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Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

wsj.com

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Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#191

Post by nullc »

CydeWeys wrote: post #132
IshKebab wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Use a different domain then?

This does seem like a stupid simple solution. tumblr.com can continue being SFW, and then there'd be nsfwtumblr.com (or whatever) that contains "the good stuff". Retain account name uniqueness across both domains.

My very limited experience with tumblr (pre-rule change) is that it was essentially impossible to use without being frequently exposed to sexually explicit photographs. ... in contrast to reddit, which is full of outright porn but there I seldom see anything more risque than a bikini shot unless I navigate to a relevant subreddit.

Maybe the critical difference is that if your account would have anything remotely adult at all, including text, or would repost anything from account that was flagged adult then your account would need to be flagged adult. And as a result a lot of accounts were adult flagged and a lot of users felt they had to log in and enable view-adult in order to not get left out. And then even if you have no particular interest in browsing the explicit content on tumblr you can't have many contacts before you start getting occasional reposts of it.

Regardless, being able to have a site which users can fully engage with without a steady stream of surprise crotch shots that they aren't interested in seems like a pretty reasonable goal. Banning the content outright seems like a really blunt way to get there, but maybe that was less damaging to the monetization strategy than making a lot of images click to load?

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#193

Post by evanelias »

joshmn wrote: post #178
evanelias wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to this article [1], you plan to move Tumblr's backend onto WordPress. Considering that Tumblr's infra stores over 1 trillion distinct product objects, this would be one of the most technically ambitious migrations in history. Can you share any thoughts of how it will be approached? Will you be pruning/purging old content or inactive users? [1] https://poststatus.com/automattic-has-purchased-tumblr/

I'm curious: What approach, if any, would you take? I'm sure you have an interesting prospective based on your experience working at MySQL-friendly shops, in addition to being an engineer at Tumblr once upon a time.

Thank you for asking, but I probably shouldn't get into that :) I'm inherently conflicted / biased due to designing a solid chunk of Tumblr's backend, and also previously worked for another Automattic competitor (Six Apart, the defunct company behind Movable Type).

Edit to avoid anyone misconstruing, I'm not trying to imply one thing or another, just that I can't approach this impartially. And in any case, I wish everyone well on both sides of this acquisition. I'm just genuinely curious how they plan to proceed from a technical standpoint, as it's a really interesting challenge.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#194

Post by rchaud »

opencl wrote: post #46
dmix wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it just me or does Tumblr feel really heavy weight and bloated when you open even small blog posts the size of a tweet? They had the opportunity to be the light weight blogging option. But its various design decisions seem strange to me as an outsider. Maybe it needs to revisit its past minimalism? ala old Twitter.

Well they decided to allow users to use arbitrary HTML themes for their blogs so there's not a whole lot they can do about that. The default theme isn't too terrible but a lot of the user themes are. The worst is people using some old theme that embeds a script hosted on a site that no longer exists and the whole page load hangs until the request times out.

nah, even the default theme is very heavy and laggy...that's on the developers, not the users. Tumblr also uploads every GIF as an actual GIF, and doesn't convert them to webm or something that would reduce it to a fraction of the size. Lots of sites slow to a crawl because of this.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#195

Post by coldtea »

mevile wrote: post #120
ethbro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That choice boggles the mind. If you're worried about cross-links between non-adult and adult content tarnishing the platform, add better features for user flagging. They (before the Yahoo and Verizon cluster&#-1s) were essentially sitting on a gold mine of training data, and ongoing training data generation, for an industry-leading porn detection engine. A subscription filtering product that would be worth $$$. Thro…

> That choice boggles the mind. Serving ads is hard when there's porn on the site.

That boggles the mind as well. The purpose of an ad is to be seen. Whether it's seen next to porn should be irrelevant.

I guess, because prudery.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#196

Post by thiagomgd »

jdcro wrote: post #177
ethbro wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That choice boggles the mind. If you're worried about cross-links between non-adult and adult content tarnishing the platform, add better features for user flagging. They (before the Yahoo and Verizon cluster&#-1s) were essentially sitting on a gold mine of training data, and ongoing training data generation, for an industry-leading porn detection engine. A subscription filtering product that would be worth $$$. Thro…

What qualifies as "better"? Twitter has pretty great user flagging, but I still get uncensored porn from people who are not followed by anyone I know in my 'Your Highlights' email, and I have safe settings enabled. I'd say even one exposure to that is enough to put off users. Or the parents of users.

Twitter is terrible for flagging NSFW content. Either everything you post is NSFW, not nothing you post is NSFW. You can't flag a single post as NSFW

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#197

Post by coldtea »

tptacek wrote: post #86
xwdv wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically an exercise in blowing several million dollars.

It's funny the stuff HN fixates on. If all you read is this comment thread, you might actually believe that non-porn Tumblr really is just "an exercise in blowing several million dollars", rather than a concern for a very loud, probably rather small subset of Tumblr users (or rather: former users). What seems at least as likely as "adult content is vital to the future of Tumblr" is that adult content has much more va…

>It's funny the stuff HN fixates on. If all you read is this comment thread, you might actually believe that non-porn Tumblr really is just "an exercise in blowing several million dollars"

Which it pretty much is. That kind of content (which wasn't exactly porn, though if one is prude enough everything is porn) was Tumblr best differentiator.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#198

Post by coldtea »

Deimorz wrote: post #188
gnicholas wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a very loud, probably rather small subset of Tumblr users (or rather: former users) Well, according to this chart (which I have only cursorily vetted), it seems there are a lot of "former users": https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/af9rwu/oc_... It shows that as of Jan, 2019, there were about 50% as many users as when the ban was announced. That would suggest that there are as many "former users" as t…

That chart is based on Google Trends, which is a terrible way to measure social network activity/popularity.

Do you have anything better?

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#199

Post by no_wizard »

I know there are a lot of nay sayers in this thread about the viability of this acquistion but consider this:

> Even still, Matt says Tumblr’s user base is, “several times larger than [WordPress.com].”

I don't know what Automattic paid exactly, but the story speculates that:

> Dan Primack of Axios is reporting a “source familiar” put the price, “well south of $20 million.”

So even if Tumblr is plateaued or declining still, it has several magnitudes of declining (for lack of a better term maybe?) before it even hits the same size as wordpress.com

Using the $20 Million Dollar as the ceiling here, all they would need to do is convert:

- four million users to their $5 month plan to make back $20 million dollars

- two million five hundred thousand users to the $8 a month plan to make $20 million dollars

- eight hundred thousand users to their $25 dollar a month plan to make $20 million dollars

- forty five thousand users to their $45 dollar a month ecommerce plan to make $20 million dollars

Now, if you figure they'll likely monetize some of these users on a wide variety of these plans, the numbers start to pan out quite quickly. This doesn't count things like ad revenue on free tiers, for instance.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#200

Post by coldtea »

evanelias wrote: post #142
tptacek wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny the stuff HN fixates on. If all you read is this comment thread, you might actually believe that non-porn Tumblr really is just "an exercise in blowing several million dollars", rather than a concern for a very loud, probably rather small subset of Tumblr users (or rather: former users). What seems at least as likely as "adult content is vital to the future of Tumblr" is that adult content has much more va…

This is spot-on. HN has generally massively over-estimated the amount of porn on Tumblr, in terms of percentage of total content. I say this as a primary source with first-hand factual knowledge.

It doesn't have to be a large "percentage of total content". It just has to be the content that matters to most users...
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