Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I helped kick off a holiday on Tumblr. Someone I don't follow made a post saying that if a small fraction of Tumblr users bought the lowest priced digital gift (a crab mini game you can gift to another user for a day) it would make up Tumblr's annual deficit easily. This would presumably extend the life of a mostly neglected website that is struggling to make money without collecting much userdata. This post made it's way to me, essentially through a friend of a friend, and I added on that if it were to work, it would have to be concentrated to a day, and suggested a day two weeks out, July 29th.
In this sense, Crab Day was my idea, though it also wasn't anyone's idea. I didn't think my post would be noticed. None of my followers at the time reblogged my date idea. Crabs by themselves weren't my idea, though I always wanted to be gifted crabs (it's the one item you can't buy for yourself.) But all the same, I, OracleOutlook, invented Crab Day.
The OP reblogged my post, and it became popular. Or at least, popular enough. Now there are many #Crab Day posts and I think at least a few thousand will participate on July 29th. Maybe I'll be surprised and it will be bigger, but there are a lot of negative people on Tumblr who are opposed to giving Tumblr any money at all. I won't go into their reasons too deeply, because this isn't the culture war thread.
I believe that Tumblr isn't collecting or selling data. The ads are the lowest possible value. Tumblr users are shown test ads, things that say, "This is a Test. Do not publish." and other silly things.
My initial contribution to Crab Day was just stating the obvious, without a real belief that anything would come from it. But now I keep defending it as the best! idea! ever! Not because it is, but because I don't want to be the person to tank it. If Tumblr users want a say in how the website functions, they need to be customers. The benefit of an annual crab day would be that Tumblr could use it as a metric of how well their changes are received each year. Crab sales fell by 50%? Revert changes. Crab sales went up 200%? Things are good. Basically create a financial incentive to listen to the database. I don't think Tumblr will ever be entirely user-funded, but if the userbase could be just 10% of their revenue that would give them collectively a seat at the table.
Alright, setting a reminder for crab day, because I have fondness for the blue hellsite, and I want to see the strategy of "make something the users like, and then ask them to give you money" succeed at least once.
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