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.
We tried to warn you, yet you banned the porn anyways.
I audibly snorted when OnlyFans was going on about this the first time around
When onlyfans said they were going to stop allowing porn. I was like wait, wut? You’re going to shut down you’re own product?
Verizon banned porn. The new owners have turned more of a blind eye to it. I know, hard to keep up with all the different owners and their individual policies.
Its different corporate masters passing Tumblr around. At least try to see how different owners have different policies. I think we all knew that Verizon was utter crap as an owner and did untold damage to the brand. But I actually was rooting for Tumblr to make a comeback this time.
Alas, Automattic couldn’t save Tumblr after all the damage to its reputation.
They didnt really try to.
A lot of the new money making features were half assed, and got abandoned pretty quickly after release. Lots of users who wanted to support them have complained that they seem to not want the money.
They’ve also added features no one wants. For example, the recent “Tumblr Live” nonsense, which is basically Twitch meets Shorts. It’s at the top of your feed and you can’t permanently turn it off - you can turn it off for what was a week, then a month. They wasted money and time to get that feature going, one that you know cost a lot because hosting video isn’t cheap, when NO ONE goes to tumblr to look at random cam girls.
They honestly didn’t have a choice at the time. They were either going to have to completely moderate content, or get sued to bankruptcy for allowing CSAM all over their platform.
The double-edged sword of user-generated content is that a bunch of them are creeps and not participating to be creative.
Speaking of bans, does anyone know what happens with community ban, is that forever or do they give you a cooloff time or what? I still get notifs, just can’t respond to anything
Edit: i wonder if I’m on ice cuz of my nesting test thread
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.
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. 😑
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’m still tiny to figure out why they thought Tumblr Live was a good idea. It seems like a waste of money to chase after…I’m not even sure who, Twitch? TikTok?
Does that function even work? Like, do real Tumblr users even use it? Everything I see is just a reminder to snooze it again, or people who have accidentally accessed it and it crashes. Definitely a feature absolutely no one asked for.
I’d love to see a defederated version of Tumblr. It would solve so many problems over there, honestly.
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
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.
