Also mentioned in this thread: Tumblr's ActivityPub integration (discussed here https://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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's not quite accurate 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.
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.
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.
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.
Can't a "trusted" domain itself, i.e. one with a non-expired cert, do all that shit just as well as a "non-trusted" one? AIUI, the cert only confirms that you are who you say you are, not that you're a good guy. I mean,are you saying Facebook doesn't have a cert, or that it doesn't have spam and advertising?
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 PM
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 on https://old.lemmy.world
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.
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."
Their entire argument appears to be "We aren't making more money than all-time peak revenue and 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
From a live-stream from the Tumblr staff convention this year, their CEO:
> Yeah, so right now, we're burning. Which means spending more than we make. About 30 million per year more than we make.
> So, that's a lot. We can't do that forever and so that's why we're really trying to figure out things that y'all would value. Whether that's merch or upgrades or badges or gifts or Blaze or other things. Every little bit helps, so please if you really enjoy Tumblr and want it to stay a thriving service buy things, and ask your friends to buy things.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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 even acknowledge there'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 absolutely require discovery. 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 monetization is 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.
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
Those are too big to fail. Nobody would buy an iPhone that doesn’t have Instagram.
500px is another example of a site full of nudity that has to arbitrarily censor for iOS, all because Apple is protecting their 10x-market-rate credit card processing business (30% instead of 3%) by preventing sideloading. It’s bullshit that Apple decides for me what I am allowed to view. How convenient that it also protects their revenue stream.
I think you might be forgetting that Tumblr had a completely fine status quo, including showing me very much adult content on my iPhone, until Verizon bought them.
Blaming the App Store was always an excuse.
Tumblr just didn’t want to put the effort in to keep CSAM off their site.
What you've said above is completely incorrect, and as a former Tumblr employee I find it deeply offensive.
Why confidently state these things when you seriously have no idea whatsoever what actually happened here? GP's statements were much closer to the situation in reality.
> Last month, Tumblr said its iOS app was pulled from the Apple Store over child pornography found on the platform. According to a Twitter user who claimed to have found the illegal content, Tumblr had initially failed to take down the images, despite repeated complaints about the problem. (As of Monday, the Tumblr app is still unavailable on Apple's App Store.)
I think you can also look at the various discussions of this issue online. The user perception was that it was inordinately difficult to report abusive content.
I also recall an instance finding problematic content and now knowing how to report it. I think it didn’t occur to me think “I think this person might be underage, better hit the share button”. TikTok for example makes it incredibly easy to report offensive, unsafe, or illegal content.
Whether or not Tumblr management _intended_ to have very poor controls against CSAM doesn’t change the fact that they did in practice. And when push came to shove, instead of protecting user expression on their platform, they banned a whole category of content rather than building the tools and policies needed to make it work.
Worst case, they could have, instead of deleting all adult content, removed the toggle for iOS users and made them go to the browser for filtered content.
Even if you hate Apple for censoring their platform, it was Tumblr’s choice to apply that policy to Android and web users.
This response and earlier comments also fail to address the fact that the iOS app had a toggle to block NSFW content. It was allowed in 2017, and it was allowed in 2022. So I’m not sure why they had to purge non-CSAM content and remove the toggle in 2018. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/11/tumblr-sensitive-content-t...
Is there insider info that challenges any of that?
You're making a ton of incorrect assumptions about what approaches Tumblr tried, what solutions Apple rejected as insufficient, what resourcing decisions were made by Tumblr vs parent company, and so many other critical details here.
It's pretty messed up for you to say "Tumblr just didn’t want to put the effort" when you have no idea who or what was actually responsible for any of the things you're describing. I don't feel you are addressing this topic in good faith, so I'm not going to continue discussing this with you.
You’re saying that from the perspective of the Tumblr people, having been purchased by Yahoo/Verizon, there were limited options. And maybe negotiations with Apple came into play once the CSAM problem was already so bad the app was delisted.
What I’m saying is that from the consumer perspective, it doesn’t really matter who in the company made the choice (Tumblr people or Verizon people), a business choice was made to remove a significant part of the users and use case for the platform.
Similarly by the time Apple banned the app for CSAM, maybe it truly was too late to keep NSFW content on the platform for Apple users, and maybe it was seen by ownership as too expensive to implement a partial solution. Regardless of ownership, failing to invest in effective moderation and flagging tools at every point in Tumblr’s journey was a business choice.
Maybe it was too expensive to keep CSAM off the platform. I don’t see evidence that Tumblr made those investments. An easy reporting option for users is the bare minimum. Maybe Tumblr would have bankrupted themselves policing that content - but choosing to not go down that road is still a business decision and still not something that can realistically be pinned on Apple.
In other words there are two versions of the story:
- Excuse: we had to take down NSFW content platform wide because Apple hates adult content
- Explanation: we didn’t have the resources to police an NSFW platform effectively, so we made a business decision to drop that segment of our business
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.
> 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.
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.
(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 a lot of text and relatively well compressed image files with not a lot of hardware.
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).
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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 their successes, thus have trouble repeating them.
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.
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.
My IG feed is 80% WeRateDogs, most of the rest is silly-positive stuff. I've not ever seen erotica on there, barely even seen any ribaldry. It has learned my tastes well.
I don't know how much variation there is in other people's feeds, of course, but that you think IG is a good example implies your feed is showing you very different things to mine.
This seems like satanic panic style paranoia. Dropping a hot take like that, especially with “literally” thrown in, needs a bit more content to mean anything. To start, I don’t know how any site “makes people addicted to porn.” Why? Because it has porn? So what?
You don't think the millions of hours of widely available online porno has any impact on our culture or how people view sex? It's incredibly ignorant to think that "evangelical Christians" are the only ones opposed to porn
> You don't think the millions of hours of widely available online porno has any impact on our culture or how people view sex?
No, hence why I didn't say that.
> It's incredibly ignorant to think that "evangelical Christians" are the only ones opposed to porn
Lots of people are opposed to porn. The idea of porn addiction, OTOH, is very strongly associated with religiosity in general, and certain socially consevative Christian subcultures in particular.
Being opposed to a thing and thinking that association with it fits in an addiction model aren't the same thing.
I can not think of legitimate organization that is more filled with conspiracy theory than the UN.. so citing "well this UN organization says it so it can be conspiracy" is very ironic
> The WHO recognizes "porn addiction" so it’s not some conspiracy theory. Not that I trust the WHO.
Who are you to say this? Who? WHO? You don’t trust WHO but do trust them when they support your pre-conceived solution? You really think you won’t get fooled again?
Using the WHO was just an example. Porn addiction is recognized by many "experts". I don't doubt you can be addicted to anything: video games, porn, exercise, sex, whatever. Now, treating it like a disease akin to drug addiction, that's something I don't understand.
You've raised a question and assumed what the answer is.
Has society been affected by accessible porn? If so, to what degree? Of the ways it was affected, which were positive and which were negative? On the whole, is it harmful?
They're good questions but I doubt the answers are simple.
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.
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.
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).
Cool find! I'm trying to post a content-focused side project in as many grassroots platforms as I can. My main site is already in Neocities, for example. I think I could work with this too!
That said, I wish they featured some random pages or categories from their homepage. I'd like to see what communities already exist around the topic of my project.
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, and other 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 felt great. Flappy Dird ended up doing pretty well on HN; I doubt I would have polished it as much without the early cohost support.
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.
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
- LinkedIn
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.
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.)
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 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.
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.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] thread- https://mastodon.social/@_jv_/110692236418053393
See what this act is about: https://ia.net/topics/unraveling-the-digital-markets-act
Sorry, but you can't say you weren't warned. We're seeing the same thing happen with AI now.
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.
Additionally, metadata such as browser history can reasonably be considered a secret: TLS helps protect that somewhat.
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.
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 on https://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...
[3] https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym
Not without being removed from the iOS app store. Apple played their hand.
No new features, new features are for closers.
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."
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...
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.
Root paths route to usernames:
- https://twitter.com/username
- https://github.com/username
- 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?
It was an earnest question. I'm trying to figure it out for my own startup.
Perhaps a tangent too far?
> Yeah, so right now, we're burning. Which means spending more than we make. About 30 million per year more than we make.
> So, that's a lot. We can't do that forever and so that's why we're really trying to figure out things that y'all would value. Whether that's merch or upgrades or badges or gifts or Blaze or other things. Every little bit helps, so please if you really enjoy Tumblr and want it to stay a thriving service buy things, and ask your friends to buy things.
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.
This always seems like a really bad idea.
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.)
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 absolutely require discovery. 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 monetization is 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.
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.
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.
The path where they just left everything untouched is a path to certain failure.
Twitter, Threads, Instagram, Chrome, and countless other App Store apps are perfectly comfortable serving up racey content.
500px is another example of a site full of nudity that has to arbitrarily censor for iOS, all because Apple is protecting their 10x-market-rate credit card processing business (30% instead of 3%) by preventing sideloading. It’s bullshit that Apple decides for me what I am allowed to view. How convenient that it also protects their revenue stream.
Blaming the App Store was always an excuse.
Tumblr just didn’t want to put the effort in to keep CSAM off their site.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/tumblr-to-ban-pornography-startin...
Some would say it is disappointing that Apple draws the line at child sexual abuse, but I guess that is a matter of opinion.
Why confidently state these things when you seriously have no idea whatsoever what actually happened here? GP's statements were much closer to the situation in reality.
I think you can also look at the various discussions of this issue online. The user perception was that it was inordinately difficult to report abusive content.
The second comment on this thread reports that even the moderation that was taken was ineffective. https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/a2r4h4/whats_...
I also recall an instance finding problematic content and now knowing how to report it. I think it didn’t occur to me think “I think this person might be underage, better hit the share button”. TikTok for example makes it incredibly easy to report offensive, unsafe, or illegal content.
Whether or not Tumblr management _intended_ to have very poor controls against CSAM doesn’t change the fact that they did in practice. And when push came to shove, instead of protecting user expression on their platform, they banned a whole category of content rather than building the tools and policies needed to make it work.
Worst case, they could have, instead of deleting all adult content, removed the toggle for iOS users and made them go to the browser for filtered content.
Even if you hate Apple for censoring their platform, it was Tumblr’s choice to apply that policy to Android and web users.
This response and earlier comments also fail to address the fact that the iOS app had a toggle to block NSFW content. It was allowed in 2017, and it was allowed in 2022. So I’m not sure why they had to purge non-CSAM content and remove the toggle in 2018. Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/11/tumblr-sensitive-content-t...
Is there insider info that challenges any of that?
It's pretty messed up for you to say "Tumblr just didn’t want to put the effort" when you have no idea who or what was actually responsible for any of the things you're describing. I don't feel you are addressing this topic in good faith, so I'm not going to continue discussing this with you.
You’re saying that from the perspective of the Tumblr people, having been purchased by Yahoo/Verizon, there were limited options. And maybe negotiations with Apple came into play once the CSAM problem was already so bad the app was delisted.
What I’m saying is that from the consumer perspective, it doesn’t really matter who in the company made the choice (Tumblr people or Verizon people), a business choice was made to remove a significant part of the users and use case for the platform.
Similarly by the time Apple banned the app for CSAM, maybe it truly was too late to keep NSFW content on the platform for Apple users, and maybe it was seen by ownership as too expensive to implement a partial solution. Regardless of ownership, failing to invest in effective moderation and flagging tools at every point in Tumblr’s journey was a business choice.
Maybe it was too expensive to keep CSAM off the platform. I don’t see evidence that Tumblr made those investments. An easy reporting option for users is the bare minimum. Maybe Tumblr would have bankrupted themselves policing that content - but choosing to not go down that road is still a business decision and still not something that can realistically be pinned on Apple.
In other words there are two versions of the story:
- Excuse: we had to take down NSFW content platform wide because Apple hates adult content
- Explanation: we didn’t have the resources to police an NSFW platform effectively, so we made a business decision to drop that segment of our business
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That's without getting into video content.
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.
Like Bored Crabs NFTs or restaurant supplier or health insurance or...?
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!
I don't think they'd generate peanuts so as to not even cover hardware costs.
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.
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?
to me, 'early days' means 1995-2005
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.
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.
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.
I don't know how much variation there is in other people's feeds, of course, but that you think IG is a good example implies your feed is showing you very different things to mine.
“Porn addiction” seems largely to be an evangelical Christian shame mechanism more than (and possibly instead of) an actual phenomenon.
No, hence why I didn't say that.
> It's incredibly ignorant to think that "evangelical Christians" are the only ones opposed to porn
Lots of people are opposed to porn. The idea of porn addiction, OTOH, is very strongly associated with religiosity in general, and certain socially consevative Christian subcultures in particular.
Being opposed to a thing and thinking that association with it fits in an addiction model aren't the same thing.
Looks like porn is available for sale, possession, and production in almost all Christian majority nations, but not Islamic ones - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography_laws_by_region
I can not think of legitimate organization that is more filled with conspiracy theory than the UN.. so citing "well this UN organization says it so it can be conspiracy" is very ironic
Who are you to say this? Who? WHO? You don’t trust WHO but do trust them when they support your pre-conceived solution? You really think you won’t get fooled again?
Has society been affected by accessible porn? If so, to what degree? Of the ways it was affected, which were positive and which were negative? On the whole, is it harmful?
They're good questions but I doubt the answers are simple.
Are we allowed to blame the internet, or the transistor for such effects too?
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...
That said, I wish they featured some random pages or categories from their homepage. I'd like to see what communities already exist around the topic of my project.
Because it's a smaller community with no "algorithm" intentional discovery actually happens. I use hashtags to find stuff, and other 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 felt great. Flappy Dird ended up doing pretty well on HN; I doubt I would have polished it as much without the early cohost support.
[2] https://eieio.games/nonsense/game-11-flappy-bird-finder/
You will have to pay for it though.
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.
> 139 employees working on product and marketing
$216,000 loss per employee per year? Ouch.
- 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
- LinkedIn
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.
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
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 think the issue is that we're worse than ever at finding good spaces for discussion.
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.
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.
So in attention economy the ultimate winners aren't advertisers or advertii but the ad brokers.