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You Win or You Learn

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Re: You Win or You Learn

#161

Post by n8cpdx »

evanelias wrote: post #157
n8cpdx wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might be forgetting that Tumblr had a completely fine status quo, including showing me very much adult content on my iPhone, until Verizon bought them. Blaming the App Store was always an excuse. Tumblr just didn’t want to put the effort in to keep CSAM off their site. https://www.pcmag.com/news/tumblr-to-ban-pornography-startin... Some would say it is disappointing that Apple draws the line at child sexu…

What you've said above is completely incorrect, and as a former Tumblr employee I find it deeply offensive. Why confidently state these things when you seriously have no idea whatsoever what actually happened here? GP's statements were much closer to the situation in reality.

> Last month, Tumblr said its iOS app was pulled from the Apple Store over child pornography found on the platform. According to a Twitter user who claimed to have found the illegal content, Tumblr had initially failed to take down the images, despite repeated complaints about the problem. (As of Monday, the Tumblr app is still unavailable on Apple's App Store.)

I think you can also look at the various discussions of this issue online. The user perception was that it was inordinately difficult to report abusive content.

The second comment on this thread reports that even the moderation that was taken was ineffective. https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/a2r4h4/whats_...

I also recall an instance finding problematic content and now knowing how to report it. I think it didn’t occur to me think “I think this person might be underage, better hit the share button”. TikTok for example makes it incredibly easy to report offensive, unsafe, or illegal content.

Whether or not Tumblr management _intended_ to have very poor controls against CSAM doesn’t change the fact that they did in practice. And when push came to shove, instead of protecting user expression on their platform, they banned a whole category of content rather than building the tools and policies needed to make it work.

Worst case, they could have, instead of deleting all adult content, removed the toggle for iOS users and made them go to the browser for filtered content.

Even if you hate Apple for censoring their platform, it was Tumblr’s choice to apply that policy to Android and web users.

This response and earlier comments also fail to address the fact that the iOS app had a toggle to block NSFW content. It was allowed in 2017, and it was allowed in 2022. So I’m not sure why they had to purge non-CSAM content and remove the toggle in 2018. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/11/tumblr-sensitive-content-t...

Is there insider info that challenges any of that?

Re: You Win or You Learn

#162

Post by OhioMan2943 »

armchairhacker wrote: post #139
phpisthebest wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who would have ever though giving way your product for free would not be a good business model... odd.... It is not "social media" that is the problem is the Ad Supported business model in general, everything ad supported is having problems right now, look at "news", blog sites, etc If it is ad support is has issue turning a profit. That is because ad supported is a terrible business model, however investors keep try…

The problem with social media is that it has to get a large userbase, and it's much, much harder to convince someone to pay than it is to use your free service. Especially if your service is social media. Twitter seems to be trying to get people to pay, and it isn't going well for them. No, in today's world in order to make a "profitable" social media, you have to get people to pay through other means. Like news.ycom…

I don't think 'having a large userbase' is a success or a necessity, you can have a better experience with 10-30 people who provide better discussion.

I think the issue is that we're worse than ever at finding good spaces for discussion.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#163

Post by rrdharan »

Kye wrote: post #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 aroun…

He's also commenting on other threads in this post.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#164

Post by beckingz »

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 has better checkmarks.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#165

Post by meepmorp »

OhioMan2943 wrote: post #162
armchairhacker wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with social media is that it has to get a large userbase, and it's much, much harder to convince someone to pay than it is to use your free service. Especially if your service is social media. Twitter seems to be trying to get people to pay, and it isn't going well for them. No, in today's world in order to make a "profitable" social media, you have to get people to pay through other means. Like news.ycom…

I don't think 'having a large userbase' is a success or a necessity, you can have a better experience with 10-30 people who provide better discussion. I think the issue is that we're worse than ever at finding good spaces for discussion.

You're right, of course, but 10-30 people isn't much of a business opportunity unless they're stupendously rich.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#166

Post by eieio »

sp332 wrote: post #77
DanielleMolloy wrote: post #69

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…

https://cohost.org/ ? Edit for a bit of info: There is no discovery mechanism built-in and no "algorithm". The way to find more posts on a topic is to use hashtags. Everything is reverse-chronological. If someone wants their post to have broader engagement, they will post with "#The Cohost Global Feed" or some broad topic. You can go browse if you want to, but the site isn't going to push anything on you (besides fol…

fwiw I got onto cohost a few months ago and have really enjoyed it.

Because it's a smaller community with no "algorithm" intentional discovery actually happens. I use hashtags to find stuff, and other people have found my stuff via hashtags! I only started sharing online this year and so that second bit is huge - it's night and day between twitter and cohost[1].

The site actively tries to avoid the status games that other social networks play. You can't see follower counts or like counts (including your own) and instead get notifications like "several folks liked this" (with a list of who did). There's no easy way to answer "how big is this person's following" when looking at their profile.

I think this adds up to a site that feels more like a community. Comments are typically either nice/encouraging or interesting and folks comment a lot. It's easy to find cool posts. Not having metrics is freeing. Many of the folks that post are there to share the cool things that they do.

It's not a replacement for twitter, but it's easily the site that I'm the most excited to share stuff on - especially early WIP stuff (I shared something fun last night!)

[1]I shared an early version of Flappy Dird[2] on cohost and got some real engagement and it felt great. Flappy Dird ended up doing pretty well on HN; I doubt I would have polished it as much without the early cohost support.

[2] https://eieio.games/nonsense/game-11-flappy-bird-finder/

Re: You Win or You Learn

#167

Post by etchalon »

I wonder what amount of a service like Tumblr's server expenses are strictly related to storing and serving historical content, and what value it really brings to the business.

What would a service like Tumblr look like if things just got deleted after 90 days, or a year? What would your server costs look like then? How much traffic do ancient posts actually garner, in aggregate? Could you monetize permanence (only pro users data is kept for longer than a year)?

Re: You Win or You Learn

#168

Post by jack1243star »

Fabricio20 wrote: post #55
spondylosaurus wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tumblr could have done the same. Not without being removed from the iOS app store. Apple played their hand.

Yes they could have, just like other platforms do like Twitter or Discord, by simply hiding the NSFW content on iOS.

Those two platforms do nothing with NSFW content. They're just too popular for Apple to screw with.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#169

Post by throw932490 »

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…

There is very simple monetization strategy: ads, cut bloat, move content moderation staff to India!

Tumblr has an army of content creator that work for free. It is a site that host text and images. How they even spend 30 million per year? Maybe on organizing "stuff convention", SF real estate and so on... Cut the bloat!

Re: You Win or You Learn

#170

Post by evanelias »

n8cpdx wrote: post #161
evanelias wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you've said above is completely incorrect, and as a former Tumblr employee I find it deeply offensive. Why confidently state these things when you seriously have no idea whatsoever what actually happened here? GP's statements were much closer to the situation in reality.

> Last month, Tumblr said its iOS app was pulled from the Apple Store over child pornography found on the platform. According to a Twitter user who claimed to have found the illegal content, Tumblr had initially failed to take down the images, despite repeated complaints about the problem. (As of Monday, the Tumblr app is still unavailable on Apple's App Store.) I think you can also look at the various discussions of…

You're making a ton of incorrect assumptions about what approaches Tumblr tried, what solutions Apple rejected as insufficient, what resourcing decisions were made by Tumblr vs parent company, and so many other critical details here.

It's pretty messed up for you to say "Tumblr just didn’t want to put the effort" when you have no idea who or what was actually responsible for any of the things you're describing. I don't feel you are addressing this topic in good faith, so I'm not going to continue discussing this with you.

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