Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic • Hacker News Board

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#371

Post by echelon » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 8:55 AM UTC

artpi wrote: post #360

echelon wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please actually do this. Find a way to get Verizon to sign off on this, and then get in touch with an established documentary maker. Pair them with an engineer and follow the story of the migration efforts. It will take time, and it'll certainly have a narrative. Nothing like this has been done before. I struggle with making what I do relatable to people, but having a technical or semi-technical documentary following…

From the documentaries I've seen, its lots of people walking to a meeting, meetings themselves, etc. For that kind of documentary, probably people walking into servers rooms, or having heated discussions. In Automattic, we basically evolved to remove all that :) There would be basically zoom calls and slack discussions. The most ambitious project I worked on in Automattic were just me, looking at the code and trying…

We don't need server rooms.

We need discussions about how to untangle integrations of your user model with Verizon/Yahoo's auth system, how you'll consolidate all the microservices, which ongoing migrations you'll halt, the puzzled looks you'll have at undocumented code that performs nested eager-loaded lazy migrations of data, etc.

I've been involved in a multi-year migration effort. I expect this may be the same for y'all. It'd be fun to have an account of something that is so prolific and well known.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#372

Post by guardian5x » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 8:56 AM UTC

Sharlin wrote: post #359

levi0214 wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why didn't Pornhub acquire Tumblr? Could you give us more information about this, since Pornhub once said they wanted to acquire Tumblr.

Hmm, this raises the question: why hasn't Pornhub (or anyone) started a successful X-rated Tumblr clone yet? The demand seems to be there.

There have been multiple.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#373

Post by davidgerard » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 8:57 AM UTC

fouc wrote: post #362

photomatt wrote: post #11

I'm super excited to have the Tumblr team and product join the Automattic family. We've been evolving Automattic to be more of a Berkshire Hathaway-inspired model and businesses with a lot of autonomy, and this continues that trend. I was very impressed with the engagement and activity Tumblr has continued to have, and I hope that with this new ownership and investment the product will blossom.

Will you be able to bring back the inclusiveness Tumblr used to have for LGBT, Sex workers, etc ?

As he said above, he's very liberal in his views, except when it might affect the money in any way.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#374

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 8:59 AM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #55

knd775 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. >Mr. Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a Tumblr user and sees the site as complementary to WordPress.com. “It’s just fun,” he said of Tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.”

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…

[deleted]

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#375

Post by mattmanser » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:12 AM UTC

elliekelly wrote: post #109

photomatt wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adult content is not our forte either, and it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety... it's a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there. I personally have very liberal views on these things, but supporting adult content as a business is very different.

> it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety... I completely understand that “Adult Content” can cause a ton of headaches for a business but Tumblr’s current definition of “Adult Content” is very broad and I hope when the transaction is complete you’ll at least be open to reviewing the scope of the definition. Right now it includes many things that aren’t adult a…

I don't know if you've ever been to Europe, but the number of topless beaches are low and you won't see women walking around without a top on the street. It's not taboo-less, nipples are still sexual.

Nipples seems a pretty silly thing to start focusing on when he clearly said they weren't interested in adult content.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#376

Post by zaarn » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:18 AM UTC

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #53

ojbyrne wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Techcrunch says the number is "nominal:" https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/12/verizon-is-selling-tumblr-...

I think after Verizon failed so hard on their Oath thing, they probably just want to dump all the crud they bought in the process.

Oath is just how Verizon leeches money out of products. Oath buys, it ruins it while extracting maximum possible value, sells it.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#377

Post by feanaro » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:29 AM UTC

wp381640 wrote: post #297

djsumdog wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future needs to be distributed. Less Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter and more ActivityPub/Mastodon/Pleroma/Pixefed .. when people get use to federated networks, they'll understand how they work. They'll understand how it's like hosting your own game server, and everyone can do it, and you can ban servers you don't like without having those servers really go away to anyone but you. The future is not centralized. The futur…

> The future is not centralized. The future is distributed. been hearing this promise for so long, it's becoming a meme like The Year of Desktop Linux

Some things happen on a larger scale than several years.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#378

Post by feanaro » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:32 AM UTC

ridaj wrote: post #307

djsumdog wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The future needs to be distributed. Less Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter and more ActivityPub/Mastodon/Pleroma/Pixefed .. when people get use to federated networks, they'll understand how they work. They'll understand how it's like hosting your own game server, and everyone can do it, and you can ban servers you don't like without having those servers really go away to anyone but you. The future is not centralized. The futur…

I want to believe that the future is decentralized but I'm convinced of the opposite when it comes to online media, primarily because spam, abuse and content moderation are expensive functions to perform in which there are strong scale effects, and they are critical not just to ad-based monetization but perhaps also to broad societal acceptance of technology.

To me it seems that ad-based monetization is untenable. The more obnoxious it becomes, the more people are enticed to learn about and set up adblockers.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#379

Post by zxcvbn4038 » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:34 AM UTC

It should be interesting to see how this proceeds. When I was a Tumblr they invested a huge amount of effort in being as nasty as possible to Yahoo and fighting/rebeling against each and everything Yahoo asked of them. I left right at the Verizon merger so I can’t say if that has changed, but if that culture is still there it will make it challenging for any purchaser. Not to reward their behavior but it might have worked out better in the long run, yahoo’s tech environment was heavily customized and integrated, it would be very difficult to extract any other Yahoo property from their portfolio.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#380

Post by feanaro » Tue, Aug 13, 2019, 9:36 AM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #357

ridaj wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to believe that the future is decentralized but I'm convinced of the opposite when it comes to online media, primarily because spam, abuse and content moderation are expensive functions to perform in which there are strong scale effects, and they are critical not just to ad-based monetization but perhaps also to broad societal acceptance of technology.

Yeah. Unfortunately... yeah. The dream of decentralized everything sounds wonderful, but there's an implicit assumption that most folks involved are good actors. It quickly becomes untenable when corporate-backed or state-backed bad actors are introduced. Here's a very simple thought exercise for anybody who disagrees. Imagine a modest social media team of perhaps 10 paid employees. That's 24,000 people-hours' worth…

The same analysis makes it untenable for centralized platforms, as you noticed yourself.

It's arguably harder to do it on a decentralized platforms since they are... Well, decentralized. Those 240,000,000 people hours are then spread over all of the decentralized platforms instead of being focused on one or a few. Also, the cost of moderation is spread over everyone instead of a single entity having to pay for all of it.