Since I posted my Tumblr portrait video rant, a couple of people have asked me the question, “…but isn’t Tumblr free?”  The meaning behind that question is actually: “Isn’t it really f—ing churlish to complain that a free service isn’t 100% perfect for your needs?”

That’s a pretty fair question.  Tumblr is free, and it isn’t costing me anything whatsoever to host my blog here, and — most of the time — it does meet my needs.  I wouldn’t use it otherwise, and I definitely wouldn’t have switched over to Tumblr from a heavily customised Wordpress if it didn’t.

A question like that is good, but it misses two deeper issues.  First is related to some of the issues discussed in my post on Twitter for Mac’s disasterous UI “makeover”: software rarely improves without a constant stream of constructive criticism.  You have to let the developer(s) know what you think is wrong, why you think it’s wrong, and — most important — ways they can fix the problem.  My post on portrait orientation wasn’t tactful, but it did meet those three criteria.

Crucial to the “improvement through feedback” process is the willingness of the developer(s) in question to listen.  In a lot of cases, they just aren’t; the product sells extremely well, or has a lot of users, or has a huge userbase of people that are basically Stockholm-syndromed.  Tumblr falls into the second category: it’s massively popular, and it’s growing constantly.  With that growth, one of two things can happen: they can coast on it, and let their early success lead to cockiness and complacency, or they can listen to their users and improve their service ruthlessly.

Which brings me to the second point: Tumblr won’t always be free.  I don’t think it can sustain itself if it is; venture capital doesn’t last forever, and it’s invested with the intention of making some kind of stupidly high ROI within a reasonably short time.  That means, somehow, they’re going to have to start making money from the platform.  The most obvious way of doing that is by evolving into some sort of freemium product: basic functionality for free, better functionality for cash.  That’s a fair trade — but it means upping their game.  The people who’ll pay for a Tumblr aren’t the teens constantly blogging and reblogging each other.  The people who’ll pay will be geeks, and they’re notoriously hard to please; they’ll want everything to work perfectly 100% of the time, and they’ll want it to make sense.  When they’re paying for something, they’ll want nicer permalinks (http://yourdomain/post/1234567890/ is efficient, but it’s ugly), and support for portrait orientation on their videos, and the <abbr> tag to work properly.

No matter how diligent your staff are, they’ll never catch everything, so Tumblr needs people to complain about the little, inconsequential niggles they encounter.  And, by taking these complaints onboard and fixing them wherever possible, they’ll build a platform that people will gladly hand over good money to use.