It’s not quite the end of Tumblr, but when management is supposedly sending memos with the Lord Tennyson quote about having “loved and lost,” it doesn’t look like there’s much of a future.
Internet statesman and Waxy.org proprietor Andy Baio posted what is “apparently an internal Automattic memo making the rounds on Tumblr” to Threads. The memo, written to employees at WordPress.com parent company Automattic, which bought Tumblr from Verizon’s media arm in 2019, is titled or subtitled “You win or you learn.” The posted memo states that a majority of the 139 employees working on product and marketing at Tumblr (in a team apparently named “Bumblr”) will “switch to other divisions.” Those working in “Happiness” (Automattic’s customer support and service division) and “T&S” (trust and safety) would remain.
We tried to warn you, yet you banned the porn anyways.
I audibly snorted when OnlyFans was going on about this the first time around
When onlyfans said they were going to stop allowing porn. I was like wait, wut? You’re going to shut down you’re own product?
At least OF came to their senses and that’s why they’re still thriving.
I almost wonder it was a guerilla marketing success story in terms of that whole debacle. Like i don’t think they were hit with anything but derision and snark.
My guess (and I think I read other people guessing this) was that the banks were pushing them to ban porn, and by announcing it the way they did, they were able to get cancellations data proving that they would die, so if the banks wanted any money from them at all in the future they had to back off, and did.
If it was marketing, then it probably backfired enormously - OF barely had competition that I heard of before then, but certainly did immediately after the announcement.
Why would banks care about porn? All they should care about is making money. They’re literal banks afterall.
I agree. Supposedly it was about adult sites having higher rates of chargebacks, fraud, etc. But to me that sounds easily solvable with increased fees from the banks for that industry instead of trying to push morals.
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About as low-stakes as it gets lol
Yeah, this was predicted by everyone, long in advance. The surprising thing here is how long they’ve managed to cling to life. I expected them to be deceased by now. I didn’t think they’d last another three years, let alone five.
Verizon banned porn. The new owners have turned more of a blind eye to it. I know, hard to keep up with all the different owners and their individual policies.
Its different corporate masters passing Tumblr around. At least try to see how different owners have different policies. I think we all knew that Verizon was utter crap as an owner and did untold damage to the brand. But I actually was rooting for Tumblr to make a comeback this time.
Alas, Automattic couldn’t save Tumblr after all the damage to its reputation.
They didnt really try to.
A lot of the new money making features were half assed, and got abandoned pretty quickly after release. Lots of users who wanted to support them have complained that they seem to not want the money.
They’ve also added features no one wants. For example, the recent “Tumblr Live” nonsense, which is basically Twitch meets Shorts. It’s at the top of your feed and you can’t permanently turn it off - you can turn it off for what was a week, then a month. They wasted money and time to get that feature going, one that you also cost a lot because hosting video isn’t cheap, when NO ONE goes to tumblr to look at random cam girls.
They honestly didn’t have a choice at the time. They were either going to have to completely moderate content, or get sued to bankruptcy for allowing CSAM all over their platform.
The double-edged sword of user-generated content is that a bunch of them are creeps and not participating to be creative.
Speaking of bans, does anyone know what happens with
community ban, is that forever or do they give you a cooloff time or what? I still get notifs, just can’t respond to anythingEdit: i wonder if I’m on ice cuz of my nesting test thread