Nostrich

Tumblr Suggests That You Stop Using Chrome Extension:

Third-party extensions and hacks are a part of the web, perhaps Tumblr should focus on building new features or its own official “app store” instead of whining about support and server issues.

The Missing e Chrome extension — and it’s an extension, not a “hack” — has quarter of a million installs just on Chrome, and all of those people just got forced to give up either some useful and clearly in-demand features or their right to support. This post on TNW is pretty harsh, but the apparent aggressiveness they’re treating Missing e with suggests a weird lack of interest in what Tumblr’s users actually want. As far as I can tell, they have no interest in implementing any of its features — and all anyone ever has is assumptions since Tumblr continues to refuse to engage its community publicly (and I thought it was great that Tumblr chose to activate this at around 5pm EST on a Friday, way to bury the backlash).

Objecting to the extension I can understand — it uses some pretty weird and definitely unsupported methods to do what it does, although this interstitial is decidedly scaremonger-y — but forcing its users to give up support (and I bet there’s no way to opt back in) is pretty shitty. This is what support teams are for; how hard is it to send a canned email to the effect of “sorry, this is probably caused by an extension”? (They have no qualms with sending useless canned responses for every other issue you might have.) If developers were really encouraged to build off the platform, Tumblr wouldn’t be forcing users to give up their use of support for using third-party extensions. You’re either willing to provide support or you’re not. Tumblr, it seems, would rather not.