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Tumblr Is Tumbling (medium.com) 157

Alex Barredo, a technology writer, shares his observation on Tumblr's popularity over the past few years: Tumblr is the home of some of the most creative online personas, and now it is dying. Or so it seems. Founded on early 2007 by David Karp with a new formula for really simplified blogging, it quickly took off. With each passing quarter, most of their stats were crushing it. It was the new star of the New York tech scene. The East Coast had a good social platform after years of Californian monopoly (MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Twitter, etc), at last. In May of 2013, Yahoo snatched it for a cool $1.1 billion: $990 million plus liabilities. Less than a year after the deal was closed, Tumblr peaked in activity. By February of 2014, there were more than 106 million new posts each day on the platform. Today that figure has been slashed by two thirds to around 35 million. David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, said today he was leaving the company. Karp founded Tumblr close to 11 years ago with Marco Arment. He wrote: I beg you to understand that my decision comes after months of reflection on my personal ambitions, and at no cost to my hopefulness for Tumblr's future or the impact I know it can have. The internet is at a crossroads of which this team can play a fundamental role in shaping. You are in the driver seat, and I am so excited to see where you go!
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Tumblr Is Tumbling

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  • Stop using the words "killer" or "dying" when talking about companies or objects.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Yo bro, companies are people too! [wikipedia.org]

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        No they're not. People are idiots, lawyers even more so.

        You can pass a law that oxygen is pink with green dots, that won't make it real.

      • Yo bro, companies are people too! [wikipedia.org]

        As idiotic as it is...this is the world we live in.

      • by Hal_Porter ( 817932 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @04:25PM (#55632601)

        That's not what CU is about

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        Justice Kennedy's majority opinion found that the BCRA section 203 prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and unions violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech.[28] The majority wrote, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."[29]

        Justice Kennedy's opinion also noted that because the First Amendment does not distinguish between media and other corporations, the BCRA restrictions improperly allowed Congress to suppress political speech in newspapers, books, television, and blogs.[7] The Court overruled Austin, which had held that a state law that prohibited corporations from using treasury money to support or oppose candidates in elections did not violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court also overruled that portion of McConnell that upheld BCRA's restriction of corporate spending on "electioneering communications". The Court's ruling effectively freed corporations and unions to spend money both on "electioneering communications" and to directly advocate for the election or defeat of candidates (although not to contribute directly to candidates or political parties).

        The majority ruled that the Freedom of the Press clause of the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Corporations, as associations of individuals therefore, have free speech rights under the First Amendment. Because spending money is essential to disseminating speech, as established in Buckley v. Valeo, limiting a corporation's ability to spend money is unconstitutional because it limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues.

        I.e. the First Amendment gives individuals a right to speech. It also gives them a right to speak when organized into a corporation.

        If you look at the background SCOTUS decision you find

        Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (known as BCRA or McCain-Feingold Act) modified the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, 2 U.S.C. section 441b to prohibited corporations and unions from using their general treasury to fund "electioneering communications" (broadcast advertisements mentioning a candidate in any context) within 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election. During the 2004 presidential campaign, a conservative nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization, Citizens United, filed a complaint before the Federal Election Commission (FEC) charging that advertisements for Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, a docudrama critical of the Bush administration's response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and produced and marketed by a variety of corporate entities, constituted political advertising and thus could not be aired within the 30 days before a primary election or 60 days before a general election. The FEC dismissed the complaint after finding no evidence that broadcast advertisements featuring a candidate within the proscribed time limits had actually been made.[11] The FEC later dismissed a second complaint which argued that the movie itself constituted illegal corporate spending advocating the election or defeat of a candidate, which was illegal under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974. In dismissing that complaint, the FEC found that:

        The complainant alleged that the release and distribution of FAHRENHEIT 9/11 constituted an independent expenditure because the film expressly advocated the defeat of President Bush and that by being fully or partially responsible for the film's release, Michael Moore a

        • Hello there. I see you posted a big wall of text above.

          I'm not going to read it.

          kthxbye

        • Nice wallotext! Shills be shillin' =)

          • Read it moron. It explains quite well why Citizens United is not the joke so many make it out to be. That the ruling is sound jurisprudence defending the freedom of speech.

            Or you can just accuse someone who simply cited Wikipedia on the case and ruling of being a shill for simply stating the facts.
            • But muh "facts"!!!!1!1!!!

              How's that corporate bootleather taste?

            • It's defending free speech based on the principle that money is speech and corporations are no different than any other association of people. That's where the disagreement is; it's not unreasonable to contest that one or both of those are covered by free speech. In fact that's far more reasonable than the more recent opinions of the left, which think hate speech isn't covered by free speech.
              • A documentary is clearly speech, even if it cost money to produce.

                And before the CU decision you had the bizarre situation that a documentary produced by Michael Moore's Dog Eat Dog films, a corporation was speech but one by CU, another corporation was money.

                That makes no sense. And the SCOTUS ended up ruling that the government had no power to prevent either under campaign finance laws.

    • Especially don't claim anything is dying before Netcraft has confirmed it.

    • Wierd, because in this case it is neither of those; it is "tumbling".
  • by Kierthos ( 225954 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @02:43PM (#55631853) Homepage

    When did Tumblr ban porn?

    • Ban porn? I thought that was all Tumblr was.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Tumblr didn't ban porn .. it's a major porn site. What they did do recently was encourage their many porn posters to mark their accounts 'adult' so a visitor has to log into Tumblr for to view the porn.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Shortly after Yahoo took over, since then it has been increasingly user hostile. I run a NSFW art side blog and as of last week it's no longer visible unless you are logged into tumblr. By default search results remove NSFW blogs and advertising is disabled on NSFW blogs.

      Recently they instituted a change to the dashboard which has always been a chronological view to a "best stuff first" further burying creator content in favor for whatever is popular, this has seen several content creating blogs suffer.

      Many

    • by Nonesuch ( 90847 )

      When did Tumblr ban porn?

      Requiring a login and removing pages from search results is one step shy of shadowbanning.

      More recently, Tumblr has been abruptly terminating NSFW accounts, no notice, no explanation.

    • They didn't. That's what I still use it for.
  • by wjcofkc ( 964165 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @02:47PM (#55631901)
    The world would become a better place overnight. All that organized hatred... gone in a swarm of bees.
  • by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @02:47PM (#55631903)

    Like any social networking site, its popularity is very fragile and dependent on who its userbase it.

    Just like Friendster, and MySpace, at some point it will fall out of favor. It's kinda like nightclubs. If it becomes too easy to get into it and starts being populated by blue-hairs and corporate shills, all the cool kids will move on and it will cease being the cool place to hang out.

    Tumblr being bought by Yahoo was the first major step to that status.

    All these social networking sites want to reach a place in the online landscape where they are not a fad, and become an institution of the online world (like Wikipedia or Rotten Tomatoes). That has not happened yet.

    • by pz ( 113803 )

      Yes, you're right. Absolutely. Up until the last sentence, though. The now-exemplary social network is Facebook, and, like it or not, it is an institution. Don't believe me? It has a global Alexa rank of 3.

      Not 300, not 3000.

      3.

      That's about as institution-like as you can get. (2 and 1 are Youtube and Google, respectively). Wikipedia is 5. RT is a paltry 397.

      Tumblr, for comparison is 54 globally, 23 in the US. Those are also institution-level numbers. While yes, there is expected to be ebb-and-flow i

      • by SeaFox ( 739806 )

        Yes, you're right. Absolutely. Up until the last sentence, though. The now-exemplary social network is Facebook, and, like it or not, it is an institution. Don't believe me? It has a global Alexa rank of 3....That's about as institution-like as you can get. (2 and 1 are Youtube and Google, respectively). Wikipedia is 5. RT is a paltry 397.

        Tumblr, for comparison is 54 globally, 23 in the US. Those are also institution-level numbers. While yes, there is expected to be ebb-and-flow in usage and popularity of a site,

        Alexa popularity ranks are only snapshots of that specific time they are run. They will fluctuate or drop completely. What was MySpace's peak rating?

        Also, unlike a social networking site, reference sites have lasting value in their databases and archived articles. Social networking is created to be a communication platform and a way of keeping up-to-date with people. Like a news site that never gets new articles published, it soon becomes irrelevant except to historians (and since social networking is not a

    • Like any social networking site, its popularity is very fragile and dependent on who its userbase it.

      Just like Friendster, and MySpace, at some point it will fall out of favor.

      And what about Facebook? What's their "secret sauce"? I think it's the huge staff of psychologists who have turned it into a platform for manipulating people's minds...

      • by SeaFox ( 739806 )

        And what about Facebook? What's their "secret sauce"? I think it's the huge staff of psychologists who have turned it into a platform for manipulating people's minds...

        There is no "secret sauce". Facebook just got much, much, much bigger than the other networking sites. The higher it gets, the longer it will take to fall to Earth. We have already passed "Peak Facebook" in the U.S., its continued growth in user numbers is driven by emerging markets getting online. With the recent revelations about Russia and other governments using it to manipulate public opinion and influence politics, you will see fewer people use it as a news source, which will further weaken the reason

        • as big businesses mature there is natural tendency to gravitate towards large near-monopolies...

          You can see this is cars, aircraft, and lots of other stuff.. Social media, and the tech industry in general is inexorably falling into this pattern...
        • by colfer ( 619105 )

          FB was the probably the first site with a large audience that micro-target ads easy to buy even for very small buyers. It is relentless in pursuing advertising dollars rather than waiting for 1. Idea 2. ??? 3. Profit!

          FB even pays outside firms for info on its users in order to strengthen its ability to sell targeted advertising, according to the author of "World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech," a book by a well-known journalists published by Penguin, not some claptrap. It's not just sellin

    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Just like Friendster, and MySpace, at some point it will fall out of favor. It's kinda like nightclubs. If it becomes too easy to get into it and starts being populated by blue-hairs and corporate shills, all the cool kids will move on and it will cease being the cool place to hang out. (...) All these social networking sites want to reach a place in the online landscape where they are not a fad, and become an institution of the online world (...). That has not happened yet.

      Except the by far largest and still quickly growing social network is everything but cool. It's now the social network where you talk to your grandma and all the other not-so-hip people that you can't have hanging out at your cool place. I don't think you've understood how deeply entrenched Facebook has become as the least common denominator. And everything is being sucked down that gravity well, more and more doesn't have a web page or forum anymore - they have a Facebook group. If anything I think it's em

  • Translation (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Luthair ( 847766 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @02:53PM (#55631969)
    My contract period expired. Peace out b....es!
  • Here's actual footage of Mr. Karp saying goodbye.

    http://reactiongifs.me/wp-cont... [reactiongifs.me]

  • by Anonymous Coward
    Tumblr has made it hard to find porn with out logging in and changing your settings. This probably killed half of their traffic.
  • Tumblr is dying!

  • by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @03:20PM (#55632181) Journal

    First they don't bother to get rid of the rape videos or pictures, and there is no way direct way to notify them of such.

    Second, in an effort to make Tumblr more exclusive, they're forcing people to sign up to see most of the tumbles, specifically the ones where men and women are naked (gasp!).

    Third, they recently implemented a Facebook-like process for their app which works on trending or some such, and is killing traffic to people's blogs. According to posted shots of traffic logs, folks are seeing a huge drop in site visits as a direct result.

    So yeah, not surprising at all.

    • Second, in an effort to make Tumblr more exclusive, they're forcing people to sign up to see most of the ** tumbles**

      Third, they make up nonsensical names for forum posts....

    • To expand on your second point:

      1. 1. Most internet users are on mobile.
      2. 2. To view Tumblr beyond just a couple pages on mobile, you need to install the mobile app. Desktop Mode doesn't alleviate this.
      3. 3. To use the app, you need an account.

      "Fuck it" can happen between 2 and 3. I didn't do 2 for the longest time because I didn't want to install the app. When I finally did to verify my claims in this post, I needed to login or sign-up. I then uninstalled the app.

  • Found the problem right here:
    "In May of 2013, Yahoo snatched it for a cool $1.1 billion"

  • by Stan92057 ( 737634 ) on Monday November 27, 2017 @05:27PM (#55632965)
    Sorry tumblr is nothing more then a porn palace. they lump porn with mature content so trying to filter it is useless. plus the stupid members not tagging the porn/nudity at all its a 10000% unsafe site. Mind you i have nothing against porn but this Being a family PC Tumblr is blocked as their is no way to safely visit tumblr without porn and nudity,erotica not being seen. They do a poor job of keeping thir site clean. that's why i don't go their anymore.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    There are two major problems with Tumblr that have gone unaddressed for years now. Being a longtime user who sought out the website for its art community, I used to be an avid proponent of the site, but now I can barely be bothered to even check my activity page between uploads. The website and its community are a hot mess right now, and only one of those problems can actually be solved by the operators of Tumblr itself.

    The first of those problems, the solvable one, is that as a website it runs like dog shi

  • I always thought there was something fishy about Tumblr.

And on the seventh day, He exited from append mode.

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