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Comment by michaelwww | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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