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You Win or You Learn

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Re: You Win or You Learn

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which afaik has an expired certificate. Let's not act like anyone outside the hn and og reddit bubble uses it

It hardly matters that the cert is expired if you're not logging in. Contrary to popular belief, TLS is not beneficial for sites where you aren't sharing secret data.

It's beneficial for all the other sites if non-secret data is TLS-encrypted, though. If I want to ban secrets, and HTTPS is only used for secrets, I can just ban TLS; but if HTTPS is used for most of the web, I have to ban most of the web (and such a ban will never last long).

Additionally, metadata such as browser history can reasonably be considered a secret: TLS helps protect that somewhat.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#112
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't true at all, Blaze was a huge success, scrolling through Tumblr you see people with silly numbers of checks, lots of people pay to remove ads, it's just that that the successes aren't massively revenue generating in the way that ads are. Trying to monetize user generated content is hard because both the users and creators believe that it's their content (which it is that's how community works) and so locki…

From the CEO’s blog today: > You mention Blaze and Ad-free doing well, but their adoption is so small relative to the use of Tumblr their revenue couldn't support a fraction of the ~1,000 servers it takes to run Tumblr, much less any salaries.

I think we're saying the same thing, they're successful in the sense that Tumblr users like them but they're small potatoes. Tumblr users aren't necessarily allergic to monetization but the ones they've found don't pay the bills.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Have you been on Instagram lately?

My IG feed is 80% WeRateDogs, most of the rest is silly-positive stuff. I've not ever seen erotica on there, barely even seen any ribaldry. It has learned my tastes well.

I don't know how much variation there is in other people's feeds, of course, but that you think IG is a good example implies your feed is showing you very different things to mine.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#114

MindGeek should buy Tumblr and allow adult content again. Tumblr's success was that it was an adult space that wasn't strictly pornography. It was a "cool sex" to PornHub's "hot sex".

> Tumblr's success was that it was an adult space that wasn't strictly pornography.

This is a common talking point here, but it just isn't historically accurate in terms of absolute numbers.

Tumblr was most successful in 2011-2012. It started getting huge in 2010 in large part due to having built-in photo and video support, at a time when Twitter didn't have these, and Instagram and Pinterest were still both tiny. Tumblr also offered built-in reblog functionality before Twitter had built-in retweeting.

For a little while there, Tumblr was a mainstream social network -- certainly a bit edgier and more liberal than most competitors, but still mainstream enough that many major brands had a Tumblr presence right alongside their Facebook and Twitter icons. Adult content was definitely present, but it was a single-digit percentage of posts at the time of Tumblr's peak historical traffic levels.

A lot of those mainstream users started to decamp to Instagram and Pinterest after that point, depending on their personal use-case.

That adult content percentage definitely rose over time, but timing-wise that coincided with total traffic decreasing, not increasing. It also scared off the brands, whose advertising dollars were sorely needed to achieve sustainability for the business. So to me, attempting to attribute Tumblr's "success" to adult content just seems way off-base.

Source: I was personally responsible for a decent chunk of Tumblr's scalability and capacity planning for several years.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#115
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Tumblr allowing adult content would probably get it removed from app stores. Only a few major apps get away with it, and when they're gone, they're gone.

Tumblr did fine before app stores ever existed, and could do perfectly well without them now as well. Web is enough.

Before app stores existed, smartphones weren't used the way they are today. Consumer habits have shifted... you'd be missing out on a HUGE part of the market.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#116

It was like a somewhat more positive counterpart to 4chan, it was full of madness, toxicity and vice, and also a space for creativity like few others. It was also one of the walled gardens, even if it always felt more open than the rest, but the web continues to weaken as content creation and delivery continues to be consolidated in the exploitative platforms of Meta, TikTok, and now to a smaller degree, X, with thei…

[flagged]

> Tumblr literally made people addict to porn.

Are we allowed to blame the internet, or the transistor for such effects too?

Re: You Win or You Learn

#117
post #115
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tumblr did fine before app stores ever existed, and could do perfectly well without them now as well. Web is enough.

Before app stores existed, smartphones weren't used the way they are today. Consumer habits have shifted... you'd be missing out on a HUGE part of the market.

Missing out on a huge part of the market is comfortable territory for Tumblr

Re: You Win or You Learn

#119
post #115
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tumblr did fine before app stores ever existed, and could do perfectly well without them now as well. Web is enough.

Before app stores existed, smartphones weren't used the way they are today. Consumer habits have shifted... you'd be missing out on a HUGE part of the market.

That simply doesn't matter. Tumblr just needs to succeed in ANY slice of the market it can find. A small slice would do nicely.

The best bet would be the slice it originally appealed to, with its original kinds of content, in the original medium it was in.

Re: You Win or You Learn

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which afaik has an expired certificate. Let's not act like anyone outside the hn and og reddit bubble uses it

It hardly matters that the cert is expired if you're not logging in. Contrary to popular belief, TLS is not beneficial for sites where you aren't sharing secret data.

> Contrary to popular belief, TLS is not beneficial for sites where you aren't sharing secret data.

I wish this meme would die.

Integrity is still important for non-secret data.

Confidentiality is important for data which may be considered secret in some contexts but not others.

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