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Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

wsj.com

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Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#431

Post by coldtea »

evanelias wrote: post #310
coldtea wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Feel free to link to the "correct" ones...

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#432

Post by evanelias »

lugg wrote: post #427
evanelias wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not exactly. Tumblr has a pretty huge Hadoop fleet and decently large Kafka setup too. It's just a question of OLTP vs OLAP use-cases being powered by different tech stacks. My answer above was limited to the product backend, i.e. technologies used in serving user requests in real-time. And even then I missed a bunch of large technologies in use there, especially around search and algorithmic ranking.

That's kind of the point though. Everyone has a Hadoop/Kafka, but when it comes to actually getting things done, good ole MySQL to the rescue. I honestly don't see the draw for Kafka. And by all means I get it, I just don't buy it. Maybe I'm just holding it wrong or something.

It really depends on the task at hand. I'm one of the most vocally pro-MySQL commenters on HN, and have literally built my career around scaling and automating MySQL, but I still wouldn't recommend it for OLAP-heavy workloads. The query planner just isn't great at monstrous analytics queries, and ditto for the feature set (especially pre-8.0).

For high-volume OLTP though MySQL is an excellent choice.

Regarding Kafka: in many situations I agree. Personally I prefer Facebook's approach of just using the MySQL replication stream as the canonical sharded multi-region ordered event stream. But it depends a lot on the situation, i.e. a company's specific use-case, existing infrastructure and ecosystem in general.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#433

Post by sushid »

Asooka wrote: post #408
dspillett wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UK. Not so much so here, so it certainly isn't universal. Though we don't usually have the weather for it anyway!

UK is not Europe and shares a lot of values with puritanical USA. Culturally you're not really part of the mainland.

Sounds like a classic case of No True Scotsman to me.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#434

Post by nthot »

evanelias wrote: post #167
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.

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/

The fact that they are already planning on making changes seems to run counter to the idea that they would be taking a "Berkshire Hathaway" approach. In my understanding Warren Buffett's current philosophy is to buy companies that need his capital, potentially his name, but definitely not his intervention.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#435

Post by evanelias »

coldtea wrote: post #431
evanelias wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Feel free to link to the "correct" ones...

Those stats are not publicly available. In general, for any company, at best they may or may not include the stats in quarterly earnings statements if the company is publicly traded. Although Tumblr has been owned by public companies since 2013, its corporate owners have not made these stats publicly available.

Elsewhere in this subthread, I've linked to public info showing that in absolute content creation numbers, the impact of the adult content ban was far less than a majority of content, and also far smaller than the slow drop-off of users over the previous five years.

Judging by your use of quotes around "correct", it seems you've already made up your mind anyway and I'm wasting my time discussing this. If you want to trust clearly incorrect numbers in The Verge over the person who built the company's relational storage tier, I suppose that's your prerogative.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#436

Post by fortran77 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #354
photomatt wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 The same could be said of deciding such an absolutely massive migration is even beneficial/necessary in the first place, before a technical exploration! And yet apparently, that part has already been decided? I am, of course, completely ignorant of how WP and Tumblr's infrastructure works. I'm not saying the…

If "Wordpress" (which I reluctantly use for our corporate branding site and blog--very carefully managed and controlled) is a better architecture than what Tumblr is using now, what they have now must be truly awful! Wordpress really doesn't scale very well, and you can easily have massive security problems.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#437

Post by pawelk »

kill_nate_kill wrote: post #298
photomatt wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You should almost make it a documentary.

This is a fantastic idea. I imagine similar form to "Some Kind of Monster", the documentary about Metallica. It's mostly the band meeting, discussing ideas, playing some music, struggling with internal tensions and personal issues etc. I'm not even a huge fan of the band, but it was a very entertaining watch and I think it would be almost guaranteed that such a massive project will result in many interesting stories.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#439

Post by cf498 »

evanelias wrote: post #420
cf498 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of, thanks for sharing your experience and insight here. You do however see how that is a bit difficult to just accept without any backing up, considering a former engineer might naturally be a bit biased about the public perception of a former project dying? By no means a personal attack, just picture yourself in my shoes. I do understand however if there is just no such data available. Like everyone else here…

> a former engineer might naturally be a bit biased about the public perception of a former project dying? Personally I'm not too concerned about that. I have other things on my resume. I'm more concerned that people keep blindly parroting that Tumblr is/was primarily a "porn site", when the internal data absolutely did not bear that out at any point. > So if tumblr isnt dying I haven't said anything about whether or…

Awesome, thanks for clearing that up

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#440

Post by Izkata »

evanelias wrote: post #257
nesadi wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've observed most discussions about Tumblr outside of HN. Most discussion revolves around how banning adult content from Tumblr removed any reason to go to Tumblr for many people. These are your average kinksters, artists, creative types who have been forced off the platform because it no longer caters to their interests. Not sure what any of this has to do with HN.

This subthread is discussing a misconception prevalent among HN users. But this same misconception may also be shared by other groups; no one is saying it's exclusive to HN. I believe your anecdotal experience in this area is true and accurate. But at the same time, the raw stats just don't reflect it being universally accurate across all users. A similar phenomenon has occurred regarding people saying they're quitti…

You're talking about accounts with porn content. GP and others are talking about visitors who may not even have an account.
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