I’m thinking about Tumblr Live again and ruminating on WHY it’s such a huge flop and I think I’ve figured it out: They’ve completely refused to make it a tumblr feature…
By which I mean (begrudgingly goes to unsnooze Tumblr live) this:
^This is meant with zero insult or derision to the people above, but these are absolutely not Tumblr users.
Every single thumbnail I’ve ever seen for Tumblr live seems to say “This is for clout!” “This is for a thirst trap!” “This is for influencers!” “This is for Tiktok wannabe stars!” “This is for showing your pretty filtered face and reaping what people on Instagram and Tiktok are desperately chasing!”
I’m remembering that Reddit has (or had) livestreams you could tune into like this. I’ve tapped into some. Ones I remember offhand include:
a guy just wandering around downtown in his city silently showing people the streets and stuff
a guy streaming his attempt to beat the last level of Celeste
a guy streaming his dog he was petting
And that, that was Reddit. That was undoubtedly just regular Reddit users going “oh stream feature? yeah okay. here’s my dog.” “here’s my video game.” “here’s my street corner in Prague.”
And when I think of all the recent successful Tumblr features, they’re all things that correctly tapped into actual Tumblr user interests. Blaze had people go “haha yeah here’s my dog.” “here’s my advertisement for a horse lawyer (lawyer who is a horse).” They let us buy crabs because, fuck it, crabs. The blue checkmarks were funny. Polls turned into the fandom brackets people have desperately wanted to make for a decade+. I’d wager the merch that calls on old Tumblr memes is at least decently successful.
If Tumblr Live wanted the chance to be successful, it should have been angled toward Tumblr users. “Here, you can livestream your cat if you want.” “You can livestream yourself working on some fanart and chatting.” “You can livestream yourself going bird watching because birds are your hyperfixation and you can identify them all by their song to all your followers who want to tune in for bird facts.”
But Tumblr Live has never tried to be that. It ONLY seems like it wants to be a Tiktok-clone, Instagram-clone, clout-chaser baited-hook trying to pull converts over from Tiktok/Insta/etc who are trying to grow their influencer brand, which Tumblr is lethally hostile to.
(And ALL of this is only touching on the concept behind what’s happening here. I haven’t even touched on the third-party streaming service and questionable data protection.)
Like fine, I guess I get it from a business model of trying to grow your userbase–since catering to your existing userbase doesn’t pull in new meat. But this will not work. Because anyone, tumblr-native or not, trying to grow themselves as an influencer will NOT find success here. This place is not a place of honor. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here. Nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. We will not watch your Shein haul stream.
