Sounds drastic. Especially for content creators who may still need Tumblr for commissions while they find an alternative.
If you can swing it, here’s why:
I suspect that the December 17th deadline is so that Verizon/Yahoo can clean house and make Tumblr appealing to investors. This is a Q4/Q1 fire sale kind of thing. It makes a certain amount of business sense to make this change. Human-lead content curation (e.g. separating the CP from the legit) is expensive and time-consuming. I doubt they have the money for it. They already sold off Flickr. As a long-time Flickr pro user, I’m not pleased by the change and increase in pro account price, but I get it.
Investors are looking for a user base. User base is a prime attraction for investment or buy-out for a social media platform or application (I speak from experience as a co-founder of Rhinobird.tv).
Every account that is cancelled will be one less account in Tumblr’s user base for their pitch. I assume that there are millions of accounts with some percentage simply being abandoned accounts that haven’t been used in years. So cancelling one’s account on the way out the door won’t really matter unless the number of cancelled accounts reaches several hundred thousand at least.
If you decide to leave and cancel, then I also recommend sending a polite message to Tumblr staff, or tweet to the account about why you are leaving.
Finally, using Twitter to voice your concerns and thoughts about this issue will increase its visibility. They ain’t gonna like that. Media outlets that cater to tech entrepreneurs, and Silicon Valley types are going to be all over this.
I never ask for reblogs, but I will this one time.
Hey so, Tumblr seems to be nuking a lot of artist blogs today. Here’s my Twitter where I also post art! If this blog ends up getting deleted, thank you for all the support over the years! ❤
I’m going to bump this again due to yesterday’s news. You can also find my NSFW twitter here https://twitter.com/qualzar
If you really want to burn your bridges and possibly send a message about how broken this hellsite has been for a good while now, you could always try the Tumblr “kill code”. If it still works, it’ll automatically and instantly delete your account and all the blogs therein. You might have to post it twice like I did the first time.
But be careful. If you use it on a public wifi – for instance, if you’re at a comics convention – it may also kill the Tumblr accounts of all the users on the same connection, that is if they’re all using the same IP address as you. So use the kill code responsibly.
If you’ve ever been curious about the kill code but didn’t want to try it out in case it permanently flagged your IP address as malicious, these final days might present a good opportunity to give it a go.
A former staff engineer, who recently left Tumblr and asked to remain
anonymous for professional reasons, tells Vox that the NSFW ban was “in
the works for about six months as an official project,” adding that it
was given additional resources and named “Project X” in September,
shortly before it was announced to the rest of the company at an
all-hands meeting. “[The NSFW ban] was going to happen anyway,” the
former engineer told me. “Verizon pushed it out the door after the child
pornography thing and made the deadline sooner,” but the real problem
was always that Verizon couldn’t sell ads next to porn.
Porn on Tumblr is something Verizon needs to wipe out if it’s going to
make any money off what it thinks is actually valuable about the
platform — enormous fandom and social justice communities that, just
before the Verizon acquisition, Khalaf was insisting the staff figure
out how to better monetize.
On that note-
Two former Tumblr employees said they were alarmed when Khalaf chose
Black Lives Matter as an example of a community that the company should
focus on converting into Yahoo media consumers. One told The Verge,
“Simon explicitly said that Black Lives Matter was an opportunity to
[make] a ton of money.”
Hey I really dislike censoring shit but tbh I’m feeling my grips and interest in tumblr coming to an end so I’mma remind y’all again with a bit of incentive that I still got a Twitter and a Weasyl that y’all should totally check out. I’ve got more activity on Twitter but Weasyl is an actual goddamn gallery for the stuff I’ve drawn, which I’ve been trying to keep up-to-date. My activity here is going to be seeing a decline so if y’all don’t want to follow me there then tough tits~
TWITTER (currently a parody account, don’t bet on this one for the time being)
I might join some other sites like Inkedfur or whatever in the future as well, but this is where I hang aside from tumblr.
Thank you all SO MUCH for the good times I’ve had on tumblr. There were bad times, but they pale in comparison to the positive experiences. My life would be even worse without the friends and fans I’ve collected here on this platform, and throughout the brony and furry communities. I hope to see you all on the flip side!
Also, Merry Celestimas!
Hugs and whatnot-
Skoon
HEADS UP ABOUT TWITTER
So my current Twitter, which was a joke account, was actually made by somebody in Italy who somehow used my email address to open it. This happened in 2016, January.
That’s the only reason I even HAVE a Twitter in the first place, I took it over after all the security checks.
BUT now that I am gonna use it for real, I am going to deactivate my old Twitter and make a new one, this time made by me right here in Murrica.
I’m a little nervous putting my art and personal info on an account I took back from a shitty hacker in Italy. 😛
Raen 