Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

wsj.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 474 posts

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#201

Post by bashinator »

dsabanin wrote: post #152
ethbro wrote: post #55

Earlier 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…

Are you worried that there's not enough porn on the internet already?

Tumblr had a wealth of self-produced and curated adult content for and by gender and sexual minorities, with meaningful discussion. No, I don't think the internet has enough of that.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#204

Post by jazzyjackson »

tptacek wrote: post #126
gnicholas wrote: post #111

Earlier 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.

People who had nudes on their tumblr weren't on tumblr just for nudes. It was just great to have a place you could stash everything you liked, kinks included.

So, network effects work both ways, people leave because their kink got banned and people who followed that person now have one less reason to log on.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#205

Post by lowdose »

Deimorz wrote: post #188
gnicholas wrote: post #111

Earlier 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…

That chart is based on Google Trends, which is a terrible way to measure social network activity/popularity.

A lot of people don't use bookmarks and even when they know very well it is facebook.com they still hit search "facebook" on Google.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#206

Post by mbreese »

coldtea wrote: post #195
mevile wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That choice boggles the mind. Serving ads is hard when there's porn on the site.

That boggles the mind as well. The purpose of an ad is to be seen. Whether it's seen next to porn should be irrelevant. I guess, because prudery.

A great deal of advertising revolves around "brand awareness". You may not be selling a particular product to the consumer, but keeping your brand in the mind of the consumer. Understandably so, not all advertisers want their brand associated with adult content.

Where an ad is seen can be just as (if not more) important to the advertiser as the ad itself. So, if your site serves up adult content -- you can guarantee that companies with large ad budgets won't be buying ad space.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#207

Post by evanelias »

coldtea wrote: post #200
evanelias wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is spot-on. HN has generally massively over-estimated the amount of porn on Tumblr, in terms of percentage of total content. I say this as a primary source with first-hand factual knowledge.

It doesn't have to be a large "percentage of total content". It just has to be the content that matters to most users...

Well, "most users" implies a majority, which is simply not the case here, full stop. Far from it, especially if you define a user as a person who has a Tumblr account and posts content on the site.

If you consider a "user" to include non-monetizeable lurkers who were just there to view adult content, then saying "most users" is definitely still wrong, but perhaps slightly less so.

Tumblr's peak was many years ago (2013 iirc), and the very slow drop-off over time is far more significant than the recent adult content ban. If you choose not to believe me, you can go to Internet Archive / Wayback Machine and view post-per-day stats on https://www.tumblr.com/about going back a decade and see for yourself.

I'm not going to reply to this further. I know the stats, I've seen the internal stats over many years, and this is a pointless thing to argue.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#208

Post by irq11 »

coldtea wrote: post #195
mevile wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That choice boggles the mind. Serving ads is hard when there's porn on the site.

That boggles the mind as well. The purpose of an ad is to be seen. Whether it's seen next to porn should be irrelevant. I guess, because prudery.

Big brands (i.e. the only companies with budgets that matter) are violently opposed to being associated with anything that might degrade their brand. It isn’t surprising, and it has nothing to do with morals or prudishness.

They are equally put off by pirated content, for example.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#209

Post by Kye »

coldtea wrote: post #195
mevile wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That choice boggles the mind. Serving ads is hard when there's porn on the site.

That boggles the mind as well. The purpose of an ad is to be seen. Whether it's seen next to porn should be irrelevant. I guess, because prudery.

Big brands with the big ad budgets tend to be run by or depend on sales to socially conservative people.

See this line from the FAQ on Automattic's ad service:

>> "The ads tend to be broad national campaigns, rather than targeted local or topical campaigns. We have found that the broad campaigns pay better. That said, visitors from countries outside the US and Europe will often see targeted local ads."

https://wordads.co/faq/

Companies like that have to think about sales everywhere, not just in places with progressive views on sex.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#210

Post by vassilyk »

This is such a good news for tumblr. It's sad that key internet services like del.icio.us, tumblr, and I'm sure others got destroyed be Yahoo! But, it's good to see that some managed to stay alive and might have another life after having been Yahoo!'d
Post reply on HN