anonsally replied to your post:cribblesticks replied to your post “Well,… Also, perhaps we…
Sunday, August 17th, 2014Also, perhaps we can come up with a way to make clear that multiple users are in agreement on this concern, without actually inundating them with 10K separate asks.
I don’t think 10K asks are going to happen in any event, so it’s probably a moot point. But even if that happened I worry that it wouldn’t make much difference. I think the decision-makers at Tumblr are probably aware that this bothers a lot of users. I think they probably anticipated that before they started the sponsored posts program, and chose to go forward anyway.
This gets into a misconception a lot of people have about commercial websites. Tumblr’s users are not its customers. They’re not paying anything. Tumblr’s users are just the product that Tumblr wants to sell to its real customers, the advertisers.
It’s true that in the beginning Tumblr needed to be able to deliver a user experience that was compelling enough to get people to use the site. Avoiding off-putting things like ads (especially horrific ones) was important during that initial phase.
It’s a lot less important now. Today Tumblr could become almost as obnoxious as it wanted to, and most users would stay anyway (as I have, despite my really hating the horror movie ads) because we don’t want to lose access to all the other users already on Tumblr.
If a tiny fraction of users complains to support or leaves altogether, the cost of that is negligible to Tumblr. It’s true that treating users that way probably hastens the day when the next service comes along and replaces Tumblr, but that day is years away at the closest. It’s not even on the radar in terms of day-to-day business decisions.
Tumblr’s founders probably began with idealistic notions of putting user experience first, ahead of the wishes of advertisers, and on some level I’m sure that attitude persists, since a lot of the early employees are still there. But those views were easy to espouse when Tumblr didn’t actually have advertisers. Now that it does the ideal is harder to maintain.
I think an idealistic argument about letting users control what types of content appear on their dash was very much a part of pre-advertising Tumblr. It’s why those strongly-worded Community Guidelines exist. But making sponsored posts live up to those principles is harder, because it means inconveniencing Tumblr’s actual customers and leaving money on the table. Grown-up businesses rarely operate that way.
I’m all for appealing to the Tumblr founders’ better natures. I just worry that if such an appeal were likely to succeed, it would have done so already. Since we find ourselves here, I think we may need to look to more-traditional business arguments.
For example, I think Tumblr’s current behavior may be exposing it to legal risk. Let’s say a troubled teenage Tumblr user commits suicide. Their distraught parents come across disturbing horror movie ads on the child’s dashboard and sue, claiming that the child was driven over the edge by the images.
In that case, the fact that Tumblr has community guidelines and advertiser policies forbidding content like that could work against it in court. The parents could argue that Tumblr was aware of the potential harm and chose to run the ads anyway. They could subpoena Tumblr’s internal documents looking for evidence that Tumblr’s officers were aware of the problem but chose to proceed anyway to avoid lost revenue. Give me a jury of middle-aged parents and ask them if they think punitive damages are in order. Maybe that even rises to potential criminal negligence?
I don’t know; I’m not a lawyer. But I wonder if that’s the sort of thing that keeps arishahdadi, Tumblr’s general counsel, up at night.
This kind of legal concern is a feature of big, established companies (like Yahoo!), not so much of tiny startups like the pre-Yahoo! Tumblr. So it may be that the transition in business culture Tumblr is undergoing now will make this legal-jeopardy argument increasingly powerful, even as the idealistic do-the-right-thing argument grows weaker.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/Vxq2w8.
