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Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

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Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#451

Post by evanelias »

coldtea wrote: post #449
evanelias wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those stats are not publicly available. In general, for any company, at best they may or may not include the stats in quarterly earnings statements if the company is publicly traded. Although Tumblr has been owned by public companies since 2013, its corporate owners have not made these stats publicly available. Elsewhere in this subthread, I've linked to public info showing that in absolute content creation numbers,…

> If you want to trust clearly incorrect numbers in The Verge over the person who built the company's relational storage tier, I suppose that's your prerogative. So, the Verge refers to data from two sources SimilarWeb and Statista, whereas your data are basically "trust me" and "absolute content creation numbers" (that is: not visitors). And on top, you say you've built Tumblr's infrastructure. I guess it's me and T…

How would you feel if random people on HN repeatedly insisted your former employer was primarily a porn site, despite these people having no real evidence, and despite this going against years of your personal experience scaling and capacity-planning the site?

Do you actually believe these numbers from SimilarWeb and Statista claiming Tumblr has more MAUs than Twitter and Snapchat combined, even after banning adult content (which you claim was a majority of Tumblr's usage)? Does that even remotely make any sense at all?

You're outright accusing me of lying here. I find this insulting and do not wish to continue this discussion. Goodbye.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#452

Post by azernik »

coldtea wrote: post #211
mbreese wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A great deal of advertising revolves around "brand awareness". You may not be selling a particular product to the consumer, but keeping your brand in the mind of the consumer. Understandably so, not all advertisers want their brand associated with adult content. Where an ad is seen can be just as (if not more) important to the advertiser as the ad itself. So, if your site serves up adult content -- you can guarantee…

> A great deal of advertising revolves around "brand awareness". You may not be selling a particular product to the consumer, but keeping your brand in the mind of the consumer. Understandably so, not all advertisers want their brand associated with adult content. If all brands allowed their ads to appear next to adult content, then it wouldn't be any special association for any particular brand, just another outlet.…

> If all brands allowed their ads to appear next to adult content, then it wouldn't be any special association for any particular brand, just another outlet.

Well yeah. Brands aren't going to put in the effort to solve a thorny collective action problem just to open up a bit more ad space. They're trying to make money, not repair broken social norms.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#453

Post by memmcgee »

I'm surprised how low the buyout price was. Like Verizon basically killed Tumblr with the adult content ban but only $3million? I'm sure the net worth of Tumblr's employees is worth more than that. They should've sold Tumblr to the employees and then turned it into a co-op if they were going to sell it for that little.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#454

Post by Izkata »

evanelias wrote: post #444
Izkata wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're talking about accounts with porn content. GP and others are talking about visitors who may not even have an account.

I've addressed that nuance in other comments in this subthread. My statements are accurate no matter how you define a "user". Additionally, Tumblr started requiring a logged-in account to view adult content some time before the ban (something like 9 months before it iirc). Furthermore, GP specifically said "forced off the platform", "go to Tumblr", etc which strongly implies people with accounts / using the site's da…

Because stuff like this this:

> Additionally, Tumblr started requiring a logged-in account to view adult content some time before the ban (something like 9 months before it iirc).

Is only technically accurate; it's irrelevant to the user experience. The ban was implemented by enabling safe mode for all users, removing the option to disable it, then automatedly marking a huge number of accounts as adult (plenty of which that got caught in this step weren't actually adult).

Content wasn't actually deleted, and can still be viewed on your own dashboard for the accounts you're subscribed to, making it less obvious to users with accounts - the ban primarily affected visitors without accounts and the posters who wanted them as an audience. Those posters are the ones who have been forced off the platform, no longer able to grow an audience, but some have been slow to realize they even got caught by the ban because of how it was implemented.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#455

Post by evanelias »

Izkata wrote: post #454
evanelias wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've addressed that nuance in other comments in this subthread. My statements are accurate no matter how you define a "user". Additionally, Tumblr started requiring a logged-in account to view adult content some time before the ban (something like 9 months before it iirc). Furthermore, GP specifically said "forced off the platform", "go to Tumblr", etc which strongly implies people with accounts / using the site's da…

Because stuff like this this: > Additionally, Tumblr started requiring a logged-in account to view adult content some time before the ban (something like 9 months before it iirc). Is only technically accurate; it's irrelevant to the user experience. The ban was implemented by enabling safe mode for all users, removing the option to disable it, then automatedly marking a huge number of accounts as adult (plenty of whi…

I don't follow how that relates to the topic being discussed here (HN misconception about the percentage of adult-related users/content/traffic on Tumblr). I only mentioned the logged-in account requirement in response to your claim about non-logged-in traffic being relevant to the stats.

I haven't expressed any opinions about the user experience of the ban, or whether the ban was implemented well, or whether the ban was a good idea or a bad one. I have no horse in that race, and was not involved in the ban's implementation in any way whatsoever.

What I am stating is that I'm directly aware of the rough percentage of Tumblr activity that was adult-related from ~2010-2018, and that percentage is significantly less than the numbers commonly thrown around on HN. But several people here think I'm lying for whatever reason, so clearly it's time for me to bow out of this infuriating gaslight fest.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#456

Post by lugg »

evanelias wrote: post #432
lugg wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of the point though. Everyone has a Hadoop/Kafka, but when it comes to actually getting things done, good ole MySQL to the rescue. I honestly don't see the draw for Kafka. And by all means I get it, I just don't buy it. Maybe I'm just holding it wrong or something.

It really depends on the task at hand. I'm one of the most vocally pro-MySQL commenters on HN, and have literally built my career around scaling and automating MySQL, but I still wouldn't recommend it for OLAP-heavy workloads. The query planner just isn't great at monstrous analytics queries, and ditto for the feature set (especially pre-8.0). For high-volume OLTP though MySQL is an excellent choice. Regarding Kafka:…

I don't think youre quite getting my point.

Kafka is not going to replace MySQL specifically because it depends on the task at hand.

If you can't replace MySQL with Kafka, then why not just stick with whatever queue/jobs/stream infra you had before kafka. At least those solutions are quite limited in scope and easily replaceable.

At this point Kafka is a solution looking for a problem.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#457

Post by fumar »

Corrado wrote: post #351
duncanawoods wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! I’d pay more for real world business documentaries than anything on netflix.

Actually, you could pitch the idea to Netflix. It sounds like something they might do. And, yes, I would watch it. :)

Verizon wouldn’t risk having negative publicity from a documentary. Not to be a buzzkill but seems too left of center for them.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#458

Post by ec109685 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #354
photomatt wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an excellent question! I don't want to be so presumptuous as to define an exact approach before the technical exploration has started, besides saying it'll be done incrementally and in an easily revertable way to be invisible to users, just like the big datacenter migration Automattic just completed a few weeks ago. At the point when we start this the Tumblr team will have been part of Automattic for the bette…

I don't want to be so presumptuous as to define an exact approach before the technical exploration has started The same could be said of deciding such an absolutely massive migration is even beneficial/necessary in the first place, before a technical exploration! And yet apparently, that part has already been decided? I am, of course, completely ignorant of how WP and Tumblr's infrastructure works. I'm not saying the…

Generally before a company buys another company, there is some amount of due diligence done beforehand, so I wouldn’t presume there hasn’t been a technical exploration.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#459

Post by redis_mlc »

davidgerard wrote: post #373
fouc wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's an uncharitable interpretation.

Craigslist went through legal hell dealing with NSFW content because of puritanical US States Attorneys. See any remaining dating links on CL?

Matt doesn't need that either.

Re: Verizon to Sell Tumblr to Automattic

#460

Post by Throwaway879989 »

ckozlowski wrote: post #294
derefr wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that almost all the SFW content creators I know who had a Tumblr blog, have gradually left the platform over the last year. The NSFW content-creators left, and with them dragged away most of the audience for SFW content. The platform is a "dead network" now; the SFW content creators are getting 10x less likes/reblogs than before for their SFW content, because none of their followers (who presumably have both S…

I think this is an excellent analogy. Tumblr was always fun because you could get both. I could have a feed of all of my interests, not just those some group deemed acceptable. I’m sure there’s some who’s interests fall entirely within the venn diagram of “acceptable”, and for those, it’s still viable. But as you stated, many like both, and many of the creators I think (who are also consumers) had interests in both S…

Thank you very much for voicing your input and opinion on that matter. It always feels a little dangerous to take position on kink, even though it shouldn't.

> To put it succinctly (and bluntly) as a friend once told me, “the venn diagram of “kink” and “geek” practically overlap.)

It's nice to have an outside view on this. I was always of the opinion that my friends just happen to overlap because my interests select people in both worlds. But yeah, there might actually be a strong correlation.

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