the man who owns and runs the thai restaurant in my town knows me by name. he is one of the kindest and most thoughtful men i know. i started ordering from his place back in january, which was when i got my fibromyalgia diagnosis. back then i was using a walker, had limited mobility in my entire body but especially my hands, and was very visibly in pain. i always ordered the same thing: yellow curry with no meat, potatoes and carrots only (i have texture and other dietary issues). he always made it a point to make sure i could get out the door and carry the food safely. he had his workers package the food so that it was easier for me to open. as i kept coming back and i told him a little bit about my health status, he would always encourage me to keep going. he told me about how the spices he used were good for inflammation and began to edit the recipe just for me so that spices that were even better for fighting inflammation were used. he’d give me extra portions and despite the fact that i would tip every time, i realized later that he never charged my card for them. as time went on and my condition began to get better, he would make encouraging remarks and tell me how happy he was for me. the day i came in without my walker, he practically jumped for joy, and despite my insistence, he gave me my meal for free that day. i continue to make progress with my conditions and i continue to go to the thai place. this man who does not know me personally and who i hardly know anything about is one of my favorite people. it’s interactions with humans like these that make loving life easier. and his curry really does help my chronic condition. it’s comfort food taken to the next level.
But what’s happened now is that this has happened so often with so many shows, that Netflix has created a self-fulfilling loop with many series that probably could have gone on to become valuable catalogue additions otherwise.
The idea is that since you know that Netflix cancels so many shows after one or two seasons, ending them on cliffhangers and leaving their storylines unfinished, it’s almost not worth investing in a show until it’s already ended, and you know it’s going to have a coherent ending and finished arc.
So you hold off watching new shows, even ones you might otherwise be interested in, because you’re afraid Netflix will cancel them. Enough people do this and surprise, viewership is low! And the show ends up cancelled. The loop is closed, and reinforced, because now there’s yet another example cited, causing even more people to be cautious the next time around. And now we’ve reached a point where unless a series is some sort of record-breaking fluke megahit (Wednesday) or established super franchise (Stranger Things), a second or third season feels like not even a coinflip, but more like 10-20% shot, at best.
Netflix’s cancelation policies have informed its viewers that if you want a show you like renewed, you need to watch it immediately, you need to tell all your friends to watch it immediately, and you need to finish all episodes in a short period of time. Anything less than that will result in likely cancelation, with the problem being, of course, that this runs contrary to the entire promise of a streaming service like Netflix in the first place. The core concept of “on demand” streaming was that ability to watch what you wanted, when you wanted to. But now binging a series in its opening weekend isn’t just an option to have, it feels almost mandatory, lest the negative data reflect poorly on a show you might otherwise like.
Something has broken with this model. It’s now created a system where creators should be afraid to make a series that dares to end on a cliffhanger or save anything for future seasons, lest their story forever be left unfinished. And viewers are afraid to commit to any show that isn’t a completely aired package lest they spend 10-30 hours on something that ends up unresolved, which has happened dozens and dozens of times, creating a vast “show graveyard” within Netflix, full of landmines viewers are going to be discovering for years.
More at the link.
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I’ve wondered if it’s driving creators to their competitors too.
Competitors have the same issues. Good Omens won’t get a third season unless viewership is high.
Streaming services are starting to forget/ignore what their strengths and weaknesses are, and why they were so valuable in contrast to broadcast television: their strength of course being that I get to decide what i watch, whenever I can, without ever needing to have recordings of it beforehand, wether it be video tape or dvd or blu Ray. The downside of course is, I might be the only one watching that particular show at the moment, making it hard to find people at the same spot in the tv show, that I can discuss theories with about the next episode.
When streaming services complain about shows not getting enough engagement, this is the solution right there. Play into your strengths and give audience better guarantees by just telling the audience and the producers how many seasons a show will get at least. I know I would watch a show that has been guaranteed three seasons from the start. this gives audiences the time to invest in a show and the hope to want to start watching. reduce their weaknesses by publishing one episode a week, which still allows people to watch whenever they want, but also creates engagement on a weekly basis. The Good Place had 13 episodes per season, which also made for this show staying in peoples mind for 13 weeks a year. It made quite the impact. I was late to the beginning of the first season, but I was caught up before the first season ended, and I still got to experience the amazing twist along with everyone else. This was of course because it while was distributed internationally on streaming service Netflix, it still followed the broadcasting style of NBC network that broadcast it in the US.
That shit works! So many shows are legendary not because of their writing, but simply because the ran for long and people could talk about it on a regular basis. People want to connect with each other. Netflix wants you to go out of your way to do it in an unnatural, annoying way, namely by pestering people about it after you’ve seen everything all at once, instead of wanting to talk with people because you are both excited to see what is coming next EVERY SINGLE WEEK, TOGETHER.
Love and sharing are foreign concepts to capitalists, and that will always be why their projects start to fail.
I know you aren't with Tumblr anymore but idk who else to ask. Why does tumblr make so many random changes AND never give any forewarning or a reasoning for why they made it, AND never give any data on the feedback we send or the results they get from those changes? I understand that tumblr doesn't make money so changes are necessary but it's the sudden changes with no warning or explanation combined with the fact that they ask for feedback and then ignore all of the feedback we send and never release anything related to that feedback we send in that gets to me and makes me not want to use tumblr and refuse to recommend it to friends.
this is a very difficult question to answer. Because… things… are complex.
I guess the gist of it is “the reality where a good part of the tumblr community lives is not the same reality that staff experience”. Mind you, I’m not saying that Staff is oblivious or uninformed. Kind of the opposite. Staff manages a big extra layer of data we the users don’t get access too. Things from “how long we have to achieve X or close” to “this change had very bad feedback but didn’t make the usage numbers go down and it’s bringing 0.03% more revenue”.
There’s a hard reality we tumblr users who like tumblr as-it-is need to start accepting: We are not making tumblr make money, so we are not going to be the ‘client’ here.
While I was in staff, we tried. We tried hard: Post+, the merch store, blaze, ad-free … all those were attempts to make tumblr a platform funded by its community. The results were … not great. Like, two orders of magnitude worse than they needed to be. That let tumblr in the hands of advertising money (that even if tiny compared with other sites, it still is the main Tumblr source of money by far). And for that, if you want to make the site stop burning millions per month you need way more people than we tumblrinas are right now.
Mix that with.. a certain disdain for tumblr as a platform from part of the top management. A big bunch of staff are hard-core users of tumblr who are more or less in tune with the feelings of the community, but in the upper management layers… there’s only one or two persons I can think of that actually seems to like and enjoy tumblr. The rest of them are mostly users of other platforms in their personal lives, and … they just don’t get why tumblr is so hooking for some of us. They don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand the popular content here, they don’t understand the people who already use this place.
Earlier this year I actually had a call with the CEO to try to explain him why tumblr was a great platform for a certain type of mindsets, how I have adapted to this boiling cauldron of feral goblins so quickly and become enthralled by it when I started using it four years ago. And I think I failed completely at trying to make him excited or even interested in either the site culture or its community. Or convince him that tumblr could expand vertically (bringing more tumblr-minded people in) instead of horizontally (broad the appeal of tumblr for the masses even if it dilutes the current essence).
So for management, it’s just a game of numbers: The current tumblr community doesn’t cover the costs of running the site, so they need a new community that does. And if in the process, some of the old community leaves forever, :shrug:, not a big loss, since they weren’t making the company any money anyway. It’s more important for them to get all those people leaving twitter or other platforms to actually come here and stay, and get those key metrics up up and to the right. Of course, this is just my personal opinion and I’m sure if someone send this post to those in management who I’m vaguepostingly mentioning here, they would be all “Of course we CARE about our community and tumblr’s history!”. But hey, you know you really don’t.
“But Javi, isn’t alienating the core community who creates most of the content in this platform a stupid and terrible idea in the long term?”. Why, dear anon, of course it is. Or that’s what I think. And that’s what I ended arguing about again and again and again and again while I was part of staff. And that’s, maybe, one of the handful of recurrent points where I wasn’t “aligned with the direction of the company” that made me un-staffed (take that, tiktok kids!).
Why, then why tumblr management keeps pushing for this pace of rapid and alienating changes? Because Automattic, tumblr owner, is a private funded company. And there has to be smoke and mirrors showing that tumblr is actually moving fast and making the numbers go up up up. Every. Fucking. Quarter.
Do you know what’s the most stressing time of the year for your random staff member? Is it eurovision with its peaks of traffic? april’s fools with all the tomfoolery? No. It’s the biannual Automattic board meeting. Because in every. single. one. of. them. we didn’t know if that was going to be the day where tumblr’s downsizing would be greenlighted. Literally, every six months the board would look at what happened at tumblr and say “ok, this is terrible but moving in a promising way, let’s see if these things you are planning work and re-evaluate in six months”.
Does this mean they are in the wrong and me and the people pushing to keep tumblr more tumblr were right? Well, no. Not necessarily. Tumblr has been under a very real existential thread for … at least a couple of years. And the reality is that 'trying to monetize tumblr as-is’ didn’t work at all from a purely economic point of view, and tumblr wouldn’t have survived for much longer without showing clear gains. So who knows, maybe by diluting tumblr they could manage to make it profitable and keep this site live for decades. I would be VERY happy to be in the wrong here.
At the end of the day, put yourself in staff shoes. You have been trying a lot of “sensible” things to try to make Tumblr sustainable. Your boss is reminding you that tumblr keeps losing money and setting dates for “lines of no return” where the company would need to deinvest on Tumblr if there is not a clear financial improvement. You know you are burning the midnight oil and the sensible changes requested by the community you have made barely had put you closer to the goal. So it’s time to try the crazy stuff and see what happens. Yeah, maybe that makes the boat explode, but maybe it changes it enough to keep it afloat. The alternative is letting it slowly sink into the darkness.
So, as I warned at the start of the post, this is a very complex issue with a lot of factors involved. And of course, this is just my particular view on it, I’m sure other ex-staff members would see it in a different way. Staff members need to keep their voices 'aligned with the direction’ so they don’t get un-staffed, but I can tell you that a good bunch of them are in private slack channels saying things like what I’m saying here (hello friends from #********* and #******-****!). Some of them like the X change but hate Y. Others don’t really care and are just doing their job and doing what their boss told them (which is a completely valid stance… this is a job).
So yeah, it’s complex. Believe me, a lot of folks in staff listen to what the community says. Deeply. But right now I don’t think management thinks that catering to the current community is a valid path. And given the constraints of time and money that staff needs to operate within, I’m not even sure it matters much.
Wait, there is people in the notes chanting the usual “it’s not staff it’s the executives who force them to do shitty changes against their will”. And truly, that’s not what I’m saying. Again, reality is complex.
What I’m saying is that execs couldn’t care less about Tumblr becoming pets.com and start selling blue parrots, as long as it started making some money. And they want whatever to happen NOW. Staff usually cares about the community, culture, etc, but at the same time are under extreme pressure to make it profitable or become the generation who closes the door forever.
And the “listen to the community, give them what they want, provide a way for them to get money in return” path had been tried unsuccessfully, so what’s left is to try and rest of unorthodox approaches that may not be our cup of tea, because focusing mostly into catering at the community was producing some results that would directly lead to Tumblr going sayonara you weeabos.
My medieval and ancient ancestors watching me trying to charge my laptop and connect to WiFi: Ah, yes, she must feed her magic mirror on the telluric current and summon the spirits of knowledge from the aether.
My ancestors watching me proceed to doomscroll on Twitter: Alas! She is beguiled by the cruel babblings of the demons within the mirror; soon she will descend into melancholy from the things she has witnessed.
Anonymous
