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Tumblr the Day After

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Re: Tumblr the Day After

#31

Post by [deleted] »

excalibur wrote: post #22
TelmoMenezes wrote: post #19

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.

Matt said they're not going to, but I wouldn't count on that being the final word on the subject. He's supportive of adult content in principle, his reasons for maintaining the ban are business reasons. If the community persists in demanding that it be lifted, I wouldn't be surprised to see a business solution present itself in the future.

[deleted]

Re: Tumblr the Day After

#32

Post by Ididntdothis »

munchbunny wrote: post #17
pixelmonkey wrote: post #3

"Automattic is still a startup — I’m sure there are deep-pocketed private equity firms that could have outbid us, but the most likely outcome then would have been an “asset” getting chopped up and sold for parts. [...] Instead, Tumblr has a new chance to redefine itself in 2019 and beyond." I think Matt is right to point out the real story here. Automattic is simply the right home for Tumblr. Perhaps similarly to how…

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…

I hate the startup talk too. After a few years you are no startup anymore. Maybe you are a successful or a struggling business but not a startup.

In my company managers think „startup” means to work a lot of overtime and weekends and changing project direction every month.

Re: Tumblr the Day After

#33

Post by luckylion »

tangue wrote: post #25
SolaceQuantum wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

Twitter is the key. Twitter has failed to deliver a sane way to read threads. after all these years I still don't know how to read a conversation. And the whole platform is about conversation ! If Tumblr can get it it right with WP, I won't miss Twitter.

> And the whole platform is about conversation!

I always understood Twitter to be a personal text broadcasting service, i.e. single direction communication, not conversation.

Re: Tumblr the Day After

#34

Post by themagician »

scrollaway wrote: post #12
ses1984 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And/or maybe it was never worth over a billion in the first place.

just overvalue an asset by 99.8%. Do you? I have to believe you don't.

Today you do. You overvalue everything by 99% and hope that one thing your invested in pops. Because all the social properties are ad-based, what you really hope for is that your thing will be the thing, at least until you cash out.

The ad dollars generally just flow to whatever is the biggest, whatever is believed to deliver the highest ROI. It doesn't even have to be good, just large and slightly better than everything else.

Tumblr didn't become Facebook or Twitter. But it could have. If something ever manages to deliver ads that are slightly better than FB or Twitter than those disappear as well.

The bar is simultaneously really low and really high. Low because all you have to do is create a platform that delivers ads with an ROI that is slightly better than nothing, at scale. High because that's actually really hard to do. In some cases "better than nothing" is actually too high a bar. A lot of businesses—maybe even the majority—would be better off spending $0 on FB. Google is the only one who can consistently provide a positive ROI, reliably, for most of their customers.

For a while it looked like Tumblr could have done it. They had the users, the growth, the content and probably more data on what people ACTUALLY liked than anyone else has ever had.

Re: Tumblr the Day After

#35

Post by luckylion »

josephwegner wrote: post #24
scrollaway wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just overvalue an asset by 99.8%. Do you? I have to believe you don't.

Don't most VCs overvalue most startups by ~100%? This doesn't seem that crazy to me.

It wouldn't be 99.8%, it had a 99.8% loss, so it was almost a hundred times overvalued, if nothing else caused the drop (which isn't plausible, but still).

Re: Tumblr the Day After

#37

Post by stevenicr »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #19

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.

I agree with this. There are ways to handle the adult stuff from different angles. I am guessing some people are disagreeing with 'postponing it's demise' -since it's possible to keep chunks of it going with the niches that are there... but I agree with the demise statement. If a stadium use to have 100 million visitors a day and changes to only handle 20 million a day - it is no longer what it once was.

I imagine parts of tumble can be useful for micro-blogging onboarding - their signup process and get to posting process was always better than everyone else in my experience. This can be valuable to automattic / WP.

I could even imagine pushing little tumblr powered niche communities for places like Disney / that are walled from the rest of the networks..

However ejecting the adult content sharing was also a terrible thing not just for expression and sharing, but curating different flows of interests. Tumblr actually showed groups of posts that would curate individual's discovery of erotic and interesting portrayals of erotic imagery - to see these mini books curated by different people - for the people who saw them, it gave you a different perspective of things people might like - one that was not curated by the commercial porn industry, one that did not a/b test for most shocking to get attention / clicks.

Taking those options away is more than a loss of millions of posts per day - it's a loss for humanity in seeing and considering alternative views of beauty.

On top of the, conversations that could be had and knowledge shared around different sexual subjects that are impossible via fbk and the like.

Removing the adult access is almost like buying a couple chains of worldwide bookstores and removing access to all the romance and erotica stories - so it's easier to be a hosting company... however this is leaving a huge hole in global learning and sharing - and it's leaving those folks who may have benefited from different ways of learning and sharing - it's leaving them to the commercial wolves who are willing to fight the censors and other issues that add to the expense of hosting adult.

Which leaves us with commercial producers and the race to the bottom / make a buck any way with a/b filtered click bait stuff that is taking over. It's a loss for humanity truly.

Re: Tumblr the Day After

#40

Post by abfan1127 »

munchbunny wrote: post #17
pixelmonkey wrote: post #3

"Automattic is still a startup — I’m sure there are deep-pocketed private equity firms that could have outbid us, but the most likely outcome then would have been an “asset” getting chopped up and sold for parts. [...] Instead, Tumblr has a new chance to redefine itself in 2019 and beyond." I think Matt is right to point out the real story here. Automattic is simply the right home for Tumblr. Perhaps similarly to how…

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…

I think its a Growth-Mindset company rather than Dividend-Focused mindset... I agree that its not a startup any more.
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