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You Win or You Learn

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Re: You Win or You Learn

#41

Post by citruscomputing »

swagempire wrote: post #32
MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #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 h…

Didn't Tumblr do a whole "alienate your user base" thing like Reddit did recently? They got rid of all the racey hot content and basically made it super boring no? This always seems like a really bad idea.

They did, but that was a while ago. Things are still pretty bad -- if your blog gets flagged for racy content, you lose the ability to have a custom avatar, for example. (Even more, and you get banned.) They've also had quite transphobic moderation policies (really strange considering their userbase!) -- normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now, which'll get your account flagged or banned. They've been making the app actively worse, redesigned the website to look like twitter, and attempted to cram "Tumblr live" down everyone's throats (only having a "hide for one week" button). Generally doing things nobody asked for, nobody wants, and continuing to break existing functionality while not listening to their users. This is an own-goal.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#42

Post by thejohnconway »

amadeuspagel wrote: post #13

Remember when people talked about Tumblr replacing Twitter as Elon Musk took over? Remember their pathetic bluecheck stunt? What's wrong with this organization? How did they fail to capitalize on such a massive opportunity?

Tumblr fundamentally doesn't work the way Twitter does (imagine if Twitter was all screenshot retweet chains!), and so it's a poor replacement. I find it hard to use – I get lost in the reblogs – and I've used it for well over a decade now.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#44

Post by echelon »

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #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 h…

The lesson:

"Don't remove porn when the userbase is left-leaning and embraces it."

Reddit and Twitter do it the right way: hiding adult-rated content behind the curtains.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#46

Post by echelon »

hypertexthero wrote: post #25

Usability-wise, the thing that keeps me from using any Fb things, Threads.net included, is they break the bloody Back button!

Change of subject - any thoughts on the difference between user-friendly URLs?

Root paths route to usernames:

- https://twitter.com/username

- https://github.com/username

- https://www.instagram.com/username

Sigil-scoped paths for usernames (these also use www-prefix):

- https://www.threads.net/@username

- https://www.youtube.com/@username

Path-scoped usernames:

- https://www.reddit.com/user/username

- https://www.reddit.com/u/username (redirect)

- https://bsky.app/profile/username.bsky.social

There's obviously an engineering cost to having usernames at the root, but does that make sharing easier?

Which would you use if you were starting a new app?

Is the first option strictly better for growth? Are the technical caveats not worth it?

Re: You Win or You Learn

#47

Post by CamperBob2 »

Hamuko wrote: post #39
CamperBob2 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but thanks to a devil's brew of knee-jerk moral panic and regulatory capture, nobody else can afford to enter your market. You're stuck with the incumbents. Sorry, but you can't say you weren't warned. We're seeing the same thing happen with AI now.

Bluesky is an incumbent? Because that's where I am mostly now.

Enjoy it while it lasts.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#48

Post by I_Am_Nous »

thejohnconway wrote: post #27
I_Am_Nous wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Their entire argument appears to be "We aren't making more money than all-time peak revenue and usage stats are lower than peak too so we aren't wasting money on it any longer."

Maybe if they had realistic goals that weren't just "try to make more money than ever before" they could have kept going at least somewhat...

Re: You Win or You Learn

#50

Post by wmf »

araes wrote: post #22
I_Am_Nous wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

Automattic has never been a get-rich-quick scheme.
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