Old woman yells at cloud

[sholio]

Reading Tumblr's post on upcoming changes (kinda long and very vague in specifics, there's a reblog addition in which they claim nothing is changing in the core product but WE'LL SEE) made me think about changes to the general style of social media over the last decade or so, especially this part:

The underlying problem is that Tumblr is not easy to use. Historically, we have expected users to curate their feeds and lean into curating their experience. But this expectation introduces friction to the user experience and only serves a small portion of our audience.

[...] Tumblr encompasses a wide range of interests, such as entertainment, art, gaming, fandom, fashion, and music. People come to Tumblr to immerse themselves in this culture, making it essential for us to ensure a seamless connection between people and content.

To guarantee Tumblr’s continued success, we’ve got to prioritize fostering that seamless connection between people and content.

I hadn't really thought about this before, but the whole experience of looking for things used to be the basic experience of getting on a new social media platform. You have to go find stuff - accounts to follow, tags to search. Ideally you can search without an account and just read the content on the site for a while before you get on, and you can spend lots of time lurking and searching before you join in, but *you* fill up your feed with the things that you want to see.

But this trend toward having the social media platform itself fill your feed/timeline/reading page with a ton of content it thinks you want rather than leaving it up to you to find things on your own is just ... I feel like it's actively antithetical to the social media experience I want to have. And it's recent, not the suggesting stuff per se (lots of sites do this in a sidebar, all the way back to the mid-2000s or earlier for places like Yahoo News) but the expectation that what's going to happen when you go on a social media site, you'll have a cascade of random crap thrown at you - that's new, it didn't used to be like that, it's completely ridiculous to say that it's the only experience users want when it's literally only the last few years that any site has done that.

In Tumblr's specific case, if they want to show off the contents of the site to new users, maybe they could try focusing on building a search function that isn't total donkey crap.

(This is more like musing and gripey nitpicking rather than me being hugely annoyed at any of this, but it's fascinating how the above quotes, and some other parts of the linked post, made me consider how there's been this general turnaround from having a slow ramping up on a new social media, where you start out with a somewhat barren experience and spend some time having to seek out content to engage with, vs having it firehosed at you - it's *new*, it's not inevitable, and I don't even think it's inevitable that every new content platform is going to be like that; there's still plenty of interest in Medium-style, Reddit-style websites, where there might be a What's New section or suggestions offered to you, but mostly you go there because you want to see specific things and have at least a minimal, Google-assisted-if-necessary ability to search for them.)

(I also just kind of resent the above-quoted bit where "curating your experience" is equated to "picking blogs you want to follow" - because *that's not how that's used,* it refers more specifically to blocking blogs, muting tags, and generally cherry-picking from the available content on your dash for a better experience, not the basic underlying mechanism that you choose what blogs you want to follow vs having the site pick for you.)

Comments

[sholio]

Honestly the comparison to old-school TV makes a lot of sense to me - on a number of levels, actually, because for those of us who grew up with it, all of the things that now seem mindblowingly kludgy about it were perfectly normal! Of course you watch only what the TV wants you to watch and you pause for ads every 15 minutes. We would never have expected anything else. Imagine going back to ad-supported network TV now after decades of ad-free streaming - we'd all hate it SO MUCH (as an instant transition) but it's all too easy to see the Internet's biggest sites transitioning steadily toward something like that which newer or more acclimatized users simply accept the way we accepted that an hour of TV was actually 40 minutes of TV and 20 minutes of commercials ...

[yhlee]

a tangent on streaming TV
In a webinar by a producer/TV writer/former Disney animator (old-school 2D, transitioned to 3D, got out), he said that it is his professional opinion that almost none of the individual streaming sites are profitable and everyone is flailing. Probable/possible exceptions: Disney+ (parents with kids especially, plus superfans of XYZ Disney thing), Amazon Prime (unclear, Amazon is super opaque, but OTOH they have deep pockets and they probably COULD afford to lose money for a while to use it to drive people to Prime and/or their other offerings).

EDIT: I did take notes on this and he had some numbers/etc. to back this assessment up, I just don't have it off the top of my head. Of course, this was about a year ago so the landscape may have changed again, but in general terms I think he's right.

His opinion on Netflix is that Netflix is long-term screwed because everyone has splintered into their own individual subscription services and it introduced ad-supported tier. The first leads to the current very annoying splintering. (I personally won't subscribe to more than two or maybe three services, so if a TV show is on another service, I just don't watch it.) The second...my vague recollection (and I may have the details wrong) is that Netflix could just...not release viewer numbers on individual shows or whatever, take it or leave it. The moment they run ADS, the people buying those ads are going to demand those numbers, at which point there is going to be revaluation AND it starts to incentivize pushing the shows that will bring in ad revenue etc.

I mean, this is complicated and I'm sure my understanding is very very imperfect. But basically: streaming screwed the money model, and of course this has repercussions on the writer/actor/director side as well due to "how are the people making/writing/acting in these shows getting compensated for streaming shows if there's no ad revenue etc. based on outdated models/contracts," as we're seeing with the ongoing WGA strike and the possible SAG-AFTRA strike looming (my understanding is the DGA has a "tenative deal" as of a month ago but I could be out of date).

[yhlee]

Honestly, I'm starting to wonder if HAM RADIO is the way to go! A friend and I were talking about it in middle school right before I moved to S. Korea, because international mail was slow (10-14 days for a typical snail letter), international calls were ruinously expensive, and this was functionally pre-internet/email. XD

[sheron]

My hope is that this will bring back the 'more episodes' tv shows that have time for episodes of fluff or 'characters stuck in an elevator' just because they need to push those ads at us XDDD

[yhlee]

I miss long-form TV seasons too! And one fascinating thing that was pointed out to me is that miniseries can be fun for viewers bingeing but because of the way Hollywood writer rooms and credits and payments and so on are currently apportioned, shorter seasons make it exponentially harder for new writers to break in and get credit for episodes that lead to future gigs etc. because there are just fewer episodes, period. Which I had never thought about before!!

[sheron]

That's a really good point! So many "filler" episodes were done by up-and-coming writers and so on. I really miss them too!