Roughly one year ago, in a desperate attempt to become profitable, Tumblr introduced a new feature called Tumblr Live. It was clearly in response to the success of Twitch, and allowed users to livestream anything (well, anything other than female-presenting nipples, of course). Being open to change of all types, and being supportive of Tumblr’s attempts to make some money to keep the lights on, the Tumblr userbase was instantly welcoming of the new feature.
Lol. Just kidding. Everyone hated it with a violent passion and made it their mission to kill Tumblr Live to death.
See, Tumblr is one of the old school social media sites. Lots of people used to be there when it was cool a decade ago, but now it’s mostly just folks who never left, recovering Supernatural fans and people who love Tumblr exactly as it is never want it to change. These are the users proud of making Yahoo lose a billion dollars on Tumblr (Yahoo bought the company for $US1.1 billion back in 2013, and then sold it to Automattic for less than $US3 million in 2019 after losing 30 per cent of the userbase in the porn ban of 2018).
Automattic tried valiantly to find ways to make the site profitable, introducing new features like Blaze (users can pay to get their post seen by a certain number of random blogs) and the Tumblr store which featured paid features like useless checkmarks. Users loved those features, though apparently not enough to sustain the site. So, Automattic also tried other bold plays, like Tumblr Live and introducing an optional algorithmic feed.
When Tumblr Live was first introduced, it was impossible to escape. Partially because US users (and some people outside the US including me, for some unknown reason) had the feature shoved on our dash at every possible opportunity. You couldn’t turn Live off, you could only snooze the feature for 30 days.
For many users, this change was incredibly unwelcome. It was antithetical to how people actually used Tumblr, and looked like Tumblr was trying to turn into the very other kinds of social media that Tumblr users were trying to avoid.
There is no such thing as a successful influencer on Tumblr. If you have 100,000 flowers on TikTok, you have a way to make money. If you have 100,000 followers on Tumblr, you have an Ask Box filled with the most annoying people possible.
Tumblr Live seemed like a way to bring an invasive species to a fragile ecosystem.
These people were coming over from platforms where you had to self-censor to get surfaced in the algorithm and bringing their “seggs”, “unalive”, “wh0r3” and other nonsense cutesy euphemisms to the place where people said what they meant and used tags to find and filter. Tumblr is one of the last places on the internet where you can properly curate your experience, without an algorithm trying to keep you there by default, so it really doesn’t matter if you say “die”. Bringing TikTok and Instagram culture where you use all the possible tags, even if they’re only tangentially related, to Tumblr was seen as a hostile threat.
Some users valiantly tried to educate the newbies on tag usage, that ‘likes’ mean nothing, and that we don’t do censorship. Others started firing metaphorical guns in the air to lower property values, even spreading (perhaps accidentally) misinformation about potential privacy risks in Tumblr Live.
While the userbase clearly didn’t like Tumblr Live, it was also a baffling move, given that live streaming seems so antithetical to what Tumblr is. Users coming to Tumblr for live streaming likely wouldn’t be interested in regular Tumblr, and vice versa.
So, it’s not surprising that Tumblr Live is shutting down on the 24th of January 2024. They gave it a red-hot go, but now it’s dead. Users have until the 23rd of January to cash out their Diamonds or use/transfer their credits (apparently these were currencies on the platform).
Unfortunately, it also seems like all the other attempts to monetise the site have failed. A leaked memo last year showed that developers working on the site have largely been moved to other teams within Automattic, with pretty much only the Trust and Safety team remaining untouched.
What’s coming next for Tumblr is anyone’s guess. But I hope they keep trying, I love it there.
Still: Rest In Piss, Tumblr Live.