TUMBLR IS LITERALLY BECOMING NAZI GERMANY (or Why Highlighting Smells Like A Dead Cat)

Saturday, February 4, 2012

TUMBLR IS LITERALLY BECOMING NAZI GERMANY (or Why Highlighting Smells Like A Dead Cat)

I just found out about this thing called Godwin’s Law, which states that, as an internet community grows larger, the probability of comparing something to Hitler/Nazis/Nazi Germany approaches 1. As far as I can tell, tumblr is at its peak, if not slightly past it, so I’ve decided to do my best to fulfill the prophecy.

Now, I do sort of have a semi-serious point here, and it centers around the new “Highlighting” (did they really have to capitalize it?) feature tumblr has introduced. I think it’s a Stupid Fucking Move (an SFM, if you will). I understand that they want to make money, but this SFM is almost as bad as the hypothetical SFM of putting those indescribably annoying oh-look-shoot-the-duck-to-win-an-Ipad Flash ads on both sides of everyone’s Dashboard. In some respects it’s worse.

As I said, I have no problem with them trying to make money. They’re admittedly in a tight spot when it comes to funding, since they provide millions of users with a free service that, in reality, isn’t cheap (with 15 billion monthly pageviews, I really want to know what their annual server bills are). But there are much, much better ways of going about increasing revenue than this pathetic Highlighting shit.

The word that immediately comes to mind is “gimmicky.” The next is “unsustainable.” On the surface it looks relatively simple and effective: pay a mere dollar and get an (ostensibly) attention-grabbing flag next to your post. The hoped-for results are tumblr getting a steady, if trickling, source of income and you getting your post seen and read by more of your subscribers. But is this actually the case?

In my eyes, no, it’s not. To start, the first two Highlights on my dashboard, reading “NEW THING!” and “PARTY!!!”, have proven agitating enough to make me write this post. The former is from the tumblr “staff” page’s announcement of the new Highlighting feature and the latter from a tumblr titled “Philolzophy” that seems to be written by two self-absorbed and borderline-insane 20-something young ladies (AKA “BFFs who starting emailing each other weird shit about the intersection between philosophy and pop culture after graduating from college and moving away from each other (tear) in like 2006…”) whose constant stream of pseudointellectual horseshit has finally resulted in my decision to unfollow them as soon as I’m finished with this rant. But I digress.

You see, “NEW THING!” and “PARTY!!!” are two of the most vacuous, cringe-worthy phrases I’ve ever read on the internet, and that’s fucking saying something. But this is what Highlighting caters to. This is what Highlighting is.

Let me tell you a story. I promise to try to keep it entertaining. Let’s say there’s this blogger, Steven, who decides that the new Highlighting feature is just the thing he needs to top off his new post about the delicious cake his mother made for the 3-year anniversary of his childhood cat’s death. He selects the bubble next to “Highlight this post” after he’s finished describing the bittersweet aftertaste the carrot cake/solemn mourning mixture has left him with. Presented with a drop-down menu of Highlighting message choices, the default being “(No message)”, he stares dimly at his laptop’s screen. He knows he has to choose something, because Mr. Finkle (his deceased cat) deserves no less than a $1 fluorescent tag beside his post. But what will he choose?

An empty tag would be blasphemy; he may as well be shitting in the box of Mr. Finkle’s ashes placed decoratively on the mantle over his parents’ fireplace. So, after an agonizing twenty-minute decision-making process, Steven narrows it down to two choices: “Very Special Post” and “My favorite!”. Doubting that anyone would understand that “My favorite!” is directed toward his beloved-yet-dead feline companion and not his mom’s cake (though it was an excellent cake), he picks “Very Special Post” and sends his dollar off to tumblr’s bank account.

There are two main ideas here:

Practically everyone who chooses to pay a dollar for Highlighting won’t select “(No message)”, meaning that they’ll have to pick from tumblr’s revolting selection of pre-made slogans
The entire idea of Highlighting gives off this intense vibe of triviality, meaninglessness, and “fakeness”

There are still other aspects to consider, such as deploying this new feature on a Friday night (seriously, who’s on tumblr on Friday nights besides housewives drunk on wine and people who hate tumblr?), but these are the two reasons why I feel Highlighting is intrinsically an SFM.

The constraint of not being able to dictate your own message will result in the very limited use of Highlighting. Sure, there will be a brief period of a couple weeks where the novelty of it will lure ADHD-suffering users to add to tumblr’s income in dollar-sized increments, but the shine will wear off and the limitations will feel more and more burdensome as the repetition of the few dozen messages becomes annoying. Highlighting also inches tumblr ever closer to the Cliff of Gaudiness that Myspace fell off half a decade ago. It’s only a small flag next to a post, but the quasi-dayglo color scheme and unbearably cliche icon choices of a Highlight speak volumes about the path tumblr is heading down. Just like the small percentage of users who will use the chintzy Highlights abundantly as a feeble attempt to gain followers, tumblr is introducing this new feature in an attempt to gain some more cash. But just like the Highlight-crazy user will unintentionally appear too inauthentic and desperate for most potential readers, tumblr seems to be inadvertently moving towards the downward spiral of internet irrelevance caused by a slowly-encroaching feeling of banality and a marketing department that’s trying too hard.

My advice would be to follow in the footsteps of resilient and successful websites, the most notable being Facebook. Zuckerberg’s reliance on constant layout changes may appear to be in the same category of “gimmicky” as this Highlighting nonsense, but it’s not. Zuckerberg knows what the fuck he’s doing, and he remodels Facebook into a completely new and equally-if-not-more functional format when he decides an injection of novelty is necessary. Furthermore, he would never even consider the notion of making users pay for a new feature. But time can’t be rewound, and tumblr has already made their decision. If tumblr wants to maintain its place among Facebook and Twitter in the top 3 social media websites though, it can’t make this kind of thing a habit.

In stark contrast to the comfortable ride up it saw in 2011, 2012 is a make or break year for tumblr. Its owners need to keep the interest of its user base while also securing steady sources of funding if they want to stay afloat in the dog-eat-dog world of the web. Unfortunately, Highlighting isn’t a very promising sign that they’re capable of that. Because of this, I don’t view the Highlight I’m adding to this post as ironic. Instead, I see it as a sort of donation, combined with a “Get Well Soon” gift. I would have sent a Hallmark card that plays Monty Python’s “Always Look On the Bright Side of Life” every time it’s opened, but I didn’t want to give the tumblr marketing execs any ideas.