Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

> it's a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there

That's exactly what Tumblr's ex-users don't want, however.

Those Tumblr users want a place to freely exchange what they like, whether that's cute cats or hardcore porn.

That's what made Tumblr so beautiful. I'm sad to see it (apparently permanently) go.

Then again something nice is coming out of it as well: The main competitor is now the non commercial, federated, ActivityPub based Fediverse, frequently referred to as Mastodon.

Funnily enough the Linux desktop appears to be slowly but surely catching on.

You'd have to explain more, given that he listed Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Greece, and others have listed more below. All of them true Scotsman where topless is totally a fair thing to see on any beach. Hell, I had a French ex who took her top off to tan when visiting the States and had to be told by friends that it wasn't an acceptable thing to do.

>How would you feel if random people on HN repeatedly insisted your former employer was primarily a porn site, despite these people having no real evidence, and despite this going against years of your personal experience scaling and capacity-planning the site?

I'd have no problem with people insisting it being "primarily a porn site", any more that if they insisted it was an "anime site", "fan fiction site" etc. The point is whether they're right or wrong, not if I don't like the type. I'd have no particular urge to disprove claims that it's a specific type of content that it's most successful.

You also repeat "having no real evidence", while the Verge article has 2 sources, and you gave none.

>Do you actually believe these numbers from SimilarWeb and Statista claiming Tumblr has more MAUs than Twitter and Snapchat combined, even after banning adult content (which you claim was a majority of Tumblr's usage)? Does that even remotely make any sense at all?

I believe Statista and SimilarWeb have no particular reason to lie about Tumblr. They just post their stats. Are they off in absolute numbers? That's neither here nor there. Even if e.g. Statista double counts, it double counts before AND after the ban, so whether the absolute numbers are accurate is irrelevant. The huge relative drop is still there.

>You're outright accusing me of lying here.

No, I'm simply accusing you of being biased and giving no numbers.

In any case, I can't see how anyone would insist Tumblr did OK after the ban, when it's said to be sold for 3mm (or close).

Heck, that's so low, that if I sold some family property, I could have bought it...

> The point is whether they're right or wrong, not if I don't like the type.

Precisely. The point is saying Tumblr is/was "primarily a porn site" is simply factually incorrect. At no point have I expressed whether or not I "like the type".

> I believe Statista and SimilarWeb have no particular reason to lie about Tumblr. They just post their stats.

And what's the source of their stats?

> Are they off in absolute numbers? That's neither here nor there.

So it's "neither here nor there" if their stats are blatantly inaccurate, but you trust the relative proportions of their stats anyway because they "have no particular reason to lie". And yet I do have some reason to lie about this? I no longer work for Tumblr, have worked on other things several orders of magnitude larger than Tumblr, haven't been an active Tumblr user in years, and had no involvement whatsoever with the implementation of Tumblr's adult content ban. Why on earth would I spend my free time making supposedly false claims about the relative percentage of adult content on Tumblr? Why not have a good-faith discussion where you assume positive intent of the person you are conversing with?

> I'm simply accusing you of being biased and giving no numbers.

I've repeatedly linked to the only publicly available numbers (posts per day stats publicly provided by Tumblr itself). What is your expectation here? It seems like you expect me to somehow retroactively capture internal confidential statistics from a former employer and then post them publicly, in order to satisfy the whims of some random pseudonymous person on HackerNews?

> I can't see how anyone would insist Tumblr did OK after the ban

At no point have I made any statement on whether Tumblr "did OK" or not after the ban. Rather, what I have stated is that the impact of the ban is a drop in the bucket relative to the much larger decline in usage over the preceding 5 years. And the reason it's a drop in the bucket is because the amount of adult content/usage on Tumblr was much smaller than you and others claim, which was precisely what tptacek theorized and I confirmed.

In any case -- you certainly aren't going to somehow change my mind regarding my personal first-hand experiences, and it seems unlikely you will change your position either, so for the third time let's please disengage and stop discussing this!