Tumblr the Day After

I enjoy tumblr for posting gifs made with code: https://dontcode.tumblr.com/

For me it's just a nice/easy place to post stuff & get quick feedback/appreciation. It's also nice to scroll through nice/funny/cute things & sometimes get info on issues that the tumblr community cares about.

For me tumblr does best in that you have chains of responses (reblogs) in images/gifs and text form, that then are reposted on one's own blog for their own followers to experience broadly in a singular dashboard whose ordering isn't really manipulated (like twitter and instagram are, to my extreme vexation).

Also, because tumblr makes it easy to create side-blogs, you can follow a favorite person for their specific stuff. For example, if my artist friend has an "inspiration" blog I can follow that blog instead of their "personal/vent" blog. Similarly if I'm looking for some kind of tea-specific blog I can follow a stranger's side blog without needing to also be exposed to the stranger ranting about a political opinion I am uncomfortable with.

Furthermore, it's one of the large social media sites for which there is a significant and semi-permanent resource and groupings for a variety of LGBTQ/diversity/political/fandom interests in a way that is more flexible than a subreddit or an interest forum. You can follow the individual blogs that you're interested in instead of needing to follow a whole community. So if you don't want to be exposed to some aspect of a community it's relatively trivial to just not follow the people involved.

Twitter has a lot of this, but the lack of easy threading posts and out-of-order feed really ruin it for me. Several of my favorite artists left tumblr for twitter and I've had very little success following them from there.

100% agree that of the list of realistic outcomes, Tumblr going to Automattic is one of the best possible outcomes.

That said, and I know this is said a lot, but I really wish our industry would stop trying to label everything a "startup". Automattic was founded in 2005 and has 1000 employees. It's not a startup, it's a mature medium size tech company. Its problems are not startup problems, they're mature medium size tech company problems. Automattic isn't even a clear underdog considering the dominance of WordPress.

To be clear, that's not a pejorative: Automattic kicked ass, and Automattic deserves its current success. But the phrasing is a sticking point for me in how people talk about tech companies because it ends up feeding into how we perceive working at these companies. When I was job searching, I saw job postings regularly where "startup" or "like a startup" are used to invoke a cultural image for companies that are already post-growth-stage.

It's a shame they won't revert the idiotic decision to ban adult content. The sense of freedom of expression and unrestrained creativity gave Tumblr its edge. Without it, it's just another boring blog engine, and this is just a matter of postponing its demise.