Didn't Tumblr do a whole "alienate your user base" thing like Reddit did recently? They got rid of all the racey hot content and basically made it super boring no?
This always seems like a really bad idea.
Didn't Tumblr do a whole "alienate your user base" thing like Reddit did recently? They got rid of all the racey hot content and basically made it super boring no?
This always seems like a really bad idea.
They did, but that was a while ago. Things are still pretty bad -- if your blog gets flagged for racy content, you lose the ability to have a custom avatar, for example. (Even more, and you get banned.) They've also had quite transphobic moderation policies (really strange considering their userbase!) -- normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now, which'll get your account flagged or banned. They've been making the app actively worse, redesigned the website to look like twitter, and attempted to cram "Tumblr live" down everyone's throats (only having a "hide for one week" button). Generally doing things nobody asked for, nobody wants, and continuing to break existing functionality while not listening to their users. This is an own-goal.
normal, non-sexual photos of trans people are "nsfw" now
FWIW, the algorithms that big tech companies use are often trained to recognize women’s underwear. So non-sexual photos of trans men wearing women’s underwear are often flagged, even when similar photos of women wearing boxers are not.
I’m not saying it’s right, just giving the actual reason this happens. (Albeit I don’t have Tumblr-specific knowledge.)
Cool. Now why does it consistently happen for images where no underwear is visible, and why doesn't it happen for cis women? Why are appeals not granted? And why didn't staff evenacknowledgethere's a problem?
No idea. I’ve never worked at any of these companies, I just learned this in an academic conference presentation on ethnographic research into OnlyFans users. OnlyFans doesn’t have its on recommendation system, so users need to find their customers on instagram, Twitter, tumblr, etc.
OnlyFans doesn’t have its on recommendation system
This is by far the most mind-blowing thing about OnlyFans to me. I’m a very open minded person and I would have been so sure that a site like OnlyFans would absolutelyrequirediscovery. Like, so sure that if I was making it, I wouldn’t even question including it. The fact they just offloaded this to every other site,and then took all the monetizationis amazing to me. Twitter, Reddit and Instagram can barely get money from these users, but they’re super popular, and they just link to their OnlyFans on their profile.
I seriously wonder what other opportunities like that are out in the wild.
They also centralize all the risk. Operating a “pay me $X/month” service is really complicated legally, ethically, etc.
In a way, OF is valuable to platforms like Twitter and Instagram, because it has monopolized a lot of the riskiest cash flow that those companies would prefer to avoid / explicitly disallow in their ToS for a “subscribe to this influencer” service.
If OF had their own discovery platform, they’d have to deal with the thorny editorial problem of ranking. In the current setup, they can totally sidestep it. It would probably cost them more to operate discovery than it’s worth.
Hi, just to sate my own curiosity: can you please provide me a link to this presentation, if it's available online? Thanks...
Not online, sorry!
How sensitive/stupid are these? Can the behavior be exploited to force innocent images get flagged as explicit? Asking for a friend… also would make an excellent shirt design if properly tweaked
Yes, there are some examples I’ve seen in the past year of images specifically generated to make image detection think it’s X when it’s really just a mess of shapes and pixels
thats fucking hilarious.
it surprises me how instagram and twitter can get away with it but tumblr cant
it surprises me how instagram and twitter can get away with it but tumblr cant
It's a huge problem on Instagram too.
Twitter is different because it doesn't prohibit sexual content in the first place, unlike Facebook and Tumblr.
How is it an own goal? They were bleeding money, so tried to find a way to succeed through growth of users or revenue.
The path where they just left everything untouched is a path to certain failure.
My guess would be that they wouldn’t have to be bleeding money if they weren’t aiming for growth.
Tumblr users are rabidly against all the user-hostile stuff other large free sites do. I think they probably could have put the site behind a $1/mo paywall two years ago and people would have gone for it, if they changed nothing else. There's a general "we're fucked" atmosphere on the site because we all know they're trying to wring money out of their users and the enshittification has begun. It doesn't seem like anyone in charge understands their users.
They did that because a lot of the people creating and posting that Content were kids…
How did you quantify that?
Reddit-fuck-up is not even remotely comparable to Tumblr-fuck-up. What Tumblr did was more like if Reddit banned edgy memes.
that was a long time ago, under a previous owner. Automattic has seemingly tried to be a good steward of the tumblr brand, but it seems like at this point, the only people left using tumblr are unmonetizable.
the bad idea was buying tumblr. but i think automattic knew that when they bought it, and just thought it would be fun to set some money on fire for a while.
Didn't Tumblr do a whole "alienate your user base" thing like Reddit did recently?
No, they did that years ago (getting on for literally 10 years ago), and that's what ultimately resulted in selling it to its current owners for like 1/1000th of what Yahoo paid for it.
This isn't true at all, Blaze was a huge success, scrolling through Tumblr you see people with silly numbers of checks, lots of people pay to remove ads, it's just that that the successes aren't massively revenue generating in the way that ads are.
Trying to monetize user generated content is hard because both the users and creators believe that it's their content (which it is that's how community works) and so locking it away and taking a non-trivial cut is going to be met with insane vitriol and there's not much value to add over the base experience. Tumblr's patron thing you should of think like Hashicorp re-licensing Terraform.
And worse is that sometimes creating true value-adds naturally perverts incentives. Like for example a true value-add would be "bubble-as-a-service" because Tumblr has some really nasty subcultures which is why posters don't like when posts "break containment." It would be the easiest money ever to just pay and get a huge blocklist without having to go through the effort of making one yourself but then you kinda need those nasty communities to justify the value.
From the CEO’s blog today:
You mention Blaze and Ad-free doing well, but their adoption is so small relative to the use of Tumblr their revenue couldn't support a fraction of the ~1,000 servers it takes to run Tumblr, much less any salaries.
(person who doesn't really know what they're talking about when it comes to services of this scale asking) Why does Tumblr need 1000 servers to run? You can serve alotof text and relatively well compressed image files with not a lot of hardware.
For the YC audience: Tumblr has about 60B images using 8 petabytes of storage. 205TB of memory, 46,752 CPU threads, 250 kW of energy. About 100k requests a second, a petabyte a day of bandwidth.
So in short, the answer to my question is that the scale is way way larger than I imagined.
It's a social network. Tumblr serves a lot of traffic, and has a lot of data. The product data alone is over 1 trillion rows in relational databases by my estimation (former early eng there), and that's not accounting for replication / high availability.
1000 servers actually sounds surprisingly small. It was a fair bit higher than that a decade ago, and that was on bare metal then, vs (afaik) cloud VMs now. Then again, their traffic is a lot lower now, but still nothing to sneeze at.
A lot of people use it to promote their art or to share screencaps/gifs/clips of movies, so I think people would get pretty cranky if the image files were overly compressed (unless it's the magic kind of compression that doesn't cost any fidelity. I don't really understand how compression works).
That's without getting into video content.
I think we're saying the same thing, they're successful in the sense that Tumblr users like them but they're small potatoes. Tumblr users aren't necessarily allergic to monetization but the ones they've found don't pay the bills.
There is very simple monetization strategy: ads, cut bloat, move content moderation staff to India!
Tumblr has an army of content creator that work for free. It is a site that host text and images. How they even spend 30 million per year? Maybe on organizing "stuff convention", SF real estate and so on... Cut the bloat!
They don't spend 30 million per year, they spend 30 million over what they generate.
I don't think they'd generate peanuts so as to not even cover hardware costs.
they spend 30 million over what they generate
That is my point. I do not understand how they total costs can be over 30M. It is mostly static content that begs for CDN cache. It is also not mission critical.
Probably they do a lot of content moderation, which takes human beings at least at some stage.
The lesson:
"Don't remove porn when the userbase is left-leaning and embraces it."
Reddit and Twitter do it the right way: hiding adult-rated content behind the curtains.
Aren’t left leaning people all about “ethical porn” and power dynamics now?
The lesson is that user generated content shouldn't be turned into an algorithmic amusement park for advertisers and data brokers.
Tumblr wasn't making money with or without porn. It was just shifting between owners who thought they'd be better at squeezing money out of it.
It looks like all the left-leaning porn posters have moved to BlueSky (to the point the main feed was unusable, last I checked).
They don't seem to have tried the one thing that might have worked for them, namely, embracing the fact that they're first and foremost a porn site. Instead, they decided to be actively hostile to this reality, with predictable results.
Different owner
yes, and even though the newish owner has not banned all things naughty that would get flagged at fbk or similar, they still have banned and removed profiles that had erotic content.
It's fine to do what they want, but it's become a slightly naughtier pg-13 - I guess nc-17. So those who want naughtier are going elsewhere, and no one knows for sure what is okay and what could be okay today and get your account removed tomorrow - so why put any content into it?
Things are pretty grim when you're asking your own staff to purchase merch because "every little bit helps".
This was live-streamed publicly and advertised to users. I didn’t make that very clear.
the monetization strategies they’ve tried ... crabs
Like Bored Crabs NFTs or restaurant supplier or health insurance or...?
A virtual pet that lives on your blog and occasionally tries to eat your mouse cursor.
MindGeek should buy Tumblr and allow adult content again.
Tumblr's success was that it was an adult space that wasn't strictly pornography. It was a "cool sex" to PornHub's "hot sex".
Tumblr's success was that it was an adult space that wasn't strictly pornography.
This is a common talking point here, but it just isn't historically accurate in terms of absolute numbers.
Tumblr was most successful in 2011-2012. It started getting huge in 2010 in large part due to having built-in photo and video support, at a time when Twitter didn't have these, and Instagram and Pinterest were still both tiny. Tumblr also offered built-in reblog functionality before Twitter had built-in retweeting.
For a little while there, Tumblr was a mainstream social network -- certainly a bit edgier and more liberal than most competitors, but still mainstream enough that many major brands had a Tumblr presence right alongside their Facebook and Twitter icons. Adult content was definitely present, but it was a single-digit percentage of posts at the time of Tumblr's peak historical traffic levels.
A lot of those mainstream users started to decamp to Instagram and Pinterest after that point, depending on their personal use-case.
That adult content percentage definitely rose over time, but timing-wise that coincided with total traffic decreasing, not increasing. It also scared off the brands, whose advertising dollars were sorely needed to achieve sustainability for the business. So to me, attempting to attribute Tumblr's "success" to adult content just seems way off-base.
Source: I was personally responsible for a decent chunk of Tumblr's scalability and capacity planning for several years.
Seems like a reasonable take but I do have one comment:
Adult content was definitely present, but it was a single-digit percentage of posts at the time of Tumblr's peak historical traffic levels.
Single-digit percentage isa lotfor adult content. I have to imagine that's a larger share of percentage than Twitter has ever had for adult content.
That's expected given Twitter leans more towards text content. The proportion of Tumblr posts that are images or video has always been much higher than Twitter's.
Twitter didn't even have built-in photo posts until mid 2011, and even then it was through a third-party integration with Photobucket for the first year. Images weren't shown inline in the Twitter timeline feed until late 2013! Meanwhile direct video upload was added even later than that.
What I'm trying to say is, to me, that just generally sounds like a pretty large share of adult content no matter how you shake it. I could be over-estimating, but I'd assume it outpaces all of the other major social media platforms and most websites of similar magnitude in general that do allow pornographic content but are not explicitly porn sites.
OK, but I'm not understanding your point. I mean it's all relative. Go back 10-15 years earlier and averylarge percentage of uuencoded files uploaded to Usenet were adult content. That doesn't mean NNTP or uuencode were primarily for porn.
On the web, similar situation for DeviantArt and a lot of other sites.
Exactly. I always assumed porn's role in Tumblr was a bit exaggerated, but actually it seems like it really was pretty big, especially considering that we're talking about something that was far, far, far more mainstream than Usenet. (and thus at least in my mind, you'dexpectit to be smaller by percentage.)
DeviantArt
Of course it's complicated. DeviantArt neverreallyallowed pornographic content, but obviously it wound up with a lot of fetish content that blurred the lines regardless. DeviantArt is basically a case study all on its own.
There's different ways to count it, but I'd estimate it was maybe a low % of posts but it was 30-40% of the user interest and traffic.
I think this is a pretty fair assessment.
It seems like a missing part of this was lack of ad safety council on Tumblrs part. Reddit has been getting away with it for over a decade (NSFW content I mean) without losing advertisers. I see a ton of mainstream ads on Reddit (I use their official app, for better or worse)
I don't think its simply the existence of NSFW content that makes advertisers wary. I think its lack of guarantees w/r/t placement
MindGeek should buy Tumblr and allow adult content again.
MindGeek isn't interested in new investments allowing independent content creation.
MindGeek has been the target of active - and successful - campaigns from anti-pornography groups withexplicitreligious motivation (Exodus Cry, Morality in Media, etc., mostly funded by right-wing evangelicals). Those groups are the reason that Xtube shut down in 2021, and that Pornhub removed all independent content a couple of months later.
Those same groups are also behind the new "age verification" laws in a number of states, which are the reason that accessing many big-name tube websites (both from MindGeek and other properties) now requires uploading your drivers' license along with biometric face scans, even when viewed from states which don't have such laws on the books.
There's been a war on pornography on the Internet for the last several years, and the anti-pornography groups have won nearly every battle, in part because the only opposition has come from sex workers, who have very little lobbying influence. For some reason, most digital rights or general First Amendment advocacy groups have paid very little attention.
If you wrote on HN in 2017 suggesting the possibility of a total ban on pornography on the Internet within a few years, you'd have been dismissed outright. But we're actually pretty close to ade factoban on pornography on the Internet. Very few websites still allow independent creators to upload pornography. Most of the ones that were around in 2017 either are dead, no longer allow pornography (Tumblr, Imgur), heavily restrict its visibility (Reddit), or only allow it from "verified creators", which limits it to commercial production (Pornhub).
Even self-hosting is going to become harder, as these groups are shifting their focus towards pressuring payment platforms and hosting providers to drop customers who produce sexual content.
Will pornography beliterallybanned on the Internet in a few years? Probably not. But will it be extremely difficult to either find or post sexual imagery or nudity within that timeframe? Probably - and so far, the anti-porn activists have actually been operatingaheadof their own schedule.
While I don't disagree with the bulk of your comment, it's worth noting that PornHub / MindGeek didn't just shoot themselves in the foot but hurt the entire industry when there were numerous videos of missing teens and underage content found on their site.
I say this as someone who ran an adult website for 18 years, in Canada, until suddenly our bank informed us that they were closing our commercial accounts and we couldn't find a single other bank or credit union in this country that would take our business despite a pristine 18 year track record.
The only thing that had changed was the MindGeek scandal. Maybe the media misrepresented it, maybe the content issues were fabricated by "anti-pornography" groups. But one day everything is fine, the next day MindGeek (a Canadian company) is in the news and the next day we're shut down despite having done nothing wrong.
It's hard for me to scapegoat conservatives and anti-porn groups when they were WAY more vocal and active when I first started my business (back in 2004 this was when the George W Bush administration was prosecuting obscenity for the first time in decades, and passing USC 18 2557). By 2022 they had virtually gone away. Then MindGeek was caught allowing some some really shady shit on PornHub.
Also this was just a year or two after the Girls Do Porn scandal (Google it if you're unaware). Those girls suing those assholes for sexual abuse and contractual misrepresentation was not "anti-porn groups."
So my take, as a former business owner in the industry, was that it took a few public scandals and scares for the banks and corporate America to go "hmm... maybe we were wrong to get too liberal with this stuff." Some of that may have been fueled by the anti-porn lobby .. but if MindGeek had kept their nose clean it likely wouldn't have worked.
Here's my problem.
numerous
I dug into one such report that broke and apparently it was around 30 videos that they had found. When I checked Pornhub, I believe it currently had over 20,000 videos, and that was presumably after they'd been under quite a bit of scrutiny. IMO there is quite a mismatch in magnitude there.
Of course, there probably were other illicit videos, but there is no reason, in my opinion, to suggest that Pornhub had an unusually large problem. Unfortunately though, a lot of the videos like this that wind up undetected likely have been spreading through the Internet for several years going unnoticed simply because it doesn't look particularly different from any other pornography. As it turns out, at least certainly late teens look a lot like young adults.
This does create an unfortunate conundrum for anyone allowing user generated content that is pornographic. Even ignoring explicit abuse, teens are relentlessly horny andwillupload inappropriate things to the Internet, or even try tosellit. Seriously short-sighted behavior, but you know... they're teenagers. We've all been there. It's not some alien condition.
I understand that people have extremely strong emotions about this and want a zero-tolerance stance, but it's not possible. If you allow adult content, you inevitably get some ideally-infinitesimal trickle of illicit content, probably often strictly by accident. Best you can do is try to find it and clean it up as effectively as possible.
I fully understand why it's treated like toxic waste, and I'm not trying to justify it, but no matter how despicable the crime is, you can't fully eliminate crime, it doesn't work that way. I think keeping "legitimate" pornography sites like Pornhub was actually likelyslowingthe amount of said toxic waste because Pornhub actually did moderate, clearly, whereas the back alleys that people are likely to fall back to are going to simply be less well-moderated by their nature. At the end of the day, most social media platforms proliferate a lot more CSAM than Pornhub has even if you estimate very generously.
In the Omegle shutdown letter, the founder notes that Omegle's content moderation resulted in some criminals going to prison. Pornhub's moderation has undoubtedly done the same.
, but there is no reason, in my opinion, to suggest that Pornhub had an unusually large problem.
How many videos or images of child exploitation are required before it becomes an "unusually large problem" ?
Again, as someone who worked in the industry, I can't even begin to tell you how fucking paranoid and diligent we were about that. One single instance would have been enough to shut us down and possibly land us in jail. Not to mention the ethics of it which are paramount! This was to the extent where I was never even comfortable with the concept of user-provided / generated content being hosted and distributed on/by my web servers at all.
PornHub played with fire. They didn't just burn themselves, they burned all of us.
It would have only taken ONE instance! Two becomes "numerous" by definition. But one would have been enough.
I actually can't believe that you're trying to downplay the severity of what was at stake. I'm not typically one to be all "think of the children", but this is that one case where it really is literally that and most people don't find the level of diligence that I'm describing as being at all unreasonable.
I mean you're basically saying "they only murdered like 3 people ... and were pretty good about making sure they didn't murder more... hardly 'numerous.'" And if you don't think that child sexual exploitation is on a similar level in terms of severity of the crime then I don't want to know you.
I mean you're basically saying "they only murdered like 3 people ... and were pretty good about making sure they didn't murder more... hardly 'numerous.'" And if you don't think that child sexual exploitation is on a similar level in terms of severity of the crime then I don't want to know you.
This is absolutely insane logic. Pornhub didn'tcommitthe crime. Did you know murder happens every day? A lot more than three times.
Perfect moderation is impossible. You're saying that they would have to have a success rate of 99.99+% at catching this, when again, it can benearly impossibleto actually tell just by looking.
What exactly do you expect them to have done? What exactly do you think Twitter does?
Are you really suggesting that because this stuff exists and is impossible to prevent with 100% success, no website should ever allow user generated pornographic content without having some rigorous and highly invasive process for validating each video's provenance? (Not that it matters: doing this kind of thing will just make backchannels thedefactochannels. Not a good outcome for improving enforcement overall.)
(Come to think of it, if this is the actual logic of someone who worked in the adult entertainment industry, then I no longer have any difficulty understanding how dystopian chat/encryption/social media legislation manages to continue to be proposed and sometimes even become law.)
I say this as someone who ran an adult website for 18 years, in Canada, until suddenly our bank informed us that they were closing our commercial accounts and we couldn't find a single other bank or credit union in this country that would take our business despite a pristine 18 year track record.
Was there no way around it? Maybe with a shell company to hide your real business? I know it didn’t end up working out, I’m just curious if there looked to be any way out or if you really were just locked out of banking.
Full story here:https://coedcherry.com/fuck-banks.html(NSFW domain, but no adult content on that particular page).
TL;DR to answer your question: shell company would have been our best bet, but not something we could do logistically or ethically. It would have worked but we'd live every single day knowing that at any moment we could get flagged and go through it all over again. And with a full time job outside outside of running the company part-time there was no time, money, energy or will to set up such a front and figure out legitimate business activities to cover the revenue that was coming in from adult entertainment.
While I don't disagree with the bulk of your comment, it's worth noting that PornHub / MindGeek didn't just shoot themselves in the foot but hurt the entire industry when there were numerous videos of missing teens and underage content found on their site.
This itself is a misconception driven by those anti-pornography groups. MindGeek wasincrediblygood about removing CSAM from their platform, not just reactively butproactively. If you look at the numbers, Facebook is actually a much larger source of child sexual exploitation material than Pornhub was. However, Exodus Cry doesn't care about CSAM on Facebook, because their goal isn't to end CSAM: it's to end pornography.
It's hard for me to scapegoat conservatives and anti-porn groups when they were WAY more vocal and active when I first started my business
Anti-porn groups arewaymore activetodaythan they were in the early Bush years. The difference is that, unlike then, their campaigns aren't receiving any attention outside the business, which is part of why they're so successful: there's no real opposition.
if MindGeek had kept their nose clean it likely wouldn't have worked.
Anti-porn groups aren't going after these companies because they have scandals. They're going after them because they oppose pornography, and it fits their agenda. If they cared about ending child exploitation, they would go after companies like Facebook - but they don't, because that doesn't accomplish theirexplict, statedgoal of ending commercial sex work.
It's missing the point to blame MindGeek for the "scandal" when they're nowhere near the worst offender - they're just being targeted by groups who have a specific political agenda. No matter how much work MindGeek does to eliminate CSAM, anti-porn groups will claim that it's not enough. The leader of the Exodus Cry campaign hasliterally saidthat they want to make it impossible for MindGeek to operate legally.
Unfortunately, it's not that simple. Tumblr allowing adult content would probably get it removed from app stores. Only a few major apps get away with it, and when they're gone, they're gone.
Tumblr did fine before app stores ever existed, and could do perfectly well without them now as well. Web is enough.
Before app stores existed, smartphones weren't used the way they are today. Consumer habits have shifted... you'd be missing out on a HUGE part of the market.
Missing out on a huge part of the market is comfortable territory for Tumblr
That simply doesn't matter. Tumblr just needs to succeed in ANY slice of the market it can find. A small slice would do nicely.
The best bet would be the slice it originally appealed to, with its original kinds of content, in the original medium it was in.
Good and subtle distinction. Thanks.
Damn it. I love Tumblr, but it is really hard to sell advertising against the content on there, I'm guessing.
I wonder if it will get sold again?
I wish it hadn't been cleansed. Reddit just ploughed through all the objections to their adult content and came out the other side unharmed. Tumblr could have done the same.
That's notquiteaccurate about Reddit. It only made it through by purging dozens to hundreds of the more controversial NSFW subreddits. Most were justified, but they definitely bent to advertisers and PR like anyone else.
They also stopped allowing NSFW content to appear on the front page of r/all.
You also can't view NSFW content without being logged in any longer.
You can with old.reddit.com
Which afaik has an expired certificate. Let's not act like anyone outside the hn and og reddit bubble uses it
It hardly matters that the cert is expired if you're not logging in. Contrary to popular belief, TLS is not beneficial for sites where you aren't sharing secret data.
Contrary to popular belief, TLS is not beneficial for sites where you aren't sharing secret data.
I wish this meme would die.
Integrity is still important for non-secret data.
Confidentiality is important for data which may be considered secret in some contexts but not others.
What are the negative effects of questionable integrity of Reddit textual content?
Injecting malicious scripts, malicious links, spam, advertising, misinformation, or other harmful content such that it appears to the user to have been served from a trusted domain.
It's beneficial for all the other sites if non-secret data is TLS-encrypted, though. If I want to ban secrets, and HTTPS is only used for secrets, I can just ban TLS; but if HTTPS is used for most of the web, I have to ban most of the web (and such a ban will never last long).
Additionally, metadata such as browser history can reasonably be considered a secret: TLS helps protect that somewhat.
Seems fine for me.
Common Name (CN) \*.reddit.com
Organization (O) REDDIT, INC.
Organizational Unit (OU) <Not Part Of Certificate>
Issued On Thursday, August 31, 2023 at 8:00:00 PM
Expires On Wednesday, February 28, 2024 at 6:59:59 PMFor now.
Reddit's currently working on a UI/UX update for moderators on new.reddit (or newnew reddit as I like to call it since it's technically a second redesign) with an ETA of early 2024 [1]. According to them last year, 4% of users use old.reddit but carry out 60% of all moderating actions [2].
My guess is once that rolls out, they'll be ready to retire old.reddit.
The UI will live on though. There's mlmym [3] that allows you to use the interface on Lemmy. The instance of Lemmy I use has it onhttps://old.lemmy.world
[1]https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/15rxkbn/announcing...
[2]https://old.reddit.com/r/reddit/comments/v3frc1/what_were_wo...
Tumblr could have done the same.
Not without being removed from the iOS app store. Apple played their hand.
Yes they could have, just like other platforms do like Twitter or Discord, by simply hiding the NSFW content on iOS.
Those two platforms do nothing with NSFW content. They're just too popular for Apple to screw with.
I always expected them to roll its functionality and community into WordPress.com and essentially turn it into a frontend. There's a lot of redundancy. They already have a whole service dedicated to making and maintaining custom WordPress installs, so that would be the obvious place to go.
Anyone knows when will Threads be available in the EU? :(
No American media company wants to touch the EU now.
Wow, Facebook and Instagram finally pulled out of the EU?
No, but thanks to a devil's brew of knee-jerk moral panic and regulatory capture, nobody else can afford to enter your market. You're stuck with the incumbents.
Sorry, but you can't say you weren't warned. We're seeing the same thing happen with AI now.
Bluesky is an incumbent? Because that's where I am mostly now.
Enjoy it while it lasts.
Moral panic and regulatory capture? You must be talking about the Congressional hearings about Tiktok in the US. They haven't needed to do that in the EU, but then again they don't have a Facebook to protect.
Bluesky is better anyway
How does one get an invite? I must message Christopher McQuarrie. He once sent me a DM on Twitter and made my month <3
Don't worry, you're not missing much, it's really dead out there.
It was up until a few weeks ago. There was a real change, loads of content and activity now. I’m getting decent engagement even without many followers. Good mix of local and national/international content. The algorithm got a lot better, too.
When Meta figures out a way to screw users without running afoul of Digital Markets Act.
See what this act is about:https://ia.net/topics/unraveling-the-digital-markets-act
It’s not clear to me what this means. Freezing feature development? Rolling the backend into the rest of Automattic? Or the end of Tumblr?
Sounds like they are moving it from an actively developed project to one where they just babysit the existing users knowing they aren't making infinite money off them like they hoped.
No new features, new features are for closers.
The only new feature I wanted for Tumblr was ActivityPub, that was nixed a while ago. Bad show.
Their entire argument appears to be "We aren't making more money thanall-time peak revenueand usage stats are lower than peak too so we aren't wasting money on it any longer."
Maybe if they had realistic goals that weren't just "try to make more money than ever before" they could have kept going at least somewhat...
Sadly any capitalistic company fails for the same exact reasons. They can't continue making more and more money every quarter, so they call it a failure and give up. To these company's, having a stable business is worse than having a failed business. Because a least a failed business can be sold off for parts.
Revenue is not profit. They're losing money. Their bank balance is decreasing.
True, but that's the consequences of their choices years ago. They owners sought constant, quarterly growth in Tumblr to validate their multi-million (or billion) dollar purchase. And rather than building a company that's stable, they were just burning cash and throwing shit at the wall to see what stuck to make that profit trendline go up.
But Tumblr users are very hostile against, really, any changes to how Tumblr operates. It just alienated a lot of us, which isn't going to help them in terms of profit.
Their problem is also that "all time peak revenue" is not enough to cover even just the server costs, let alone salaries. They're bleeding 30 million USD per year with no path to profitability ever.
And move to the next project where we hope to make infinite money with no work.
Crypto had a great exemplary quote a while ago from poop face bros: "Obviously the crypto market did not live up to its lofty ambitions, so we're leaving."
Automattic has never been a get-rich-quick scheme.
It seems like social medias, from a financial perspective, are more commonly bad than good. Out of all the mainstream social medias I know, these ones seem to be losing money (or at least aren't generating "enough" profit):
- Twitter: halved in value in 1 year
- Tumblr
- Reddit: stated it wasn't doing well when it increased the API price
- YouTube: seems to not be doing well because it's trying to push adds and increasing YouTube premium
- Threads: I doubt this is generating profit, because I see multiple posts about how this "failed" and this is the first threads post I've seen posted somewhere else. Maybe I'm wrong though
- Mastodon & rest of the Fediverse: not very mainstream, but funding seems to be a common issue among communities, and this is with the relatively small userbase
- Stack Overflow and Quora: they've both done layoffs recently, and I've heard they're also faring poorly, but I don't have much information
- Bluesky, the audio-only one I forgot it's name: these certainly aren't making money
The ones which are doing well:
- Facebook: seemingly generating a lot of revenue because of ads and data collection
- Instagram: same as Facebook
- TikTok: probably because China pays well do to all of the information they get
- Discord: I haven't heard anything about them losing money, and they don't really push ads. Maybe because a lot of people pay for Discord nitro, or people pay for the servers?
- Slack & Teams: I also haven't heard anything, but I doubt they are losing money because companies pay for these
- Tinder: not really a social media but they're probably making money from people who pay a lot for premium
- Hacker News: Because it's cheap to run being text-only and brings publicity to YCombinator and their companies, I'm sure this is considered a financially good investment. But even then, it doesn't generate any revenue on its own
And ones I don't know:
- Twitch: seemed to have issues with money but idk, they have a lot of deals and sponsorships
Of course starting a small social media is always a bad investment, because it's very hard to get popular. But it looks like even the popular social medias are burning through cash reserves.
Who would have ever though giving way your product for free would not be a good business model... odd....
It is not "social media" that is the problem is the Ad Supported business model in general, everything ad supported is having problems right now, look at "news", blog sites, etc
If it is ad support is has issue turning a profit.
That is because ad supported is a terrible business model, however investors keep trying it for some reasons... it is like socialism, this time it will work .. we just have to "do it right"
nope. ad supported will never work. google is the closest by control everything from the browser up, but as we see with YT they still struggle
The problem with social media is that it has to get a large userbase, and it's much, much harder to convince someone to pay than it is to use your free service. Especially if your service is social media.
Twitter seems to be trying to get people to pay, and it isn't going well for them.
No, in today's world in order to make a "profitable" social media, you have to get people to pay through other means. Like news.ycombinator.com, forum.bodybuilding.com,https://forums.tomshardware.com/, and other forums do by promoting the main site (ycombinator.com, bodybuilding.com,https://tomshardware.com/). The forums definitely help the main site so they are a net positive to run, but you don't pay by using them directly.
Alternatively, if you don't care about making huge profits, there are a lot of social medias out there which seem to run on donations and volunteer work alone. 4chan, letsrun.com, lemmy.world and mastadon.world, and (although they're invite-only) tildes.net and lobste.rs, don't seem to have an income source besides (at most) banner ads and a merch store.
Forums can be very cheap to run, especially if they're text-only: I imagine you can run a site with ~1 million daily users on <$100/mo, a few admins who work after their day job, and an army of volunteer moderators.
I don't think 'having a large userbase' is a success or a necessity, you can have a better experience with 10-30 people who provide better discussion.
I think the issue is that we're worse than ever at finding good spaces for discussion.
You're right, of course, but 10-30 people isn't much of a business opportunity unless they're stupendously rich.
>and it isn't going well for them.
I would love to see your source for that? To my understanding since twitter is private now no one has any idea what their costs structure or revenue is currently and are taking huge assumptions that they have issues because of events like them not paying rent etc. But some of that is common tactics to force people to negotiate.
I am not saying they are doing well, but currently I have no evidence in either direction
>you have to get people to pay through other means.
Which ironically is twitter/x over all goal I believe, to not just be Social media but to bring in some of the original idea's that first made Elon rich... Paypal. Money Exchange, ecommmerce, now AI, etc etc etc.
To be more than just social media.
The company formerly known as Twitter handed out stock grants to its employees in paperwork that valued it at about $19 billion
https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/xs-rock-bottom-leaves-...
Perhaps (probably) Twitter was overvalued, perhaps they're lying, but there's no evidence suggesting that Twitter is doing better than it was before and a lot of evidence suggesting otherwise.
That being said, I do think Elon's other bad decisions and press have caused the greater share of loss, and maybe charging users is getting some of that back. And one of Elon's goals, having people pay for content creators and services, isn't necessarily a bad idea; it's just that right now most people go out of their way not to.
I think it's a good point, considering that in an example only meta products made money. And Meta is huge advertising company that doesn't just sell ads in their apps, but also sell ads in other people apps with Audience Network.
So in attention economy the ultimate winners aren't advertisers or advertii but the ad brokers.
I wonder if HN gets paid by companies recruiting, they might even manage to make a small profit if so. I think the "high density" of users is in favor of HN doing well - low server requirements and an average high median income per user (if HN ever need crowdfunding, that is.)
Does Substack count as social media? How are they doing?
Is there any alternative for having a gallery of text&photo posts without forced login and exploitative social media distractions? (except for self-hosting)
When I looked for this 11 years ago, tumblr was the only platform ticking these boxes. I just wanted to share a link to photos of what we are up to with family and friends without asking them to register at another platform, and only tumblr allowed that and did not look as if it would close shop within two years.
Looked again recently and it still seems to be the only platform filling that overall „niche“. Also it has a clean and good user interface, and is customizable to the point of changing the HTML. I hope they can save or otherwise sustain it.
Other social media attempts to constantly distract and emotionalize me to keep me hooked. Looking at a good art or photography Tumblr feels like relief now honestly.
Edit for a bit of info: There is no discovery mechanism built-in and no "algorithm". The way to find more posts on a topic is to use hashtags. Everything is reverse-chronological. If someone wants their post to have broader engagement, they will post with "#The Cohost Global Feed" or some broad topic. You can go browse if you want to, but the site isn't going to push anything on you (besides following the site admins lol).
Cohost doesn't have full-text search built-in, but Google actually has it covered.https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=is%20piss%20a%20vegeta...
Hmm not bad, though having to do 4 "pick the land vehicles from 4-bit images" was super annoying!
fwiw I got onto cohost a few months ago and have really enjoyed it.
Because it's a smaller community with no "algorithm" intentional discovery actually happens. I use hashtags to find stuff, andother people have found my stuff via hashtags!I only started sharing online this year and so that second bit is huge - it's night and day between twitter and cohost[1].
The site actively tries to avoid the status games that other social networks play. You can't see follower counts or like counts (including your own) and instead get notifications like "several folks liked this" (with a list of who did). There's no easy way to answer "how big is this person's following" when looking at their profile.
I think this adds up to a site that feels more like a community. Comments are typically either nice/encouraging or interesting and folks comment a lot. It's easy to find cool posts. Not having metrics is freeing. Many of the folks that post are there to share the cool things that they do.
It's not a replacement for twitter, but it's easily the site that I'm the most excited to share stuff on - especially early WIP stuff (I shared something fun last night!)
[1]I shared an early version of Flappy Dird[2] on cohost and got some real engagement and it feltgreat. Flappy Dird ended up doing pretty well on HN; I doubt I would have polished it as much without the early cohost support.
Wordpress can be quite close to the aesthetic of tumblr. One blog post per event, with pictures and text in whatever form you want.
You will have to pay for it though.
Tumblr hasn't been primarily about your styled hosted "x.tumblr.com" site for a long time. Most users hang out on the dashboard and don't really expect non-Tumblr users to be visiting their blog. It's a lot closer to Twitter than a blog these days.
Pixelfed is trying to be a federated version of Instagram, with the generally pro-user design that goes along with it that goes along with that.
It's a free alpha. The finished product will be paid (but cheap) for those who want to post.
But it's not for porn if that's the sort of photos you want to post.
google photos share gallery?
Usability-wise, the thing that keeps me from using any Fb things, Threads.net included, is they break the bloody Back button!
Change of subject - any thoughts on the difference between user-friendly URLs?
Root paths route to usernames:
-https://www.instagram.com/username
Sigil-scoped paths for usernames (these also use www-prefix):
-https://www.threads.net/@username
-https://www.youtube.com/@username
Path-scoped usernames:
-https://www.reddit.com/user/username
-https://www.reddit.com/u/username(redirect)
-https://bsky.app/profile/username.bsky.social
There's obviously an engineering cost to having usernames at the root, but does that make sharing easier?
Which would you use if you were starting a new app?
Is the first option strictly better for growth? Are the technical caveats not worth it?
Why the heck did this get downvoted to -4?
It was an earnest question. I'm trying to figure it out for my own startup.
Perhaps a tangent too far?
No, it's just hackernews
I love custom domains, and subdomains, but with the way cookies and everything work now you really have to put everything in a sub-directory, so I'd recommend the first approach.
the first option is the best imo by far. So clean. I've seen nontechnical people experimenting with those, playing and having fun seeing who has the username "banana" etc
Youtube web version for desktop has the same problem if I get what you mean right.
Going to a Microsoft support forum page will do this as well. At least in my experiences
Remember when people talked about Tumblr replacing Twitter as Elon Musk took over? Remember their pathetic bluecheck stunt? What's wrong with this organization? How did they fail to capitalize on such a massive opportunity?
Tumblr fundamentally doesn't work the way Twitter does (imagine if Twitter was all screenshot retweet chains!), and so it's a poor replacement. I find it hard to use – I get lost in the reblogs – and I've used it for well over a decade now.
It's really hard to get people to switch one at a time, you have to bring over whole networks for it to work. It has to be a community switching together. Threads has been successful because they can promote it so much from Instagram.
Tumblr has better checkmarks.
Twitter is being replaced the way Craigslist was replaced, gradually and by many options instead of one. There won't be a single new sudden Twitter replacement. That's a good thing, I use a bigger variety of sources than I did before quitting Twitter. I don't rely so much on any one.
twitter still allows porn accounts
Also mentioned in this thread: Tumblr's ActivityPub integration (discussed herehttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33716429) was apparently announced without any plan and then immediately cancelled once they started thinking about how to implement it.
Glad to hear they dodged that bullet. Thanks for pointing this out.
Who dodged which bullet? This is all just lose-lose as far as I can make out.
lol
Though with the new context that a few months after that tweet, the whole of Tumblr has been put on life support, it seems there may have been business considerations he wasn't privy too.
I think Tumblr is going to end up in business textbooks as a classic example of corporations seizing a community and strangling the life out of it
I think it's rather a cautionary tale of never growing income to meet your expenses. They never made a business; just a vc then yahoo then verizon then automattic-owned charity.
It's really fascinating how long some of these things can carry on. One of my contracting clients has been going for over ten years (!!!) without ever making a profit and even now with the waves lapping at their feet they're still angling for the next big investment tranche.
It's a case study footnote, a citation that proves that the social media economy could only bear 2-3 commercially successful participants. Everything else is just prospectors digging for oil and never striking it.
Sign of the times. Another classic name from the earlier days on the intertubes may be about to vanish.
I guess I feel old because tumbler feels like one of the 'newer' sites, as it came out about 2007 - when the great migration to facebook started.
to me, 'early days' means 1995-2005
I miss the days of AIM and "Skype Me". Simpler, more innocent times.
our AIM away message was the equivalent to a facebook wall back then
A side point, but: the title holds another important lesson. It’s a well known truism that smart people learn from their failures. But most people also don’t bother to learn from theirsuccesses, thus have trouble repeating them.
It seems like success is luck (usually timing) more often than anything else, while failure has a more diverse range of modes.
Luck provides opportunity (if you let it) but then how you handle the opportunity is something you can learn.
Interesting to see this was posted on Threads instead of Tumblr which might kind of show the root of some of their problems.
Does $30 Million a year spend rate seem typical for their size? I'm assuming a large part of that is the salaries for 139 people.
If you're leaking confidential corporate info, you probably don't want to post the leaks on the same company's platform.
I answered a ton of questions about this, on my Tumblr using the Asks feature:https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt
I didn't scroll very far down before the site demanded that I log in and wouldn't let me continue reading. Why do you do that, and is it possible you could see your way clear to not do that?
As an early Tumblr user, godspeed. You were fun while you lasted.
Tumblr is the only social media site that truly hooks me for hours at a time anymore. So while I’d be sad to see it go and take all its lovely fan communities down… I would get a lot of my time back.
Tumblr, a service mainly used by teenage girls is unmonetizable? You don't say...
How do you know it’s mostly teenage girls? Also, teenage girls buy a lot of stuff as well as heavily influence what teenage boys buy/like…
I know it’s cool to bags on teenage girl tastes but in reality it’s not very accurate. The youth demographic is one of the most important for many consumer businesses.
Automattic's product catalogue kind of comes across as an elephant graveyard of formerly important services well past their prime, so this doesn't seem terribly surprising.
OpenText is another one like that.
I'm surprised that memo leaked. Automattic is very open with employees and trusts them not to share internal information. While I worked there (2013-2018) I don't remember any news leaking.
Even when we do leak, it's thoughtful. You can tell whoever did it cropped out a bunch of stuff, including the text that would have tripped the Texts acquisition that wasn't announced at the time. I still don't love it, but at least it speaks to our hiring process finding people with high integrity.
Turns out social networks are hard to get right.
More like, it's hard to turn social networks into advertiser casinos. As long as the servers stay up, I doubt Tumblr users care.
It was like a somewhat more positive counterpart to 4chan, it was full of madness, toxicity and vice, and also a space for creativity like few others.
It was also one of the walled gardens, even if it always felt more open than the rest, but the web continues to weaken as content creation and delivery continues to be consolidated in the exploitative platforms of Meta, TikTok, and now to a smaller degree, X, with their recommendation algorithms fine tuned to make you an addict to parasocial relationships and negative emotions.
Don't forget YouTube. Video thumbnails seem to be converging on a few clickbaity templates - probably to appease "the algorithm". Not even LockPickingLawyer is safe.
From Mr. Automattic himself:https://www.tumblr.com/photomatt/733544011556618240/theres-o...
Key part:
>"I'm advocating for this change because I think it has a good chance at success. I don't do anything hoping to fail. There are lots of examples of products with hundreds of millions more MAUs and smaller teams than Tumblr currently has, and there are amazing examples like OpenAI and Telegram running circles around much bigger players with small teams. That's what we hope to replicate."
So it sounds like he hasn't given up on Tumblr.
He's also commenting on other threads in this post.
Or you lose, as Tumblr is figuring out.
photomatt is like a benevolent DHH
> losing $30M a year
> 139 employees working on product and marketing
$216,000 loss per employee per year? Ouch.
I wish I was allowed to use Threads.
Wow, threads on the front page, is this the first time that organically happened (ie. Not the launch announcement)
I wonder what amount of a service like Tumblr's server expenses are strictly related to storing and serving historical content, and what value it really brings to the business.
What would a service like Tumblr look like if things just got deleted after 90 days, or a year? What would your server costs look like then? How much traffic do ancient posts actually garner, in aggregate? Could you monetize permanence (only pro users data is kept for longer than a year)?
OT: it seems as if Meta‘s play with Threads is working out?
[…] we’re going to give everyone an opportunity to have a “top three” ranked list of what other things around Automattic they would be interested in working on.
Admittedly cynical take, but please don’t let anybody mess up Pocket Casts. That app is near perfection and has been criminally underrated for far too long.
A more accessible non-Threads version:https://xoxo.zone/@andybaio/111380745108104518
I alwyas thought I did learn more from winning than from losing for future success.
( win || ( learn || wallow in self pity ) )
From a live-stream from the Tumblr staff convention this year, their CEO:
Tumblr’s monetization strategy since the Automattic acquisition has been “throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.” Which is kind of your only option when the Tumblr user-base is actively hostile towards monetization attempts. Tumblr tried a “Tumblr Post Plus” Patreon-like subscription thing, and the creator that they enrolled in the test got so much hate they cancelled it before it fully launched. I could list the monetization strategies they’ve tried but there are too many. Merch, tipping, promoting your own posts, cosmetic check marks after your username, crabs, promoting other people’s posts, lore behind the merch store, a “Luffy” tab on the top of the page (in between “Following” and “For You”) (I think was a Netflix promo). At one point they were running ads for Tumblr on Tumblr. I should make a post describing them all.