Slashdot Mirror
Tumblr Is Tumbling (medium.com)
Alex Barredo, a technology writer, shares his observation on Tumblr's popularity over the past few years: Tumblr is the home of some of the most creative online personas, and now it is dying. Or so it seems. Founded on early 2007 by David Karp with a new formula for really simplified blogging, it quickly took off. With each passing quarter, most of their stats were crushing it. It was the new star of the New York tech scene. The East Coast had a good social platform after years of Californian monopoly (MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Twitter, etc), at last. In May of 2013, Yahoo snatched it for a cool $1.1 billion: $990 million plus liabilities. Less than a year after the deal was closed, Tumblr peaked in activity. By February of 2014, there were more than 106 million new posts each day on the platform. Today that figure has been slashed by two thirds to around 35 million. David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, said today he was leaving the company. Karp founded Tumblr close to 11 years ago with Marco Arment. He wrote: I beg you to understand that my decision comes after months of reflection on my personal ambitions, and at no cost to my hopefulness for Tumblr's future or the impact I know it can have. The internet is at a crossroads of which this team can play a fundamental role in shaping. You are in the driver seat, and I am so excited to see where you go!
Yahoo snatched it for 1100 billion?
May as well have bought Apple and Google.
None of them compare to my beloved Geocities. Even Angelfire had some merit, but Geocities... so sad.
Stop using the words "killer" or "dying" when talking about companies or objects.
#DeleteFacebook
That's why Tumblr is falling down and no longer Weeble-Wobble status.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
where companies go to die
What is Tumblr, anyway? A blogging site, or a repository of pics and clips?
Yahoo is to blame?
Tumblr is a SJW shithole. We need to teach investors that identity politics doesn't pay.
To fit into Tumblr's community you have to be so far left that you can't see moderates even with a telescope. That's why it's failing. People are turning on that whole group and their complete and utter lunacy. This is what happens when SJWs and millennials run a company with their ridiculous political and social views on display for the world to see. The attract similar nut jobs and kill the company.
nevar 4get the 6 gorillion !
When did Tumblr ban porn?
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
The world would become a better place overnight. All that organized hatred... gone in a swarm of bees.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Like any social networking site, its popularity is very fragile and dependent on who its userbase it.
Just like Friendster, and MySpace, at some point it will fall out of favor. It's kinda like nightclubs. If it becomes too easy to get into it and starts being populated by blue-hairs and corporate shills, all the cool kids will move on and it will cease being the cool place to hang out.
Tumblr being bought by Yahoo was the first major step to that status.
All these social networking sites want to reach a place in the online landscape where they are not a fad, and become an institution of the online world (like Wikipedia or Rotten Tomatoes). That has not happened yet.
I don't know, but suddenly a lot of Tumblr pages require login because of safe mode. IMHO, that's bullshit. I could register and login, but fuck creating just another throwaway account.
Also, 99% of the layouts people have are awful, horrible, borderline unreadable garbage. And Tumblr seems to suck memory in massive quantities. The infinite scrolling just doesn't work in that regard. Manual paging should always be available. No, I won't screw around with scripts and extensions.
Ban porn? I thought that was all Tumblr was.
Tumblr didn't ban porn .. it's a major porn site. What they did do recently was encourage their many porn posters to mark their accounts 'adult' so a visitor has to log into Tumblr for to view the porn.
My contract period expired. Peace out b....es!
Here's actual footage of Mr. Karp saying goodbye.
http://reactiongifs.me/wp-cont...
* = Insert your fav word here.
Sounds deep huh!
Tumblr has made it hard to find porn with out logging in and changing your settings. This probably killed half of their traffic.
Tumblr is dying!
I don't know, but suddenly a lot of Tumblr pages require login because of safe mode. IMHO, that's bullshit. I could register and login, but fuck creating just another throwaway account..
This so much. Tumblr was a great alternative to DeviantArt in terms of porn thanks to
1. No need for accounts to see the porn
2. More lax rules about content (DA always seemed to have an inconsistently puritan content filter at times)
3. Less demanding interface (assuming the blog's creator went with the more minimalist designs)
3 was done away with a while ago, now 1 is gone. Once they get around to removing 2, Tumblr will officially be relegated to the wayback machine.
My favorite thing is Tumblr blogs that rant about ableism in 8 point light-pink-on-off-white fonts embedded in a "stylish" page layout that makes it impossible to be sensibly parsed by screenreaders.
First they don't bother to get rid of the rape videos or pictures, and there is no way direct way to notify them of such.
Second, in an effort to make Tumblr more exclusive, they're forcing people to sign up to see most of the tumbles, specifically the ones where men and women are naked (gasp!).
Third, they recently implemented a Facebook-like process for their app which works on trending or some such, and is killing traffic to people's blogs. According to posted shots of traffic logs, folks are seeing a huge drop in site visits as a direct result.
So yeah, not surprising at all.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Tumblr has been like 90% porn and reposting porn and 10% fascists who apparently think that the universe itself is sexist and oppressing them.
Shortly after Yahoo took over, since then it has been increasingly user hostile. I run a NSFW art side blog and as of last week it's no longer visible unless you are logged into tumblr. By default search results remove NSFW blogs and advertising is disabled on NSFW blogs.
Recently they instituted a change to the dashboard which has always been a chronological view to a "best stuff first" further burying creator content in favor for whatever is popular, this has seen several content creating blogs suffer.
Many of us are slowly migrating to twitter which seems less stupid at the moment. It's a real shame though tumblr could have really continued to grow but Yahoo couldn't figure out how to squeeze the userbase for cash so is doing all kinds of shitty things to systematically destroy it.
IMHO infinite scrolling is the worst idea ever coded. We don't have infinite memory on our computers.
#DeleteFacebook
Found the problem right here:
"In May of 2013, Yahoo snatched it for a cool $1.1 billion"
tone
What makes even less sense is that infinite scrolling is more design around phone hardware than desktops, despite the fact that phones only have about half the memory of desktops (though thanks to Razer we'll probably see next year's flagships shipping with 8GB).
Also fuck whoever decided that clicking an image on an infinite scroll page shouldn't open said image in a new tab by default.
When did Tumblr ban porn?
Requiring a login and removing pages from search results is one step shy of shadowbanning.
More recently, Tumblr has been abruptly terminating NSFW accounts, no notice, no explanation.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Uh, what makes you think you need to keep infinite memory to support infinite scroll? Items that are in the direction of scroll are preloaded, objects that are beyond the view window in the other direction are purged. Pretty basic UI stuff, we've been doing this for years.
In my mind, it's one of the more useful UX improvements rather than the idiotic "next page" BS that came before it.
Tumblr is mostly porn and that's the best thing you can say about it. Every other community on tumblr is a toxic cesspool.
Communities for shoplifters,
Communities for meth users,
Then there are the so-called SJWs but I don't even think it's fair to associate tumblr's particular brand with the rest of the fringe left. Their version of this community is almost exclusively crybullies competing for who is the most disabled and disadvantaged. There is little actual political discourse involved so I don't even know it's fair to call it the fringe left, more like a cargo-cult version of the left. You'll never meet so many PoC disabled, multiple system, trans, queer, etc people... who all invariably turn out to be white chubby teens/20 something girls who still live with their parents and have no mental diagnoses. Literally white kids who wish they had real problems, pretending to be black or disabled or gay.
Every time I mention this I get voted down which is funny because it means you're not going to look for yourself. If you've ever wondered where it is that this crazy left-fringe boogyman that the right likes so much, you can go interact with it on tumblr. Go look at the weird part of tumblr it's not even a left/right thing, it's just fucking nuts!
Sorry tumblr is nothing more then a porn palace. they lump porn with mature content so trying to filter it is useless. plus the stupid members not tagging the porn/nudity at all its a 10000% unsafe site. Mind you i have nothing against porn but this Being a family PC Tumblr is blocked as their is no way to safely visit tumblr without porn and nudity,erotica not being seen. They do a poor job of keeping thir site clean. that's why i don't go their anymore.
Jack of all trades,master of none
The internet as we know it in the US has existed for a very long time with limited laws and regulations. Most laws and regulations simply do not work as technology finds ways around them. I understand technology has evolved to grant ISP's the ability block and throttle specific connections, but vice versa the free market approach along with technology like tunneling and encryption also work around most anything ISP's can do. This is why the internet is so great.
I would rather governments create laws to open up telephone poles, wireless spectrums and enable municipality built networks vs laws which really do not mean much and are easily circumvented. If there were more competition in the free markets companies that throttle, block or have fast lanes will lose to those companies that do not. Again free market.
What magic browser are *you* using? Every browser I've ever tried on one of those pages makes for massive memory leaks when scrolling very far down on those pages. Maybe the Javascript does attempt to remove all references to the scrolled-past images from both its own variables and from from the DOM, but somehow or another those big blobs are not being forgotten.
It takes a good page load to clear the slate. Like it or not, what you call "next-page BS" is the only way to go.
All of what you said is exactly what I said further down. I just couldn't remember the name of what they changed to their Facebook-like app.
https://slashdot.org/comments....
There are two major problems with Tumblr that have gone unaddressed for years now. Being a longtime user who sought out the website for its art community, I used to be an avid proponent of the site, but now I can barely be bothered to even check my activity page between uploads. The website and its community are a hot mess right now, and only one of those problems can actually be solved by the operators of Tumblr itself.
The first of those problems, the solvable one, is that as a website it runs like dog shit. Seriously.
To be perfectly fair to Yahoo, this was becoming an issue long before the buyout was finalized, but practically everyone I know who uses Tumblr noticed that shortly after the buyout, the quality of the site's code and its performance across every browser really began to tank. It's slow, unresponsive, and extremely intensive for a website that does what Tumblr does, and all of these objective declines in performance haven't been accompanied by the introduction of compelling new features to justify the trade-off, or really any new features at all. (That is, besides a really lame direct messaging system to replace the perfectly functional old one: A feature that was introduced for the express purpose of making Tumblr look and act more like Facebook, probably in order to make it more attractive to a clueless potential buyer.) It reminds me of how bad Twitch was getting before they basically rebuilt everything from scratch, but unlike Twitch, there was actually a prior point in time when every single feature of Tumblr didn't run like garbage. Something went majorly wrong on the technology side of things, and as a result the site is no longer enjoyable to use in any capacity. It is honestly a chore, both for me and my aging laptop computer, to even log in and look around.
Dumb interface changes and alienating policies concerning NSFW content don't even qualify as the proverbial icing on the cake, because what's running under the hood is a great big frosted turd. It also goes without saying that the mobile version of Tumblr is even worse, and more and more, content on the site can't even be viewed on a mobile device without downloading their worthless app. (Remember, one upon a time the site actually worked just fine.) Fixing the performance issues with a rollback or an overhaul of the site would go a very long way toward making Tumblr useful again, but at this point it seems as though Tumblr's ship has already sailed, or sunk depending on how you look at it. Most of my friends who use(d) it have already migrated to Twitter to use it for the exact same purposes, even though Twitter mauls practically every image that gets uploaded to it that isn't a photograph. Considering that a website which does this is now a more attractive option for artists should say a lot about just how bad Tumblr's user experience has gotten.
The other problem with Tumblr, however, is much tougher nut to crack. Tumblr's community is like a smoldering underground fire at a landfill that shows no signs of extinguishing itself anytime soon, and it's been that way for a very, very long time. There's more than a little kernel of truth in the stereotypes of Tumblr users, and especially among other artists who use the site. You can see the kind of person that Tumblr has become infamous for coming from a mile away, no matter which flavor of asshat they happen to be. The overall tone of the website seems to be of one of tolerance for casual bigotry and a very rigid set of outlandish and often contradictory cultural standards, and precious little else. Being someone who grew up during the Bush years, it's especially astonishing to me to see what passes for the political-left these days going on to produce their very own mirror image of bible thumping conservatives, right before my very eyes. The imitators are no less hostile, intolerant, and irritating to be around than their right-wing counterparts, and the notorious 'callout culture' that thrives on Tumblr has definitely had a chilling effect on the site. It is an abs
I always thought there was something fishy about Tumblr.
what the fuck is it? why would anyone look at it? haven't heard of it outside the internet and never heard a single person talk about it. is there some bubble of social-media retards who know what it is?
You can't bookmark your infinite scroll position nor can you jump to the bottom and read everything in the order it was written. The primary drawback of 'next page' was that almost every site had their pages numbered backwards. Page 1 should be the oldest content, not the newest content. You can't ever keep your place when the content of the pages keep changing while their address stay the same.
Basic UI stuff was abandoned long ago.
I can guarantee you his leaving hinged purely on when his RSUs and Options vested, which would have been at least 3 years. Maybe having been bought would yield him a better deal than three, but still.
--
Ex Yahoo! employee
They didn't. That's what I still use it for.
Tumblr is synonymous with slacktivism, harassment mobs, doxxing cabals, and mentally-ill people who claim their gender is various forms of weaponized aircraft. If it dies, it's because it's a toxic cesspool of freaks who wouldn't last a minute once they're inevitably kicked out of their houses or arrested.
I remember just a year or so ago tumblr had all kinds of nice porn sites. No more. I get 404 - nothing here messages on some really nice ones. It's doomed.