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.
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.
Tumblr aren’t being laid off, they’re just switching to other teams within Automattic.
I’d love to see a defederated version of Tumblr. It would solve so many problems over there, honestly.
How about
People just start hosting their own blogs again?
But doesn’t that make it harder to get discovered? Im not into blogs, so I know nothing about tumblr or self hosted blogs.
Federation in it’s current state won’t solve that problem either.
As someone who still uses Tumblr daily, I like how they’ve neglected they keep pissing around with the site itself which probably drives down engagement, or people purchasing things like the damn crabs or even the ad free premium. That layout they did to make it have the ugly sidebar was a terrible decision and I’m surprised they listened enough to roll it back. At one point I thought about supporting it with the premium but then they did that layout change, and briefly got rid of avatars on the dashboard… people like Tumblr for what it is. They don’t want it to look like Xitter or New Reddit. 😑
I’m still tiny to figure out why they thought Tumblr Live was a good idea. It seems like a waste of money to chase after…I’m not even sure who, Twitch? TikTok?
Does that function even work? Like, do real Tumblr users even use it? Everything I see is just a reminder to snooze it again, or people who have accidentally accessed it and it crashes. Definitely a feature absolutely no one asked for.
No one I know who uses Tumblr likes it. I don’t know anyone who has done anything other than snooze it the second it turns back on. They really just did not know their user base and how tumblr is used.
