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Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

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Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#411

Post by seebs »

I wonder if the new people will do anything about the "site is actively hostile to photosensitive people" thing. I used to use tumblr, and we reported, pretty much every year or so, the thing where login pages or "not found" pages always had full-page flashing or fast-moving animated GIFs, because that was a horrible source of seizure-inducing experiences, migraines, etcetera.

I always assumed it was a considered and intentional choice by the tumblr staff to actively drive those people away.

I also note: I didn't go there for porn, but I left over the porn ban, and will not even consider returning while the porn ban remains. I had >40k posts, I met the kid we ended up adopting there, and so on. I had a lot of engagement with the site, but while porn wasn't emotionally important to me, the side-effects of the porn ban made the site completely useless.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#412

Post by progforlyfe »

georgestephanis wrote: post #270
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 have no idea precisely what we're going to do or how, but if I were spitballing, I'd think something like ... Currently I think Tumblr stores all posts across all sites in one big table? WP.com does different tables per site. I also think Tumblr's post ids are often above php's int max for 32-bit systems ( 2,147,483,647 ) -- I know I've seen some issues trying to parse tumblr's post ids to integers rather than stri…

Close; For the most part, to the application the Posts appear to be from one table since the lookup interface is the same (externally), but in reality at this massive scale, it just wouldn't be possible in a single MySQL table and database, even if you had a huge number of replicas. Tumblr's posts are spread across MANY "shards" which are actually different servers, each running a chunk of posts, shared by the blog owner. e.g. Blogs 1 - 10,000,000 on Shard 1, 10,000,001 to 20,000,000 on Shard 2, etc. More in depth talk here http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr-architectur... and http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/74/Massively%20Sharded%... though it's from 2011/2012, but the overall ideas still hold. At the time of that post (7 years ago) there were already 200 Database servers.

Thankfully nothing is 32-bit so no worries about integer overflows. That would cause huge headaches everywhere on the PHP side. In MySQL, a regular unsigned INT column does have that limitation (roughly max 4.5 billion for unsigned, 2.2 signed), so BIGINT must be used there (Twitter had to do the same). Where it gets interesting is PHP doesn't support unsigned integers, so with 64 bit your max integer in PHP is 9,223,372,036,854,775,807, whereas in MySQL an unsigned 64 bit int is double that. I think it's safe to say though that neither Tumblr nor WordPress, even combined, would ever have more posts than atoms on Earth =)

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#414

Post by tomp »

progforlyfe wrote: post #412
georgestephanis wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have no idea precisely what we're going to do or how, but if I were spitballing, I'd think something like ... Currently I think Tumblr stores all posts across all sites in one big table? WP.com does different tables per site. I also think Tumblr's post ids are often above php's int max for 32-bit systems ( 2,147,483,647 ) -- I know I've seen some issues trying to parse tumblr's post ids to integers rather than stri…

Close; For the most part, to the application the Posts appear to be from one table since the lookup interface is the same (externally), but in reality at this massive scale, it just wouldn't be possible in a single MySQL table and database, even if you had a huge number of replicas. Tumblr's posts are spread across MANY "shards" which are actually different servers, each running a chunk of posts, shared by the blog o…

> I think it's safe to say though that neither Tumblr nor WordPress, even combined, would ever have more posts than atoms on Earth =)

If my math is correct, you're a wee bit off.

9,223,372,036,854,775,807 is 2^63, which is roughly 10^19. The Avogadro constant, which is about 6 * 10^23, is the number of particles (atoms / molecules) in a mole of substance, which for atoms amounts to (atom number of element) grams of mass (so e.g. 12g of C12 is a mole).

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#415

Post by lesdeuxmagots »

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.

I wish you and the team the best of luck. Tumblrs first downfall was partly because the autonomy it was given to a team that had no idea how to grow the business. Karp had zero idea how to grow the product or the revenues past the initial vision. D'onofrio is an operator, likely not the best fit for leading a vision of what a new Tumblr with a new mandate should be.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#416

Post by evanelias »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #386
evanelias wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ehhh parts of that article were never accurate, especially the stuff about having an hbase-powered dashboard feed. Primarily the product backend is monolithic PHP (custom framework) + services in various languages + sharded MySQL + Memcached + Gearman. Lots of other technologies in use though too, but I'll defer to current employees if they want to answer.

Fantasy big data: let's use Hadoop and Kafka! Reality big data: Let's shard it across Mysql.

Not exactly. Tumblr has a pretty huge Hadoop fleet and decently large Kafka setup too. It's just a question of OLTP vs OLAP use-cases being powered by different tech stacks.

My answer above was limited to the product backend, i.e. technologies used in serving user requests in real-time. And even then I missed a bunch of large technologies in use there, especially around search and algorithmic ranking.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#417

Post by jsjohnst »

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #410
jsjohnst wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is they in this case? Tumblr leadership, Yahoo! leadership, Oath leadership, or Verizon leadership?

Yes.

I can think of a few good decisions the former half of that list made. Later half, not so much.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#418

Post by [deleted] »

np_tedious wrote: post #300
carlinmack wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi just to let you know your acronym for the LGBT+ community (LGBTQIKAP+) is unecessarily long and it comes off like you're trying too hard. I'm pretty into tumblr identities and queer politics and I can't think of any identity which starts with a K. Queer is just as good as the common LGBT+ but some people still associate it with the slur and don't feel comfortable with identifying with it. The plus really is the um…

Kink. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=LGBTQIAPK (#2) They use a slightly different order, but I'd imagine it's the same thing.

[deleted]

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#419

Post by Mindwipe »

photomatt wrote: post #168
opencl wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any plans to improve the automated porn flagging system which seems to have a very annoyingly high false positive rate at the moment?

I can imagine that false positives are incredibly frustrating for legit creators, and something we will try to eliminate.

Ha, claiming liberal viewpoints and then lets the mask slip by describing creators of adult content, sex workers etc as outside "legit creators".

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#420

Post by evanelias »

cf498 wrote: post #337
evanelias wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am basing my statements on knowledge from personal experience. As I said above, I'm a primary source with first-hand factual knowledge about this topic. (If you do a lot of capacity planning for a UGC / social network infrastructure over many years, you become intimately familiar with changes in growth rate over time...)

First of, thanks for sharing your experience and insight here. You do however see how that is a bit difficult to just accept without any backing up, considering a former engineer might naturally be a bit biased about the public perception of a former project dying? By no means a personal attack, just picture yourself in my shoes. I do understand however if there is just no such data available. Like everyone else here…

> a former engineer might naturally be a bit biased about the public perception of a former project dying?

Personally I'm not too concerned about that. I have other things on my resume.

I'm more concerned that people keep blindly parroting that Tumblr is/was primarily a "porn site", when the internal data absolutely did not bear that out at any point.

> So if tumblr isnt dying

I haven't said anything about whether or not it is "dying". Afraid you've misunderstood. My point is that HN tends to vastly overstate the amount of adult-related Tumblr usage. Far more users slowly left over time long before the adult content ban.

You want public numbers, OK, I'll link directly to the wayback machine info that I previously mentioned downthread:

Jan 21 2014 (random day around "peak Tumblr"): 110m posts [1]

Dec 16 2018 (before adult content ban): 28m posts [2]

Feb 3 2019 (a bit after adult content ban): 23m posts [3]

While daily posting volume doesn't perfectly equate to MAUs, in my experience with UGC / social networking products, posting volume is closely correlated with overall usage.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140121015438/https://www.tumbl...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20181216220821/https://www.tumbl...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20190203200751/https://www.tumbl...

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