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Comment by noelwelsh | Hacker News Reader

I found the discussion of the culture of Tumblr interesting, but I was left wondering more about the broken business model of Tumblr. They really don't seem to want to share with their influential users the value they generate. The lack of transparency into Tumblr's actions would also be worrying to me if I was involved in the platform. Watching Twitter drop the ball in similar ways makes me think there is a market opportunity for a social network that gives its users basic rights that we demand in our offline world. I'm growing more to like the "social network at a utility" model that I believe some in Twitter unsuccessfully argued for in its earlier days.

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Tumblr treated it's users very poorly in my opinion. They deleted popular blogs with no warning and no recourse. At least give the teens a chance to align themselves with the terms of service by issuing a warning first. It makes me wonder what Tumblrs real motivation was. If hosting blogs that bring fun and interest to the lives of millions of teenagers is not part of their business model, then what is it?

Yup. Sometimes you get so locked into what you think the vision for the company is you overlook who the real users are.

I think you can blame Yahoo for that. Didn't that fallout occur right after tumblr was bought by yahoo?

A few months later yes, after they kept repeating how "nothing is going to change for the users". Made me truly grok how talk from a big company is just that, PR, while any sensible person could have guessed what was going to happen at the mere sound of "billion" and "dollar" in the same sentence.

Given how badly Yahoo seems to be doing financially, and considering other high profile "failures" like Parse being shut down by Facebook and Apple being challenged by the state: I wonder whether these big companies can continue to extract rents after open sourcing and retrofitting everything with decentralised protocols, encryption etc.

That seems like a preferable direction from a consumer point of view than forcing society to rebuild everything from scratch, despite the fact that things like GitLab, blockchain and p2p social networks are not inherently inferior. Adoption is hard. "Charity" is the same as PR, so there might be more side benefit than the original speculators hoped for with the failed centralised business models by opening up and decentralising.

> I'm growing more to like the "social network at a utility" model that I believe some in Twitter unsuccessfully argued for in its earlier days.

The problem with a utility is you have to pay for usage. The majority of the internet has shown they aren't willing to pay $.02 for an account.

This being the case the only way to build a business model is to capture as much of the value as possible from your user which creates the Consumer v. Business relationship where both are trying to extract the maximum value they can from the other.

Walmart, Amazon, etc. does the same thing with their suppliers.

Businesses always align with their customer's short term interests [via voting with their cash] in relatively free markets. Long term thinking isn't something consumers do.

> The problem with a utility is you have to pay for usage. The majority of the internet has shown they aren't willing to pay $.02 for an account.

I think users would be more willing to pay if it were easier to pay. You have to break out your credit card to pay for software. Then you have to enter your number, your billing information, etc. It's a question of how badly you want it.

If there were a service like Amazon's 'buy with 1-click' that could be integrated with any website, it could help monetize more sites.

Amazon defends that patent so it isn't possible to create such a service without cash for lawyers.

https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

You'd need to use a service like that.

> They really don't seem to want to share with their influential users the value they generate.

And that means they don't want share with their shareholders the value Tumblr generates. It's really mibd-blowing to think that anyone would have thought what Tumblr did was a good idea. I totally agree with their goal of shutting down sketchy and basically fraudulent ways of making money. But at least make a genuine attempt to provide a compelling alternative way for bloggers to make money.

The value of a social network is entirely in the community and their desire to devote time on the site (and not at all in any functionality or technology per se). By killing the vibe in the community they're basically burning money. Tumblr is dying in one of the saddest acts of corporate suicide in the last ten years.

Perhaps these teen sites were a drop in the bucket and not worth the hassle of any association with diet pills? But to just throw away a loyal audience of millions of people who are proving to be profitable customers as well - seems careless.

From the sound of it these kids probably would have gotten into compliance immediately with a warning. You'd think it would be worth tumblr's time. Apparently not though.

> They really don't seem to want to share with their influential users the value they generate.

I have never understood why tumblr doesn't simply offer optional ads for blogs, and revenue share with the authors.

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