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.
Soup.io – well-known alternative to Tumblr. Reblogging, post types, themes, collab blogs, dashboard, artsy, great community already there. Soup can auto-import everything you’ve posted on Tumblr.
TypePad – Includes reblogging. Dashboard and post types similar to Tumblr.
Tumblr after fucking with your app, embedding “recommended” blogs, ads, etc are now gonna block all their best content contributors. A whole new level of stupid.
Tumblr wants to take away all adult content on the platform, abandoning a large majority of it’s userbase which uses the site for this exact matter. Please sign the above petition if you would like to keep tumblr the way it is. They need to be shown that they will lose a HUGE amount of their traffic if they’re too carry this through.
Congratulations, Tumblr, you’ve provided a tremendous lesson in unnecessary censorship. You’ve always had mechanisms in place to identify adult content, so you new policies do nothing but curtail free speech and go against what has always been a Tumblr hallmark: the importance of free expression. https://t.co/3DFD6D470O
