7 ms·

OK, what's it going to take to keep tumblr running? That's literally all I care about here. Everything else in Yahoo can be gotten or done elsewhere, but tumblr

by oddevan 10y ago

OK, what's it going to take to keep tumblr running? That's literally all I care about here. Everything else in Yahoo can be gotten or done elsewhere, but tumblr's a social network, so there's value in preserving those connections.

davidgerard 10y ago
Import to Wordpress. They've been chronically unable to monetise Tumblr. Assume they could Geocities you at any moment.
- pjc50 10y ago
  You can't forcibly migrate other people to wordpress, and its their blogs which have the value. Tumblr is an important community even if it does have a few weirdnesses and inconsistent policy enforcement.
  - jstanley 10y ago
    Perhaps there's scope for a tumblr mirror, which could eventually take over from real-tumblr (and allow the blog owners to continue blogging) in the event that real-tumblr goes all geocities.
    - hxegon 10y ago
      I feel like that would be a TOS violation.
      - patrick_haply 10y ago
        If a service doesn't exist, can you violate its TOS?
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - tajen 10y ago
        We don't know whether Tumblr's porn content is legal. There's absolutely no way a risk department would allow hosting massive porn pictures of potentially underage volunteers (or not-so-volunteers), let alone acquire a company who does that as a job, or copy that content over for free. Porn ventures use specific advertising platforms, payment methods and insurances. I must be wrong, since Yahoo believes Tumblr increases its worth.
  - komali2 10y ago
    How is it an important community? I thought it was a blogging platform? Can't users just migrate to wordpress?
    - pjc50 10y ago
      Blogs don't stand on their own, part of the popularity of it is the easy re-blogging and propagation of popular posts, both for memes, discussions, and occasionally fictional collaboration. It's like Livejournal in that regard.
    - CydeWeys 10y ago
      It's a social network, not a blogging platform. You have a consistent identity across the entire site, including everyone else's blogs that you comment on. It's closer to Facebook (with a larger focus on writing original posts) than it is to WordPress. If you were around for LiveJournal, it's more like that. Tumblr has a huge community and there are a large number of niche topics that have their biggest communities on Tumblr.
      - sedachv 10y ago
        > If you were around for LiveJournal, it's more like that. LiveJournal is a good comparison here - it never went away, is still popular in some communities (Runet), and is not worth very much money because most Internet users in the United States that advertisers care about decided to move on to other social networks.
  - vntok 10y ago
    Why not migrate them to WordPress.com (the platform) then?
    - untog 10y ago
      Does WordPress have reblogging? A feed that will show you all the posts from people you follow? From what I've seen (and I'll admit to not being overly familiar with either), WordPress and Tumblr are very different beasts with every different aims.
      - elliottcarlson 10y ago
        This has been one of the things I saw as the biggest hurdle (as a former Tumblr employee) - most people unfamiliar with Tumblr assume it's a blogging platform, while the dashboard with its social aspects is biggest component of Tumblr. Wordpress and Tumblr are very different beasts when it comes to what they offer in whole - though Wordpress would suit those that only use Tumblr as a blogging platform.
      - JorgeGT 10y ago
        > Does WordPress have reblogging? A feed that will show you all the posts from people you follow? To answer your questions: yes and yes: https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/read-blogs/ https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/read-blogs/ (Not that I use it, but this functionality was implemented back in 2012).
        gibrown 10y ago
        And still actively being worked on: https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/reader-refresh-2017/ https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/reader-refresh-2017...
  - davidgerard 10y ago
    I'm active on Tumblr. The trouble is it's owned by Yahoo, doesn't make a lot of money (if it's even in the black) and has resisted all attempts to monetise it. (Advertisers seem to want something like a blogging Pinterest, not extended political ranting.) At this point there's the ArchiveTeam and that's about it, so we actually have something to point at when we're talking about what a great website that sure was back then.
dragonwriter 10y ago
> OK, what's it going to take to keep tumblr running? If the Verizon deal falls through, I'd say "someone with the skill and resources to keep Tumblr running buying Tumblr, either together with other parts of Yahoo! or separately."
stryk 10y ago
Isn't Yahoo _really_ big in Japan? My understanding is a lot of their services are overwhelmingly popular there.
- ghaff 10y ago
  Yahoo Japan is basically a separate organization, albeit with Yahoo investment.
ghaff 10y ago
For me, it's Flickr that I would be annoyed losing. Not so much for my own photo hosting which is easily moved elsewhere. Everything is local on Lightroom anyway and I basically never use the social aspect of Flickr any longer. But Flickr is a great repository of other content, including a great deal of Creative Commons and public domain, that AFAIK isn't available with nearly the quantity or curation elsewhere. Maybe Google would buy given that it's pretty much bombed out on photo sharing itself.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  interesting...forgot about flickr. to be honest imgur and even reddituploads pretty much killed it for me.
  - leviathant 10y ago
    I use Flickr's API to drive some arts related websites. I also appreciate that Flickr stores (and exposes, with your permission) EXIF data. It doesn't overcompress images, and you can access the full resolution that you upload to. I really haven't found anything else quite like it, and I would hate to see it go away. I've been paying for my pro account for the last eight years.
    - ghaff 10y ago
      SmugMug at least used to be considered a good alternative. They became less attractive after a pricing change a few years back but I haven't really looked carefully for a long time. My main requirement is that I can essentially just set up a new publishing channel from Lightroom and press "Go" (which I believe I can do with SmugMug). But, yeah, it was popular for a time to dump on Flickr because they hadn't really moved forward. But truth be told, it pretty much does the job for me the way it is and I don't want a whole bunch of social stuff dumped on it.
  - chrisper 10y ago
    But imgur and reddituploads are serving a different purpose? They are both just image sharing (no one cares if it is low quality). However, Flickr is for photographers who want high quality images and EXIF info etc.
brilliantcode 10y ago
Maybe it will end up like the geocities. All in all, I stay away from tumblr because the pages always crash and slows to a crawl. I'm not sure if Marissa accounted for the fact that Tumblr's users are far far less likely to look at ads than even FB.
skuhn 10y ago
The short answer is: a ton of money. Tumblr has insanely high operating costs and practically no revenue stream. Yahoo has spent a lot of time and money (while fighting with Tumblr people) to get these costs down, but much of that work would be undone to separate Tumblr from Yahoo. So much of Tumblr's traffic is comprised "non-monetizable" porn sites that Yahoo foots the CDN bill for, which does nothing to build the brand or the social aspect of the service. They can't truly crack down on it though, because that would reveal the truth: there isn't that much real use to justify the spending.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  Well, they can't crack down on it because a significant amount of Tumblr's actual users are there for porn (both fanart and "regular" porn), at least in part, and would see doing so as censorship and being disconnected from the community.
- sytelus 10y ago
  Why Tumblr has such high costs? It doesn't seem to warrant complicated infrastructure like search or Flickr. It shouldn't require 100s of people to maintain. A tons of eyeballs should translate to very significant revenues here.
- dismantlethesun 10y ago
  > So much of Tumblr's traffic is comprised "non-monetizable" porn sites that Yahoo foots the CDN bill for I'm curious why you find pornography to be non-monetizable. It's a $97 billion dollar industry, and is probably easier to directly monetize than a random mishmash of personal blogs because adult sites tend to focus solely on a single fetish, and there's a clear standardized categorization of such.
  - skuhn 10y ago
    Tumblr does not display ads on pornographic content. It is not something that Yahoo is willing or able to monetize, and yet it represents a substantial amount (perhaps the majority) of the cost of operating Tumblr. Maybe a future operator of Tumblr would feel differently -- but I think it would be difficult to monetize both sets of content simultaneously.
jimmywanger 10y ago
> so there's value in preserving those connections. Why is there value? Honest question, just curious. Do myspace friends, for instance, still have value in today's day and age?

by oddevan 10y ago

davidgerard 10y ago

Import to Wordpress. They've been chronically unable to monetise Tumblr. Assume they could Geocities you at any moment.

pjc50 10y ago
You can't forcibly migrate other people to wordpress, and its their blogs which have the value. Tumblr is an important community even if it does have a few weirdnesses and inconsistent policy enforcement.
- jstanley 10y ago
  Perhaps there's scope for a tumblr mirror, which could eventually take over from real-tumblr (and allow the blog owners to continue blogging) in the event that real-tumblr goes all geocities.
  - hxegon 10y ago
    I feel like that would be a TOS violation.
    - patrick_haply 10y ago
      If a service doesn't exist, can you violate its TOS?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - tajen 10y ago
      We don't know whether Tumblr's porn content is legal. There's absolutely no way a risk department would allow hosting massive porn pictures of potentially underage volunteers (or not-so-volunteers), let alone acquire a company who does that as a job, or copy that content over for free. Porn ventures use specific advertising platforms, payment methods and insurances. I must be wrong, since Yahoo believes Tumblr increases its worth.
- komali2 10y ago
  How is it an important community? I thought it was a blogging platform? Can't users just migrate to wordpress?
  - pjc50 10y ago
    Blogs don't stand on their own, part of the popularity of it is the easy re-blogging and propagation of popular posts, both for memes, discussions, and occasionally fictional collaboration. It's like Livejournal in that regard.
  - CydeWeys 10y ago
    It's a social network, not a blogging platform. You have a consistent identity across the entire site, including everyone else's blogs that you comment on. It's closer to Facebook (with a larger focus on writing original posts) than it is to WordPress. If you were around for LiveJournal, it's more like that. Tumblr has a huge community and there are a large number of niche topics that have their biggest communities on Tumblr.
    - sedachv 10y ago
      > If you were around for LiveJournal, it's more like that. LiveJournal is a good comparison here - it never went away, is still popular in some communities (Runet), and is not worth very much money because most Internet users in the United States that advertisers care about decided to move on to other social networks.
- vntok 10y ago
  Why not migrate them to WordPress.com (the platform) then?
  - untog 10y ago
    Does WordPress have reblogging? A feed that will show you all the posts from people you follow? From what I've seen (and I'll admit to not being overly familiar with either), WordPress and Tumblr are very different beasts with every different aims.
    - elliottcarlson 10y ago
      This has been one of the things I saw as the biggest hurdle (as a former Tumblr employee) - most people unfamiliar with Tumblr assume it's a blogging platform, while the dashboard with its social aspects is biggest component of Tumblr. Wordpress and Tumblr are very different beasts when it comes to what they offer in whole - though Wordpress would suit those that only use Tumblr as a blogging platform.
    - JorgeGT 10y ago
      > Does WordPress have reblogging? A feed that will show you all the posts from people you follow? To answer your questions: yes and yes: https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/read-blogs/ https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2012/01/20/read-blogs/ (Not that I use it, but this functionality was implemented back in 2012).
      - gibrown 10y ago
        And still actively being worked on: https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/reader-refresh-2017/ https://en.blog.wordpress.com/2016/12/14/reader-refresh-2017...
- davidgerard 10y ago
  I'm active on Tumblr. The trouble is it's owned by Yahoo, doesn't make a lot of money (if it's even in the black) and has resisted all attempts to monetise it. (Advertisers seem to want something like a blogging Pinterest, not extended political ranting.) At this point there's the ArchiveTeam and that's about it, so we actually have something to point at when we're talking about what a great website that sure was back then.

dragonwriter 10y ago

> OK, what's it going to take to keep tumblr running? If the Verizon deal falls through, I'd say "someone with the skill and resources to keep Tumblr running buying Tumblr, either together with other parts of Yahoo! or separately."

stryk 10y ago

Isn't Yahoo _really_ big in Japan? My understanding is a lot of their services are overwhelmingly popular there.

ghaff 10y ago
Yahoo Japan is basically a separate organization, albeit with Yahoo investment.

ghaff 10y ago

For me, it's Flickr that I would be annoyed losing. Not so much for my own photo hosting which is easily moved elsewhere. Everything is local on Lightroom anyway and I basically never use the social aspect of Flickr any longer. But Flickr is a great repository of other content, including a great deal of Creative Commons and public domain, that AFAIK isn't available with nearly the quantity or curation elsewhere. Maybe Google would buy given that it's pretty much bombed out on photo sharing itself.

brilliantcode 10y ago
interesting...forgot about flickr. to be honest imgur and even reddituploads pretty much killed it for me.
- leviathant 10y ago
  I use Flickr's API to drive some arts related websites. I also appreciate that Flickr stores (and exposes, with your permission) EXIF data. It doesn't overcompress images, and you can access the full resolution that you upload to. I really haven't found anything else quite like it, and I would hate to see it go away. I've been paying for my pro account for the last eight years.
  - ghaff 10y ago
    SmugMug at least used to be considered a good alternative. They became less attractive after a pricing change a few years back but I haven't really looked carefully for a long time. My main requirement is that I can essentially just set up a new publishing channel from Lightroom and press "Go" (which I believe I can do with SmugMug). But, yeah, it was popular for a time to dump on Flickr because they hadn't really moved forward. But truth be told, it pretty much does the job for me the way it is and I don't want a whole bunch of social stuff dumped on it.
- chrisper 10y ago
  But imgur and reddituploads are serving a different purpose? They are both just image sharing (no one cares if it is low quality). However, Flickr is for photographers who want high quality images and EXIF info etc.

brilliantcode 10y ago

Maybe it will end up like the geocities. All in all, I stay away from tumblr because the pages always crash and slows to a crawl. I'm not sure if Marissa accounted for the fact that Tumblr's users are far far less likely to look at ads than even FB.

skuhn 10y ago

The short answer is: a ton of money. Tumblr has insanely high operating costs and practically no revenue stream. Yahoo has spent a lot of time and money (while fighting with Tumblr people) to get these costs down, but much of that work would be undone to separate Tumblr from Yahoo. So much of Tumblr's traffic is comprised "non-monetizable" porn sites that Yahoo foots the CDN bill for, which does nothing to build the brand or the social aspect of the service. They can't truly crack down on it though, because that would reveal the truth: there isn't that much real use to justify the spending.

vertex-four 10y ago
Well, they can't crack down on it because a significant amount of Tumblr's actual users are there for porn (both fanart and "regular" porn), at least in part, and would see doing so as censorship and being disconnected from the community.
sytelus 10y ago
Why Tumblr has such high costs? It doesn't seem to warrant complicated infrastructure like search or Flickr. It shouldn't require 100s of people to maintain. A tons of eyeballs should translate to very significant revenues here.
dismantlethesun 10y ago
> So much of Tumblr's traffic is comprised "non-monetizable" porn sites that Yahoo foots the CDN bill for I'm curious why you find pornography to be non-monetizable. It's a $97 billion dollar industry, and is probably easier to directly monetize than a random mishmash of personal blogs because adult sites tend to focus solely on a single fetish, and there's a clear standardized categorization of such.
- skuhn 10y ago
  Tumblr does not display ads on pornographic content. It is not something that Yahoo is willing or able to monetize, and yet it represents a substantial amount (perhaps the majority) of the cost of operating Tumblr. Maybe a future operator of Tumblr would feel differently -- but I think it would be difficult to monetize both sets of content simultaneously.

jimmywanger 10y ago

> so there's value in preserving those connections. Why is there value? Honest question, just curious. Do myspace friends, for instance, still have value in today's day and age?