Tumblr Post+ Protest

[soc_puppet]

Anyway, yeah, I'll be logging off of Tumblr in a few hours as part of Phase Two of the Post+ Protest. I'm afraid I don't actually expect Tumblr to take Post+ away; a lot of websites are married pretty hard to the Sunk Cost Fallacy, and Tumblr has sunk waaaay too much into Post+ to abandon it without at least a few years of trying to make it work. But I'm sure y'all have already gathered how big a proponent I am of Dreamwidth, and, well, any excuse to get people to check it out!

Official logoff time starts in about 3.25 hours after this post goes up, and lasts for 48 hours. We'll see what happens!

Comments

[gwydion]

What's Post+?

[capri0mni]

It's a thing Tumblr is trying out, to get people with Tumblr accounts to put a portion of their content behind a paywall... From which, Tumblr will take a cut (naturally).

The really bad thing is that, in Tumblr's first announcements of this shiny "new feature," they were encouraging account holders to get paid for their fan art and fanfic... which is illegal. And also, in the fine print about Post+, they absolved themselves of all responsibility, and won't defend any user if they get sued for their fan art or fanfic.

[soc_puppet]

capri0mni already explained it pretty well; there's more details, like how they didn't actually announce it themselves, but let a beta-tester announce it for them—and how she was pelted with misdirected abuse for daring to even think about trying the idea. Not Tumblr's best move, setting someone else up to take the fall.

There was a prior logoff protest a couple months ago, shortly after Post+ was announced, and a lot of people participated. After that, Tumblr staff removed the language that directly suggested that Tumblr users could and should try to make a profit off of their Destiel fanfic, but didn't add any language to say that their users shouldn't try to profit off of fanworks, and the thing where Tumblr staff won't be supporting any creators who get their butts sued is still in there.

IIRC, the goal of this longer logoff is to get Tumblr to remove Post+ entirely, but as I stated above, I don't find it very likely. In addition to the sunk cost fallacy stuff, Tumblr has got to be absolutely hemorrhaging money right now, making them still desperate to keep Post+, and with the most egregious bit of language taken care of (direct suggestion vs. indirect suggestion), I expect there will be fewer people logging off this time as well.

Some users have suggested alternatives to Post+, like buying little stickers to send to your friends, or little hats for your icon to wear, stuff like that, but again: Pretty sure sunk cost fallacy, as well as the fear that some of those same users will accuse them of stealing the idea and demand a cut of the profits, is going to keep Tumblr from going for that.

[gwydion]

Ah right. I remember the initial nightmare roll out, and then prompty forgot what it was called or that it was a thuing once the mocking ended.

[soc_puppet]

Yeah, they started rolling it out more thoroughly not long ago. I've got a little "Post+!!!" icon dealy in the drop-down menu for personal account related stuff (followers, drafts, settings, etc).

Honestly, I'd be satisfied (to the extent possible) if Tumblr made absolutely certain to clarify that profiting off of fandom content through Post+ was not allowed, or at least horribly fraught, but I already covered how I'm not expecting them to get rid of it entirely.

[gwydion]

I wish there was a total opt out.

[soc_puppet]

On the plus side, I'm pretty sure you have to actually sign up for Post+, if only because they need some sort of payment information. (And it looks like that information is going through Stripe, so it's not entirely the worst idea in the world, in terms of infosec.) Other than that, I'm thinking Xkit is our best bet.

[gwydion]

I live by xkit.