It’s not quite the end of Tumblr, but when management is supposedly sending memos with the Lord Tennyson quote about having “loved and lost,” it doesn’t look like there’s much of a future.
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.
I’ll be honest I thought all the tumblr screencaps on here were 5+ years old until this moment when I learned Tumblr is even still a thing at all.
To be fair they probably are 5+ years old
Well, they banned all the porn and destroyed their platform.
It was an intentional sabotage intended to destroy the company, yes? Nobody’s stupid enough to not realise what would happen.
As someone who still uses Tumblr daily, I like how they’ve neglected they keep pissing around with the site itself which probably drives down engagement, or people purchasing things like the damn crabs or even the ad free premium. That layout they did to make it have the ugly sidebar was a terrible decision and I’m surprised they listened enough to roll it back. At one point I thought about supporting it with the premium but then they did that layout change, and briefly got rid of avatars on the dashboard… people like Tumblr for what it is. They don’t want it to look like Xitter or New Reddit. 😑
Honestly if they’d just pulled a yearly donation drive like Ao3 they woulda done a lot better than all that fucking around
No, no you don’t understand, every social media has to be the exact same thing with a slightly different colored branding, consolidated in the ownership of 3 gigacompanies. Also, every social media should also have the same content, with screenshots and videos from the others.
I can’t wait to be able to upload my shorts to linkedin, post jobs on instagram, and send my friend money on twitter!
/s
I’d love to see a defederated version of Tumblr. It would solve so many problems over there, honestly.
Well it was going to get ActivityPub integration, so something was happening on that front.
Of course, if they don’t want it they could make it open source and let people start their own instances but that’s not going to happen while there’s data to mine.
It would solve so many problems over there, honestly.
Which ones?
Needs more porn
It’s rare that this is the solution to a problem not originating from my pants but…
Alot, in my opinion. I think defederation and community management could address Tumblr’s unwanted censorship that seems to go after trans people aggressively but ignore literally dangerous porn bots. They could build it without the shitty tik-tok-esque service Tumblr staff are trying to integrate in to please investors who know nothing about the site. Folks wouldn’t have the constant fear that the site will shut down every year because trying to make money off of Tumblr is like throwing money into a woodchipper.
Most of Tumblr’s problems are self-inflicted by management, and people who are actually passionate about the site could make Tumblr amazing
How about
People just start hosting their own blogs again?
But doesn’t that make it harder to get discovered? Im not into blogs, so I know nothing about tumblr or self hosted blogs.
Back in the Old Days of the internet we used stuff like message boards and “webrings” which was a bunch of sites linking to each other (if you like my stuff, check out my friends!), everything was word-of-mouth. It intersected pretty strongly with real world nerd shit, connecting at conventions or colleges. I don’t think the normie internet could exist like that, it was just hobbyists and hikikomori types.
Federation in it’s current state won’t solve that problem either.
That’s sad. I wish Tumblr had done better than Twitter.
It still kinda is.
I tried to be a tumblr user to learn what it’s all about. I never got the feeling that engagement was authentic, it always felt like it was interacting with bots or posting into a black hole.
Somehow the Tumblr app on my phone needed my password again to login so I just deleted the app instead.
The app is kind of bad. I respond to something someone reblogged and get comments I can’t actually view on the original blog post. It happens to me all the time. Plus the porn bots. Always the porn bots.
They had a path to profitability, but using the bible is more important to investors
Uh… what?
Tumblr died because they banned porn, which is usually because of religion.
In this case it was because the app store wouldn’t allow them to be on it with such access to porn
Apple did not remove them for porn, it removed them for CSAM content. It was their decision to nuke all porn instead of just the illegal stuff.
The App Developer’s Bible. A 6000 page screed written by techbros and venture capitalists about how to turn an app in to a billion dollar IP. With such helpful rules as, “Current users are old users, and old users are lost users.” Or, “uniformity of design does not equal uniformity of experience.” And of course, “looking different is the death of your app. Steal relentlessly.”
Don’t worry about that other Bible. That’s for poor people.
I like Tumblr, I hope it sticks around.
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It used to be 90% porn and the rest was people competing to see who had the most liberal opinion or oppressed identity.
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They’re like fancy clowns who work in a circus and are scared of big falls.
But enough about the social media company…
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.”
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.
The phenomenon of microblogging, or “Tumblelogs,” low-commitment personal blogs that contained snippets of text, images, audio, or other ephemera, were shaped into a product that launched in early 2007.
CEO Matt Mullenweg at the time called Tumblr “one of the web’s most iconic brands,” and said he intended to maintain the adult content ban and hoped the site would complement Automattic’s other products, like WooCommerce, Jetpack, Longreads, and others.
Edward Snowden’s leak of highly classified documents in 2013 spurred government surveillance higher-ups to create an “IC on the Record” tumblog, a very odd fit that somehow continues to this day.
The original article contains 857 words, the summary contains 198 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Tumblr aren’t being laid off, they’re just switching to other teams within Automattic.
Elon will make twitter run on electricity just like his cars
