I'm super excited to have the Tumblr team and product join the Automattic family. We've been evolving Automattic to be more of a Berkshire Hathaway-inspired model and businesses with a lot of autonomy, and this continues that trend.
I was very impressed with the engagement and activity Tumblr has continued to have, and I hope that with this new ownership and investment the product will blossom.
According to this article [1], you plan to move Tumblr's backend onto WordPress. Considering that Tumblr's infra stores over 1 trillion distinct product objects, this would be one of the most technically ambitious migrations in history. Can you share any thoughts of how it will be approached? Will you be pruning/purging old content or inactive users?
That's an excellent question! I don't want to be so presumptuous as to define an exact approach before the technical exploration has started, besides saying it'll be done incrementally and in an easily revertable way to be invisible to users, just like the big datacenter migration Automattic just completed a few weeks ago.
At the point when we start this the Tumblr team will have been part of Automattic for the better part of a year if not more, so there will be a lot of learning and evolution of the products on both sides to make any migration easier.
I promise we'll write about it afterward for anyone who is curious.
I don't want to be so presumptuous as to define
an exact approach before the technical exploration
has started
The same could be said of deciding such an absolutely massive migration is even beneficial/necessary in the first place, before a technical exploration! And yet apparently, that part has already been decided?
I am, of course, completely ignorant of how WP and Tumblr's infrastructure works. I'm not saying the migration would be a bad idea, technically or financially. Or good. Just honestly curious.
I promise we'll write about it afterward for
anyone who is curious.
Definitely looking forward to that. Best of luck. (That's not sarcasm. Honestly, best of luck!)
I've often decided on technical decisions with incomplete information. Here's an example of how it works (translated to this analogy):
1) You come up with a working (if expensive or otherwise imperfect) technical path
2) You define a half-dozen other potential (less expensive, more practical) paths
3) You announce the decision
4) You complete due diligence, and take the best path
There are other ways as well. Announcements and plans aren't binding; they occasionally change. You can make an announcement when you're 98% confident you'll do something. You can pivot if it doesn't work out. There are places this doesn't work (e.g. customer promises), but on something like an internal migration, this is a-okay.
If "Wordpress" (which I reluctantly use for our corporate branding site and blog--very carefully managed and controlled) is a better architecture than what Tumblr is using now, what they have now must be truly awful! Wordpress really doesn't scale very well, and you can easily have massive security problems.
Among Tumblr users, the basic incompetence of @staff in constructing a functional website is legendary. I would not be surprised if the backend were far worse than you're supposing.
The funny thing is, the incompetence of @staff is the value proposition for Tumblr, as a user - because Tumblr's backend is a rickety tower of matchsticks and paste and the devs couldn't program themselves out of a wet paper bag, it means that they haven't been able to implement - for instance - algorithmic non-chronological timeline ordering, or competent data harvesting / robomarketing. And the comically broken search tools actually give a reasonable approximation of privacy for discussions. The user experience is firmly stuck in the mid-2000s, when social sites were for communities and discussions instead of data farming.
Don't get me wrong, Tumblr's user experience is also awful - search sucks, tags suck, moderation EXTRA sucks, the website's still overrun by pornographic spambots even after the Great Titty Purge - but any development team competent enough to make real improvements would also be one competent enough to squeeze out what makes Tumblr work.
Generally before a company buys another company, there is some amount of due diligence done beforehand, so I wouldn’t presume there hasn’t been a technical exploration.
Find a way to get Verizon to sign off on this, and then get in touch with an established documentary maker. Pair them with an engineer and follow the story of the migration efforts. It will take time, and it'll certainly have a narrative.
Nothing like this has been done before. I struggle with making what I do relatable to people, but having a technical or semi-technical documentary following this large project would be eye-opening.
We'll even crowd fund this if you give us the chance. I'm not kidding.
Please, please, please make this migration a documentary film.
From the documentaries I've seen, its lots of people walking to a meeting, meetings themselves, etc.
For that kind of documentary, probably people walking into servers rooms, or having heated discussions.
In Automattic, we basically evolved to remove all that :) There would be basically zoom calls and slack discussions.
The most ambitious project I worked on in Automattic were just me, looking at the code and trying to understand why something is happening.
Or looking up Stripe documentation.
We get to sit in front of our laptops in nice places though :)
We need discussions about how to untangle integrations of your user model with Verizon/Yahoo's auth system, how you'll consolidate all the microservices, which ongoing migrations you'll halt, the puzzled looks you'll have at undocumented code that performs nested eager-loaded lazy migrations of data, etc.
I've been involved in a multi-year migration effort. I expect this may be the same for y'all. It'd be fun to have an account of something that is so prolific and well known.
This would be an interesting new type of documentary. A few shots of people with laptops on beaches around the world to establish characters, then just animated slack chats, terminal sessions and whiteboard sessions.
This is a fantastic idea. I imagine similar form to "Some Kind of Monster", the documentary about Metallica. It's mostly the band meeting, discussing ideas, playing some music, struggling with internal tensions and personal issues etc. I'm not even a huge fan of the band, but it was a very entertaining watch and I think it would be almost guaranteed that such a massive project will result in many interesting stories.
I have no idea precisely what we're going to do or how, but if I were spitballing, I'd think something like ...
Currently I think Tumblr stores all posts across all sites in one big table? WP.com does different tables per site.
I also think Tumblr's post ids are often above php's int max for 32-bit systems ( 2,147,483,647 ) -- I know I've seen some issues trying to parse tumblr's post ids to integers rather than strings on some old servers years ago.
For an overview of how our systems are run here's Barry, our head sysadmin, talking about six years ago on how the wpcom infastructure is structured:
It's changed somewhat, but not much conceptually. It's a really fascinating talk and I'd encourage anyone curious on massive scale data to give it a look, and see precisely what can be managed with determination and mysql and coffee.
Close; For the most part, to the application the Posts appear to be from one table since the lookup interface is the same (externally), but in reality at this massive scale, it just wouldn't be possible in a single MySQL table and database, even if you had a huge number of replicas. Tumblr's posts are spread across MANY "shards" which are actually different servers, each running a chunk of posts, shared by the blog owner. e.g. Blogs 1 - 10,000,000 on Shard 1, 10,000,001 to 20,000,000 on Shard 2, etc. More in depth talk here http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr-architectur... and http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/74/Massively%20Sharded%... though it's from 2011/2012, but the overall ideas still hold. At the time of that post (7 years ago) there were already 200 Database servers.
Thankfully nothing is 32-bit so no worries about integer overflows. That would cause huge headaches everywhere on the PHP side. In MySQL, a regular unsigned INT column does have that limitation (roughly max 4.5 billion for unsigned, 2.2 signed), so BIGINT must be used there (Twitter had to do the same). Where it gets interesting is PHP doesn't support unsigned integers, so with 64 bit your max integer in PHP is 9,223,372,036,854,775,807, whereas in MySQL an unsigned 64 bit int is double that. I think it's safe to say though that neither Tumblr nor WordPress, even combined, would ever have more posts than atoms on Earth =)
> I think it's safe to say though that neither Tumblr nor WordPress, even combined, would ever have more posts than atoms on Earth =)
If my math is correct, you're a wee bit off.
9,223,372,036,854,775,807 is 2^63, which is roughly 10^19. The Avogadro constant, which is about 6 * 10^23, is the number of particles (atoms / molecules) in a mole of substance, which for atoms amounts to (atom number of element) grams of mass (so e.g. 12g of C12 is a mole).
The fact that they are already planning on making changes seems to run counter to the idea that they would be taking a "Berkshire Hathaway" approach. In my understanding Warren Buffett's current philosophy is to buy companies that need his capital, potentially his name, but definitely not his intervention.
I'm curious: What approach, if any, would you take?
I'm sure you have an interesting prospective based on your experience working at MySQL-friendly shops, in addition to being an engineer at Tumblr once upon a time.
Thank you for asking, but I probably shouldn't get into that :) I'm inherently conflicted / biased due to designing a solid chunk of Tumblr's backend, and also previously worked for another Automattic competitor (Six Apart, the defunct company behind Movable Type).
Edit to avoid anyone misconstruing, I'm not trying to imply one thing or another, just that I can't approach this impartially. And in any case, I wish everyone well on both sides of this acquisition. I'm just genuinely curious how they plan to proceed from a technical standpoint, as it's a really interesting challenge.
Ehhh parts of that article were never accurate, especially the stuff about having an hbase-powered dashboard feed.
Primarily the product backend is monolithic PHP (custom framework) + services in various languages + sharded MySQL + Memcached + Gearman. Lots of other technologies in use though too, but I'll defer to current employees if they want to answer.
Not exactly. Tumblr has a pretty huge Hadoop fleet and decently large Kafka setup too. It's just a question of OLTP vs OLAP use-cases being powered by different tech stacks.
My answer above was limited to the product backend, i.e. technologies used in serving user requests in real-time. And even then I missed a bunch of large technologies in use there, especially around search and algorithmic ranking.
It really depends on the task at hand. I'm one of the most vocally pro-MySQL commenters on HN, and have literally built my career around scaling and automating MySQL, but I still wouldn't recommend it for OLAP-heavy workloads. The query planner just isn't great at monstrous analytics queries, and ditto for the feature set (especially pre-8.0).
For high-volume OLTP though MySQL is an excellent choice.
Regarding Kafka: in many situations I agree. Personally I prefer Facebook's approach of just using the MySQL replication stream as the canonical sharded multi-region ordered event stream. But it depends a lot on the situation, i.e. a company's specific use-case, existing infrastructure and ecosystem in general.
Kafka is not going to replace MySQL specifically because it depends on the task at hand.
If you can't replace MySQL with Kafka, then why not just stick with whatever queue/jobs/stream infra you had before kafka. At least those solutions are quite limited in scope and easily replaceable.
At this point Kafka is a solution looking for a problem.
My feeling about Kafka is that it's a useful tool to solve the "we MUST get this data to reliable storage IMMEDIATELY" problem. And to greatly mitigate the "each item must be processed and shown to be processed, exactly once" problem.
But there are relatively few situations where that's absolutely vital. And you can solve it with good ol' SQL.
Adult content is not our forte either, and it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety... it's a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there. I personally have very liberal views on these things, but supporting adult content as a business is very different.
> it creates a huge number of potential issues with app stores, payment providers, trust and safety...
I completely understand that “Adult Content” can cause a ton of headaches for a business but Tumblr’s current definition of “Adult Content” is very broad and I hope when the transaction is complete you’ll at least be open to reviewing the scope of the definition. Right now it includes many things that aren’t adult at all, like “female presenting nipples” which could be seen by children on many beaches in Europe and even on the streets of Boston and New York City. It also includes illustrations of genitalia or sex acts which can be found in biology textbooks and many magazines like Cosmo. The instruction leaflet that comes in a box of tampons wouldn’t currently be permitted on Tumblr. That doesn’t seem right to me nor does it seem like that sort of content would pose any risk to Tumblr’s operations.
I understand where you’re coming from with the adult content but I do also hope you’ll consider liberating the definition a bit. I actually think Tumblr is pretty well positioned to be the “next Instagram” for many young women today who would really appreciate a major social media platform recognizing that Kama Sutra illustrations or a photo of a woman’s nipple is no big deal, it’s just natural.
I don't know if you've ever been to Europe, but the number of topless beaches are low and you won't see women walking around without a top on the street. It's not taboo-less, nipples are still sexual.
Nipples seems a pretty silly thing to start focusing on when he clearly said they weren't interested in adult content.
I'm from Europe and I've visited quite a few countries in Europe, and to me it seems like it's pretty normal to be topless on _any_ beach... Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Greece...
EDIT: Generally I'd say in Europe while women's breasts are sexualised, they're not considered sexually explicit. The US is exceptionally prudish in comparison and for well-known historical reasons, too.
You'd have to explain more, given that he listed Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Greece, and others have listed more below. All of them true Scotsman where topless is totally a fair thing to see on any beach. Hell, I had a French ex who took her top off to tan when visiting the States and had to be told by friends that it wasn't an acceptable thing to do.
I have been to Europe. And I’ve taken my bathing suit top off on several beaches there. In my experience they don’t really have “topless beaches” so much as they just have beaches.
If you re-read my comment you’ll see that my point of starting with nipples is precisely because they aren’t the adult content that Automattic is understandably interested in avoiding. Why are your nipples nbd while mine are adult content? That seems “pretty silly” if you ask me.
AFAIK "female presenting nipples" is banned from Apple's App Store in non-17+ apps. A huge company such as Facebook could maybe fight it, Automattic certainly can't.
I mean… reddit’s app pretty clearly allows NSFW subreddits. You have to check a setting on the web to search for NSFW content, but that’s not actually in-app so it’s a-ok.
I appreciate the perspective, but let's be honest.
What you're essentially saying is 'Adult content is hard because the US government is willing to lean on payment providers to enforce quasi-legal, anti-free speech policies.'
Have you considered adopting a federated corporate structure that would legally firewall off a "tumblr-for-porn"?
Most of the goodwill bonfire seems to have been caused not by Tumblr treating adult content differently, but by not even putting up a fight to provide a space for it.
Having a mirror world Tumblr that adult blogs could be kicked to would earn a lot of that back, while presumably amortizing platform development and ops over a larger userbase.
Surrendering because free speech is hard is never a good look.
> Have you considered adopting a federated corporate structure that would legally firewall off a "tumblr-for-porn"?
That is literally the convoluted situation photomatt was trying to avoid.
I also think that the suggestion is hilariously naive. Presumably the founder/head of the company has considered a variety of incorporation structures.
> best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there.
Sorry for being so blunt but I couldn't agree less with. If you leave this to "big porno", you will get the same exploitive, generic bullshit you get anywhere else as well. It's a shame that nobody dares to touch that who isn't in the porn industry already.
be that as it may, the current automated flagging system is abhorrent and pretty much killed all confidence in the platform especially among artists. why would anyone take invest the time and effort to build a gallery & maintain a presence on tumblr when it feels like you're playing russian roulette with every (non-nsfw) image you upload? 4chan recently was split into separate domains for sfw/nsfw boards, maybe tumblr could go in a similar direction?
> it's a problem area best suited for companies fully dedicated to creating a great experience there
That's exactly what Tumblr's ex-users don't want, however.
Those Tumblr users want a place to freely exchange what they like, whether that's cute cats or hardcore porn.
That's what made Tumblr so beautiful. I'm sad to see it (apparently permanently) go.
Then again something nice is coming out of it as well: The main competitor is now the non commercial, federated, ActivityPub based Fediverse, frequently referred to as Mastodon.
For the ones that don't know you, you are the CEO and founder, Matt Mullenweg [0].
I am curious to hear more about the: "...to be more of a Berkshire Hathaway-inspired model and businesses with a lot of autonomy". Could you share some details?
Thanks for building Wordpress. When I used to be a prolific blogger, it was my platform of choice.
We've found the model of strong CEOs or GMs, combined with a great culture and shared platform, can be really magical. It doesn't need to be complicated, but it's also not easy.
It would be nice if investment in Tumblr is made to create a privacy focused social network for those who have or would like to remove FB from our worlds.
it's probably not economically feasible to have a privacy-respecting app that's also funded by a programmatic targeted advertising network.
even if it was, people have shown over and over that they prioritize convenience over privacy, and businesses simply aren't conscientious enough to try a different way.
You are entirely right!
However, they are entirely different monetization business models that we are offering our WordPress.com users.
Our Simple Payments block for example let's you sell directly on your site: https://en.support.wordpress.com/wordpress-editor/blocks/sim...
People are extremely creative in how they use it, basically turning sites into stores or kickstarter-like campaigns with that little feature.
We are looking into extending this functionality.
Is there a demand for an NSFW-only Tumblr alternative, or was it the mix of content that made Tumblr popular?
I mean personally I think if e.g. pornhub were to launch a product like that, they should make sure that it's not associated with PH or pornography directly. That creates a stigma - "oh, it's that porn blog" - which in my outsider's perspective was never Tumblr's identity.
The difference is that each tumblr was curated individually and there were also lots of image focused/exclusive tumblrs. This curation by hand + sometimes extremely narrow definition of a tumblrs content allowed one to find exactly what one wanted.
I think the difference is in branding/positioning, and therefore the mental state of the person engaging with the site and creating content.
Porn = male gaze-y[1], intentionally and overtly about sexual gratification, less about exploration
A free-wheeling blog site = a place open to the exploration of a number of different aspects of identity, of which sexuality is one of them.
In short: If Pornhub were to create a tumblr clone, they'd inherently be enticing people to _produce porn_ rather than producing content which might happen to be somewhat pornographic. There's a huge mental barrier there for lots of people, even if they happen to enjoy viewing porn or producing sexually explicit imagery.
[1] Yes I know women watch porn, the default assumption of porn viewership is still a cis male audience
Users. Paid porn is huge, I'm sure they would have no problem providing it as a paid service. They already have pornhub premium which is apparently very successful
>Pornhub Premium launched in 2015, and now has more than 1 million signups. That's nearly the number of people who subscribe to the Showtime channel's streaming service.
>According to various reports, currently, the porn industry’s net worth is about $97 billion. This money is enough to feed at-least 4.8 billion people a day. Every year, Hollywood releases roughly 600 movies and makes $10 billion in profit. And how much porn industry makes? 13,000 films and close to $15 billion in profit. The porn industry makes more money than Major League Baseball, The NFL and The NBA combined.
I wish you and the team the best of luck. Tumblrs first downfall was partly because the autonomy it was given to a team that had no idea how to grow the business. Karp had zero idea how to grow the product or the revenues past the initial vision. D'onofrio is an operator, likely not the best fit for leading a vision of what a new Tumblr with a new mandate should be.
We are planning to do the opposite: excited to invest into the platform. The web needs open and independent publishing and social media more than ever.
Does it? There are an awful lot of platforms that support the kind of content Tumblr supports now. How is this meaningfully different from a WordPress account, or a user subreddit, or a Medium blog, or even Facebook? How is Tumblr going to provide a platform that is substantially different from those?
There are more open platforms. There are more popular platforms. There are more independent platforms. How is the new Tumblr going to improve on the existing options?
The future needs to be distributed. Less Tumblr/Facebook/Twitter and more ActivityPub/Mastodon/Pleroma/Pixefed .. when people get use to federated networks, they'll understand how they work. They'll understand how it's like hosting your own game server, and everyone can do it, and you can ban servers you don't like without having those servers really go away to anyone but you.
The future is not centralized. The future is distributed.
I want to believe that the future is decentralized but I'm convinced of the opposite when it comes to online media, primarily because spam, abuse and content moderation are expensive functions to perform in which there are strong scale effects, and they are critical not just to ad-based monetization but perhaps also to broad societal acceptance of technology.
The dream of decentralized everything sounds wonderful, but there's an implicit assumption that most folks involved are good actors.
It quickly becomes untenable when corporate-backed or state-backed bad actors are introduced.
Here's a very simple thought exercise for anybody who disagrees. Imagine a modest social media team of perhaps 10 paid employees. That's 24,000 people-hours' worth of content generation per year... and it is perhaps multiplied by a factor of ten if they're sophisticated enough to put some work into tooling to automate their work. Russia alone reportedly had hundreds of people doing this sort of work, and surely they're not alone.
Now imagine 10,000 of those teams around the world. That's 240,000,000 people-hours of span and/or bad-faith social media posting. And that's probably an extremely conservative estimate.
How would a decentralized social network possibly combat this?
It's a life-or-death struggle even for a company with deep pockets (and huge cubical farms full of human content moderators) like Facebook to combat this sort of thing.
If one of the decentralized solutions ever reaches any sort of critical mass, it will have to confront this in a hurry, and it will not be able to.
The same analysis makes it untenable for centralized platforms, as you noticed yourself.
It's arguably harder to do it on a decentralized platforms since they are... Well, decentralized. Those 240,000,000 people hours are then spread over all of the decentralized platforms instead of being focused on one or a few. Also, the cost of moderation is spread over everyone instead of a single entity having to pay for all of it.
The same analysis makes it untenable for centralized platforms, as you noticed yourself.
Strong disagree, though I certainly hope that I am wrong and that decentralized platforms are more viable than I suspect.
It is not easy, but it is most definitely tenable for centralized platforms with sufficient funding and motivation i.e. Facebook, Google, etc.
They have:
1. Many millions (billions, in Facebook's case) of users, some percentage of which are willing to click those "Report..." buttons
2. Their own farms of in-house workers
3. Their own bespoke tools and heuristics to identify trends and more easily identify malicious actors/content, for review by the human moderators. this would presumably incorporate reports from users.
It's arguably harder to do it on a decentralized platforms
Again, I really can't agree but hope to be wrong.
How does a malicious social media team "attack" Facebook? For the most part, they produce content that winds up being spread virally. They don't spead the information around Facebook; the users do. This would function largely the same way in a decentralized network.
Keep in mind that today's decentralized networks are a bit like the Usenet was before "Eternal September."
In other words, these decentralized networks are currently populated primarily with relatively savvy users. Not perfect by any means, but on average, more savvy than your average FB or Twitter user who will eagerly share articles and links without even a cursory vetting. That will change in a hurry if any of these decentralized networks ever gains critical mainstream mass.
To me it seems that ad-based monetization is untenable. The more obnoxious it becomes, the more people are enticed to learn about and set up adblockers.
Reading between the lines...
Was Facebook/Instagram also in the market for Tumbler or was it just Verison getting close to killing it off and fishing around for a last minute buyer?
Good luck with it anyway - we need more independant platforms rather than a few mono-cultures.
I guess my rather naive question is "if the platform is to accept only the same kind of safe content then what is its USP compared to Facebook/Instagram/Reddit/etc?"
I was very impressed with the engagement and activity Tumblr has continued to have, and I hope that with this new ownership and investment the product will blossom.