On that Tumblr subscription service thing

[soc_puppet]

So Tumblr's offering a new subscription service, where you can pay them a few bucks a month and they won't show you ads. I think this is a good move for them! It has plenty of potential, and it's a lot better than Posts+; the tip jar option they floated a little while ago wasn't too bad either, aside from the whole "all or nothing" bit, where you couldn't turn it off for posts that would get you dinged for intellectual property theft.

That said, I'm rather torn about whether I'll be subscribing myself. I do spend a lot of time on Tumblr, but that's mostly because the people whose content I want to follow are mostly on Tumblr rather than my preferred platform. I understand the value of being able to share images, sound, and video with a wide audience, I just don't know if I personally like the methods of content aggregation.

In short, I... don't know if I would mind if Tumblr went down. I'd be a little upset if it happened, say, tomorrow, without me having a way to back up the stuff I've added since the porn ban, and I'd feel bad for the people who really love it there, and I'd feel extra bad for anyone who'd have to scramble to find new ways of making money or any friends they've made there, but I ultimately prefer Dreamwidth. I don't know if I want Tumblr to stick around enough to pay a minimum of $40 USD per year for the privilege.

Methinks I've got some weighing of priorities to do.

Comments

[bluedreaming]

I access Tumblr almost exclusively via rss to email or direct links people share, but I’m also always a proponent of no ads (I’d always rather pay for something: I guess the whole “if you don’t pay for a product, you are the product” really stuck), so I went for it.

(Twitter! Give me no ads!)

While I wouldn’t personally be affected by its loss, the loss of all the meta and fanworks and other works and people using the images as image hosting elsewhere—it would be significant.

[soc_puppet]

I'm still looking at my bank account and weighing the pros and cons.

Tumblr going under would be a devastating loss to fandom history. Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure we've been seeing bits of that for years; there are tons of fics on AO3 that will link to specific Tumblr posts, but when I click the link for more context, the post is gone. Either someone changed their Tumblr handle (and I only learned recently that I can just plug the new handle into the old address for it to go right again), or they deleted their blog entirely, or something else entirely.

[bluedreaming]

Definitely, the transience of Tumblr and Twitter links is so frustrating! It's one thing if they've purposefully deleted the post, but when it's just url rot it's so aggravating.