Surprised by this news. Tumblr has lost a ton of momentum since its policy change, and the site itself doesn't have a very strong "brand" audience attached to it.
Fun fact: I can't recall the last time I either opened a Tumblr link or saw one in the wild. But maybe that's just me.
Every time I visit a Tumblog subdomain it just kicks me back to my own Tumblr dashboard and has for around 2 years now. When it started happening people said it was a bug but seemingly it's intentional? Not sure I understand the point but presumably this is for some sort of metrics they push?
Individual Tumblr blogs get to decide whether example.tumblr.com is "only visible to logged-in users." If they turn on that setting, the site 1. forces you to log in, and 2. renders the site inline as part of the Tumblr dashboard SPA. If you don't turn it on, though, your Tumblr blog is a public/static website indexable by Google.
Importantly left out here is what the default is. It sounds like the default is must log in - I can't imagine how many tumblr users would choose to only have logged in viewers. I've left a while though so feel free to correct that.
The default is public. Usually, the users who choose “must log in” choose it either because they’re paranoid about privacy, or because it is a prerequisite to having the site enforce a viewer blacklist for them (to block incessant stalkers.)
There is also, above and beyond that, the ability to make a blog private, by setting a password to access it. A blog with a password is still rendered out to a static site, though, strangely enough; just one with the equivalent of an .htaccess password-gate behaviour.
> Fun fact: I can't recall the last time I either opened a Tumblr link or saw one in the wild. But maybe that's just me.
I'm pretty sure I've never opened a tumblr link in my life, but I see screenshots all the time on Facebook and reddit, and I know what "rebloging" is. So I guess the brand has some value there.
1) Tumblr has turned into such a disaster that Verizon is looking to dump it ASAP, and they're asking for fire sale prices.
2) Automattic thinks they can turn Tumblr around. They will probably get a lot of good will if they reverse the porn ban, and that alone will draw a lot of attention to Tumblr. And if that fails, then Automattic has 200 new employees they can put to work on their in-house projects. At worst, it's an acquihire, and if #1 is correct, it's a cheap acquihire.
>Mr. Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a Tumblr user and sees the site as complementary to WordPress.com. “It’s just fun,” he said of Tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.”
Is it just me or does Tumblr feel really heavy weight and bloated when you open even small blog posts the size of a tweet?
They had the opportunity to be the light weight blogging option. But its various design decisions seem strange to me as an outsider. Maybe it needs to revisit its past minimalism? ala old Twitter.
Well they decided to allow users to use arbitrary HTML themes for their blogs so there's not a whole lot they can do about that. The default theme isn't too terrible but a lot of the user themes are.
The worst is people using some old theme that embeds a script hosted on a site that no longer exists and the whole page load hangs until the request times out.
nah, even the default theme is very heavy and laggy...that's on the developers, not the users. Tumblr also uploads every GIF as an actual GIF, and doesn't convert them to webm or something that would reduce it to a fraction of the size. Lots of sites slow to a crawl because of this.
December 17th 2018, maybe? I know I stopped seeing a lot of tumblr links when that policy changed, even ones that weren't affected by the change. I'm curious how much traffic and posting changed when that finally went into effect.
I will say though that the "final straw" dropped interest by half overnight.... so it certainly was detrimental but they certainly where losing interest over time.
or it stopped growing through google discovery, but its core base had it bookmarked, visited it through autocomplete, or used the app. google search results going down doesnt necessarily mean active users went down.
App store bans and country bans should be better indicators.
Their brand wasn't particularly strong in the first place. Correct me if I'm wrong, but for years it was widely known as a home to porn and people blogging about genders. I never knew anyone personally who hosted anything on Tumblr.
Maybe it could be turned around, but it's pretty old-school at this point and seems hardly better to me than MySpace.
I never knew anyone personally who hosted anything on Tumblr.
My impression is that most people used it pseudonymously, to speak to things they didn't want associated with their public identity, so perhaps you knew people who hosted on Tumblr but didn't know that you knew them.
I never said there was. The public, on the other hand, isn't necessarily interested in sifting through those kinds of content on a dying platform that many people have long since moved away from. If they want to bring people back to Tumblr at this point, they either need to get rid of the perception that they're a dumping ground for porn, or they've got to completely own it. But that won't happen, because enough people remember that Tumblr tried to expunge all that stuff.
any reasonably large brand that can afford a social media manager will use automated tools that crossposts the exact same content to Twitter, FB, IG, and Tumblr.
The original appeal of Tumblr was that it was a modern day Xanga, lots of personal, anonymous journaling, weird jokes and photos. I don't recall anybody becoming an influencer via Tumblr, probably because it didn't attract that kind of audience.
Fun fact: I can't recall the last time I either opened a Tumblr link or saw one in the wild. But maybe that's just me.