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You Win or You Learn

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Re: You Win or You Learn

#22

It’s not clear to me what this means. Freezing feature development? Rolling the backend into the rest of Automattic? Or the end of Tumblr?

Sounds like they are moving it from an actively developed project to one where they just babysit the existing users knowing they aren't making infinite money off them like they hoped. No new features, new features are for closers.

And move to the next project where we hope to make infinite money with no work.

Crypto had a great exemplary quote a while ago from poop face bros: "Obviously the crypto market did not live up to its lofty ambitions, so we're leaving."

Re: You Win or You Learn

#27

It’s not clear to me what this means. Freezing feature development? Rolling the backend into the rest of Automattic? Or the end of Tumblr?

Sounds like they are moving it from an actively developed project to one where they just babysit the existing users knowing they aren't making infinite money off them like they hoped. No new features, new features are for closers.

The only new feature I wanted for Tumblr was ActivityPub, that was nixed a while ago. Bad show.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#28
I'm surprised that memo leaked. Automattic is very open with employees and trusts them not to share internal information. While I worked there (2013-2018) I don't remember any news leaking.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#29
From a live-stream from the Tumblr staff convention this year, their CEO:

> Yeah, so right now, we're burning. Which means spending more than we make. About 30 million per year more than we make.

> So, that's a lot. We can't do that forever and so that's why we're really trying to figure out things that y'all would value. Whether that's merch or upgrades or badges or gifts or Blaze or other things. Every little bit helps, so please if you really enjoy Tumblr and want it to stay a thriving service buy things, and ask your friends to buy things.

Tumblr’s monetization strategy since the Automattic acquisition has been “throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.” Which is kind of your only option when the Tumblr user-base is actively hostile towards monetization attempts. Tumblr tried a “Tumblr Post Plus” Patreon-like subscription thing, and the creator that they enrolled in the test got so much hate they cancelled it before it fully launched. I could list the monetization strategies they’ve tried but there are too many. Merch, tipping, promoting your own posts, cosmetic check marks after your username, crabs, promoting other people’s posts, lore behind the merch store, a “Luffy” tab on the top of the page (in between “Following” and “For You”) (I think was a Netflix promo). At one point they were running ads for Tumblr on Tumblr. I should make a post describing them all.

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