Tumblr Is Reportedly On Life Support As Its Latest Owner Reassigns Staff (arstechnica.com) 54
Tumblr may be nearing its end after its management sent memos to staff with the Lord Tennyson quote about having "loved and lost." Ars Technica reports: Internet statesman and Waxy.org proprietor Andy Baio posted what is "apparently an internal Automattic memo making the rounds on Tumblr" to Threads. The memo, written to employees at WordPress.com parent company Automattic, which bought Tumblr from Verizon's media arm in 2019, is titled or subtitled "You win or you learn." The posted memo states that a majority of the 139 employees working on product and marketing at Tumblr (in a team apparently named "Bumblr") will "switch to other divisions." Those working in "Happiness" (Automattic's customer support and service division) and "T&S" (trust and safety) would remain.
"We are at the point where after 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have revenue and usage above its previous peaks," the posted memo reads. After quotes and anecdotes about love, loss, mountain climbing, and learning on the journey, the memo notes that nobody will be let go and that team members can make a ranked list of their top three preferred assignments elsewhere inside Automattic.
"We are at the point where after 600+ person-years of effort put into Tumblr since the acquisition in 2019, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have revenue and usage above its previous peaks," the posted memo reads. After quotes and anecdotes about love, loss, mountain climbing, and learning on the journey, the memo notes that nobody will be let go and that team members can make a ranked list of their top three preferred assignments elsewhere inside Automattic.
Pr0n (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What does this site even do? (Score:5, Informative)
You might just not fall into its demography...
It is (was) a microblogging platform that was initially used for a variety of purposes, but quickly became a way to share your favorite erotica (and porn).
On the bright side, most of its users were girls that found a platform to share erotica outside of the porn industry stereotypes.
On the dark side, it had an underbelly of dangerous content like pro-ana and self-harm blogs.
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The YouTube creator has since disowned this video, most likely as a result of woke capture, but this remains the best overall commentary on what Tumblr was (and did) at its peak:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-e4PgiVfM [youtube.com]
Now just imagine an entire internet generation growing up steeped in that stuff.
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The YouTube creator has since disowned this video, most likely as a result of woke capture, but this remains the best overall commentary on what Tumblr was (and did) at its peak:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m-e4PgiVfM [youtube.com]
Now just imagine an entire internet generation growing up steeped in that stuff.
The "male" voice in sounds an awful lot like Devin Stone aka LegalEagle
Re: What does this site even do? (Score:2)
So this is where this insane hysteria of toxic-victimhood has been fostered and grown.
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"woke capture" haha you culture warriors are just desperate to stir shit up.
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I missed all that, I just saw the nudie pix. Lots and lots of collections by people showing off their favorite turn ons.
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Maybe you asked a younger demographic?
As it died a while back with the porn ban and now is just doing the death flopping of a fish pulled out of water..
So younger people have likely never stumbled to any content on it.
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"We'll get more and better advertisers once they see we've lost 90% of our user base."
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It's one thing to get rid of some of the fringe stuff
But allow porn and the fringe elements will come out of the woodwork to post their stuff too. And who gets to decide what is mainstream and what is fringe?
Object lesson: You open a forum up for adult themed stuff and you have just invited in the weird kink stuff.
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Object lesson: You open a forum up for adult themed stuff and you have just invited in the weird kink stuff.
One man's weird kinky is another's vanilla.
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We’re not going to bother consenting adults who like to dress up in leather boy scout uniforms and smash each other in the head with ball-peen hammers while they take turns blowing their cat. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that. It’s a victimless hobby. And think of how good the cat must feel!
--George Carlin
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If your vanilla is pissing on each other than I'd hate to see your chocolate.
I don't think that's the problem (Score:2)
I know isps will tell you that it's because electricity costs went up and all that's true mode
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>The main issue is the cost of bandwidth seems to have shot up massively over the last several years
That is weird.
As a small provider of VPS:es, remote backup and related services we have found the prices we pay stay similar until the high inflation in the last two years, and even then the rises have been less than inflation.
It is true that the prices have not kept going down since 2020 like they went down in the 2010s, but in real inflation adjusted terms we are way below 2010 prices and a bit below 202
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So my experience is very different from what you describe.
That's because the parent poster is just making shit up while you are drawing upon real-world experience.
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Did you really just censor the word "pussy"? (Score:2)
Don't do that. It's obnoxious. Either use grown-up words like a grown-up or find different words.
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That's the main part. Tumblr had three primary demographics:
1. Regular old porn.
2. Furries and similarly minded people, with porn.
3. Teenagers playing at having mental illnesses. They'd compete to see who could fake the most illnesses, anything ranging from boring autism to multiple personalities, which they termed 'head mates'. This was also where the personal pronouns fad first hit the big time.
Even if they hadn't dumped the porn, what advertisers would want to market to these broke weirdos? If they clear
The porn is back (Score:3)
IMO the real detractor from tumblr is all of the half baked, half done features. For example, some porn is blocked but most gets through. Lately I have noticed the date/time of posts in my queue are wrong, mostly for later evening posts.
One time, as a joke, I thought about creating youtube videos for all of the bugs and half done stuff. I had list of 30 (no joke there) items to start with too. But I was too lazy ;)
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They were convinced that they could run just as well with the 3% who used it to post things about knitting and short stories.
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Great, another social media page opening towards the perpetually offended and self-identified persecuted.
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And nothing of value is lost (Score:3)
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it is alive and kicking.
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Why just Twitter? Is there ANY social media site that brings more value to society than causes damage?
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I learned a bit of plumbing from YouTube. It saved me $300.
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Fair enough. We can save the house repair tutorials while burning down the rest.
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Second this for youtube. It's got tons of good stuff. Learned how to grout tiles, lay bricks, improved my woodworking and other workshop skills. There's also amazing documentaries like TechnologyConnections's 3 hour documentary on the final evolution of vinyl records for storing video and also the video on the best toaster ever made.
There's a lot of good stuff. Also a ton of shit, but that's life.
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Most of them, if you use them right. Like any other tool, they have great potential for improvement, as well as great potential for damage.
Which one is it depends on who uses them.
If someone would ask me "Which Social Media platform helped you?", my honest answer would be "All of them". Except for the ones I never used, of course, such as X.
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So, less crap in search results soon. (Score:4, Insightful)
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pinterest is what the "-site:" search string parameter was invented for.
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Unfortunately yes. And even more unfortunately search engines still offer results from there.
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Hey, Pinterest is actually pretty good once you use userscripts (Greesemonkey, tampermonkey, etc.) to remove the need to login, allow image saving, add a button to directly open the full-resolution image....
OK, OK, you pretty much need to rewrite the entire site, but there's some great data berried under all the BS.
Surprised /s (Score:3)
Dump the p0rn and everyone bails. Now they are rearranging the deck chairs. "Hey, I ordered my whiskey neat. What is this ice doing in my drink?"
Tumblr was never more than a symptom (Score:2)
Tumblr was operant conditioning on minors and the result was a lot of teens without much sense of accomplishment began competing with each other for attention. What they posted for attention they then competed to be zealous about (and treat as cornerstones of their identity) so it had some kind of bizarre No True Scotsman scolding intolerant tolerance obsessed identity politics dynamic.
Whenever I think about what'd happen if Facebook/Twitter/YouTube collapsed I'm torn between delight and horror. Delight bec