
Tumblr CEO David Karp is stepping down from the company - mtwstudios
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/27/16705748/tumblr-ceo-david-karp-founder-resignation-verizon-yahoo-oath
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mrmekon
Tumblr was the easiest way to setup a simple stream-of-photos blog, so I used
it often.

I recently moved all of my "blogs" off of it because visiting one slowed
desktop browsers to a crawl, and literally crashed mobile browsers. Dev tools
showed a minimum of 20MB transferred when visiting my site, and it quickly ran
up to 60+MB if you touched the scrollbar.

That is a _lot_ of prefetching.

Just visiting tumblr.com while not logged in currently transfers 8MB, and
displays a content-less landing page.

~~~
krisdol
Exploring tumblr today is like exploring myspace pages in 2006. No matter how
powerful your PC, it's a miserably slow site to browse and, in my opinion,
difficult to mentally ingest content from.

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giobox
Did anyone really think that with a Yahoo acquisition this would go any other
way? Great for the original Tumblr team getting their probably deserved
payday, not much else.

I did love how Tumblr embraced the mess of custom styling etc they supported -
was refreshing to visit a crowd driven site where everyone's profile isn't the
same stale standard template.

~~~
danso
I loved Tumblr. I was a casual user but not only was it fun for a time, it
opened my eyes to how important details are in implementation. I mean in the
sense that I thought Tumblr wouldn't be useful to me because I already had my
own WordPress blog (and various Jekyll blogs), but Tumblr's opinionated
refinements and limitations made for a substantially new content-creating
experience. And it was something I could only grok by trying out Tumblr.

Didn't use it much after the Yahoo acquisition. Nothing relating to Yahoo, had
just moved onto other things. But I don't know what blame to assign to Yahoo,
other than the sin of not being more aggressive in trying to "do" something.
But it's not clear that trying to aggressively iterate Tumblr would be better
than being hands-off about it.

What would Tumblr be like if Yahoo hadn't acquired it? It was a great platform
but I never got the sense -- in the way that I have with Instagram and
Snapchat -- that Tumblr was capable of rapidly innovating while preserving the
core experience.

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QAPereo
[https://medium.com/@somospostpc/tumblr-is-
tumbling-d6deb3bb8...](https://medium.com/@somospostpc/tumblr-is-
tumbling-d6deb3bb831e)

Seems like this might have something to do with it.

~~~
adammck
Wow, that New Posts chart is brutal. This nearby link[1] seems to claim that
Yahoo failed to "not screw it up", but the details are extremely vague. I'm
unclear what could have caused such a dramatic reversal. ~Everyone left, but
why? What changed?

[1] [https://qz.com/735583/](https://qz.com/735583/)

~~~
adventured
There is now a better way to do what Tumblr was trying to do. Their stated
mission was basically to dramatically simplify expression.

Young people hate writing very much text.

Young people hate using posting interfaces of the sort Tumblr utilizes (it
still comes across as a CMS posting system).

Young people hate too much effort toward customization, which is required to
make a Tumblr page look half decent.

Enter Snapchat, WhatsApp, Kik, Viber, Instagram etc.

Click, record video, send.

Click, snap, add four words, send.

No layout customization bullshit. No concerns about something on your page
breaking by mistake and having no idea how to fix it to get it back to normal.
No diary/journal or blog text aspect, which _most_ people have zero interest
in.

It's too useful for what its newer users want (the ones that would be signing
up and providing growth).

Simply put, Tumblr is a dinosaur. It happened that fast.

~~~
adjkant
I actually disagree strongly with this analysis, and I want to detail some
stuff here.

Tumblr was something that artists and fandoms took pride in putting time into.
The grassroots were always the holder of the users despite everything
mentioned here, even in 2010 and earlier. XKit tried its best to cater to the
fans, but it felt as if it was being fought every step of the way by Tumblr
itself. They had the power users that drove it, they will for some time still
too, but again and again, they ignored the needs of their users, and the
terribly broken comment system barely got a marginal fix just recently (past
year?), which is still broken on individual blogs often. Blogs often got
deleted for unknown reasons without warning and tons of users lost years of
content and conglomeration of information.

I don't see Tumblr being in the same category as any of those you listed
really except for maybe Instagram, where more professional artists are
thriving. The culture was always the glue of Tumblr, and none of those
services have it.

The CMS posting style was fine. The customization was great, and while retro,
suited the community. There are tons of great text posts and educational
content that was immensely helpful towards LGBT youth, sexual discovery,
getting real history lessons to supplement the broken US high school history
classes, art, music, fandoms, and so much more. Lots of it is still there even
today. But it's a fringe community with very little marketing or ad value and
a community that hates corporations more than any other group I can think of.
There was never a path to monetization. I'm just sad to see it be killed
through neglect of its true potential and actively pushing away users it felt
like. I think its creator took a few wrong steps but in the end, realized
there wasn't anything he could do with it and is hence moving on.

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bernardino
Unfortunately, I deleted my blog a year ago but I used Tumblr from 2009 to
2016, around from age 14 (when I got my first laptop) to age 21.

My blog went through many stages: I went from having a quality blog to having
an astronomy/science blog to having a surf/beach blog to having a film/tv-show
blog to having a design/architecture/animation blog to having a
literature/poetry/quotes blog to having a spirituality/art blog. The community
on Tumblr was particularly wonderful since it always aligned with what your
blog interests where. I had many friends over the years, i.e. a woman from New
York who I met when she was in high school and I was in high school (we video
chatted and talked for almost four years), a woman from Paris studying for a
masters in translation in Scotland when I had my literature/poetry/quotes blog
(I remember her recommending I read Pride and Prejudice and I saying I would
only read Pride and Prejudice if she watched The Godfather), a man from London
who was a father when I had a spirituality blog (we would philosophize about
things).

Above all, while these days I try to use the internet less and I am not a part
of many social media platforms, I remember those days fondly and some lates
nights, I think I wish I still had my blog and my followers and the people who
I was following. I do not think there is/or will ever be a better place for an
internet community than Tumblr was for me.

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alfithehermutt
I would too tumblr's day has passed. Marissa made a huge mistake betting on
tumblr.

The pornography and toxic community killed what could have been a strong
twitter microblog service.

~~~
dna_polymerase
I get the pornography part, whenever you are checking a simple site it can
happen that there is NSFW stuff visible without a warning.

However, toxic community? I never had that impression. That said I never used
Tumblr for longer periods and I don't get how to comment on stuff or really
interact there.

~~~
erebus_rex
Can't speak for OP but Tumblr has a pretty big SJW subculture; screenshots
from more esoteric or radical discussions get some ridicule on reddit and
elsewhere. Check (the equally toxic) subreddit tumblrinaction for a sample of
this type of content. I can't tell you how representative that is of the whole
site though as I am also not a tumblr user.

~~~
free_everybody
I'd like to point out that you're referencing hand picked, extreme examples of
a community. There's a massive bias. You have no way of knowing what Tumblr is
like based on these examples.

~~~
zaarn
From my experience, TIA is rather representative once you remove the various
art blogs and their reblogs.

As I've stated in another comment, several creators I enjoy have been
massively bullied by wider communities on Tumblr until they left.

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manigandham
WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. are the popular networks now.

Tumblr naturally declined regardless of Yahoo (which definitely failed at
integrating its adtech and never made any money). That's how it goes with
social networks, it's a cycle of latest and greatest, and the whims of the
public can change in a few short years.

~~~
1_2__4
None of those have adult communities in the rounding error of the scale Tumblr
does.

~~~
manigandham
...reddit does. Also the adult sites are building their own communities now,
no need for a limited separate network.

