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Tumblr to move its half a billion blogs to WordPress
- adriamaker 2y agooh wow, wordpress is still strong
- mrweasel 2y agoWordpress is huge, but practically invisible to most of us.
- achillesheels 2y agoHard to find a path to justify a $1B valuation. Cult content subscriber model? #meh
- Terretta 2y agoFTA: “A longtime popular place to socialize, blog, participate in fandoms, and more, Tumblr originally exited to Yahoo (also TechCrunch’s parent) for north of $1 billion under then-CEO Marissa Mayer’s leadership in 2013. The hope at the time was to transform Tumblr into another social media powerhouse and to grow its ads business. However, the subsequent years were rough on Tumblr, as sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit dominated the space.” That last sentence just skips the whole story. Verizon bought Yahoo in 2017, thinking the way to "grow the ad business" was to dump the "and more" part of Tumblr in 2018. It took less than a year for Verizon to look for a way to avoid being reminded of this miscalculation. Asking 0.3% of Yahoo's price did the trick in 2019. This isn't so long ago. The omission is interesting.
- deepsun 2y agoDidn't get what you're saying. What is "and more" part of Tumblr?
- avandekleut 2y agoNamely adult content. They began heavily moderating this kind of stuff, leading to a mass exodus, in particular to twitter which was amenable to it.
- bhaak 2y agoNot to Reddit? I hardly ever saw adult content on Twitter.
- debacle 2y agoReddit still has a lot of adult content, but AFAIK you can't find it unless you know where it is.
- SV_BubbleTime 2y agoI know the search in Reddit is absolute trash, but let’s not pretend such silly things, okay?
- ribosometronome 2y agoDon't you need to toggle the setting on if you use the official app? Plenty of folk will never look there.
- dpassens 2y agoPlenty of folk won't want adult content to show up in their search results. I'd wager that those that do are capable enough to check their settings, given that they should know concepts like safe search from google.
- dpassens 2y agoAt least on old.reddit.com, underneath the searchbar is an expandable help section that, among others, explains the nsfw: search parameter. I'd hardly call that hidden.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- speckx 2y agoMore @ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391260 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41391260
- djbusby 2y agoNo, this thread is larger. That link has three small comments.
- cabbageicefruit 2y agoNot to nitpick your nitpick, but “more” has more than one definition.
- debacle 2y agoThis is very cool.
- RobotToaster 2y agoI assume they're migrating it to the proprietary wordpress.com SaaS, not the open source wordpress.org?
- batuhanicoz 2y agoDisclaimer: I work at Automattic but not on WordPress.com or Tumblr. This is all based on my impressions and personal opinion. From the perspective of the user it’s just another blogging platform. Tumblr blogs are not self hosted and isn’t based on open source code at all. Tumblr code seems too specific and part of a bigger machine, so it also doesn’t make sense to make it open source. AFAIK goal is to make this mostly invisible to the users and their blogs will be powered by open source. Any improvements to Tumblr blogs will have a chance to make it into the core of WordPress. I’d imagine it’s also going to be way easier to move your blog to any other hosting provider, giving the user a wider choice.
- michaelbuckbee 2y agoIt's described in the article that they're going to use Wordpress as a sort of "backend" platform for the existing Tumblr front end interface and that this is to mesh with their existing hosted architecture.
- oaththrowaway 2y agoAt one time Tumblr had all the assets from each blog in one giant S3 bucket. Wonder what that migration looks like for this or if they'll just keep them there.
- mannyv 2y agoThere's no technical reason not to do that. The only reason to move it to some other storage provider would be to save on egress fees, but I'm sure that 95% of the content is never touched by humans after it's posted. It may be crawled, though.
- chiefalchemist 2y agoMigrating Tumblr to WP effectively doubles WP's market share. Market share is often sighted by Automattic and the WP Community. "Around 478 million websites are built on WordPress" From: https://www.wpzoom.com/blog/wordpress-statistics/ https://www.wpzoom.com/blog/wordpress-statistics/
- cabbageicefruit 2y agoTumblr is one website. Not 500,000. Even though 500,000 people have a blog there, it is still tumblr.com. Even if you do set up a subdomain such as my-blog.tumblr.com it still just redirects to tumblr.com/my-blog. Counting tumblr as 500,000 websites is like counting everyone’s Facebook profile as its own website.
- chiefalchemist 2y agoI'm fairly confident that's not how WP.com does it. On WP.com - via WP multisite - each site has it's own instance of WP and therefore each counts as a site running WP. Tumblr's injection would result in a significant increase in the number of websites running WP.
- evanelias 2y agoThe relevant number is 500,000,000, which is 1000x larger than the number you're citing. But also your comment about subdomains is wrong: redirecting to tumblr.com/my-blog is an optional setting, with the default being to use a subdomain. You can also use custom domains rather than a tumblr.com subdomain. Tumblr has had this functionality for almost its entire existence.
- chiefalchemist 2y agoHalf a billion is 500 million.
- evanelias 2y agoYes, and the user I directly replied to above incorrectly said "500,000" three times, which is only 500 thousand. Tumblr exceeded that blog count well over 15 years ago. Your original comment, about how a Tumblr migration would double the WP site count, was correct. That isn't what I replied to above.
- justinator 2y agoSomeone, somewhere just got a massive headache when they read the deadline for this.
- chambers 2y ago"You won’t even notice a difference from the outside." I can't recall the last time a company told the world about an internal migration, with no user impact, before the migration even started. It reminds me when a company I worked for acquired a growing PHP-based platform with an active userbase. Unfortunately, the parent didn't understand the new business as well as they thought. They were also afraid to take risks, to learn the business and grow it. Absent a product strategy, mid-level management & engineers prioritized an enormous but politically safe migration from PHP to Python, the parent's standard. That migration took years while other companies and platforms entered the space and ate up marketshare, leaving the acquired platform superfluous. I would be unsurprised if Automattic is using technical migration as busy-work. I would even suggest that, given this post's marketing and history[1], Automattic has realized they cannot grow Tumblr. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672486 and the follow-up take from the CEO https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36672956
- teruakohatu 2y agoIn this case it is not rewriting for the sake of rewriting, it’s moving content from one CMS to another which happens to be their main product. There is no reason to think this would not work out. The only code being rewritten is front end theme code, and some Wordpress plugins to support any unique tumblr features.
- vineyardmike 2y ago> I would be unsurprised if Automattic is using technical migration as busy-work. I would even suggest that, given this post's marketing and history[1], Automattic has realized they cannot grow Tumblr. I would also say that migration to WordPress is explicitly a marketing strategy for word press, their main product. Migrating a product you bought to be part of your main product is a pretty common corporate move.
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- red_admiral 2y ago> The company clarified that it will not change Tumblr _into_ WordPress; it will just run on WordPress. > ... > You won’t even notice a difference from the outside[.] Less of a story than the headline suggests.
- dimal 2y agoIf they can pull of that migration, it seems interesting enough for HN. It’s “just” a blog, but this is a huge technical challenge.
- red_admiral 2y agoOh, definitely. But the average tumblr user won't wake up one day and have their page look like a wordpress site. (There's a chance they'll wake up one day and everything is down for a while, but that's a different matter.)
- dvh 2y agoWhat always bugged me about WordPress is that default installation which has only 7 tables uses 3 different column naming conventions (table.ID, table.table_id, table.table_ID) plus sometimes it uses full table prefix and sometimes shortened prefix. Are you not bothered by it? This is the first thing new user sees. This was years ago I had to check again as I'm not using it and default installation is now 12 tables but the random column naming is still there.
- lioeters 2y agoInconsistent naming is one of a million things that will drive you crazy about WordPress if you are a detail-oriented person. It's a living demonstration of "Worse is better."
- dangrossman 2y agoBackwards compatibility is more important than consistent naming conventions. 43.5% of all sites on the web run on WordPress (as of August 2024), and they have 20+ years of plugins and themes installed, many of which talk directly to the database.
- jorams 2y ago> This is the first thing new user sees. The vast majority of WordPress users, and even many people who call themselves "WordPress developers" never look inside the database. WordPress is, in almost every way, a terrible platform to develop on. What saves it is backwards compatibility, an enormous ecosystem, and being relatively easy to use for everybody who needs to use it.
- egypturnash 2y agoWhen does a new user look at Wordpress’ tables? I’ve been using it for my site for like a decade and I only ever have to look in the database when I’m doing really complicated hacks, or something broke.
- righthand 2y agoI would be upset. Wordpress is such a terrible platform to develop on, footguns and limitations in every implemented magic function. why would you even open the door to Wordpress with so many better options?
- Tomte 2y agoYou‘re not seriously asking why Automattic would use WordPress?
- righthand 2y agoAh missed that bit of history I guess. It’s still a bad idea, just the amount of effort it takes to translate from one system to another. I’m currently doing this at my company but we’re leaving Wordpress and it’s an astronomical effort.
- sigseg1v 2y agoI'm assuming that you are trying to keep your content, styling, and markup maintainable or even upgrade it as you move the pages though? I'd imagine this is a different scenario. The content created by users will be put through some AI transformation and it will be completely and utterly unmaintainable slop (and a significant portion of it would have already been that anyway before they started since it's user submitted). They aren't going to care that much if some edge cases break. Users can go fix that themselves. It seems much different to me than trying to delicately move something you care about.
- remexre 2y agoAutomattic, the developers of Wordpress, currently own Tumblr.
- righthand 2y agoThey should know how bad of an idea it is then. There is going to be so much broken from this migration.
- pfdietz 2y agoThis is surprising news. I was surprised Tumblr was still around.
- incognito124 2y agoIn my circle, tumblr is pretty much around. It had a bit of a renaissance after musk bought twitter and reddit broke 3rd party apps, when both userbases fled to tumblr
- scosman 2y agoShouldn’t they just use a static site generator? /s
- pupppet 2y agoHow many of these half a billion blogs are zombie blogs that haven’t been updated in years?
- ss64 2y agoMigrating to to the "WordPress back end" is not the same as migrating to WordPress. The back-end database of Tumblr is reportedly very simple so migrating it to whatever database running on whatever OS is probably not too hard. The chance of them migrating all the application code to use some kind of hacked about wordpress theme is absolutely zero.
- genter 2y ago> The chance of them migrating all the application code to use some kind of hacked about wordpress theme is absolutely zero. Dunno why you'd say that, that's the exact thing I'd expect them to do. I realize it's idiotic and will end in failure, but I still expect them to do that.
- evanelias 2y agoNo, that doesn't even make sense as a concept. Tumblr has its own templated theme functionality. Users can pick one of many thousands of existing themes, or fully customize one from scratch. So it sounds like Automattic would need to implement a conversion layer between Tumblr's template language and data model, and the corresponding ones in WP. Their functionality and data models also don't line up 1:1 conceptually, so this is no easy task.
- CodeWriter23 2y agoYou sound just like the guy from approx 20 years ago who stomped up and down on the Ars forums proclaiming "Cocoa was not going to replace Carbon".
- amaccuish 2y agoLink?
- ericyd 2y ago> probably not too hard > The chance... is absolutely zero Unsolicited advice: practice more intellectual humility.
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- extraduder_ire 2y agoHopefully they can pull this off without a horrific accident turning most of them into crabs.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- stephenr 2y ago.... I need to know what this is a reference to?
- extraduder_ire 2y agoIn general, Carcinisation (convergent evolution turning everything into crabs). In specifics, that's a running joke on the website, the staff even warned users when they added user verification badges to the site that they cannot guarantee the badges will not turn into crabs one day.
- doublerabbit 2y agoNext up: "oops we lost all the data due to migration. Sorry about that"
- winddude 2y agoInteresting, I wonder will it be "1 wordpress instance" with each tumblr blog as an author, or something like wordpress.com / WPMU where each tumblr blog is a wordpress blog.
- mrweasel 2y agoFrom Wordpress own post about it, they're going to run it on the wordpress.com infrastructure. The solution is whatever is already running their hosted offering. It does not however seems like Automattic themselves completely know how this will work. https://automattic.com/2024/08/27/shipping-tumblr-and-wordpress/ https://automattic.com/2024/08/27/shipping-tumblr-and-wordpr...
- rbanffy 2y agoBeen there, done that in 2008, but it was only half a million blogs. A very interesting undertaking anyway.
- sogen 2y agoCan you tell more
- crossroadsguy 2y agoAutomattic has quite a portfolio as of now: https://automattic.com https://automattic.com. Among other things they now have Beeper, Simplenote + Day One, PocketCasts, and Tumblr which is moving.
- throwgfdtr2024 2y agoI am a fan of the way Matt thinks, and I absolutely adore what he did for Simplenote. I don't get the Beeper acquisition at all. But maybe it has some core technology value.
- codedokode 2y agoBy the way why does Tumblr now resembles Twittr so much? And they also lock the screen after viewing several posts.
- ernesth 2y agoIs this move the reason for the random 403 errors I get from the tumblr rss feeds I follow? Since a few weeks ago, some feeds are disappearing then reappearing, sometimes they are unavailable for a few days, sometimes it's back the moment I refresh. If the move is in the future, I guess that means they have neglected the current platform.
- markx2 2y agoAutomattic has said for years that they (Wordpress) power X% of the internet. Before wordpress.com users had to actively choose WP. With the advent of wordpress.com and it's 'freemium' tier that arguably started to distort numbers. After all, stale, dead "Hello World" blogs count toward stats. Now, with Tumblr, Automattic will say they power X+% of the internet When Automattic buys Blogger, that boast about powering % of the net will increase even further. It's a takeover, not user choice.
- donohoe 2y agodead "Hello World" blogs count toward stats By the same argument, those same dead blogs on other platforms also count in the other direction too. The "WP powering X% of the internet" is just a nice PR/marketing blurb. It never had anything to do with user choice so I would bot conflate the two.
- raverbashing 2y agoMy question is how efficient this is. I suppose Automattic has a multi tenant version of WP, still, thinking on how traditional WP scales, having one instance per blog seems overkill.
- throwgfdtr2024 2y agoI don't know how different wordpress.com is to 'typical' WPMU (wordpress multi-user) as is deployed by e.g. some large universities, where tens of thousands of blogs can exist in one single database instance, served by one single front end which has a wildcard/domain mapper. But I imagine it is not exactly the same. They have tens of millions of tenants AFAIK.
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoSurely they're not getting rid of Tumblr's streamlined 'tumblelog' post UI/UX right? So what are they talking about.... the functionality will just be using a WordPress posting API in the background? Which to all regular users won't look or feel like 'WordPress' really. Feel like WordPress means the experience of using that blogging UI. Which I guess is why the conclusion here is "you won't even notice a difference from the outside". Making this kind of a non-story.
- snapplebobapple 2y agoNext week's news: tumblr blogs all hacked
- h_tbob 2y agoI don’t understand why you would migrate anything to Wordpress. Wordpress, to me, seems like the platform you start on. Easy to get up and running. But when you get a mature product, you need something with better performance. I hate to say it, but anything with a plug-in architecture is always going to be slower than a custom stack. I wonder how performance will be affected after the move. Never used tumblr by the way.
- evanelias 2y agoInfrastructure-wise, the FOSS wordpress.org that you self-host isn't quite the same as the massively multi-tenant wordpress.com service run by Automattic. Your comment seems to be about the former, but this announcement is about the latter. In other words, they're proposing a migration of some unspecified portion of Tumblr to re-use existing infrastructure/code/services that power the wordpress.com hosted service. They're not proposing somehow moving 600 million Tumblr blogs to individual FOSS wordpress.org instances; that indeed would make no sense whatsoever.