12 mo. ago • 98%

Tumblr is reportedly on life support as its latest owner reassigns staff

arstechnica.com Tumblr is reportedly on life support as its latest owner reassigns staff

"600+ person-years of effort" have not stopped the site from losing $30M a year.

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.

66 comments

We tried to warn you, yet you banned the porn anyways.

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- I audibly snorted when OnlyFans was going on about this the first time around
  
  111
  
  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?
  
  88
- Yeah, this was predicted by everyone, long in advance. The surprising thing here is how long they've managed to cling to life. I expected them to be deceased by now. I didn't think they'd last another three years, let alone five.
  
  49
- 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.
  
  33
  
  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.
  
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- 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.
  
  7
- 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
  
  0
  
  "Community ban" as in you're banned from a community? Unless the mods set a specific duration, it's perpetual. If you think you are banned from a community check the mod log or ask the moderators.
  
  1
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.

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- Permanently Deleted
  
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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.

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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. 😑

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- Honestly if they'd just pulled a yearly donation drive like Ao3 they woulda done a lot better than all that fucking around
  
  15
- 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
  
  13
- 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?
  
  2
  
  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.
  
  1
I'd love to see a defederated version of Tumblr. It would solve so many problems over there, honestly.

50
- 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.
  
  31
- It would solve so many problems over there, honestly.
  
  Which ones?
  
  12
  
  Needs more porn
  
  38
  
  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
  
  5
- How about
  
  People just start hosting their own blogs again?
  
  1
  
  But doesn't that make it harder to get discovered? Im not into blogs, so I know nothing about tumblr or self hosted blogs.
  
  4
I really hope this isn't a sign of things to come with other Automattic companies. I'd hate to see Pocket Casts go away.

22
- Isn't Pocket Casts open source?
  
  4
  
  I hadn't heard about it but yeah, the iOS and Android apps are open source.
  
  6
- Oh :( I’ll just quitely make an export of my subs though
  
  2
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.

21
- 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.
  
  1
That's sad. I wish Tumblr had done better than Twitter.

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- It still kinda is.
  
  4
They had a path to profitability, but using the bible is more important to investors

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- Uh.. what?
  
  6
  
  Tumblr died because they banned porn, which is usually because of religion.
  
  8
  
  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.
  
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I like Tumblr, I hope it sticks around.

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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!

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Permanently Deleted

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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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- Permanently Deleted
  
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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...
  
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Tumblr aren't being laid off, they're just switching to other teams within Automattic.

1
Elon will make twitter run on electricity just like his cars

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