Ben Gold

Please, please, just stop it. Feedback is important, but at a certain point you being to cross a line into the realm of obnoxious (I’ve been guilty of this too, it happens). Your choice is simple: continue using a FREE service that is far superior to any of its competitors in a number of ways and deal with the growing pains of a popular product or leave.

Leaving is probably the best thing you can do if you’re unhappy with something and you feel like those responsible are not listening (not that Tumblr isn’t hearing you; they are and they care about their work). If enough people decide to go elsewhere, they’ll have no choice but to take notice. A service like Tumblr isn’t any good without its users.

That said, I don’t think you should stop using Tumblr, even if you have been disappointed with their recent performance. You just need to understand that 15 million blogs (and counting) is a lot to deal with, especially with such a small team (yeah, Tumblr is really tiny considering how “big” it is).

The point I’m trying to make extends beyond this one tumblelogging platform and into life in general. You shouldn’t bail on something, or someone, at the first sign of trouble. If you always do that, you’ll miss out on some great stuff.

Thanks.

maniacalrage:

About 1% of the feedback to my ridiculous Tumblr Error Page post has been that I’m a stupid jackass for complaining about a free service (the other 99% is likes and agreeing reblogs). But here’s the thing, folks: I’ve been complaining for years that Tumblr is free. I don’t want it to be free. I want to pay for it. Tumblr is one of the few services on earth that refuses to take my money. And it’s a shame, because rather than taking VC or running a tiny team, they could be charging customers, making money, and growing the service while remaining stable.

I’m of the opinion there’s no reason to give away a product for free if you want it to succeed. Sure, there are outliers here, but most of them, such as Gmail, use advertising anyway so they’re not technically free. Eventually, everything costs money. Don’t wait until it’s too late and then have to decide between angering cheap customers or being successful. Most users of free services are douchebags. I’ve no doubt that 90% of Tumblr’s users would flee if there was a monthly cost announced, but that’s fine—you don’t want those users long-term anyway. If someone isn’t interested in supporting your service, they’re not a good customer. Real customers spend fair amounts of money on things they appreciate.

Restaurants aren’t going around giving away free meals. It’s a business. It costs money to run, even more money to run well, and you expect people who solicit your service to pay their fair share. Why are internet businesses any different?

I’m really not so sure that there are that many people who would be willing to use Tumblr, as it exists today, if it suddenly became a subscription service. It is a great blogging platform and I don’t think I need to tell anyone that after using it for four years, but Tumblr was never meant to compete with Wordpress.

A tumblelog is microblog for sharing things quickly and easily. A lot of Tumblr users still use the service this way. There isn’t a lot of value in that besides the fact that it’s fun. The other thing is that you have a lot of high school age kids using Tumblr as a way to express themselves in a public forum.

You can’t charge these kinds of users. I’m not going to pay to share a neat YouTube video with my 10 followers. As a 14 year old girl, I don’t have money or a credit card to pay for the service and I’m not sure how I can convince my parents that it’s a worthwhile investment.

That said, I do believe that Tumblr should start charging. With all of these media companies on Tumblr, I’m sure that they could offer them premium features. A Tumblr Publisher account would give you access to stats, referrers, trends, and a number of other features that someone using Tumblr for a serious media site would be willing to pay for. It wouldn’t just have to be for big companies like NBCUniversal or NPR; people like Garrett Murray and my self would be willing to spend money for additional functionality, just as you would with Wordpress or Typepad.

Just because you’re a startup that’s trying to grow its community and you have $40 million in funding, it doesn’t mean that you should pass up a good business opportunity when one exists. I know that that the people who run Tumblr aren’t stupid and I’m sure they’ve thought about this already, which makes me think that money isn’t the issue, but I’m not going to speculate about something I know nothing about.