How Tumblr Can Save Yahoo | Hacker News Reader

How Tumblr Can Save Yahoo

medium.com

44 pointsawwstn47 comments

Anybody who wants to think about "saving" Yahoo must read PG's essay on Yahoo: http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html It's a bit dated but relevant.

2 steps must be taken first before you can talk about "saving" Yahoo:

1. Get rid of 2/3 of the managers

2. Make engineers the "top dogs" in the company.

>The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people, the same number Yahoo had when I went to work there. But boy did things seem different. It was still very much a hacker-centric culture. I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that. Theirs was not to reason why; theirs was to build what product managers spec'd. I remember coming away from Google thinking "Wow, it's still a startup."

A desire and the ability to own problems is difficult to bring back once it is lost.

The desire never goes away, it just gets invested in side-projects that end up in graveyards because of work fatigue.

You should visit the Tumblr offices.

Google -> Yahoo is a smaller jump away from an engineering driven company than Yahoo -> Tumblr

That PG essay is the bomb. Can't imagine a world where Microsoft inspired that much fear : )

  > Can't imagine a world where Microsoft inspired that much fear :)

First it's not funny. Many companies including Netscape, Google (and at the moment PaaS companies) have/had the fear that Microsoft will crush them. You are either too young, or an employee of MS, otherwise nothing funny about. Maybe you should read pg's essay:

  "Another big factor was the fear of Microsoft. If anyone 
  at Yahoo considered the idea that they should be a 
  technology company, the next thought would have been 
  that Microsoft would crush them.

  It's hard for anyone much younger than me to understand 
  the fear Microsoft still inspired in 1995. Imagine a 
  company with several times the power Google has now, but 
  way meaner. It was perfectly reasonable to be afraid of 
  them. Yahoo watched them crush the first hot Internet 
  company, Netscape. It was reasonable to worry that if 
  they tried to be the next Netscape, they'd suffer the 
  same fate. How were they to know that Netscape would 
  turn out to be Microsoft's last victim?"

Not sure why you got downvoted.

I like his ending statement:

"Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."

The threatened world was where IE6 and ActiveX won, where websites routinely insisted on running unsandboxed native code in the browser to implement closed source client-server applications. Where both client and server had to be Microsoft in order to interoperate, paying MS license fees for every client and server. Where sufficiently successful application developers got the phone call from Microsoft offering to either lowball buyout their company or Microsoft would ship a competing product for free in their next release.

(Containerisation would be absurdly expensive in this world, as you'd need a new Windows Server license for every VM. I think you still do, so nobody does this).

Yishan Wong writes a lot about that to. http://algeri-wong.com/yishan/

I wonder if a similar lesson may apply to hardware. Take 8086 vs iAPX 432 for example.

And get rid of the purple, it's hideous.

You downvote, but I've talked to countless people that hate their branding, purple being a large part of it.

Don't disregard good aesthetic taste, Yahoo clearly doesn't have it.

I can't speak to what their actual audience is, but I've always imagined it as the average middle-aged middle-American. Which makes me think of Marie from Breaking Bad - her whole house is varying shades of that purple.

What demographic are the people you've talked to in?

The way to save Yahoo is for Yahoo to kill Yahoo.

Tumblr is in New York. Away from Sunnyvale. Yahoo could build a new Yahoo there that was comprised of small teams, making new products, shipping on a regular cadence, shielded from the mothership.

When the original Macintosh was created, the team was in a new building away from the Apple II team. Yahoo needs to find its own pirate flag to fly.

When I worked at yahoo I suggested this idea. Take yahoo as we know it today, silo it off and give it just enough resources to keep it alive. Then with the massive cash reserves & rest of the employees start experimenting new products that are not under the yahoo name, but get media exposure from Yahoo. If one of them is successful make that the new yahoo.

Sadly, It was not taken over well. If I were an executive I'm not sure I'd also risk my lucrative salary either. I'm also pretty sure the shareholders would not appreciate us burning potentially billions of dollars if this plan failed. So I totally get where management has gone. Its just sad as yahoo never really got a fighting chance.

Tumblr has recently (actually, not so recently any more) disabled commenting on their platform. My partner is part of a relatively close running community that used to use Tumblr to connect with others, give/receive encouragement about their runs, and so on. Since they disabled comments (with some half-hearted promise about bringing them back, well, sometime) hardly any of her friends post any more.

Since, as this article says, Tumblr's business model is depending on people using it, removing comments (in favor of pushing people toward reblogging) seems ill-advised.

>Since, as this article says, Tumblr's business model is depending on people using it, removing comments (in favor of pushing people toward reblogging) seems ill-advised.

They've recently added a chat system. http://i.imgur.com/Aw8EEvh.png It's the smiley face in the middle. I don't know if it's default yet but I have it right now and it works fine. The only difference is that in a chat system comments aren't public, but if you're giving other people feedback this works fine. I think this is a good middle ground between the network effects they get with reblogging and just being able to give people feedback without spamming your followers.

I knew about the chat, but it's not really the same thing at all. That's as if Facebook removed the ability to comment on posts, but said "Oh it's cool, we still have chat!"

It works ok, as you say, if you just want to say "Great job," but it's not the same use case.

This is a problem. Tumblr the Community are at the mercy of Tumblr/Yahoo the Corporation.

My partner is also a user of Tumblr, and according to her much of the community are dissatisfied with the direction the company is heading. Actually, now that I think about it, the strategies outlined in this article are more likely to strangle both Tumblr and Yahoo than save either of them.

I'm almost tempted to start working on the-next-tumblr and see if it's possible to tempt all those users over to a platform better suited for their needs.

Why would they do this? Remove comments? Unless trolling and racism and abuse were an overwhelming problem on the platform (and I don't believe they were any worse than anywhere else) why would a major platform built on user engagement deliberately disable comments?

Beats me. The announcement about them disabling it was in late October (http://support.tumblr.com/post/131951272032/pardon-our-dust-...), and on Nov. 4 they confirmed they were coming back, eventually (http://support.tumblr.com/post/132577661107/david-wizardries...). There's been no movement since then as far as I can tell.

I think they want the reblog to be the primary form of engagement, but that's silly for a lot of things, because the entire original post shows up in the reblog by default. For a running community (just one example), that's pretty lousy: you don't want to clutter up your own blog just to say "That's really fast, congratulations! Keep it up!" to a dozen other people.

They push people to reblog instead, which results in more overall engagement. (Probably because it makes it much easier to stoke flamewars, but that doesn't show up in the metrics...)

Very interesting to me, because I'm working on a personal essy/reflective article about 'communities' online relating to message boards vs. commenting system. I never was a Tumblr user so I've got a quick question - were they using an in-house type commenting system or something like Disqus? Thanks for sharing the info about that change in context of this, it's helpful.

They were using an in-house thing; some blogs also have Disqus comments enabled but nobody really uses them, as far as I can tell. (Even when they did, they were outside the stream of native Tumblr replies, and didn't show up in users' dashboards.)

Got it, thanks. I've been trying to categorize and review the different approaches. If it's not too much trouble to reply once more, was there any form of 'moderation' involved in the grand scheme of things? Like a flagging system for bad posts or some kind of behind the scenes 'review' process where comments/posts violating terms/conditions/standards would result in deleting a post or eventually banning an account? Thank you for your time!

I'm honestly not sure (I don't have a Tumblr myself; I just read my wife's blog!) I think that probably users could block comments from people, or have some kind of moderation over their own, but I'm not sure about flagging or any system globally.

Yahoo is a farce. Ostensibly it is a kind of passive index fund that only holds two assets: Alibaba and Yahoo, which is rapidly declining in value and should be cashflowed out (remove overhead, no add'l investment and collect cash til it dies--or sold to a PE fund that will do that). Typical passive fund managers earn their fee 2%/20% by re-balancing their portfolio as needed to approximate the index. Yahoo is not even doing that. so in fact they are more like a pass through or shell entity that holds one asset, usually for tax advantageous reasons. thus the managers (yahoo management) should get some nominal fee comparable to a clearinghouse. Marissa Meyer earns $20mm per year for running a shell company. that's like paying your agent in the cayman islands $20mm per year merely to file the paperwork to remain incorporated there. what a fucking farce.

A company that can be 'saved' by Tumblr is in serious trouble indeed.

During the SOPA debacle, Tumblr informed their entire userbase via their dashboards that forthcoming legislation would destroy the service. They enabled one-click to contact your representative. It generated 87,000 calls. http://staff.tumblr.com/post/12930076128/a-historic-thing

At the time, I remember seeing HN jumping up and down about how great this was. I was excited too, because now I had hard data of a 0.29% response rate. Tumblr as a business died that day.

It doesn't matter how many users you have or what their demographic is if you haven't created a culture of commerce. In the absence of revenue, "rope in millions of users and then reap the profits" seems to scale to about three people profiting per transaction.

2013: "Yesterday, during her call with Wall Street analysts, Marissa Mayer said Yahoo would explore giving Tumblr bloggers the chance to run Yahoo ads on their own pages."

It's 2016 and Tumblr still shows zero revenue on Yahoo's balance sheet.

I appreciate this post being on Medium.

while i agree that unifying the yahoo-tumblr experience is a good direction, it won't save yahoo. the problem with both twitter and tumblr is that advertising within the content platform is ineffective and does not generate enough revenue

I'd argue that a large portion of that is ineffective ads. There have been a large number of ads for a free-to-play "choose your own adventure" game, and they are frequently reblogged and mocked. (Might explain why non-rebloggable ads are suddenly showing up in my feed!)

Users already follow tumblr blogs that cater to their interests. Tumblr already knows I follow a Pokémon-themed blog, a How To Train Your Dragon-themed blog, and the official blogs for Instapaper and Apple Music. And Taylor Swift.

Based on those interests, Tumblr should be able to sell ads for, say, the new Pokémon mobile game or Taylor Swift's new concert film (premiering on Apple Music), or whatever. It shouldn't matter whether or not I click or do anything actionable on those ads; what matters is that I see them. It's like television ads in that respect: you're paying to get your message out to a group of people.

So yes, tumblr advertising is currently quite ineffective. But it doesn't have to be.

I once spotted an Etsy card on Tumblr. 7,000+ reblogs. A month later the $3 card was still available. I contacted the artist asking about it. "If I had a nickel..." she said.

Tumblr's just not a place you go when you're thinking about buying stuff. If it doesn't work organically it's not going to work when you bring corporate ads in. Yahoo bought it for display ad inventory and then, oops, the bottom dropped out of display ads.

> Tumblr's just not a place you go when you're thinking about buying stuff.

I'll agree that the largest part of tumblr's userbase doesn't have the ability to whip out the credit card at the drop of a hat. I'll argue that TV is also not a place you go when you're thinking about buying stuff, yet display ads seem to be working there.

I'll also add some sympathy for that Etsy seller. I have a friend with an Etsy shop, and the bane of her existence is people reblogging a card or print with no link back (or worse, "google images" listed as the source).

Watermarking images with a name and url is a common practice to help mitigate that problem.

Who would've thought that blog posts about the evil patriarchy cannot generate enough revenue.

Also the fact that tumblr blogs look like they came straight out of 2006. We have mainstream 24-27inch screens with 1920 horizontal pixels now. Why do most tumblr blogs look like geocities-era thin vertical strips of annoying gifs filled with tiny blocks of hard to read text?

Because Tumblr, for a large part of its audience, fills the geocities-era niche of self-expression. The majority of tumblr bloggers don't care about 1920-pixel screens, they care about the colors and the aesthetic, web design principles be damned.

A lot of Tumblr users are artists, students, and teenagers. You may think 24" screens are the norm but a lot of these people are on crummy laptops or phones.

To use a Tumblr-relevant phrase with tongue only slightly in cheek: check your privilege :)

The same reason so many other websites decide to waste so much real estate: phones.

edit: also being lazy.

I guess they were unable to grok responsive design CSS practices, even at a $1b valuation.

Case in point of some people who get it: medium.com

> while i agree that unifying the yahoo-tumblr experience is a good direction

That's what happened to Flickr... see http://gizmodo.com/5910223/how-yahoo-killed-flickr-and-lost-...

> The Flickr team was forced to focus on integration, not innovation.

I thought tumblr had actually cracked into profitability for a bit before it got bought.

"So Yahoo paid $1.1 billion for a company that made $14 million in revenue last year. It took Tumblr five years to generate as much annual revenue as a moderately well-managed New York deli." http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2013/05/20/the-int...

Tumblr save Yahoo? Wow. The other day I logged into Tumblr for the first time in ages, and there was a HTML5 animation thing in the background which completely froze Safari on my recent MBP.

Completely unusable, even with the fans spinning so hard I thought the thing was going to take off.

not sure the author understands the magnitudes of money at play here. tumblr is a blip in yahoo world. on its own its a niche, nothing more. beloved by some, sure, but nowhere near the stuff that would be needed to turn around yahoo.

I agree, as a Tumblr outsider I'm under the impression that Tumblr's (community) importance is mainly self importance.

That was my initial thought as well. I looked through the 10k but they only break out revenues by Yahoo-owned/affiliate rather than individual Yahoo products. Can you cite any sources to back up this claim?

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