The difference between being the customer and being the commodity

[beatrice_otter]

Over on tumblr, things are shaking up--tumblr is changing how people track tags and search for tags, and also they've taken away (mostly) the ability to reply to a post. madamehardy hits the nail on the head as to why:

"When you consider the latest highly annoying changes to Tumblr, never forget that they aren’t meant for you. Yahoo, Tumblr’s owner, is under a lot of pressure to make some money. That means that Tumblr has to either pull its weight or be shut down. In the Web-ancient adage, “If you aren’t the customer, you’re the product.” That is, if you aren’t directly paying for any Website, then the Website is selling you, in the form of advertising. Tumblr desperately needs to monetize you. To monetize you, they need to know your personal demographics, so that they can sell groups of similar users to advertisers."

“If you aren’t the customer, you’re the product.”

Let me repeat that again: “If you aren’t the customer, you’re the product.”

This is why I really, really don’t like websites where advertising is part of the revenue stream.  I would rather pay up front–in donations or user fees–and be the CUSTOMER who is catered to instead of the PRODUCT that the website is SELLING to its advertisers.

What Tumblr is doing now?  That’s what LJ used to do, back when LJ was the fandom hub.  The great advantage of DW over LJ is that DW’s users are its CUSTOMER base, because DW organized their finances from the very beginning so that they didn’t need ads.  User revenues–paid accounts, merchandise from the store, extra icons, etc–pay the bills.  DW is never going to be a huge goliath of money-making, but it doesn’t have to be because it is financially self-sustaining and makes a decent income for the owners.  (And they manage it on a freemium basis, where basic accounts are free, and you get more features if you pay but you don’t have to to use the site.)  DW has other issues, but we are not the commodity we are the customers.

AO3 is similar.  The whole POINT of AO3 was that a big enough segment of fans got fed up with being the commodity and not the customers, and wanted to own the servers that fannish work was on.  AO3 has problems–huge problems–but at that they are quite successful.  We own the servers.  Our donations fund a service designed by, for, and about US.

Pinboard is also user-supported.  That fee you pay?  That means that we are the customer, not the commodity.  Which means that while Pinboard may eventually close down, it won’t do like Delicious did and make itself unusable for us while making itself more attractive to its advertisers.

I know tumblr has a lot of great features.  But maybe that shouldn’t be the number one thing we as fandom look for in a website.  Because what do the features matter if they get yanked out from under us every time they’re not profitable enough?

Comments

[laurajv]

not coincidentally, delicious went down the tubes when yahoo bought it

[beatrice_otter]

Yes, what a coincidence! Not.

[firecat]

I love everything about this post.

[beatrice_otter]

Thank you!

[tielan]

Good points.

[beatrice_otter]

Thank you!

[juliekarasik]

If the past is any indication of the future we're on roughly a five to ten year cycle, which seems to be the time needed for the overlap of a generation of fans to mature while a platform degrades it's fannish services.

The problem with fandom doing a mass-migration to or back to DW is that DW is very very good at being a fannish resource for fandom as it existed in 2009, but is much less suited to being a fannish hub for fandom as it has evolved to be in 2015.

The younger generation of fans have grown up with complete multimedia integration. Seamless, friction free upload and hosting of images, videos, music, etc. They are used to liking and sharing content a la the FB model. I really don't know how good a fit DW is for that mode of interaction.

[beatrice_otter]

I don't think fandom is going to come back to DW in a big way--but I do think that DW is a good example of the things that fandom should be looking for in a platform to replace tumblr.

[anghraine]

Exactly. There's a pretty much identical conversation about that going on at f_fa, and it's kind of ... in general I go, grumpily, where fandom goes, but even with XKit bringing back the features it was pretty much the writing on the wall as far as I'm concerned. DW isn't flashy, but it's reliable and we don't have to fear the corporate overloards.

(Several years later, everything is just where I left it and works in the same way. <3)

[beatrice_otter]

It's not necessarily a good thing that EVERYTHING works the same way. There are some things that tumblr does really well even now that DW doesn't--image hosting, for example, and easy reblogging.* I don't want DW to stay trapped in the past, which it kinda has. I want a service that is a) functional and trustworthy, but also b) keeps up with at least a few carefully curated trends.

*what I want with reblogging: an easy way to reblog things like gifsets and fannish content, while also being able to mark some content as unreblogable.

[anghraine]

Hm, yes. Well, there are some ways I appreciate reblogging, but I think it kind of inherently doesn't work with journal-style comments, and I much prefer this style of conversation where you can actually see how its developing from person to person (like, my post about Luke's administrative excellence gets reblogged a lot, but it's all in response to your EU reply--and afaik you don't get most of the alerts about it). I want to see the whole conversation, not just the particular reblog chain that crosses my dash :|

I do think image hosting would be very, very helpful. I probably wouldn't have come back if I didn't have the Tumblr hosting available. But honestly, it's just such a relief to come back and not have everything broken or unrecognizable or both.

[beatrice_otter]

There's different kinds of reblogging, though. There's reblogging-as-a-shitty-substitute-for-comment-threads, which, yes, OMG. Then there's reblogging-as-a-signal-boost. Then there's reblogging-as-a-way-of-sharing-the-shiny.

I'm greedy, I want both. I want to be able to have actual discussions and see the whole discussion, not just whatever comment thread happens to cross my dash. But I ALSO want to be able to easily share the shiny and signal boost.