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.
so, i only went in to get the shiny silvally code. should’ve taken like a minute or two at most but i was in there for upwards of ten. it was deeply unsettling right off the bat when i walked in because it was quiet. like really quiet. the tv that plays the gaming news and the speaker that plays the ads weren’t running. the cashier says hello and i get in line to wait. it is dead silent. nobody in the store is making any noise except for the cashier, who is typing. she’s helping a little boy sell 12 PS4 games. the boys mom is walking back and forth behind him sipping her gas station brand cup of coffee. literally just walking back and forth from one end of the store to the other. all the while the entire store is silent, the kid is silent, the mom is silent… all 5 of the other full grown adults in this store are silent. and i’m the only one in line behind this kid, these other adults throughout the store are like standing in one space just staring and being quiet. they weren’t browsing, they weren’t talking. nobody was making any noise. i wasn’t making any noise. i was standing there thinking about how eerily silent it was in this gamestop and wondering what the hell was going on - hyper aware of every move i made because i didn’t want to make a noise and break the silence. this carried on for literally 10 minutes before another cashier came in through the front door and loudly exclaimed “i can’t leave you alone for five minutes.” he called me to the counter and asked me what i needed help with. it was like immediately the ambient noises of gamestop all returned at once and i stepped forward to get my code.
my favorite part of this is the implication that not only was the first cashier somehow responsible for the eerie silence to begin with but also that this has certainly happened before
