"600+ person-years of effort" have not stopped the site from losing $30M a year.

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.

  • @jesseaccountnameEnglish
    54•1 year ago

    I’d love to see a defederated version of Tumblr. It would solve so many problems over there, honestly.

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝OPEnglish
      33•1 year ago

      Well it was going to get ActivityPub integration, so something was happening on that front.

      Of course, if they don’t want it they could make it open source and let people start their own instances but that’s not going to happen while there’s data to mine.

      • @jesseaccountnameEnglish
        5•1 year ago

        Alot, in my opinion. I think defederation and community management could address Tumblr’s unwanted censorship that seems to go after trans people aggressively but ignore literally dangerous porn bots. They could build it without the shitty tik-tok-esque service Tumblr staff are trying to integrate in to please investors who know nothing about the site. Folks wouldn’t have the constant fear that the site will shut down every year because trying to make money off of Tumblr is like throwing money into a woodchipper.

        Most of Tumblr’s problems are self-inflicted by management, and people who are actually passionate about the site could make Tumblr amazing

      • @[email protected]English
        4•1 year ago

        But doesn’t that make it harder to get discovered? Im not into blogs, so I know nothing about tumblr or self hosted blogs.

        • @SoggyEnglish
          4•1 year ago

          Back in the Old Days of the internet we used stuff like message boards and “webrings” which was a bunch of sites linking to each other (if you like my stuff, check out my friends!), everything was word-of-mouth. It intersected pretty strongly with real world nerd shit, connecting at conventions or colleges. I don’t think the normie internet could exist like that, it was just hobbyists and hikikomori types.

        • @AuxEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          Federation in it’s current state won’t solve that problem either.