"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.

  • @ZiemekZEnglish
    55•1 year ago

    At least OF came to their senses and that’s why they’re still thriving.

    • @cheese_greaterEnglish
      32•1 year ago

      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.

      • @davidgroEnglish
        44•1 year ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]English
          3•1 year ago

          Why would banks care about porn? All they should care about is making money. They’re literal banks afterall.

          • @NotMyOldRedditNameEnglish
            6•1 year ago

            It’s usually the credit cards. They don’t want to be associated with the porn. Their brands show on the website.

            Nobody knows what bank any company uses.

          • @Hitchie_RawtinEnglish
            5•1 year ago

            It seems that way to us on the face of it but the lines that’ve been trotted out are firstly the worry that money is coming from an illegal source whether underaged or trafficked and secondly that money laundering could be happening, OF would be/is an extremely easy way to clean dirty money.

            They used to have to set up actual businesses that did actual work in case a genuine customer appeared, now they can buy feet pics and jars of farts or whatever.

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

              Hmm I don’t think that’s it. They can still publish bullshit content and launder money that way. Also, jars of farts aren’t porn and presumably still allowed

              • @Hitchie_RawtinEnglish
                1•1 year ago

                Tough to sell any old jar of farts without somebody wanting it for some reason (like having already seen pics of your butthole and becoming a perverted fan of everything your butthole ejects).

          • @davidgroEnglish
            3•1 year ago

            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.