I'm super excited to have the Tumblr team and product join the Automattic family. We've been evolving Automattic to be more of a Berkshire Hathaway-inspired model and businesses with a lot of autonomy, and this continues that trend.
I was very impressed with the engagement and activity Tumblr has continued to have, and I hope that with this new ownership and investment the product will blossom.
According to this article [1], you plan to move Tumblr's backend onto WordPress. Considering that Tumblr's infra stores over 1 trillion distinct product objects, this would be one of the most technically ambitious migrations in history. Can you share any thoughts of how it will be approached? Will you be pruning/purging old content or inactive users?
That's an excellent question! I don't want to be so presumptuous as to define an exact approach before the technical exploration has started, besides saying it'll be done incrementally and in an easily revertable way to be invisible to users, just like the big datacenter migration Automattic just completed a few weeks ago.
At the point when we start this the Tumblr team will have been part of Automattic for the better part of a year if not more, so there will be a lot of learning and evolution of the products on both sides to make any migration easier.
I promise we'll write about it afterward for anyone who is curious.
I don't want to be so presumptuous as to define
an exact approach before the technical exploration
has started
The same could be said of deciding such an absolutely massive migration is even beneficial/necessary in the first place, before a technical exploration! And yet apparently, that part has already been decided?
I am, of course, completely ignorant of how WP and Tumblr's infrastructure works. I'm not saying the migration would be a bad idea, technically or financially. Or good. Just honestly curious.
I promise we'll write about it afterward for
anyone who is curious.
Definitely looking forward to that. Best of luck. (That's not sarcasm. Honestly, best of luck!)
I've often decided on technical decisions with incomplete information. Here's an example of how it works (translated to this analogy):
1) You come up with a working (if expensive or otherwise imperfect) technical path
2) You define a half-dozen other potential (less expensive, more practical) paths
3) You announce the decision
4) You complete due diligence, and take the best path
There are other ways as well. Announcements and plans aren't binding; they occasionally change. You can make an announcement when you're 98% confident you'll do something. You can pivot if it doesn't work out. There are places this doesn't work (e.g. customer promises), but on something like an internal migration, this is a-okay.
If "Wordpress" (which I reluctantly use for our corporate branding site and blog--very carefully managed and controlled) is a better architecture than what Tumblr is using now, what they have now must be truly awful! Wordpress really doesn't scale very well, and you can easily have massive security problems.
Among Tumblr users, the basic incompetence of @staff in constructing a functional website is legendary. I would not be surprised if the backend were far worse than you're supposing.
The funny thing is, the incompetence of @staff is the value proposition for Tumblr, as a user - because Tumblr's backend is a rickety tower of matchsticks and paste and the devs couldn't program themselves out of a wet paper bag, it means that they haven't been able to implement - for instance - algorithmic non-chronological timeline ordering, or competent data harvesting / robomarketing. And the comically broken search tools actually give a reasonable approximation of privacy for discussions. The user experience is firmly stuck in the mid-2000s, when social sites were for communities and discussions instead of data farming.
Don't get me wrong, Tumblr's user experience is also awful - search sucks, tags suck, moderation EXTRA sucks, the website's still overrun by pornographic spambots even after the Great Titty Purge - but any development team competent enough to make real improvements would also be one competent enough to squeeze out what makes Tumblr work.
Generally before a company buys another company, there is some amount of due diligence done beforehand, so I wouldn’t presume there hasn’t been a technical exploration.
Find a way to get Verizon to sign off on this, and then get in touch with an established documentary maker. Pair them with an engineer and follow the story of the migration efforts. It will take time, and it'll certainly have a narrative.
Nothing like this has been done before. I struggle with making what I do relatable to people, but having a technical or semi-technical documentary following this large project would be eye-opening.
We'll even crowd fund this if you give us the chance. I'm not kidding.
Please, please, please make this migration a documentary film.
From the documentaries I've seen, its lots of people walking to a meeting, meetings themselves, etc.
For that kind of documentary, probably people walking into servers rooms, or having heated discussions.
In Automattic, we basically evolved to remove all that :) There would be basically zoom calls and slack discussions.
The most ambitious project I worked on in Automattic were just me, looking at the code and trying to understand why something is happening.
Or looking up Stripe documentation.
We get to sit in front of our laptops in nice places though :)
We need discussions about how to untangle integrations of your user model with Verizon/Yahoo's auth system, how you'll consolidate all the microservices, which ongoing migrations you'll halt, the puzzled looks you'll have at undocumented code that performs nested eager-loaded lazy migrations of data, etc.
I've been involved in a multi-year migration effort. I expect this may be the same for y'all. It'd be fun to have an account of something that is so prolific and well known.
This would be an interesting new type of documentary. A few shots of people with laptops on beaches around the world to establish characters, then just animated slack chats, terminal sessions and whiteboard sessions.
This is a fantastic idea. I imagine similar form to "Some Kind of Monster", the documentary about Metallica. It's mostly the band meeting, discussing ideas, playing some music, struggling with internal tensions and personal issues etc. I'm not even a huge fan of the band, but it was a very entertaining watch and I think it would be almost guaranteed that such a massive project will result in many interesting stories.
I have no idea precisely what we're going to do or how, but if I were spitballing, I'd think something like ...
Currently I think Tumblr stores all posts across all sites in one big table? WP.com does different tables per site.
I also think Tumblr's post ids are often above php's int max for 32-bit systems ( 2,147,483,647 ) -- I know I've seen some issues trying to parse tumblr's post ids to integers rather than strings on some old servers years ago.
For an overview of how our systems are run here's Barry, our head sysadmin, talking about six years ago on how the wpcom infastructure is structured:
It's changed somewhat, but not much conceptually. It's a really fascinating talk and I'd encourage anyone curious on massive scale data to give it a look, and see precisely what can be managed with determination and mysql and coffee.
Close; For the most part, to the application the Posts appear to be from one table since the lookup interface is the same (externally), but in reality at this massive scale, it just wouldn't be possible in a single MySQL table and database, even if you had a huge number of replicas. Tumblr's posts are spread across MANY "shards" which are actually different servers, each running a chunk of posts, shared by the blog owner. e.g. Blogs 1 - 10,000,000 on Shard 1, 10,000,001 to 20,000,000 on Shard 2, etc. More in depth talk here http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr-architectur... and http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/74/Massively%20Sharded%... though it's from 2011/2012, but the overall ideas still hold. At the time of that post (7 years ago) there were already 200 Database servers.
Thankfully nothing is 32-bit so no worries about integer overflows. That would cause huge headaches everywhere on the PHP side. In MySQL, a regular unsigned INT column does have that limitation (roughly max 4.5 billion for unsigned, 2.2 signed), so BIGINT must be used there (Twitter had to do the same). Where it gets interesting is PHP doesn't support unsigned integers, so with 64 bit your max integer in PHP is 9,223,372,036,854,775,807, whereas in MySQL an unsigned 64 bit int is double that. I think it's safe to say though that neither Tumblr nor WordPress, even combined, would ever have more posts than atoms on Earth =)
> I think it's safe to say though that neither Tumblr nor WordPress, even combined, would ever have more posts than atoms on Earth =)
If my math is correct, you're a wee bit off.
9,223,372,036,854,775,807 is 2^63, which is roughly 10^19. The Avogadro constant, which is about 6 * 10^23, is the number of particles (atoms / molecules) in a mole of substance, which for atoms amounts to (atom number of element) grams of mass (so e.g. 12g of C12 is a mole).
The fact that they are already planning on making changes seems to run counter to the idea that they would be taking a "Berkshire Hathaway" approach. In my understanding Warren Buffett's current philosophy is to buy companies that need his capital, potentially his name, but definitely not his intervention.
I'm curious: What approach, if any, would you take?
I'm sure you have an interesting prospective based on your experience working at MySQL-friendly shops, in addition to being an engineer at Tumblr once upon a time.
Thank you for asking, but I probably shouldn't get into that :) I'm inherently conflicted / biased due to designing a solid chunk of Tumblr's backend, and also previously worked for another Automattic competitor (Six Apart, the defunct company behind Movable Type).
Edit to avoid anyone misconstruing, I'm not trying to imply one thing or another, just that I can't approach this impartially. And in any case, I wish everyone well on both sides of this acquisition. I'm just genuinely curious how they plan to proceed from a technical standpoint, as it's a really interesting challenge.
Ehhh parts of that article were never accurate, especially the stuff about having an hbase-powered dashboard feed.
Primarily the product backend is monolithic PHP (custom framework) + services in various languages + sharded MySQL + Memcached + Gearman. Lots of other technologies in use though too, but I'll defer to current employees if they want to answer.
Not exactly. Tumblr has a pretty huge Hadoop fleet and decently large Kafka setup too. It's just a question of OLTP vs OLAP use-cases being powered by different tech stacks.
My answer above was limited to the product backend, i.e. technologies used in serving user requests in real-time. And even then I missed a bunch of large technologies in use there, especially around search and algorithmic ranking.
It really depends on the task at hand. I'm one of the most vocally pro-MySQL commenters on HN, and have literally built my career around scaling and automating MySQL, but I still wouldn't recommend it for OLAP-heavy workloads. The query planner just isn't great at monstrous analytics queries, and ditto for the feature set (especially pre-8.0).
For high-volume OLTP though MySQL is an excellent choice.
Regarding Kafka: in many situations I agree. Personally I prefer Facebook's approach of just using the MySQL replication stream as the canonical sharded multi-region ordered event stream. But it depends a lot on the situation, i.e. a company's specific use-case, existing infrastructure and ecosystem in general.
Kafka is not going to replace MySQL specifically because it depends on the task at hand.
If you can't replace MySQL with Kafka, then why not just stick with whatever queue/jobs/stream infra you had before kafka. At least those solutions are quite limited in scope and easily replaceable.
At this point Kafka is a solution looking for a problem.
My feeling about Kafka is that it's a useful tool to solve the "we MUST get this data to reliable storage IMMEDIATELY" problem. And to greatly mitigate the "each item must be processed and shown to be processed, exactly once" problem.
But there are relatively few situations where that's absolutely vital. And you can solve it with good ol' SQL.
Adult content is not our forte either, and it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety... it's a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there. I personally have very liberal views on these things, but supporting adult content as a business is very different.
> it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety...
I completely understand that “Adult Content” can cause a ton of headaches for a business but Tumblr’s current definition of “Adult Content” is very broad and I hope when the transaction is complete you’ll at least be open to reviewing the scope of the definition. Right now it includes many things that aren’t adult at all, like “female presenting nipples” which could be seen by children on many beaches in Europe and even on the streets of Boston and New York City. It also includes illustrations of genitalia or sex acts which can be found in biology textbooks and many magazines like Cosmo. The instruction leaflet that comes in a box of tampons wouldn’t currently be permitted on Tumblr. That doesn’t seem right to me nor does it seem like that sort of content would pose any risk to Tumblr’s operations.
I understand where you’re coming from with the adult content but I do also hope you’ll consider liberating the definition a bit. I actually think Tumblr is pretty well positioned to be the “next Instagram” for many young women today who would really appreciate a major social media platform recognizing that Kama Sutra illustrations or a photo of a woman’s nipple is no big deal, it’s just natural.
I don't know if you've ever been to Europe, but the number of topless beaches are low and you won't see women walking around without a top on the street. It's not taboo-less, nipples are still sexual.
Nipples seems a pretty silly thing to start focusing on when he clearly said they weren't interested in adult content.
I'm from Europe and I've visited quite a few countries in Europe, and to me it seems like it's pretty normal to be topless on _any_ beach... Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Greece...
EDIT: Generally I'd say in Europe while women's breasts are sexualised, they're not considered sexually explicit. The US is exceptionally prudish in comparison and for well-known historical reasons, too.
You'd have to explain more, given that he listed Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Greece, and others have listed more below. All of them true Scotsman where topless is totally a fair thing to see on any beach. Hell, I had a French ex who took her top off to tan when visiting the States and had to be told by friends that it wasn't an acceptable thing to do.
I have been to Europe. And I’ve taken my bathing suit top off on several beaches there. In my experience they don’t really have “topless beaches” so much as they just have beaches.
If you re-read my comment you’ll see that my point of starting with nipples is precisely because they aren’t the adult content that Automattic is understandably interested in avoiding. Why are your nipples nbd while mine are adult content? That seems “pretty silly” if you ask me.
AFAIK "female presenting nipples" is banned from Apple's App Store in non-17+ apps. A huge company such as Facebook could maybe fight it, Automattic certainly can't.
I mean… reddit’s app pretty clearly allows NSFW subreddits. You have to check a setting on the web to search for NSFW content, but that’s not actually in-app so it’s a-ok.
I appreciate the perspective, but let's be honest.
What you're essentially saying is 'Adult content is hard because the US government is willing to lean on payment providers to enforce quasi-legal, anti-free speech policies.'
Have you considered adopting a federated corporate structure that would legally firewall off a "tumblr-for-porn"?
Most of the goodwill bonfire seems to have been caused not by Tumblr treating adult content differently, but by not even putting up a fight to provide a space for it.
Having a mirror world Tumblr that adult blogs could be kicked to would earn a lot of that back, while presumably amortizing platform development and ops over a larger userbase.
Surrendering because free speech is hard is never a good look.
> Have you considered adopting a federated corporate structure that would legally firewall off a "tumblr-for-porn"?
That is literally the convoluted situation photomatt was trying to avoid.
I also think that the suggestion is hilariously naive. Presumably the founder/head of the company has considered a variety of incorporation structures.
> best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there.
Sorry for being so blunt but I couldn't agree less with. If you leave this to "big porno", you will get the same exploitive, generic bullshit you get anywhere else as well. It's a shame that nobody dares to touch that who isn't in the porn industry already.
be that as it may, the current automated flagging system is abhorrent and pretty much killed all confidence in the platform especially among artists. why would anyone take invest the time and effort to build a gallery & maintain a presence on tumblr when it feels like you're playing russian roulette with every (non-nsfw) image you upload? 4chan recently was split into separate domains for sfw/nsfw boards, maybe tumblr could go in a similar direction?
> it's a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there
That's exactly what Tumblr's ex-users don't want, however.
Those Tumblr users want a place to freely exchange what they like, whether that's cute cats or hardcore porn.
That's what made Tumblr so beautiful. I'm sad to see it (apparently permanently) go.
Then again something nice is coming out of it as well: The main competitor is now the non commercial, federated, ActivityPub based Fediverse, frequently referred to as Mastodon.
For the ones that don't know you, you are the CEO and founder, Matt Mullenweg [0].
I am curious to hear more about the: "...to be more of a Berkshire Hathaway-inspired model and businesses with a lot of autonomy". Could you share some details?
Thanks for building Wordpress. When I used to be a prolific blogger, it was my platform of choice.
We've found the model of strong CEOs or GMs, combined with a great culture and shared platform, can be really magical. It doesn't need to be complicated, but it's also not easy.
It would be nice if investment in Tumblr is made to create a privacy focused social network for those who have or would like to remove FB from our worlds.
it's probably not economically feasible to have a privacy-respecting app that's also funded by a programmatic targeted advertising network.
even if it was, people have shown over and over that they prioritize convenience over privacy, and businesses simply aren't conscientious enough to try a different way.
You are entirely right!
However, they are entirely different monetization business models that we are offering our WordPress.com users.
Our Simple Payments block for example let's you sell directly on your site: https://en.support.wordpress.com/wordpress-editor/blocks/sim...
People are extremely creative in how they use it, basically turning sites into stores or kickstarter-like campaigns with that little feature.
We are looking into extending this functionality.
Is there a demand for an NSFW-only Tumblr alternative, or was it the mix of content that made Tumblr popular?
I mean personally I think if e.g. pornhub were to launch a product like that, they should make sure that it's not associated with PH or pornography directly. That creates a stigma - "oh, it's that porn blog" - which in my outsider's perspective was never Tumblr's identity.
The difference is that each tumblr was curated individually and there were also lots of image focused/exclusive tumblrs. This curation by hand + sometimes extremely narrow definition of a tumblrs content allowed one to find exactly what one wanted.
I think the difference is in branding/positioning, and therefore the mental state of the person engaging with the site and creating content.
Porn = male gaze-y[1], intentionally and overtly about sexual gratification, less about exploration
A free-wheeling blog site = a place open to the exploration of a number of different aspects of identity, of which sexuality is one of them.
In short: If Pornhub were to create a tumblr clone, they'd inherently be enticing people to _produce porn_ rather than producing content which might happen to be somewhat pornographic. There's a huge mental barrier there for lots of people, even if they happen to enjoy viewing porn or producing sexually explicit imagery.
[1] Yes I know women watch porn, the default assumption of porn viewership is still a cis male audience
Users. Paid porn is huge, I'm sure they would have no problem providing it as a paid service. They already have pornhub premium which is apparently very successful
>Pornhub Premium launched in 2015, and now has more than 1 million signups. That's nearly the number of people who subscribe to the Showtime channel's streaming service.
>According to various reports, currently, the porn industry’s net worth is about $97 billion. This money is enough to feed at-least 4.8 billion people a day. Every year, Hollywood releases roughly 600 movies and makes $10 billion in profit. And how much porn industry makes? 13,000 films and close to $15 billion in profit. The porn industry makes more money than Major League Baseball, The NFL and The NBA combined.
I wish you and the team the best of luck. Tumblrs first downfall was partly because the autonomy it was given to a team that had no idea how to grow the business. Karp had zero idea how to grow the product or the revenues past the initial vision. D'onofrio is an operator, likely not the best fit for leading a vision of what a new Tumblr with a new mandate should be.
We are planning to do the opposite: excited to invest into the platform. The web needs open and independent publishing and social media more than ever.
Does it? There are an awful lot of platforms that support the kind of content Tumblr supports now. How is this meaningfully different from a WordPress account, or a user subreddit, or a Medium blog, or even Facebook? How is Tumblr going to provide a platform that is substantially different from those?
There are more open platforms. There are more popular platforms. There are more independent platforms. How is the new Tumblr going to improve on the existing options?
The future needs to be distributed. Less Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter and more ActivityPub/Mastodon/Pleroma/Pixefed .. when people get use to federated networks, they'll understand how they work. They'll understand how it's like hosting your own game server, and everyone can do it, and you can ban servers you don't like without having those servers really go away to anyone but you.
The future is not centralized. The future is distributed.
I want to believe that the future is decentralized but I'm convinced of the opposite when it comes to online media, primarily because spam, abuse and content moderation are expensive functions to perform in which there are strong scale effects, and they are critical not just to ad-based monetization but perhaps also to broad societal acceptance of technology.
The dream of decentralized everything sounds wonderful, but there's an implicit assumption that most folks involved are good actors.
It quickly becomes untenable when corporate-backed or state-backed bad actors are introduced.
Here's a very simple thought exercise for anybody who disagrees. Imagine a modest social media team of perhaps 10 paid employees. That's 24,000 people-hours' worth of content generation per year... and it is perhaps multiplied by a factor of ten if they're sophisticated enough to put some work into tooling to automate their work. Russia alone reportedly had hundreds of people doing this sort of work, and surely they're not alone.
Now imagine 10,000 of those teams around the world. That's 240,000,000 people-hours of span and/or bad-faith social media posting. And that's probably an extremely conservative estimate.
How would a decentralized social network possibly combat this?
It's a life-or-death struggle even for a company with deep pockets (and huge cubical farms full of human content moderators) like Facebook to combat this sort of thing.
If one of the decentralized solutions ever reaches any sort of critical mass, it will have to confront this in a hurry, and it will not be able to.
The same analysis makes it untenable for centralized platforms, as you noticed yourself.
It's arguably harder to do it on a decentralized platforms since they are... Well, decentralized. Those 240,000,000 people hours are then spread over all of the decentralized platforms instead of being focused on one or a few. Also, the cost of moderation is spread over everyone instead of a single entity having to pay for all of it.
The same analysis makes it untenable for centralized platforms, as you noticed yourself.
Strong disagree, though I certainly hope that I am wrong and that decentralized platforms are more viable than I suspect.
It is not easy, but it is most definitely tenable for centralized platforms with sufficient funding and motivation i.e. Facebook, Google, etc.
They have:
1. Many millions (billions, in Facebook's case) of users, some percentage of which are willing to click those "Report..." buttons
2. Their own farms of in-house workers
3. Their own bespoke tools and heuristics to identify trends and more easily identify malicious actors/content, for review by the human moderators. this would presumably incorporate reports from users.
It's arguably harder to do it on a decentralized platforms
Again, I really can't agree but hope to be wrong.
How does a malicious social media team "attack" Facebook? For the most part, they produce content that winds up being spread virally. They don't spead the information around Facebook; the users do. This would function largely the same way in a decentralized network.
Keep in mind that today's decentralized networks are a bit like the Usenet was before "Eternal September."
In other words, these decentralized networks are currently populated primarily with relatively savvy users. Not perfect by any means, but on average, more savvy than your average FB or Twitter user who will eagerly share articles and links without even a cursory vetting. That will change in a hurry if any of these decentralized networks ever gains critical mainstream mass.
To me it seems that ad-based monetization is untenable. The more obnoxious it becomes, the more people are enticed to learn about and set up adblockers.
Reading between the lines...
Was Facebook/Instagram also in the market for Tumbler or was it just Verison getting close to killing it off and fishing around for a last minute buyer?
Good luck with it anyway - we need more independant platforms rather than a few mono-cultures.
I guess my rather naive question is "if the platform is to accept only the same kind of safe content then what is its USP compared to Facebook/Instagram/Reddit/etc?"
So, the real question is: are the censorship policies going to be reversed?
To be specific, is adult content going to be kosher on Tumblr again? Because if not, I'd have very little faith in the platform (and I do have an account there).
>Mr. Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a Tumblr user and sees the site as complementary to WordPress.com. “It’s just fun,” he said of Tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.”
If you're worried about cross-links between non-adult and adult content tarnishing the platform, add better features for user flagging.
They (before the Yahoo and Verizon cluster&#-1s) were essentially sitting on a gold mine of training data, and ongoing training data generation, for an industry-leading porn detection engine.
A subscription filtering product that would be worth $$$.
Throwing that away because of some overly prudish concept of brand identity is hilarious.
Well remember what actually happened. Apple removed their app! That's a bigger problem in general (I think at some point, legislators will need to force Apple to allow 3rd party installs without jailbreaking a phone).
Tumblr had issues with jailbait and childporn. Even with a lot of moderation and policing, it was difficult to keep under control. As an interesting consequence, people who use scripts to rip entire blogs, may have underage selfies and other pics they're not even aware of. It's a strict liability crime in the US, so even having huge Tumblr dumps can be risky!
There were a lot of factors involved in the censorship, and it makes me thing the future of the open web needs to be more federated/distributed. Sites like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook need to lose relevance.
Apple specifically removed it for child porn, and once Tumblr took care of that (before removing adult content in general), Apple added them back to the store.
Taking care of it on an ongoing basis might have been too great a burden for the (assumedly-understaffed) team, or they had too few tools to deal with it and no incentive or manpower to create new ones that worked with the existing adult content system.
Simply banning adult content en masse allows them to use heuristics to identify nudtiy and genitalia in images.
Previously, they would have had to make a judgment call on whether those depicted were of adult age. By banning all of it, they no longer have the responsibility to make that choice.
That wasn’t the case. They had the industry standard tools (PhotoDNA + partnership with NCMEC), but I can’t say how well they were being maintained at the time of the situation with Apple.
The thing is, a naked 17-year-old and a naked 18-year-old look fairly similar. One is a felony; one is not. It would be evry difficult to distinguish between them. Apple probably wanted to head off the outrage which some person would drum up, and passed to tumbler. Tumbler figured it was easier to classify all inappropriate content, as there's no real way to classify something so fuzzy with the requisite accuracy.
Other porn sites with user contributed content exist. This is not as big a problem as you make it out to be. Not to the extent that a big company like Automattic wouldn't be able to solve it and keep that quite profitable interest group on board. The reason they won't is because they don't like to go against the grain of the currently advertiser-mandated vision of an exclusively family-friendly internet — where 'internet' here means the ad-supported part of it; i.e., all of the bigger commercial content silos.
The outrage comes when people stumble upon photos of minors in the early pubescent or even prepubescent stage of development intended to titillate. That is, content that is fairly consistently classed as child pornography, and no apparent action is undertaken to purge that content.
> […] as there's no real way to classify something so fuzzy with the requisite accuracy.
For the odd case where an account is uploading content that looks like it might involve a minor nearing adulthood, a platform privately and confidentially asking for proof of identity and age is reasonable enough. It's a fair solution for, to name just one example, the odd flat-chested twenty-something exhibitionist of Asian descent.
Very true, but there's a notable distinction: they can devote 100% of their expertise to moderating such nuances. It would be costly for a company such as tumbler (one which is not built around inappropriate material) to build out and maintain such expertise.
> The reason they won't is because they don't like to go against the grain of the currently advertiser-mandated vision of an exclusively family-friendly internet — where 'internet' here means the ad-supported part of it; i.e., all of the bigger commercial content silos.
Are you surprised this is the case? What brand wants to be associated with that sort of stuff?
> The outrage comes when people stumble upon photos of minors in the early pubescent or even prepubescent stage of development intended to titillate. That is, content that is fairly consistently classed as child pornography, and no apparent action is undertaken to purge that content.
> For the odd case where an account is uploading content that looks like it might involve a minor nearing adulthood, a platform privately and confidentially asking for proof of identity and age is reasonable enough. It's a fair solution for, to name just one example, the odd flat-chested twenty-something exhibitionist of Asian descent.
I'm sure there was a more polite way to phrase that. Regardless, much of the internet consists of downloading and re-uploading media. This would remain difficult.
>Other porn sites with user contributed content exist.
I bet that those sites also hosts vast amounts of illegal material as well. The law isn't fully enforced because doing so would have so many people arrested that it would lead to invalidating the law.
As you said, the outrage doesn't really exists in those hard to tell cases, but the law isn't written to align with the outrage. So the content is largely ignored unless a specific case happens to get popular attention.
Overall the standards are about as sane as our standards around other similar topics, which is to say not at all.
If you've got porn on a domain, it doesn't matter if you show ads on porn or not, it doesn't matter if you require age verification, nothing you do will likely matter.
What if there was a way to "ban" something by changing it's domain? What if there were two web apps with a linked backend? Let's say:
tumblargh.com
tumblarghR.com
When something is "banned" from tumblargh.com, it remains on tumblarghR.com, which is otherwise a mirror of tumblargh.com.
>Whether it's seen next to porn should be irrelevant.
It does not work that way. If some average person sees some brand advertised on WSJ and FT, and another competing brand on PornHub he will attach more 'premium' value to a first brand, and will pay more for owning product from this brand. It's only normal and a part of human nature.
People enjoy content from PornHub, but they want to be associated with something advertised on WSJ/FT/NYT/etc. People want to signal status, not just own a good stuff.
>It does not work that way. If some average person sees some brand advertised on WSJ and FT, and another competing brand on PornHub he will attach more 'premium' value to a first brand, and will pay more for owning product from this brand.
That doesn't explain the connection of "porn" with "less than premium". You call it "normal and part of human nature" but looks like totally cultural.
Historical prudery, and a past that associated looking at adult content with "low status", lesser citizens (and not what the "proper people do", does explain it.
(While we of course know that people of all statuses and walks of life look at porn, from the industrialist, to the bank executive, to the judge).
>People enjoy content from PornHub, but they want to be associated with something advertised on WSJ/FT/NYT/etc.
I'd understand it if we were talking about high status ads, yaugt ads, hi-fi ads, expensive clothes ads, and so on. But most people don't read or care for WSJ/FT/NYT -- that's a small minority. Most people read magazines just as popular/mass market as People, Reader's Digest, CNN, FOX, USA Today and the like, and advertisers have no issue advertising at those.
They think it's immoral but they definitely still look at that content. For advertisers it's about brand perception and not appearing next to immoral content.
No, but they will gladly indulge in a bit of pitchfork-and-torchery when someone shares a screenshot on Facebook of a Proctor & Gamble ad for baby powder next to a young woman with pigtails and tube socks in the questionably named 'teen' category getting spit roasted.
People are biological animals first and humans at a distant second. It's short-sighted to so brazenly dismiss the long term effects of periodically associating a brand with the strong feelings that come with an orgasm.
>From my experience in dealing with very rich and very poor people of many different cultures, the only people who give a damn about status to that extent are the young and dumb
Sorry, you are mostly wrong here.
Let me present you with example of an ad targeted to 50+ very rich audience. This is an ad directed by Cohen brothers ("Big Lebowski", "No Country For Old Men", etc) advertising Mercedes AMG Roadster and shown during SuperBowl -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exxaJrtH2kg -- and pay attention to a punchline -- "still looking good". Pure signaling for an older folks.
This may sound illogical, but most people who buy "signaling" products (such as Mercedes AMG Roadster) are in +40 y.o. cohort. They got money to spend, unlike millenials who can only signal status while choosing craft beer on Friday evening.
Also, your guess about me living in my "pristine little bubble" was too personal, tbh, but I'm fine with that. No offense taken here.
> Let me present you with example of an ad targeted to 50+ very rich audience. This is an ad directed by Cohen brothers ("Big Lebowski", "No Country For Old Men", etc) advertising Mercedes AMG Roadster and shown during SuperBowl
These concepts are not mutually exclusive concepts:
- targeting a group of people that are 50+ years old
- for the people that actually buy the cars to be vain, young and dumb, and insecure.
> This may sound illogical, but most people who buy "signaling" products (such as Mercedes AMG Roadster) are in +40 y.o. cohort.
That's not illogical at all; that's mainly who I see in Porsche dealerships and nothing about that contradicts what I said. In that individual statement, I was merely commenting on the set of people who care about their things being associated with a porn advertisement, not the intersection of people who care about status to that extent and have money to signal their status.
> Also, your guess about me living in my "pristine little bubble" was too personal, tbh, but I'm fine with that. No offense taken here.
It was, I'm sorry about that and I've removed it; Frankly, I am frustrated and probably overly sensitive (to the point of false positives) to the trend I noticed in the Bay area where people who couldn't be bothered to leave their home/tech bubble and interact with people outside their comfort zone, remarking on how people the world over work. Their abstractions are incredibly wrong if you just go 50 miles outside the bay area.
Due to having family and their friends spread out over the world and due to having a remote job, I've seen and lived with people of diverse cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds; the Bay rarely understands any of those people except those in their bubble and despite that, it's not uncommon for them to speak with authority on them; I find that audacity infuriating and is something I need to work on.
>That's not illogical at all, that's mainly who I see in Porsche dealerships and nothing about that contradicts what I said.
I don't know, I think signaling is OK, and I don't consider people why buy signaling products as "vain dumb and insecure". I just don't see that anything wrong with that. I mean, you made enough money to choose good, quality product, be that t-shirt, bike or even a car. Why not choose some premium brand with some signaling attached to that, instead of just buying generic nike t-shirt or toyota corolla car? If you like that Mercedes AMG Roadster because you think that it will make you more attractive to chicks (and btw it will, I guarantee) -- and you got money to spare, well, go for it! You made enough money to buy Porsche 911, why drive Honda Civic then?
I see people signaling with their choices wrt premium products, and I don't judge them at all.
>Frankly, I am frustrated with a common trend I noticed in the Bay area where people who couldn't be bothered to leave their home/tech bubble and interact with people outside their comfort zone
I've never visited USA in my life, and do not plan to, so your guess about me being SF resident living in SF bubble is wrong. :) I do work in ad-tech / advertising, though, so I learned something about how industry works. JIC, during my daily commute (I don't own a car and use public transit) I see more people who make $500/month than people who make $5000/month, so no bubble here. :)
I'm not saying signaling is wrong; I'm saying to the EXTENT that someone cares so much that they wouldn't buy it because there may be porn associated alongside it, is a symptom of being in the set of vain, insecure, and young and dumb people.
I own a Porsche, I couldn't care less who they are advertising to so long as it doesn't hurt anyone. Moreover, I've learned with anything that attracts that much attention, it's not signaling any kind of attention you would want. I get really annoying attention, on a daily basis. If it wasn't for the tears of joy that I get from driving it down twisties, I would sell it in a heartbeat.
From my perspective as someone in the 1% of my age group and was apart of the set of young and dumb, vain and insecure people, signaling with expensive items is childishly overrated; it's far more fruitful to signal with kindness, compassion and intellect; any trust fund baby can afford a porsche and be as vapid as anyone else.
Well, I get that you want the world to function in a slightly different way, and you don't want people to associate advertised product to content around it; I'm fine with that. However, the world around us functions in a way where people subconsciously associate the product and content.
This is, in fact, a billion dollar opportunity -- ads on porn sites are so abundant and so cheap, first person who will help sell more premium product by advertising it on porn sites will become a billionaire. Not happened yet, and most porn sites advertise, well, other porn sites. There might be a reason for that (and it's not a hidden cabal of puritans who run marketing departments of well-known brands being haters of porn. trust me, those folks will sell their souls to the devil for 10% uptick in sales).
It's not that I want the world to function in that way, it's that sex is such a fundamental part of our biological nature that I believe it supersedes any human abstractions we place over our animal nature; to the extent where, the unworkable symbiosis you posited, of porn associated with the advertising of well known brands, is wanting the world to work in a different way than it actually does. More succinctly, just because advertisers haven't done it well, doesn't mean it can't be done.
In fact, as this generation of baby boomers dies off, I have a strong feeling porn will become far more normalized and have more prestigious non-porn brands associated with it, so long as more prestigious porn brands can rise up.
Would depend which way the pendulum ends up swinging afa "sex positivity" vs. puritanism in modern feminism, plus of course how mainstream porn develops. Looks to me like it's ending up equally or even more compartmentalized, just for very different reasons.
I mean current moves are more along the lines of dropping topless women from tabloids/Playboy ending nudity, Britain trying to age-limit porn, etc.
Also probably comes down to the basic technical difficulty of targeting ads on websites often browsed in private mode. Which will probably keep being the case for a lot of people, for practical reasons, regardless of how normalized porn might be.
A great deal of advertising revolves around "brand awareness". You may not be selling a particular product to the consumer, but keeping your brand in the mind of the consumer. Understandably so, not all advertisers want their brand associated with adult content.
Where an ad is seen can be just as (if not more) important to the advertiser as the ad itself. So, if your site serves up adult content -- you can guarantee that companies with large ad budgets won't be buying ad space.
>A great deal of advertising revolves around "brand awareness". You may not be selling a particular product to the consumer, but keeping your brand in the mind of the consumer. Understandably so, not all advertisers want their brand associated with adult content.
If all brands allowed their ads to appear next to adult content, then it wouldn't be any special association for any particular brand, just another outlet.
So I guess it has more to do with the historical prudery of some countries, when an ad appearing next to adult content would trigger angry letters to the editor, editorials, and so on from "concerned citizens".
That said, advertisers didn't seem to have much issue advertising all kinds of stuff on Playboy back in the day, or FHM and the like today...
> If all brands allowed their ads to appear next to adult content, then it wouldn't be any special association for any particular brand, just another outlet.
Well yeah. Brands aren't going to put in the effort to solve a thorny collective action problem just to open up a bit more ad space. They're trying to make money, not repair broken social norms.
Big brands (i.e. the only companies with budgets that matter) are violently opposed to being associated with anything that might degrade their brand. It isn’t surprising, and it has nothing to do with morals or prudishness.
They are equally put off by pirated content, for example.
Big brands with the big ad budgets tend to be run by or depend on sales to socially conservative people.
See this line from the FAQ on Automattic's ad service:
>> "The ads tend to be broad national campaigns, rather than targeted local or topical campaigns. We have found that the broad campaigns pay better. That said, visitors from countries outside the US and Europe will often see targeted local ads."
This does seem like a stupid simple solution. tumblr.com can continue being SFW, and then there'd be nsfwtumblr.com (or whatever) that contains "the good stuff". Retain account name uniqueness across both domains.
My very limited experience with tumblr (pre-rule change) is that it was essentially impossible to use without being frequently exposed to sexually explicit photographs. ... in contrast to reddit, which is full of outright porn but there I seldom see anything more risque than a bikini shot unless I navigate to a relevant subreddit.
Maybe the critical difference is that if your account would have anything remotely adult at all, including text, or would repost anything from account that was flagged adult then your account would need to be flagged adult. And as a result a lot of accounts were adult flagged and a lot of users felt they had to log in and enable view-adult in order to not get left out. And then even if you have no particular interest in browsing the explicit content on tumblr you can't have many contacts before you start getting occasional reposts of it.
Regardless, being able to have a site which users can fully engage with without a steady stream of surprise crotch shots that they aren't interested in seems like a pretty reasonable goal. Banning the content outright seems like a really blunt way to get there, but maybe that was less damaging to the monetization strategy than making a lot of images click to load?
What qualifies as "better"? Twitter has pretty great user flagging, but I still get uncensored porn from people who are not followed by anyone I know in my 'Your Highlights' email, and I have safe settings enabled. I'd say even one exposure to that is enough to put off users. Or the parents of users.
Tumblr had a wealth of self-produced and curated adult content for and by gender and sexual minorities, with meaningful discussion. No, I don't think the internet has enough of that.
It's funny the stuff HN fixates on. If all you read is this comment thread, you might actually believe that non-porn Tumblr really is just "an exercise in blowing several million dollars", rather than a concern for a very loud, probably rather small subset of Tumblr users (or rather: former users).
What seems at least as likely as "adult content is vital to the future of Tumblr" is that adult content has much more valence in an HN discussion thread, since people have opinions about adult content and not so many opinions about the overwhelming majority of Tumblr content that isn't suppressed. So it takes on an importance on HN that it doesn't have elsewhere, simply because of the fundamental dynamics of message boards ("controversy is always important").
I know that almost all the SFW content creators I know who had a Tumblr blog, have gradually left the platform over the last year. The NSFW content-creators left, and with them dragged away most of the audience for SFW content. The platform is a "dead network" now; the SFW content creators are getting 10x less likes/reblogs than before for their SFW content, because none of their followers (who presumably have both SFW and NSFW interests) checks Tumblr any more, instead having moved onto whatever platform the NSFW content is on (Twitter, I think.)
Think of it this way: a pharmacy sells both prescription drugs and OTC drugs. You can buy OTC drugs from anywhere (e.g. a grocery store, a convenience store, etc.) but you can only get prescription drugs from a pharmacy, so people tend to buy their OTC drugs from pharmacies while they're there for prescription drugs. If your neighbourhood pharmacy decides to stop selling prescription drugs, would you still bother to go there for your OTC drugs? Or would you just buy your OTC drugs from whatever pharmacy you end up now having to go to for your prescription drugs?
Tumblr was always fun because you could get both. I could have a feed of all of my interests, not just those some group deemed acceptable. I’m sure there’s some who’s interests fall entirely within the venn diagram of “acceptable”, and for those, it’s still viable. But as you stated, many like both, and many of the creators I think (who are also consumers) had interests in both SFW and NSFW content.
I don’t have any data to back this up either. But I think – and it’s a very certain feeling – that more individuals are into, let’s say, deviant content, than is spoken publicly. And the tech community, which has always skewed the populations of these platforms as opposed to the population whole, influences this. To put it succinctly (and bluntly) as a friend once told me, “the venn diagram of “kink” and “geek” practically overlap.)
I visited Tumblr for it’s digital art community, but also because it was also heavily used by the shibari community, which practices and demos erotic rope bondage.
Photographers, riggers, and models all maintained accounts on there and Instagram (IG). Tumblr was in some cases the preferred (with Instagram accounts forwarding their users over to Tumblr) as it was the more open platform.
There was a huge outcry in this community and others when the shift was announced, with people scrambling to maintain connections and set up alternate platforms. For while IG was (and to some extent still is) popular, many accounts on IG are often deleted due to reports (“female presenting nipples”). Tumblr was a good anchor to reconnect because it was consistent.
Tumblr’s “closing” had many discussing what to do, as IG is becoming increasingly intolerant to even “artistic” adult content. Twitter remains somewhat usable. But to go back to the original point, I asked some of my favorite artists if they didn’t want to consider a platform such as “Ello” (which seemed a natural fit for this content) instead of Instagram or other mass-market platform, which seemed all too likely to follow Tumblr’s path. The answer? “Because I want my work to be seen.”
And I think that’s what the controversy comes down to. The legally questionable content notwithstanding, artists want their work to be seen, to be viewed by new people, and to connect with those who are waiting to find something to inspire them. Our community meets people all of the time who see an image and get drawn to something about it, feel something unlocked inside that they never knew to ask about. Walling this content off into “adult-only” areas is like a segregation of sorts. You may be able to post pictures, but with it comes the implicit labeling that somehow, it’s different, shameful, and isn’t worthy of being grouped with everything else. And this has a chilling effect on people and their interests which different from the mainstream.
So I’m dismayed when I see waves of channels deleted on YouTube, accounts taken down on Instagram, and one more artist I follow declaring that they’re tired of fighting whack-a-mole and head off into one of the secluded boxes in some corner of the internet like bdslr, or FetLife, or others. They essentially “go dark” [1]. This doesn’t bode well for the internet and society at large, for all we’ll have left is the sterile, the “acceptable”, the echo chamber which we find so troublesome today.
P.S.: I didn’t hit upon the tremendous hypocrisy I feel occurs when it seems to pull a hate speech post offline requires hand-wringing or controversy (or god forbid, a shooting), but adult content accounts can be shuttered instantly with no explanation other than a boilerplate. That, I feel, could be an entirely new discussion however.
Thank you very much for voicing your input and opinion on that matter. It always feels a little dangerous to take position on kink, even though it shouldn't.
> To put it succinctly (and bluntly) as a friend once told me, “the venn diagram of “kink” and “geek” practically overlap.)
It's nice to have an outside view on this. I was always of the opinion that my friends just happen to overlap because my interests select people in both worlds. But yeah, there might actually be a strong correlation.
It shows that as of Jan, 2019, there were about 50% as many users as when the ban was announced. That would suggest that there are as many "former users" as there are current users. And the downward trend has probably continued in the subsequent 6 months.
That doesn't matter much. The largest difference is that the majority of people access social networks through mobile apps now, and Google Trends can't reflect that at all.
For example, Facebook shows a 71% drop worldwide in Google Trends over the last 5 years. Their Q2 2019 earnings showed a 20% worldwide growth in monthly users over the last two years alone.
Google Trends can't tell you anything useful about a site's growth or activity.
The assumption that Tumblr's loss of users is entirely or even mostly due to suppressing adult content is probably unwarranted, but I'd be interested in data either way.
The chart shows that there was already a downward trend, but it really fell off a cliff after the announcement.
Also, for platforms with network effects, a drop-off (or even belief that there will be a drop-off) can do major damage to even unrelated communities on the platform. For example, Tumblr used to be a huge referrer for my startup, thanks to Tumblr's robust ADHD, dyslexia, and CFS communities who spread the word about our tools. We still get occasional traffic from posts, but I get the sense that those communities have been hollowed out by the perception that Tumblr is dead. I don't know if they've moved elsewhere (perhaps Twitter), but they sure aren't on Tumblr much anymore.
I certainly hope Automattic can revive Tumblr one way or another, but it seems like the smart play here would have been to announce that they'll be looking to find a way to restore the prior functionality, and then work out the details later. That way they can get a bump in traffic from the expectation that there will be a bigger community, which helps them regardless of the extent to which the ban is reversed.
On July 15, 2017, ~36 million posts were made on Tumblr [1]. A year later, July 14, 2018 [4], about ~31 million posts were made [2]. July 13, 2019 saw only ~21 million [3].
The Wayback Machine doesn't have fine-grained enough details to get a good estimate of how much the loss of adult content itself was responsible, but this does reinforce the impression given from the Google Trends link cited several times that there has been a steady decline in Tumblr punctuated with a massive hit on or around the removal of adult content.
People who had nudes on their tumblr weren't on tumblr just for nudes. It was just great to have a place you could stash everything you liked, kinks included.
So, network effects work both ways, people leave because their kink got banned and people who followed that person now have one less reason to log on.
Yes and no. As someone commented above, when people lost one of their interests, the dropped it completely and took all their presence away.
One of the reasons that I left is the need for Yahoo to share all my actions with some of the shittiest trackers, advertisers, and privacy violators. Not fun fact: you can't shake/AdBlock/NoScript/PrivacyBadger them if Tumblr itself is doing the sale.
I didn’t even use tumblr for porn at all. I pretty much only follow artists.
I’m not sure if it’s still a problem, but the ban resulted in loads of non-porn images being flagged as porn. Most people gave up trying to fight it and left. When I visit tumblr now, it’s dead. Everyone moved on and fast.
Artists use it less and less, mainly to bait and switch (patreon). Adult content is out. Fandoms wither because well teenagers grow and abandon this slowly - until the next/new fandom pops up.
Curating is one thing. Make "chinese walls" and prevent teens to access the hard adult stuff, but let them free and it will organically grow again.
We are past the years where teens needed a journal, they've gone to FB/IG for that.
Tumblr is fun if let free. If not, then it will wither further and die.
I can only see Automattic using it as another wordpress, a bit more hip. But still the user geneated content needs to be the free driver, not the gagged driver.
From my little corner of the internet (furries), porn was often a lead generator. People came for the hot werewolf boyfriends, then stayed for all the non-porn stuff. They don't necessarily stick around if the thing that reminded them Tumblr existed goes away. They follow the draw where it goes. A lot of them moved to Reddit, Twitter, Mastodon, and Telegram chats.
It's a niche, but not a small one. Enough niches tumbled together (or out) is a lot of people.
The adult content is what differentiated tumblr from other platforms, users came to tumblr for it and stayed to view other content. Remove it and those users decide it's not worth sticking around versus twitter/facebook/whatever. So while you don't lose as much content you do lose a proportionally larger percentage of users (50% seems to be cited). And once those users leave the creators of sfw content will start to move to other platforms.
Or in other words porn was free marketing and lead generation for tumblr. I somehow doubt a buyer will be willing to put in enough money to make up for it.
Sure, it's the former users that are complaining rather than the current users. The problem is that the Tumblr with its current set of users and current policies are what make it a boring and uninteresting place to go on the web.
Tumblr was a hot property specifically because of the former users, and if the site doesn't try to get them back it will become something reminiscent of Digg and Myspace- something to be looked upon with nostalgia but not for spending any time visiting.
One thing I’ve noticed with the Tumblr migration, is that I’ve switched to hard core porn.
With Tumblr I had my lists of soft things where there was a lot left to imagine. Some of them are still online, proof they were supersoft. But I had to surf away and I can’t find mild ones. All because some überentity wants to sanitize and cleanse the world. And drove all the softporn to Instagram, where the everyday girl poses, which... is worse for the masses. And is less easy to browse.
If anything, closing Tumblr has driven my habits to way worse, and I’d bet we’re hundreds of thousands in this situation. As much for sanitizing society.
This happens with other things as well. One of the problems with kicking $bad_thought people off the mainstream platforms like Twitter is all the $bad_thought people get isolated, enter an echo chamber, and radicalize.
This is spot-on. HN has generally massively over-estimated the amount of porn on Tumblr, in terms of percentage of total content. I say this as a primary source with first-hand factual knowledge.
I've observed most discussions about Tumblr outside of HN. Most discussion revolves around how banning adult content from Tumblr removed any reason to go to Tumblr for many people. These are your average kinksters, artists, creative types who have been forced off the platform because it no longer caters to their interests. Not sure what any of this has to do with HN.
This subthread is discussing a misconception prevalent among HN users. But this same misconception may also be shared by other groups; no one is saying it's exclusive to HN.
I believe your anecdotal experience in this area is true and accurate. But at the same time, the raw stats just don't reflect it being universally accurate across all users. A similar phenomenon has occurred regarding people saying they're quitting Facebook, deleting Uber, moving off GitHub, etc.
In this specific case re: Tumblr, my guess would be that only a portion of them actually stopped using Tumblr at that specific time and for that reason. I suspect some of these people already stopped using Tumblr long ago, and meanwhile some others do continue using Tumblr despite previously saying otherwise. I'm just speculating though.
Do you base that on anything but a suspicion on your part? You are claiming this to be a misconception, can you actually back that up? I have no idea who those new content creators are supposed to be, like everyone else i just saw people with a decade or more of content producing behind them leaving. And not some of the people i knew but all of them. If there are great hidden communities that grew in the vacuum left, please share.
I am basing my statements on knowledge from personal experience. As I said above, I'm a primary source with first-hand factual knowledge about this topic. (If you do a lot of capacity planning for a UGC / social network infrastructure over many years, you become intimately familiar with changes in growth rate over time...)
First of, thanks for sharing your experience and insight here.
You do however see how that is a bit difficult to just accept without any backing up, considering a former engineer might naturally be a bit biased about the public perception of a former project dying? By no means a personal attack, just picture yourself in my shoes. I do understand however if there is just no such data available.
Like everyone else here I saw whole communities with active people, with sometimes over a decade of content creation behind them, just vanish. And those werent just the complete porn focused ones, hell even the few leftists i followed from soup.io days packed up for good. Granted, just my anecdotal experience but given how many experienced the same, i would be confident to say that some rather big, active and motivated communities died and others lost a great share of formerly active members and especially content creators due to the sometimes bizarre overlap.
So if tumblr isnt dying, which new active communities sprung up to fill that void? Did any with the current public perception of tumblr? How is the rate of content creation and interaction looking pre and post porn ban announcement?
Differently put, what good do lurker numbers do if the content creators are gone? Without them lurkers arent going to be sticking around forever and which new content creators are acquired?
I do mean what I said in the last post and I mean everyone who reads this,
>If there are great hidden communities that grew in the vacuum left, please do share.
edit: I also forgot to mention the most damming part, Verizon selling tumblr for under 3m. They sure are convinced its dead for good.
> a former engineer might naturally be a bit biased about the public perception of a former project dying?
Personally I'm not too concerned about that. I have other things on my resume.
I'm more concerned that people keep blindly parroting that Tumblr is/was primarily a "porn site", when the internal data absolutely did not bear that out at any point.
> So if tumblr isnt dying
I haven't said anything about whether or not it is "dying". Afraid you've misunderstood. My point is that HN tends to vastly overstate the amount of adult-related Tumblr usage. Far more users slowly left over time long before the adult content ban.
You want public numbers, OK, I'll link directly to the wayback machine info that I previously mentioned downthread:
Jan 21 2014 (random day around "peak Tumblr"): 110m posts [1]
Dec 16 2018 (before adult content ban): 28m posts [2]
Feb 3 2019 (a bit after adult content ban): 23m posts [3]
While daily posting volume doesn't perfectly equate to MAUs, in my experience with UGC / social networking products, posting volume is closely correlated with overall usage.
I've addressed that nuance in other comments in this subthread. My statements are accurate no matter how you define a "user".
Additionally, Tumblr started requiring a logged-in account to view adult content some time before the ban (something like 9 months before it iirc).
Furthermore, GP specifically said "forced off the platform", "go to Tumblr", etc which strongly implies people with accounts / using the site's dashboard feed which requires an account (as opposed to visiting specific blog subdomains directly as a logged-out user).
I really don't understand the implicit distrust of my direct first-hand experience here. The amount of gaslighting in this thread is profoundly disturbing.
> Additionally, Tumblr started requiring a logged-in account to view adult content some time before the ban (something like 9 months before it iirc).
Is only technically accurate; it's irrelevant to the user experience. The ban was implemented by enabling safe mode for all users, removing the option to disable it, then automatedly marking a huge number of accounts as adult (plenty of which that got caught in this step weren't actually adult).
Content wasn't actually deleted, and can still be viewed on your own dashboard for the accounts you're subscribed to, making it less obvious to users with accounts - the ban primarily affected visitors without accounts and the posters who wanted them as an audience. Those posters are the ones who have been forced off the platform, no longer able to grow an audience, but some have been slow to realize they even got caught by the ban because of how it was implemented.
I don't follow how that relates to the topic being discussed here (HN misconception about the percentage of adult-related users/content/traffic on Tumblr). I only mentioned the logged-in account requirement in response to your claim about non-logged-in traffic being relevant to the stats.
I haven't expressed any opinions about the user experience of the ban, or whether the ban was implemented well, or whether the ban was a good idea or a bad one. I have no horse in that race, and was not involved in the ban's implementation in any way whatsoever.
What I am stating is that I'm directly aware of the rough percentage of Tumblr activity that was adult-related from ~2010-2018, and that percentage is significantly less than the numbers commonly thrown around on HN. But several people here think I'm lying for whatever reason, so clearly it's time for me to bow out of this infuriating gaslight fest.
Well, "most users" implies a majority, which is simply not the case here, full stop. Far from it, especially if you define a user as a person who has a Tumblr account and posts content on the site.
If you consider a "user" to include non-monetizeable lurkers who were just there to view adult content, then saying "most users" is definitely still wrong, but perhaps slightly less so.
Tumblr's peak was many years ago (2013 iirc), and the very slow drop-off over time is far more significant than the recent adult content ban. If you choose not to believe me, you can go to Internet Archive / Wayback Machine and view post-per-day stats on https://www.tumblr.com/about going back a decade and see for yourself.
I'm not going to reply to this further. I know the stats, I've seen the internal stats over many years, and this is a pointless thing to argue.
>Well, "most users" implies a majority, which is simply not the case here, full stop.
Well, 30% of the traffic leaving within the first couple of months of the ban, seems rather significant to me:
"The blogging platform’s traffic has dropped by 30 percent since the December ban on all adult content (...) In December, Tumblr’s global traffic clocked in at 521 million, but it dwindled to a mere 370 million in February, according to The Verge".
And moving onwards, it continues to look like a death spiral - a website that lost half or more of its users and is on a slope:
Those stats are not publicly available. In general, for any company, at best they may or may not include the stats in quarterly earnings statements if the company is publicly traded. Although Tumblr has been owned by public companies since 2013, its corporate owners have not made these stats publicly available.
Elsewhere in this subthread, I've linked to public info showing that in absolute content creation numbers, the impact of the adult content ban was far less than a majority of content, and also far smaller than the slow drop-off of users over the previous five years.
Judging by your use of quotes around "correct", it seems you've already made up your mind anyway and I'm wasting my time discussing this. If you want to trust clearly incorrect numbers in The Verge over the person who built the company's relational storage tier, I suppose that's your prerogative.
>If you want to trust clearly incorrect numbers in The Verge over the person who built the company's relational storage tier, I suppose that's your prerogative.
So, the Verge refers to data from two sources SimilarWeb and Statista, whereas your data are basically "trust me" and "absolute content creation numbers" (that is: not visitors).
And on top, you say you've built Tumblr's infrastructure.
How would you feel if random people on HN repeatedly insisted your former employer was primarily a porn site, despite these people having no real evidence, and despite this going against years of your personal experience scaling and capacity-planning the site?
Do you actually believe these numbers from SimilarWeb and Statista claiming Tumblr has more MAUs than Twitter and Snapchat combined, even after banning adult content (which you claim was a majority of Tumblr's usage)? Does that even remotely make any sense at all?
You're outright accusing me of lying here. I find this insulting and do not wish to continue this discussion. Goodbye.
>How would you feel if random people on HN repeatedly insisted your former employer was primarily a porn site, despite these people having no real evidence, and despite this going against years of your personal experience scaling and capacity-planning the site?
I'd have no problem with people insisting it being "primarily a porn site", any more that if they insisted it was an "anime site", "fan fiction site" etc. The point is whether they're right or wrong, not if I don't like the type. I'd have no particular urge to disprove claims that it's a specific type of content that it's most successful.
You also repeat "having no real evidence", while the Verge article has 2 sources, and you gave none.
>Do you actually believe these numbers from SimilarWeb and Statista claiming Tumblr has more MAUs than Twitter and Snapchat combined, even after banning adult content (which you claim was a majority of Tumblr's usage)? Does that even remotely make any sense at all?
I believe Statista and SimilarWeb have no particular reason to lie about Tumblr. They just post their stats. Are they off in absolute numbers? That's neither here nor there. Even if e.g. Statista double counts, it double counts before AND after the ban, so whether the absolute numbers are accurate is irrelevant. The huge relative drop is still there.
>You're outright accusing me of lying here.
No, I'm simply accusing you of being biased and giving no numbers.
In any case, I can't see how anyone would insist Tumblr did OK after the ban, when it's said to be sold for 3mm (or close).
Heck, that's so low, that if I sold some family property, I could have bought it...
> The point is whether they're right or wrong, not if I don't like the type.
Precisely. The point is saying Tumblr is/was "primarily a porn site" is simply factually incorrect. At no point have I expressed whether or not I "like the type".
> I believe Statista and SimilarWeb have no particular reason to lie about Tumblr. They just post their stats.
And what's the source of their stats?
> Are they off in absolute numbers? That's neither here nor there.
So it's "neither here nor there" if their stats are blatantly inaccurate, but you trust the relative proportions of their stats anyway because they "have no particular reason to lie". And yet I do have some reason to lie about this? I no longer work for Tumblr, have worked on other things several orders of magnitude larger than Tumblr, haven't been an active Tumblr user in years, and had no involvement whatsoever with the implementation of Tumblr's adult content ban. Why on earth would I spend my free time making supposedly false claims about the relative percentage of adult content on Tumblr? Why not have a good-faith discussion where you assume positive intent of the person you are conversing with?
> I'm simply accusing you of being biased and giving no numbers.
I've repeatedly linked to the only publicly available numbers (posts per day stats publicly provided by Tumblr itself). What is your expectation here? It seems like you expect me to somehow retroactively capture internal confidential statistics from a former employer and then post them publicly, in order to satisfy the whims of some random pseudonymous person on HackerNews?
> I can't see how anyone would insist Tumblr did OK after the ban
At no point have I made any statement on whether Tumblr "did OK" or not after the ban. Rather, what I have stated is that the impact of the ban is a drop in the bucket relative to the much larger decline in usage over the preceding 5 years. And the reason it's a drop in the bucket is because the amount of adult content/usage on Tumblr was much smaller than you and others claim, which was precisely what tptacek theorized and I confirmed.
In any case -- you certainly aren't going to somehow change my mind regarding my personal first-hand experiences, and it seems unlikely you will change your position either, so for the third time let's please disengage and stop discussing this!
>It's funny the stuff HN fixates on. If all you read is this comment thread, you might actually believe that non-porn Tumblr really is just "an exercise in blowing several million dollars"
Which it pretty much is. That kind of content (which wasn't exactly porn, though if one is prude enough everything is porn) was Tumblr best differentiator.
Except from what everyone is saying and the drop in traffic people are observing it drove multiples of SFW traffic. The porn kept and drove users but they also viewed plenty of SFW content as well. You can monetize the SFW side of things.
It doesn't mean it's going to be like that forever. Maybe they're just saying that for the time being until the deal goes through, and afterwards when they've actually familiar with the product and know what it takes to properly implement adult content handling for Tumblr. Automattic isn't that large of a company, and it could take some time and effort to implement proper content moderation features, assign and train people, etc. Either way, even if they leave everything as is, there is no way they are going to be worse stewards of the thing as Verizon or Yahoo were.
Which is their plan for the moment. Which worries me about the sanity of Automattic. When you’ve stopped growing long ago and you start buying ventures to keep the turnover going, you end up like this big company which was buying ventures to stay afloat. What was it again?
Yup - so will die sooner than later once an adequate alternative exists. Shaming sex and sexuality via policy has no place in a reasonable, civilized, accepting - healthy society.
If you were to ask people in the street about Tumblr and what it was for, I would be surprised if you had many people say 'porn!'. They might not have heard of it or they might remember it from a decade ago or they might even think it was 'flickr'. It certainly is not up there with Twitter and Facebook as a full on household name.
The next 'tumblr' that comes along, i.e. when it is another thing that Automattic do, need not carry over any of the adult content connotations of the past. It can be fully repurposed with the SFW punters happy with whatever comes next. I doubt it will be mySpaced.
It wasn't just about porn, it was about things like not remotely porn-y art, entirely SFW LGBT-related material, and even entirely random image content all getting automatically flagged as porn.
It wasn't even worth the effort of trying to get previous posts on my Tumblrs unflagged; I just stopped using the site.
It is worth noting that Tumblr was an indirect acquisition by Verizon when they bought Yahoo in 2017.
It seems to have had stable unique views up until Aug-Sep 18 [1]. At some point it suffered from country-wide bans in places such as Indonesia. The country bans coupled with a ban from the iOS App store [2] caused direct downward pressure on viwership. This has led to a rapid drop in viewership in the months after [3]. Considering the amount of legislation towards telecom companies and the potential risk to the Verizon brand by proxy, it was imperative that the company would sell Tumblr.
Due to the current political environment in the US, it is unlikely that Automattic will open the gates that partially made Tumblr what it was in the 17-18 era for the next 3-6 months, that is unless they take a very conservative take on reviewing that kind of content prior to it being posted.
I think the adult content ban was in response to being blocked in some countries and by iOS... they banned adult content so those bans would be reversed
Surprised by this news. Tumblr has lost a ton of momentum since its policy change, and the site itself doesn't have a very strong "brand" audience attached to it.
Fun fact: I can't recall the last time I either opened a Tumblr link or saw one in the wild. But maybe that's just me.
Every time I visit a Tumblog subdomain it just kicks me back to my own Tumblr dashboard and has for around 2 years now. When it started happening people said it was a bug but seemingly it's intentional? Not sure I understand the point but presumably this is for some sort of metrics they push?
Individual Tumblr blogs get to decide whether example.tumblr.com is "only visible to logged-in users." If they turn on that setting, the site 1. forces you to log in, and 2. renders the site inline as part of the Tumblr dashboard SPA. If you don't turn it on, though, your Tumblr blog is a public/static website indexable by Google.
Importantly left out here is what the default is. It sounds like the default is must log in - I can't imagine how many tumblr users would choose to only have logged in viewers. I've left a while though so feel free to correct that.
The default is public. Usually, the users who choose “must log in” choose it either because they’re paranoid about privacy, or because it is a prerequisite to having the site enforce a viewer blacklist for them (to block incessant stalkers.)
There is also, above and beyond that, the ability to make a blog private, by setting a password to access it. A blog with a password is still rendered out to a static site, though, strangely enough; just one with the equivalent of an .htaccess password-gate behaviour.
> Fun fact: I can't recall the last time I either opened a Tumblr link or saw one in the wild. But maybe that's just me.
I'm pretty sure I've never opened a tumblr link in my life, but I see screenshots all the time on Facebook and reddit, and I know what "rebloging" is. So I guess the brand has some value there.
1) Tumblr has turned into such a disaster that Verizon is looking to dump it ASAP, and they're asking for fire sale prices.
2) Automattic thinks they can turn Tumblr around. They will probably get a lot of good will if they reverse the porn ban, and that alone will draw a lot of attention to Tumblr. And if that fails, then Automattic has 200 new employees they can put to work on their in-house projects. At worst, it's an acquihire, and if #1 is correct, it's a cheap acquihire.
>Mr. Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a Tumblr user and sees the site as complementary to WordPress.com. “It’s just fun,” he said of Tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.”
Is it just me or does Tumblr feel really heavy weight and bloated when you open even small blog posts the size of a tweet?
They had the opportunity to be the light weight blogging option. But its various design decisions seem strange to me as an outsider. Maybe it needs to revisit its past minimalism? ala old Twitter.
Well they decided to allow users to use arbitrary HTML themes for their blogs so there's not a whole lot they can do about that. The default theme isn't too terrible but a lot of the user themes are.
The worst is people using some old theme that embeds a script hosted on a site that no longer exists and the whole page load hangs until the request times out.
nah, even the default theme is very heavy and laggy...that's on the developers, not the users. Tumblr also uploads every GIF as an actual GIF, and doesn't convert them to webm or something that would reduce it to a fraction of the size. Lots of sites slow to a crawl because of this.
December 17th 2018, maybe? I know I stopped seeing a lot of tumblr links when that policy changed, even ones that weren't affected by the change. I'm curious how much traffic and posting changed when that finally went into effect.
I will say though that the "final straw" dropped interest by half overnight.... so it certainly was detrimental but they certainly where losing interest over time.
or it stopped growing through google discovery, but its core base had it bookmarked, visited it through autocomplete, or used the app. google search results going down doesnt necessarily mean active users went down.
App store bans and country bans should be better indicators.
Their brand wasn't particularly strong in the first place. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for years it was widely known as a home to porn and people blogging about genders. I never knew anyone personally who hosted anything on Tumblr.
Maybe it could be turned around, but it's pretty old-school at this point and seems hardly better to me than MySpace.
I never knew anyone personally who hosted anything on Tumblr.
My impression is that most people used it pseudonymously, to speak to things they didn't want associated with their public identity, so perhaps you knew people who hosted on Tumblr but didn't know that you knew them.
I never said there was. The public, on the other hand, isn't necessarily interested in sifting through those kinds of content on a dying platform that many people have long since moved away from. If they want to bring people back to Tumblr at this point, they either need to get rid of the perception that they're a dumping ground for porn, or they've got to completely own it. But that won't happen, because enough people remember that Tumblr tried to expunge all that stuff.
any reasonably large brand that can afford a social media manager will use automated tools that crossposts the exact same content to Twitter, FB, IG, and Tumblr.
The original appeal of Tumblr was that it was a modern day Xanga, lots of personal, anonymous journaling, weird jokes and photos. I don't recall anybody becoming an influencer via Tumblr, probably because it didn't attract that kind of audience.
> Mr. Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a Tumblr user and sees the site as complementary to WordPress.com. “It’s just fun,” he said of Tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.”
Not surprising, but in light of that statement one wonders what the value proposition of this acquisition is aside from an acquihire.
They haven't published a sale price. Doubt very much if Matt Mullenweg over paid for it. If the price is low enough that Tumblr cash flows or close to it with existing advertising revenue then it was a pretty smart purchase.
I've been wondering if you could trade successfully just by shorting literally everything Oath buys into. Their acquisition list is basically just a subset of the Startup Graveyard at this point.
Automattic will probably be much more effective at handling Tumblr since they have experience with content platforms. Whereas for Verizon, Tumblr was way, way outside their core competency.
It was always a shame at how Verizon seemed to mismanage Tumblr so it's exciting that Tumblr may become relevant again!
Yeah, Automattic probably got a steal. I doubt they would've been able to afford Tumblr in its heyday, or pay the price Yahoo paid.
Wordpress doesn't seem to ever have been able to push into the "social" discovery space. I bet Automattic folks have a bunch of half-baked ideas that didn't make sense for Wordpress but would be great directions for Tumblr. Seems like they were able to "buy low" so-to-speak and get access to a whole landscape they not only competed with but couldn't have afforded.
I know there are a lot of nay sayers in this thread about the viability of this acquistion but consider this:
> Even still, Matt says Tumblr’s user base is, “several times larger than [WordPress.com].”
I don't know what Automattic paid exactly, but the story speculates that:
> Dan Primack of Axios is reporting a “source familiar” put the price, “well south of $20 million.”
So even if Tumblr is plateaued or declining still, it has several magnitudes of declining (for lack of a better term maybe?) before it even hits the same size as wordpress.com
Using the $20 Million Dollar as the ceiling here, all they would need to do is convert:
- four million users to their $5 month plan to make back $20 million dollars
- two million five hundred thousand users to the $8 a month plan to make $20 million dollars
- eight hundred thousand users to their $25 dollar a month plan to make $20 million dollars
- forty five thousand users to their $45 dollar a month ecommerce plan to make $20 million dollars
Now, if you figure they'll likely monetize some of these users on a wide variety of these plans, the numbers start to pan out quite quickly. This doesn't count things like ad revenue on free tiers, for instance.
Why are you comparing the cost of a single month against a one-off purchase price? I have no idea what Tumblr's churn rate is, but if they can hold onto that $5/mo user for a year, they only need 333k to make back $20m -- or 50,000 to make back $3m.
Tumblr is in a free fall for years, especially after last december. What is there for wordpress to take? the domain name? it's not that great ;) Maybe it's worth it to convert the few remaining blog owners?
I don't think tumblr is a valuable brand name, most of its adult blogs have moved to twitter and newtumbl, and judging from google trends that was ~50% of the searches.
Anyway automattic seems a good fit , but i hope they didn't pay too much for it.
Instagram is worth $50B-200B today based on their revenue contributions to Facebook on the conservative and their growth contributions on the generous end.
As someone who used Tumblr more like Dribbble and not for 'adult' content, I think this is a great move. I like Automattic as a company and I trust Matt will find a way to make Tumblr relevant again for creators without having to resort to the LCTG - lowest common traffic generator.
In theory, the Yahoo acquisition held a lot of potential for Verizon. In reality, Verizon operationally mismanaged many parts of the business and destroyed most of the value. Tumblr is one visible example of that. It's unfortunate but not uncommon. Once the deal closes, internal politics rather than common sense and innovation rules and a small handful of bad leaders or a small set of perverse incentives can sink the whole ship.
I view the ability to successfully execute on acquisitions of Yahoo's size as one of the key differentiators between tech giants who will survive into the next generation and those who won't. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft all have a much better (by no means perfect) track record than the older more traditional businesses trying to catch up to them (telecoms like Verizon included). Telecom is a capital intensive business. Tech is a human capital intensive business. Just one extra word but a big difference.
Verizon should release a WhatsApp, FBMessenger, iMessage competitor and let you pick if you want it to be Verizon, Yahoo, or AIM themed. Nostalgia is all the rage. Being able to use AIM (like facebook chat at the bottom of a page) while I browse Yahoo News and Yahoo Finance, and Yahoo Fantasy....
No one outside the US has heard of Verizon and most of the products (whatsapp, messenger) you named have the majority of their users outside the US. Most internet users today have also not heard of or have any nostalgia for Yahoo Messenger or AIM.
have most people heard of Verizon OR Yahoo OR AOL or ICQ? They are sitting on a bunch of brand names that DO have some sort of recognition.
If facebook can have three separately branded interoperable products, why cant someone else try. They can market the four products to different markets with different aesthetics, and under the hood, its one messenger base. Verizon absolutely has the power to force and plow themselves into the market through sheer will and stubbornness.
Tim Armstrong somehow convinced Verizon leadership that by combining Yahoo with AOL, they would create a 3rd major player in the ad world that could compete with Google and Facebook.
I will refrain from adding my personal opinion of that plan, but you can probably guess.
In any case, all of the Verizon execs involved in that deal are long gone, and the new Verizon CEO is said to be focused entirely on 5G.
Most sites start that way. That was our policy on reddit too. If it was legal it was allowed. But you can see where that leads -- as you get bigger you attract a crowd that may be legal, but not one you want to support.
The best analogy is that I support your right to spew your hate speech if you want, but I'm not going to open my house and let you do it in my living room.
Most sites eventually decide that they don't want to be associated with that speech and clamp down.
The Wordpress community is less tightly intertwingled than Reddit (or Twitter, for that matter) was.
The chance of negative social interactions occurring goes up with the number of interactions, not the number of participants. In a dense community, this is O(N^2). In a sparse community, where participants subdivide into cliques that have little or nothing to do with each other, it approaches O(N).
Specific social features all have different effects on the degree of interconnectedness on a site. In particular, things like unified user profiles, retweets, direct-link shortcuts to either user profiles or posts, navigational links, and real-time engagement increase the interconnectedness. Things like no-comment links (np.reddit), time delays, separate domain names for different subjects, subreddits, few links between different communities, separate user accounts, etc. reduce the interconnectness. Social sites exist on a spectrum from individual communities (4chan, HN, forums, etc.) to densely-connected but partitioned networks (Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and Facebook) to publishing platforms (YouTube and Wordpress) to sitebuilders (SquareSpace, Wix, etc.) The latter end has virtually no problem with miscreants because it has virtually no social interaction; the former has a big problem with miscreants but has enjoyed the benefits of higher growth, higher engagement, and more ad dollars, except that if you go too far toward the community end, the community self-limits its size through rules and customs before it becomes big enough to monetize.
Wordpress has benefitted from slower growth - because they're basically a publishing platform rather than a community, they don't face the same problems that being a community has. (They didn't get the benefits, either, which is why Facebook is a $500B company and they're not.)
Steve's take on Reddit these days almost seems like he's doubling down on the whole "free speech" thing for better or for worse.
I personally left the site after eleven years. Steve actually permanently banned me after I had pointed out a few instances where racism was not only allowed to live, but seemingly encouraged.
I can think of at least one subreddit that often hits the top of r/all that will limit posts only to people who have sent a picture of their forearm to the mod to verify their race. Somehow that is allowed. Literally submitting a picture of your skin for the color to be judged. headdesk
Why not, forearms are still pretty identifiable, all the pictures of forearms, user names, and IP addresses will subject to administrative subpoena the next time something happens.
What keeps me on is staying out of the r/all subs. Ever since forums have pretty much waned (rather SEO buried them from the light of day) subreddits are all that's left for niche interest forums or local groups. It's also painless to make your own subreddits.
Occasionally I'll be logged out of reddit and see the new defaults and my god, I feel like I'm getting dumber.
Yeah, I love free speech but fundamentally social media is a product that I use and not having to deal with hate speech all the time is an important part of that product for me. At a certain point I've found moderation leads to a vastly better product to use than no moderation. For people where no moderation is important they can use a product without it (like some of the different *chans) but they just aren't as popular with people.
The fact that people reflexively spam online chats if given the chance should tell you all you need to know about handing every jackass with a keyboard a megaphone.
The majority of consumers, yes. Not majority of companies.
Whether tech giants or smaller businesses, they all do advertisers' bidding, and the advertisers themselves have the insipid idea in their heads that having their ads show up alongside non-PC content is going to somehow associate their brand with that exact content, as if it's an endorsement.
With the way Youtube, Twitch, and other large platforms share revenue with the content creators, the idea that an ad showing in front of content "associates" their brand with that video doesn't even go far enough. Those brands DO endorse that content directly with their money.
There was an issue on YT where a video from ISIS containing a beheading was monetized. Advertisers were directly funding terrorism in that case (until YT interceded). The same happens all the time with other anti-humanitarian videos all the time.
I agree that there has been some over-reaction, but let's not pretend it's not a problem.
More than that, even if there are tools available for the advertisers to only target specific content they don’t want to be associated with a website that provides content they don’t like. IIRC, this was one of the reasons why Twitch was spun out of Justin.tv— advertisers liked the gaming content but not what was in the other categories.
For me the most important aspect of this acquisition is that Automattic is a fully remote company. Tumblr's office space in New York City must be very expensive, I wonder if they're getting rid of it and transition everyone to remote.
Automattic has had offices in the past, so there is some precedent. The Tumblr team has a strong office culture, so we don't want to break anything that's working well. Simultaneously we believe the future of work is distributed, and over the next decade that's the direction we firmly want to head. If you want to learn more about this, including hybrid organizations, check out my new podcast at distributed.blog.
Verizon moved Tumblr out of their longtime HQ last year. It was a beautiful space in Flatiron District that the company occupied for almost 8 years. I've heard the space is now a WeWork.
CW Old man comment: I tried to use tumblr years ago but the UI was so baffling I quickly gave up. Specifically: I never knew what would happen if I clicked on something. Does this “favorite” the post? Reblog it? Take me to the users page? How do I see the original post page (not the reblog)? How do I see the 6000 people who responded to this post?
Maximal violation of principal of least surprise. I could never figure anything out so I gave up.
Two things I loved about Tumblr that were very much not the social aspect (something about the community did just never work for me) were the stupid easy to use publishing tools and simple template language. I may have made some 600 of those site templates over the years and it was FUN.
Later design changes tried to push the social thing more to the front (which, again, idgaf about) and so I left. But it'd pretty cool to start seeing SOME of that in wp, which is in this kinda weird middle spot right now where it's not hard to work with but enough of a chore to pay someone to do it for you.
Price has tumbld to $3M apparently. At this price the original founder could buy it back. Despite their shenanigans they could reengage their users (including the adult themed ones)
I see this as great news; my first reaction to hearing it was excitement. A lot of comments here are talking about the porn but outside of that, tumblr has a community with a uniquely sardonic sense of humor and is a platform for a host of independent artists and creators, and I would be incredibly sad to see it die. IMO Automattic will make for decent stewards of the platform (hell, anybody would be better than Verizon + Yahoo) and I have cautious optimism for tumblr's future.
This is such a good news for tumblr. It's sad that key internet services like del.icio.us, tumblr, and I'm sure others got destroyed be Yahoo! But, it's good to see that some managed to stay alive and might have another life after having been Yahoo!'d
It'll be interesting to see if Tumblrs code gets open sourced. I used to run the biggest WordPress deployment in the world outside of WordPress.com and worked with a few Automattic devs in the process.
Hi just to let you know your acronym for the LGBT+ community (LGBTQIKAP+) is unecessarily long and it comes off like you're trying too hard. I'm pretty into tumblr identities and queer politics and I can't think of any identity which starts with a K. Queer is just as good as the common LGBT+ but some people still associate it with the slur and don't feel comfortable with identifying with it. The plus really is the umbrella for asexual, intersex etc that is "left out" by just using LGBT+
You could embed gifs right in the posts. You subscribe to many blogs of very specific niches and fetishes, then you have a feed of animated gifs, videos and pictures of your specific tastes. Its perfect for porn addiction because it sucks you in and you keep accessing deeper and deeper darker psychological porn. Additionally it had a really good retweet type feature for the content.
It should be interesting to see how this proceeds. When I was a Tumblr they invested a huge amount of effort in being as nasty as possible to Yahoo and fighting/rebeling against each and everything Yahoo asked of them. I left right at the Verizon merger so I can’t say if that has changed, but if that culture is still there it will make it challenging for any purchaser. Not to reward their behavior but it might have worked out better in the long run, yahoo’s tech environment was heavily customized and integrated, it would be very difficult to extract any other Yahoo property from their portfolio.
Does anyone want to try to elucidate whatever bull case Yahoo! modeled out to buy it in the first place? Because God knows anyone with a brain should have probably been able to see that it was going to be a disaster.
Back in the '90s, Yahoo! owned some of the hottest properties on the Internet. But by the end of the '00s, those properties were all Web 1.0 dinosaurs that had long been surpassed by modern platforms. They wanted that old relevance back; they wanted to buy a modern platform that was popular with young people and had a huge userbase and cultural influence.
And Yahoo!, being Yahoo!, never really knew what to do with that acquisition and just let it start to die on the vine, and when Verizon took over, they pissed away whatever goodwill they had left by gutting Tumblr.
Sure, but that's not really a model, right? (Sorry, not to attack you.) I really hope the MBAs on the M&A team for Yahoo! didn't just say "Well, we used to be cool, but we're not anymore, so.."
Tumblr was growing, but it was extremely young (read: low HHI, difficult to target, resistant to advertising) and extremely brand un-safe (read: impossible to monetize). So they had to believe one of four things:
1. The brand would grow into an older demographic, despite being not designed as such
2. Users would not leave in mass once brand-safety initiatives were to be put in place and/or advertisers wouldn't care
3. Some other business model would emerge, despite that not happening to almost any other similar consumer product ever
4. Display advertising would reverse the trend of CPMs plummeting and being sucked up by Facebook and Google
I can't imagine any competent M&A analyst actually looking at Tumblr and the state of the Internet ultimately believing any of them, which is why the deal was hugely baffling then.
I'm surprised how low the buyout price was. Like Verizon basically killed Tumblr with the adult content ban but only $3million? I'm sure the net worth of Tumblr's employees is worth more than that. They should've sold Tumblr to the employees and then turned it into a co-op if they were going to sell it for that little.
I have a very old Tumblr account that I got locked out of (I forgot to update my email address, don't have access to the old domain email, and therefore can't reset. When I tried contacting Tumblr recently, they wouldn't help me even try anything at all to verify the account.
Will Automattic allow me to get my old account back?
Not necessarily true. I understand what you mean but there are other ways to identify and verify an account. In fact, I had an account with one other company where I forgot to update my email address and they were able to verify me.
I wonder if the new people will do anything about the "site is actively hostile to photosensitive people" thing. I used to use tumblr, and we reported, pretty much every year or so, the thing where login pages or "not found" pages always had full-page flashing or fast-moving animated GIFs, because that was a horrible source of seizure-inducing experiences, migraines, etcetera.
I always assumed it was a considered and intentional choice by the tumblr staff to actively drive those people away.
I also note: I didn't go there for porn, but I left over the porn ban, and will not even consider returning while the porn ban remains. I had >40k posts, I met the kid we ended up adopting there, and so on. I had a lot of engagement with the site, but while porn wasn't emotionally important to me, the side-effects of the porn ban made the site completely useless.
I was lucky to get out of Tumblr on the first part of it's decline. Very very sad to see one of the best blogging platforms getting shuffled from one team to another :(
I blogged on the Wordpress site for a time. They like to lock options down tight. A -little- less tight than Stumbleupon, but not much Keeps it simple? Yes, that and nothing more. As a blogger, there's not much room for innovation.
At one time Tumbler (tried it a bit very early on) -did- have that option going for it. But Tumbler's obviously been fading. If WordPress tries WordPress-like 'reforms', I see little hope for Tumbler.
how is nobody talking about the absolutely terrible decision to purchase or manage this acquisition by Marissa Meyer? How do you spend $1.1B on something in 2013 and then sell it 6 years later for $3M? I mean that's about as total of a loss as exists.
Tumblr was censored to drive traffic to Reddit and Twitter, which creates a more centralized crowd. The decision to censor Tumblr makes absolutely no business sense for tumblr, which means the main motivator is something else.
This move excites me a lot. Tumblr isn't really about "brands" (in spite of what Oath would've wanted you to believe)— it's a lot of things, but at the end of the day, at it's core, it's a blogging platform.
IMO it had a lot of potential in the late 2000s but the execution just wasn't there, and I have a few theories why that could've been:
- Cost of revenue. Tumblr was pretty media-heavy from the start (vs Twitter for example, which started as short snippets of text, reddit which didn't host its own images/video until much later, etc). The cost of this, per user, was probably huge. Moreover, they had to power things like custom themes, custom sub-domains, 7 different kinds of posts, etc. That doesn't sound cheap.
- Location. It matters a lot, and growing a company like this in NYC was probably harder, especially at the time, then it would've been in SF or the bay. Be this in terms of getting the right engineers, investors, managers, etc.
- Ambition. I've heard from a reliable source that David Karp, originally, simply didn't want Tumblr to grow huge and become this behemoth of a tech company. He kept it at about a dozen engineers for as long as he could, and even when the company started growing more, he doesn't seem to be an empire-building entrepreneur like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. Now that he's out of Tumblr, he's fallen completely off the radar. I doubt he will build anything else. He's got the money he needs, so it wouldn't surprise me if he just retires.
I think it had, at one point, the potential to compete with the likes of Instagram and VSCO for the younger creative demographic (Can't beat Tumblr's customizability, and some themes make great portfolios). Or with twitter as a place to post random thoughts and follow celebrities (Taylor Swift, afaik, still uses Tumblr. Tumblr invented reblogs before Titter invented retweets afaik). Or with Snapchat and the like for the younger demographic who likes privacy and anonymous features (it had an anonymous question/answer feature before tbh, a company since acquired by Facebook).
But it didn't happen.
At this point, I don't think it makes sense for them to even try to make it happen. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc. They're here to stay as the primary players in their respective markets. The space where I feel there's still room for Tumblr to shine is back in its core competency, which is the fully customizable "personal site".
The fact you can follow Tumblr sites and be followed is icing on top of the cake but not a core competency to be leveraged because the feed market is crowded with all the aforementioned players. The fact you can take any content, and publish it on the web in any format you want (thanks to how highly customizable Tumblr profiles are) is amazing and should be the primary focus.
Essentially, Tumblr cannot compete in feeds, but it can compete in profiles and use its feed as a killer added benefit.
Let's look at what Automattic has achieved with WordPress. It offers you a fully-customizable site, to post your content, and _a third_ of the top 10 million sites (by Alexa ranking) are using it [1]. What I want to see is WordPress building up Tumblr to be like this— an option for people looking to set up websites.
Square just bought Weebly for $365 million, and it accounts, at the moment, for 0.4% of the top 10 million CMSes [1]. The space for small-shop online commerce is evidently valuable.
Lets say WordPress pitches Tumblr as a competitor to Squarespace or Weebly in the e-commerce field. It's already-existing social features could boost the value of its commerce features considerably. Maybe as a competitor to Squarespace or Behance in the personal-portfolio field. Again, its already existing feed could have amazing added value. As a creative I'd consider it over Behance right away for exposure. If you were an artist, would you prefer a SoundCloud that also allows you to set up a personal music site, complete with custom url, online shop, cool looks, etc? Imagine a writing and discovery experience that is as good or better than Medium, but you can customize the front page of publication to not look anything like medium.
Long-term, and if they align the protocols, Tumblr could become a follow button for the web. But first it has to become a larger part of the web and this is where Automattic I think can really excel with Tumblr.
John is a pompous jerk who likes to misinterpret half-truths, scream persecution, and then block people when called out rather than admit fault. And if ever called on it he silently deletes his tweets instead of acknowledging his actions or faults.
source: he blocked me years ago for precisely this. also, coincidentally, when he was screaming persecution once prior.
Hmm, it's implied at least later in the Twitter thread that it's predatory pricing. John's friend Pieter Level's quotes [0] Wikipedia [1] as follows:
>"Under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, pricing below cost is prohibited where the seller has a dominant market position and the pricing will have an anti-competitive effect.[22][23]"
It's a sales person offering to answer questions and (maybe? it's a bit unclear what the scope of "our services" is here) offer onboarding advice/assistance. Considering that to be "predatory pricing" would ban the sales and technical support processes of virtually any company.
Well it's not my claim, but I think it must be what John means.
Otherwise, as you correctly point out, it's clearly just plain old competitive behavior.
Edit: thinking this through, the Automattic sales people aren't stupid, so they're not going to hand over a smoking gun by making an explicit offer that would be provable predatory pricing. But there's a hint there that might be the intention. In the original tweet, John has underlined in red the following phrase:
>To be clear, we don't charge anything for our services.
What is meant by "services"? I think Automattic would claim it's just the Special Projects services
On the other hand, it's maybe deliberately ambiguous: Possibly once contact is made more is on offer.
I guess they're doing this only for the traffic. Because I don't recall any interesting Tumblr to visit. Everything interesting can be found in other places, like Medium or their own hosted websites.
I was very impressed with the engagement and activity Tumblr has continued to have, and I hope that with this new ownership and investment the product will blossom.