I see this as great news; my first reaction to hearing it was excitement. A lot of comments here are talking about the porn but outside of that, tumblr has a community with a uniquely sardonic sense of humor and is a platform for a host of independent artists and creators, and I would be incredibly sad to see it die. IMO Automattic will make for decent stewards of the platform (hell, anybody would be better than Verizon + Yahoo) and I have cautious optimism for tumblr's future.
Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
131–140 of 474 posts
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That choice boggles the mind. Serving ads is hard when there's porn on the site.
Use a different domain then?
This does seem like a stupid simple solution. tumblr.com can continue being SFW, and then there'd be nsfwtumblr.com (or whatever) that contains "the good stuff". Retain account name uniqueness across both domains.
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#133As someone who used Tumblr more like Dribbble and not for 'adult' content, I think this is a great move. I like Automattic as a company and I trust Matt will find a way to make Tumblr relevant again for creators without having to resort to the LCTG - lowest common traffic generator.
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's your plan to wind down Tumblr?
We are planning to do the opposite: excited to invest into the platform. The web needs open and independent publishing and social media more than ever.
How can you claim to embrace "open and independent publishing" while doubling down on the world's most widely-mocked censorship initiative?
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a very loud, probably rather small subset of Tumblr users (or rather: former users) Well, according to this chart (which I have only cursorily vetted), it seems there are a lot of "former users": https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/af9rwu/oc_... It shows that as of Jan, 2019, there were about 50% as many users as when the ban was announced. That would suggest that there are as many "former users" as t…
The assumption that Tumblr's loss of users is entirely or even mostly due to suppressing adult content is probably unwarranted, but I'd be interested in data either way.
The chart shows that there was already a downward trend, but it really fell off a cliff after the announcement.
Also, for platforms with network effects, a drop-off (or even belief that there will be a drop-off) can do major damage to even unrelated communities on the platform. For example, Tumblr used to be a huge referrer for my startup, thanks to Tumblr's robust ADHD, dyslexia, and CFS communities who spread the word about our tools. We still get occasional traffic from posts, but I get the sense that those communities have been hollowed out by the perception that Tumblr is dead. I don't know if they've moved elsewhere (perhaps Twitter), but they sure aren't on Tumblr much anymore.
I certainly hope Automattic can revive Tumblr one way or another, but it seems like the smart play here would have been to announce that they'll be looking to find a way to restore the prior functionality, and then work out the details later. That way they can get a bump in traffic from the expectation that there will be a bigger community, which helps them regardless of the extent to which the ban is reversed.
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd imagine it'll be something along the lines of "of course we market to potential customers".
Hmm, it's implied at least later in the Twitter thread that it's predatory pricing. John's friend Pieter Level's quotes [0] Wikipedia [1] as follows: >"Under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, pricing below cost is prohibited where the seller has a dominant market position and the pricing will have an anti-competitive effect.[22][23]" [0] https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1146446632…
That's an insane statute to apply here.
It's a sales person offering to answer questions and (maybe? it's a bit unclear what the scope of "our services" is here) offer onboarding advice/assistance. Considering that to be "predatory pricing" would ban the sales and technical support processes of virtually any company.
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
That choice boggles the mind. If you're worried about cross-links between non-adult and adult content tarnishing the platform, add better features for user flagging. They (before the Yahoo and Verizon cluster&#-1s) were essentially sitting on a gold mine of training data, and ongoing training data generation, for an industry-leading porn detection engine. A subscription filtering product that would be worth $$$. Thro…
> That choice boggles the mind. Serving ads is hard when there's porn on the site.
If you've got porn on a domain, it doesn't matter if you show ads on porn or not, it doesn't matter if you require age verification, nothing you do will likely matter.
What if there was a way to "ban" something by changing it's domain? What if there were two web apps with a linked backend? Let's say:
tumblargh.com
tumblarghR.com
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#138Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm, it's implied at least later in the Twitter thread that it's predatory pricing. John's friend Pieter Level's quotes [0] Wikipedia [1] as follows: >"Under Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, pricing below cost is prohibited where the seller has a dominant market position and the pricing will have an anti-competitive effect.[22][23]" [0] https://twitter.com/levelsio/status/1146446632…
That's an insane statute to apply here. It's a sales person offering to answer questions and (maybe? it's a bit unclear what the scope of "our services" is here) offer onboarding advice/assistance. Considering that to be "predatory pricing" would ban the sales and technical support processes of virtually any company.
Well it's not my claim, but I think it must be what John means.
Otherwise, as you correctly point out, it's clearly just plain old competitive behavior.
Edit: thinking this through, the Automattic sales people aren't stupid, so they're not going to hand over a smoking gun by making an explicit offer that would be provable predatory pricing. But there's a hint there that might be the intention. In the original tweet, John has underlined in red the following phrase:
>To be clear, we don't charge anything for our services.
What is meant by "services"? I think Automattic would claim it's just the Special Projects services
On the other hand, it's maybe deliberately ambiguous: Possibly once contact is made more is on offer.
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Steve's take on Reddit these days almost seems like he's doubling down on the whole "free speech" thing for better or for worse. I personally left the site after eleven years. Steve actually permanently banned me after I had pointed out a few instances where racism was not only allowed to live, but seemingly encouraged.
I can think of at least one subreddit that often hits the top of r/all that will limit posts only to people who have sent a picture of their forearm to the mod to verify their race. Somehow that is allowed. Literally submitting a picture of your skin for the color to be judged. headdesk
Why not, forearms are still pretty identifiable, all the pictures of forearms, user names, and IP addresses will subject to administrative subpoena the next time something happens.
Or if someone feels like it.