"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
      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