stay afloat? How many of them are also artists who will give you a completely new piece of visual art, made to order, in exchange for a few euros? What is Tumblr promising you? A Twitter-like, advertiser-friendly dashboard with all the tracking cookies you can eat, where the Southern Baptists can evangelise from here 'til doomsday. You "don't have that kind of money", shut the fuck up. You donated money to a website that thrives on incestuous fan fiction, then you bought crabs from Tumblr at the same time they were banning 15 transsexuals. And you call Tumblr the "queerest place on the internet".
--29 July 2023--