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Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

wsj.com

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Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#301

Post by erikpukinskis »

opportune wrote: post #14

Automattic will probably be much more effective at handling Tumblr since they have experience with content platforms. Whereas for Verizon, Tumblr was way, way outside their core competency. It was always a shame at how Verizon seemed to mismanage Tumblr so it's exciting that Tumblr may become relevant again!

Yeah, Automattic probably got a steal. I doubt they would've been able to afford Tumblr in its heyday, or pay the price Yahoo paid.

Wordpress doesn't seem to ever have been able to push into the "social" discovery space. I bet Automattic folks have a bunch of half-baked ideas that didn't make sense for Wordpress but would be great directions for Tumblr. Seems like they were able to "buy low" so-to-speak and get access to a whole landscape they not only competed with but couldn't have afforded.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#302

Post by PhasmaFelis »

bkberry352 wrote: post #49
afturner wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This paints a pretty clear picture: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=tumblr&geo=US

Does it? This seems to indicate that the site has been declining since 2013 and that the policy was more of a "final straw" type factor

It had been slowly declining for some time, sure. Then it suddenly dropped by well over 50% in a month and stayed there. That seems clear enough.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#303

Post by PhasmaFelis »

ravenstine wrote: post #25
skilled wrote: post #4

Surprised 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.

Their brand wasn't particularly strong in the first place. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for years it was widely known as a home to porn and people blogging about genders. I never knew anyone personally who hosted anything on Tumblr. Maybe it could be turned around, but it's pretty old-school at this point and seems hardly better to me than MySpace.

It was huge for LGBTQ people. There was nothing else like it, and now there's just nothing.

But hey, I guess they were all just "blogging about genders."

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#304

Post by jjeaff »

mevile wrote: post #120
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…

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

That doesn't seem to stop Twitter.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#305

Post by donohoe »

photomatt wrote: post #11

I'm super excited to have the Tumblr team and product join the Automattic family. We've been evolving Automattic to be more of a Berkshire Hathaway-inspired model and businesses with a lot of autonomy, and this continues that trend. I was very impressed with the engagement and activity Tumblr has continued to have, and I hope that with this new ownership and investment the product will blossom.

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#306

Post by NikkiA »

carlinmack wrote: post #228
aussieguy1234 wrote: post #215

It's looks like Tumblrs strict new moderation policies aren't going to be reversed. I've long been a Tumblr user and because of these policies I created Libr to replace Tumblr https://app.librapp.com The front end progressive web app is open source https://github.com/cipher-code/libr It'll be interesting to see if Tumblrs code gets open sourced. I used to run the biggest WordPress deployment in the world outside of W…

Hi just to let you know your acronym for the LGBT+ community (LGBTQIKAP+) is unecessarily long and it comes off like you're trying too hard. I'm pretty into tumblr identities and queer politics and I can't think of any identity which starts with a K. Queer is just as good as the common LGBT+ but some people still associate it with the slur and don't feel comfortable with identifying with it. The plus really is the um…

The K is likely 'Kinky'

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#307

Post by ridaj »

djsumdog wrote: post #234
curryst wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? There are an awful lot of platforms that support the kind of content Tumblr supports now. How is this meaningfully different from a WordPress account, or a user subreddit, or a Medium blog, or even Facebook? How is Tumblr going to provide a platform that is substantially different from those? There are more open platforms. There are more popular platforms. There are more independent platforms. How is the new…

The future needs to be distributed. Less Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter and more ActivityPub/Mastodon/Pleroma/Pixefed .. when people get use to federated networks, they'll understand how they work. They'll understand how it's like hosting your own game server, and everyone can do it, and you can ban servers you don't like without having those servers really go away to anyone but you. The future is not centralized. The futur…

I want to believe that the future is decentralized but I'm convinced of the opposite when it comes to online media, primarily because spam, abuse and content moderation are expensive functions to perform in which there are strong scale effects, and they are critical not just to ad-based monetization but perhaps also to broad societal acceptance of technology.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#309

Post by samstave »

djsumdog wrote: post #213
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…

Well remember what actually happened. Apple removed their app! That's a bigger problem in general (I think at some point, legislators will need to force Apple to allow 3rd party installs without jailbreaking a phone). Tumblr had issues with jailbait and childporn. Even with a lot of moderation and policing, it was difficult to keep under control. As an interesting consequence, people who use scripts to rip entire blo…

> Tumblr had issues with jailbait and childporn.

There should just be legislation that all childporn posters and viewers just get immediately and automatically reported to the FBI....

Oh wait, the FBI protects pedos and lets them get murder-suicided in federal prison if they have too much compromat on wealthy pedos.

I forgot.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#310

Post by evanelias »

coldtea wrote: post #289
evanelias wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (20…

> Well, "most users" implies a majority, which is simply not the case here, full stop. Well, 30% of the traffic leaving within the first couple of months of the ban, seems rather significant to me: "The blogging platform’s traffic has dropped by 30 percent since the December ban on all adult content (...) In December, Tumblr’s global traffic clocked in at 521 million, but it dwindled to a mere 370 million in February…

> it dwindled to a mere 370 million in February

You are linking to incorrect stats. These numbers claim Tumblr has more MAUs than Twitter and Snapchat combined.

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