Live data from Hacker News

You Win or You Learn

threads.net

121–130 of 220 posts

Re: You Win or You Learn

#121

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 that because a lot of the people creating and posting that Content were kids…

Re: You Win or You Learn

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Sadly any capitalistic company fails for the same exact reasons. They can't continue making more and more money every quarter, so they call it a failure and give up. To these company's, having a stable business is worse than having a failed business. Because a least a failed business can be sold off for parts.

Revenue is not profit. They're losing money. Their bank balance is decreasing.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bee…

> normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now FWIW, the algorithms that big tech companies use are often trained to recognize women’s underwear. So non-sexual photos of trans men wearing women’s underwear are often flagged, even when similar photos of women wearing boxers are not. I’m not saying it’s right, just giving the actual reason this happens. (Albeit I don’t have Tumblr-specific knowledge.)

How sensitive/stupid are these? Can the behavior be exploited to force innocent images get flagged as explicit? Asking for a friend… also would make an excellent shirt design if properly tweaked

Re: You Win or You Learn

#124

Is there any alternative for having a gallery of text&photo posts without forced login and exploitative social media distractions? (except for self-hosting) When I looked for this 11 years ago, tumblr was the only platform ticking these boxes. I just wanted to share a link to photos of what we are up to with family and friends without asking them to register at another platform, and only tumblr allowed that and did n…

[dead]

Re: You Win or You Learn

#125
From Mr. Automattic himself: https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/733544011556618240/theres-o...

Key part:

>> "I'm advocating for this change because I think it has a good chance at success. I don't do anything hoping to fail. There are lots of examples of products with hundreds of millions more MAUs and smaller teams than Tumblr currently has, and there are amazing examples like OpenAI and Telegram running circles around much bigger players with small teams. That's what we hope to replicate."

So it sounds like he hasn't given up on Tumblr.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#126
post #44

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.

The lesson is that user generated content shouldn't be turned into an algorithmic amusement park for advertisers and data brokers.

Tumblr wasn't making money with or without porn. It was just shifting between owners who thought they'd be better at squeezing money out of it.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#127

I think Tumblr is going to end up in business textbooks as a classic example of corporations seizing a community and strangling the life out of it

It's a case study footnote, a citation that proves that the social media economy could only bear 2-3 commercially successful participants. Everything else is just prospectors digging for oil and never striking it.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bee…

> normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now FWIW, the algorithms that big tech companies use are often trained to recognize women’s underwear. So non-sexual photos of trans men wearing women’s underwear are often flagged, even when similar photos of women wearing boxers are not. I’m not saying it’s right, just giving the actual reason this happens. (Albeit I don’t have Tumblr-specific knowledge.)

thats fucking hilarious.

it surprises me how instagram and twitter can get away with it but tumblr cant

Re: You Win or You Learn

#130
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, Facebook and Instagram finally pulled out of the EU?

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.

Moral panic and regulatory capture? You must be talking about the Congressional hearings about Tiktok in the US. They haven't needed to do that in the EU, but then again they don't have a Facebook to protect.
Post reply on HN