Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That choice boggles the mind. Serving ads is hard when there's porn on the site.
How about Imgur? And Reddit?
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Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
151–160 of 474 posts
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. >Mr. Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a Tumblr user and sees the site as complementary to WordPress.com. “It’s just fun,” he said of Tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.”
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…
Are you worried that there's not enough porn on the internet already?
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#153Facebook bought Instagram for $1B. About a year later, Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1B.
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#154Surprised by this news. Tumblr has lost a ton of momentum since its policy change, and the site itself doesn't have a very strong "brand" audience attached to it. Fun fact: I can't recall the last time I either opened a Tumblr link or saw one in the wild. But maybe that's just me.
Every time I go to visit Tumblr, it asks me to log in. If I can't lurk on a content site, I'm moving on.
Individual Tumblr blogs get to decide whether example.tumblr.com is "only visible to logged-in users." If they turn on that setting, the site 1. forces you to log in, and 2. renders the site inline as part of the Tumblr dashboard SPA. If you don't turn it on, though, your Tumblr blog is a public/static website indexable by Google.
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#155For me the most important aspect of this acquisition is that Automattic is a fully remote company. Tumblr's office space in New York City must be very expensive, I wonder if they're getting rid of it and transition everyone to remote.
Verizon moved Tumblr out of their longtime HQ last year. It was a beautiful space in Flatiron District that the company occupied for almost 8 years. I've heard the space is now a WeWork.
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#156It is worth noting that Tumblr was an indirect acquisition by Verizon when they bought Yahoo in 2017. It seems to have had stable unique views up until Aug-Sep 18 [1]. At some point it suffered from country-wide bans in places such as Indonesia. The country bans coupled with a ban from the iOS App store [2] caused direct downward pressure on viwership. This has led to a rapid drop in viewership in the months after [3…
Their adult content ban in December 2018 probably also accelerated that decline: https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/14/18266013/tumblr-porn-ban-...
I think the adult content ban was in response to being blocked in some countries and by iOS... they banned adult content so those bans would be reversed
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm curious why you would choose to maintain Verizon's policy changes that alienated the majority of the user-base.
Adult content is not our forte either, and it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety... it's a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there. I personally have very liberal views on these things, but supporting adult content as a business is very different.
be that as it may, the current automated flagging system is abhorrent and pretty much killed all confidence in the platform especially among artists. why would anyone take invest the time and effort to build a gallery & maintain a presence on tumblr when it feels like you're playing russian roulette with every (non-nsfw) image you upload? 4chan recently was split into separate domains for sfw/nsfw boards, maybe tumblr could go in a similar direction?
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#158Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
In theory, the Yahoo acquisition held a lot of potential for Verizon. In reality, Verizon operationally mismanaged many parts of the business and destroyed most of the value. Tumblr is one visible example of that. It's unfortunate but not uncommon. Once the deal closes, internal politics rather than common sense and innovation rules and a small handful of bad leaders or a small set of perverse incentives can sink the…
Yahoo still has some strong brand recognition in some sectors, and COULD make a massive comeback if Verizon made the right moves. Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News, Yahoo Fantasy, Yahoo Email/Messenger. Verizon should release a WhatsApp, FBMessenger, iMessage competitor and let you pick if you want it to be Verizon, Yahoo, or AIM themed. Nostalgia is all the rage. Being able to use AIM (like facebook chat at the bottom of a…
They shut down yahoo messenger a while back
Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic
#160So, the real question is: are the censorship policies going to be reversed? To be specific, is adult content going to be kosher on Tumblr again? Because if not, I'd have very little faith in the platform (and I do have an account there).
If you were to ask people in the street about Tumblr and what it was for, I would be surprised if you had many people say 'porn!'. They might not have heard of it or they might remember it from a decade ago or they might even think it was 'flickr'. It certainly is not up there with Twitter and Facebook as a full on household name.
The next 'tumblr' that comes along, i.e. when it is another thing that Automattic do, need not carry over any of the adult content connotations of the past. It can be fully repurposed with the SFW punters happy with whatever comes next. I doubt it will be mySpaced.