351–360 of 474 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety... I completely understand that “Adult Content” can cause a ton of headaches for a business but Tumblr’s current definition of “Adult Content” is very broad and I hope when the transaction is complete you’ll at least be open to reviewing the scope of the definition. Right now it includes many things that aren’t adult a…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
According to this article [1], you plan to move Tumblr's backend onto WordPress. Considering that Tumblr's infra stores over 1 trillion distinct product objects, this would be one of the most technically ambitious migrations in history. Can you share any thoughts of how it will be approached? Will you be pruning/purging old content or inactive users? [1] https://poststatus.com/automattic-has-purchased-tumblr/
That's an excellent question! I don't want to be so presumptuous as to define an exact approach before the technical exploration has started, besides saying it'll be done incrementally and in an easily revertable way to be invisible to users, just like the big datacenter migration Automattic just completed a few weeks ago. At the point when we start this the Tumblr team will have been part of Automattic for the bette…
I don't want to be so presumptuous as to define
an exact approach before the technical exploration
has started
I am, of course, completely ignorant of how WP and Tumblr's infrastructure works. I'm not saying the migration would be a bad idea, technically or financially. Or good. Just honestly curious.
I promise we'll write about it afterward for
anyone who is curious.
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.
Could you give us more information about this, since Pornhub once said they wanted to acquire Tumblr.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, I get that you want the world to function in a slightly different way, and you don't want people to associate advertised product to content around it; I'm fine with that. However, the world around us functions in a way where people subconsciously associate the product and content. This is, in fact, a billion dollar opportunity -- ads on porn sites are so abundant and so cheap, first person who will help sell mo…
It's not that I want the world to function in that way, it's that sex is such a fundamental part of our biological nature that I believe it supersedes any human abstractions we place over our animal nature; to the extent where, the unworkable symbiosis you posited, of porn associated with the advertising of well known brands, is wanting the world to work in a different way than it actually does. More succinctly, just…
I mean current moves are more along the lines of dropping topless women from tabloids/Playboy ending nudity, Britain trying to age-limit porn, etc.
Also probably comes down to the basic technical difficulty of targeting ads on websites often browsed in private mode. Which will probably keep being the case for a lot of people, for practical reasons, regardless of how normalized porn might be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The dream of decentralized everything sounds wonderful, but there's an implicit assumption that most folks involved are good actors.
It quickly becomes untenable when corporate-backed or state-backed bad actors are introduced.
Here's a very simple thought exercise for anybody who disagrees. Imagine a modest social media team of perhaps 10 paid employees. That's 24,000 people-hours' worth of content generation per year... and it is perhaps multiplied by a factor of ten if they're sophisticated enough to put some work into tooling to automate their work. Russia alone reportedly had hundreds of people doing this sort of work, and surely they're not alone.
Now imagine 10,000 of those teams around the world. That's 240,000,000 people-hours of span and/or bad-faith social media posting. And that's probably an extremely conservative estimate.
How would a decentralized social network possibly combat this?
It's a life-or-death struggle even for a company with deep pockets (and huge cubical farms full of human content moderators) like Facebook to combat this sort of thing.
If one of the decentralized solutions ever reaches any sort of critical mass, it will have to confront this in a hurry, and it will not be able to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing I’ve noticed with the Tumblr migration, is that I’ve switched to hard core porn. With Tumblr I had my lists of soft things where there was a lot left to imagine. Some of them are still online, proof they were supersoft. But I had to surf away and I can’t find mild ones. All because some überentity wants to sanitize and cleanse the world. And drove all the softporn to Instagram, where the everyday girl poses…
This happens with other things as well. One of the problems with kicking $bad_thought people off the mainstream platforms like Twitter is all the $bad_thought people get isolated, enter an echo chamber, and radicalize.
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.
Why didn't Pornhub acquire Tumblr? Could you give us more information about this, since Pornhub once said they wanted to acquire Tumblr.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes! I’d pay more for real world business documentaries than anything on netflix.
Please actually do this. Find a way to get Verizon to sign off on this, and then get in touch with an established documentary maker. Pair them with an engineer and follow the story of the migration efforts. It will take time, and it'll certainly have a narrative. Nothing like this has been done before. I struggle with making what I do relatable to people, but having a technical or semi-technical documentary following…
In Automattic, we basically evolved to remove all that :) There would be basically zoom calls and slack discussions. The most ambitious project I worked on in Automattic were just me, looking at the code and trying to understand why something is happening. Or looking up Stripe documentation.
We get to sit in front of our laptops in nice places though :)