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Tumblr is losing $30M each year, CEO says
(techcrunch.com)
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this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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I think that if a platform wants to support long-form content, it needs to make design choices around long-form. It can't be a short-form content UX with an arbitrary limit removed so that long posts can be created, if they're going to be displayed and interacted with in the same way as 280 character tweets.
Some design choices that made Tumblr better for long-form posts and discussion: Being able to tag a post without writing the tag inside the main post body, so posts can be categorized without messing up the content. Text formatting support. Media can be inserted into any part of the text instead of forcing them to appear at the bottom of the post. Q&A. Post archives. Custom blog theming. One account can have multiple blogs to organize content. Replies show the context of what they're replying to when shared. Support for commenting on posts. They combined these effectively with short-form design like the centralized feed of posts and interaction buttons.
Another reason I prefer Tumblr over Twitter is because Tumblr's format makes discussion most visible, while Twitter makes soapboxing most visible. Tumblr's design has flaws, but it's the best example of platform design that balances long-form, short-form and discussion in my opinion.
That all makes sense.
But I think all of these design choices are somewhat arbitrary. That is, they’re all mostly independent of each other and can be mixed and matched pretty freely without the underlying data structures on the backend changing much or at all.
The point being that I think we’re still transitioning out of the big social era where the platform is a highly walled garden. Once social media becomes decentralised and federated and FOSS, a lot of these boundaries no longer exist or don’t need to exist. Both a tumblr like UI and the ordinary UI and a Twitter like UI could exist on top of a single mastodon server.
Also, interestingly, I think calckey, which has a char limit of 4000 has also made some design choices similar to tumblr’s, but maybe organically and independently so(?)