I watched the live with the CEO, here is the tl;dr
The good news:
- Chronological dash is here to stay! Whether you have to toggle it weekly or new users default to “For you” was not elaborated on but at least that’s confirmed.
- Custom themes are here to stay! Once again, may be buried for all I know but, for sure will remain an option.
- Search updates are in the works!!!!
The neutral news:
- Tumblr is seriously in the red financially and needs more support, Ad-free for example is not widely used
- They would not comment on the suggestion to bring back NSFW behind a paywall (which we all know would get them a boatload of money)
- They’re possibly going to add a donation system like Ao3 and Wikipedia.
- They would “rather not” sell data to make up the costs
- Most of staff are pre-2010 tumblr users including the CEO who joined in 2007, so they do actually use the site and have for a long time
The bad news:
- Condensed reblogs/removing reblog chains is going forward. The reason cited was to meet “certain expectations” of users coming from other social media, which isn’t good.
- Disability features (specifically turning off flashing ads for epileptics) was met with a request to purchase Ad-free
Overall it was more chill than I expected, @photomatt and @zingring seem to be far more in tune with the userbase than u/spez.
Under the bad news column:
I did ask our ads team to investigate any kind of vibrancy or flashing on ads – we do not want to accidentally trigger seizures or cause distress with flashing etc. Buying ad-free (or gifting ad-free to someone else) is always an option, but that is not the solution (and of course, some folks simply can’t afford it). Sorry that it sounded dismissive in the session! That was not my intent.
Condensed reblogs/removing reblog chains is going forward.
Depending on how that looks/if it can be turned off, that could kill the site as surely as removing chronological following only feeds would…
We want reblogs, not rooted posts with comments under them. At that point you are just Facebook…
reblog chains where users iteratively produce something funny or informative are practically this site’s main cultural export i don’t know what kind of tepid soup is sloshing around in your skull that you’d even consider getting rid of that