Marco.org

The biggest part of running a service like Tumblr (or Hype Machine) is saying no.

Anthony gets it right.

If we implemented every user request and every feature that everyone else has, here’s what would happen:

• The interface would look and perform like this.
• We’d be out of money quickly from paying an army of programmers, and we’d have to start charging money for basic features or putting awful ads everywhere and making our free accounts suck.
• After those miserable results, we’d be so ashamed of our product that we’d probably stop running it.

In short, Tumblr wouldn’t exist if we said “yes” to every request.

Imagine the elegance of the iPod if Apple had listened to every ridiculous, edge-case, impractical user request.