Tumblr CEO David Karp is stepping down from the company | Hacker News Reader

Tumblr CEO David Karp is stepping down from the company

theverge.com

106 pointsmtwstudios45 comments

Tumblr was the easiest way to setup a simple stream-of-photos blog, so I used it often.

I recently moved all of my "blogs" off of it because visiting one slowed desktop browsers to a crawl, and literally crashed mobile browsers. Dev tools showed a minimum of 20MB transferred when visiting my site, and it quickly ran up to 60+MB if you touched the scrollbar.

That is a lot of prefetching.

Just visiting tumblr.com while not logged in currently transfers 8MB, and displays a content-less landing page.

Exploring tumblr today is like exploring myspace pages in 2006. No matter how powerful your PC, it's a miserably slow site to browse and, in my opinion, difficult to mentally ingest content from.

Ironically, one of the other sites that has that effect on my Mac is theverge.com, host of TFA.

I have a reasonably powerful desktop computer (i7 3770, 12GB ram) and tumblr seems to be the only site capable of consistently crashing firefox and chrome every 30 minutes with only a couple of tabs open. I have no idea how they managed that.

Did anyone really think that with a Yahoo acquisition this would go any other way? Great for the original Tumblr team getting their probably deserved payday, not much else.

I did love how Tumblr embraced the mess of custom styling etc they supported - was refreshing to visit a crowd driven site where everyone's profile isn't the same stale standard template.

I loved Tumblr. I was a casual user but not only was it fun for a time, it opened my eyes to how important details are in implementation. I mean in the sense that I thought Tumblr wouldn't be useful to me because I already had my own WordPress blog (and various Jekyll blogs), but Tumblr's opinionated refinements and limitations made for a substantially new content-creating experience. And it was something I could only grok by trying out Tumblr.

Didn't use it much after the Yahoo acquisition. Nothing relating to Yahoo, had just moved onto other things. But I don't know what blame to assign to Yahoo, other than the sin of not being more aggressive in trying to "do" something. But it's not clear that trying to aggressively iterate Tumblr would be better than being hands-off about it.

What would Tumblr be like if Yahoo hadn't acquired it? It was a great platform but I never got the sense -- in the way that I have with Instagram and Snapchat -- that Tumblr was capable of rapidly innovating while preserving the core experience.

If you look at the DAU graph they sold at pretty much the optimal time.

https://medium.com/@somospostpc/tumblr-is-tumbling-d6deb3bb8...

Seems like this might have something to do with it.

Wow, that New Posts chart is brutal. This nearby link[1] seems to claim that Yahoo failed to "not screw it up", but the details are extremely vague. I'm unclear what could have caused such a dramatic reversal. ~Everyone left, but why? What changed?

[1] https://qz.com/735583/

I think part of the problem was the content began to congeal into the same kinds of posts. Even the exact same posts. The reblog feature meant a lot of content was just being endlessly re-posted, sometimes with a comment and sometimes not.

So there were much fewer unique posts, and thus less reason/interest to invest time into making new posts.

At least this was my perception as a somewhat regular user among friends several years ago and why I ended up stopping using the platform.

Anecdotal opinion ahead, but from someone who's been an avid user since 2010-12-ish (in a variety of scenes but mostly in illustration).

Personally, it's felt like a death of a thousand cuts. Tumblr was a gift to people who wanted one place to share "fandom" material whether it be fanart, fic, various graphics - basically a great place to land when livejournal/dreamwidth started going, and as someplace a little more personal and "warm" than twitter. There's been an ongoing harassment problem in recent years (similar to what twitter is facing) that didn't help, and tumblr's user base feels more anti-corp than most social media platforms, so the Yahoo buyout probably hurt it worse than usual. Pair that with the invasive advertisement "tweaks" (the algorithm-based feed was a nasty change for small creators like myself; it's not something that a third-party extension like xkit can get rid of easily) and the rise of alternatives like mastodon - and they've got a problem.

I still think tumblr has a lot of potential - it's still my favorite platform for the "fandom" scene and as an amazingly versatile platform for illustration/animation portfolios (ie a cleaner version of blogspot) - but I'm not optimistic these days.

There is now a better way to do what Tumblr was trying to do. Their stated mission was basically to dramatically simplify expression.

Young people hate writing very much text.

Young people hate using posting interfaces of the sort Tumblr utilizes (it still comes across as a CMS posting system).

Young people hate too much effort toward customization, which is required to make a Tumblr page look half decent.

Enter Snapchat, WhatsApp, Kik, Viber, Instagram etc.

Click, record video, send.

Click, snap, add four words, send.

No layout customization bullshit. No concerns about something on your page breaking by mistake and having no idea how to fix it to get it back to normal. No diary/journal or blog text aspect, which most people have zero interest in.

It's too useful for what its newer users want (the ones that would be signing up and providing growth).

Simply put, Tumblr is a dinosaur. It happened that fast.

That's what I was going to say but better and more detailed. I think most of Tumblr's core has migrated to IG, Snapchat, and some of those others I'm not hip to. I always saw Tumblr as a simplified MySpace but it had much of that same appeal - you could customize your templates and basically turn it into a teenager's room covered with posters and crap if that's what you wanted. On mobile all that is wasted - what looks impressive on desktop gets lost on mobile. So they're going the way of MySpace now.

I actually disagree strongly with this analysis, and I want to detail some stuff here.

Tumblr was something that artists and fandoms took pride in putting time into. The grassroots were always the holder of the users despite everything mentioned here, even in 2010 and earlier. XKit tried its best to cater to the fans, but it felt as if it was being fought every step of the way by Tumblr itself. They had the power users that drove it, they will for some time still too, but again and again, they ignored the needs of their users, and the terribly broken comment system barely got a marginal fix just recently (past year?), which is still broken on individual blogs often. Blogs often got deleted for unknown reasons without warning and tons of users lost years of content and conglomeration of information.

I don't see Tumblr being in the same category as any of those you listed really except for maybe Instagram, where more professional artists are thriving. The culture was always the glue of Tumblr, and none of those services have it.

The CMS posting style was fine. The customization was great, and while retro, suited the community. There are tons of great text posts and educational content that was immensely helpful towards LGBT youth, sexual discovery, getting real history lessons to supplement the broken US high school history classes, art, music, fandoms, and so much more. Lots of it is still there even today. But it's a fringe community with very little marketing or ad value and a community that hates corporations more than any other group I can think of. There was never a path to monetization. I'm just sad to see it be killed through neglect of its true potential and actively pushing away users it felt like. I think its creator took a few wrong steps but in the end, realized there wasn't anything he could do with it and is hence moving on.

I can't speak to everyone, but my artist friends all moved to Instagram because it's a better place to post photos/videos, and the comment system is preferable.

As an artist, yeah. I have a pretty big tumblr following that I've built up over the years, but I also prefer instagram even though I've only had it for a little over a year and haven't built up nearly as big of a base. I think for me it's that instagram feels more for the everyman, in a way. Plenty of grandparents out there with instagrams full of their grandkids, y'know? You reach a much broader audience.

> Yahoo has written down $712 million of the original $990 million that it paid for Tumblr

Brutal

I take it you didn't see the MS write down of Nokia mobile phones. Over ten times that, 7.6 billion USD: https://www.theverge.com/2015/7/8/8910999/microsoft-job-cuts...

Worse than brutal, a shame. And Windows Phone 8.1 was actually a good platform. I'm back on iOS, and it feels like being kicked back to the 20th century.

HP had to take a write down of $8.8B after their Autonomy acquisition.

... and Time Warner wrote down AOL by $45B.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1043702683178461304

That. Was. Awesome.

> And Windows Phone 8.1 was actually a good platform.

Also, Nokia was a world leader. Imagine what all that manufacturing and design capability could have accomplished. Sad waste.

That author keeps referring to the “end of their sigmoid curve.” It’s not a sigmoidal function; new accounts aren’t finite. If engagement took off again, they can have another log phase.

He’s just bandying about a technical jargon term to try and look mathematically insightful when he means to say “growth has slowed.” But that doesn’t sound fancy enough.

Absolutely.

Although 5 years old, /r/tumblrinaction didn't really start being used until 4 years ago.

For non-reddit users, it is a reactionary subreddit for crazy Tumblr nonsense that floats around the echo chambers of the site.

I think the decline in use was caused in part by the polarization of extreme feminism (think: all men are rapists) and red pill (think: feminism is cancer) nonsense. It became hard to have any reasonable conversation without posts being shared and brigaded by extremists.

Other platforms became better, IMHO.

Unfortunately, I deleted my blog a year ago but I used Tumblr from 2009 to 2016, around from age 14 (when I got my first laptop) to age 21.

My blog went through many stages: I went from having a quality blog to having an astronomy/science blog to having a surf/beach blog to having a film/tv-show blog to having a design/architecture/animation blog to having a literature/poetry/quotes blog to having a spirituality/art blog. The community on Tumblr was particularly wonderful since it always aligned with what your blog interests where. I had many friends over the years, i.e. a woman from New York who I met when she was in high school and I was in high school (we video chatted and talked for almost four years), a woman from Paris studying for a masters in translation in Scotland when I had my literature/poetry/quotes blog (I remember her recommending I read Pride and Prejudice and I saying I would only read Pride and Prejudice if she watched The Godfather), a man from London who was a father when I had a spirituality blog (we would philosophize about things).

Above all, while these days I try to use the internet less and I am not a part of many social media platforms, I remember those days fondly and some lates nights, I think I wish I still had my blog and my followers and the people who I was following. I do not think there is/or will ever be a better place for an internet community than Tumblr was for me.

I would too tumblr's day has passed. Marissa made a huge mistake betting on tumblr.

The pornography and toxic community killed what could have been a strong twitter microblog service.

It's great for pornography though.

I get the pornography part, whenever you are checking a simple site it can happen that there is NSFW stuff visible without a warning.

However, toxic community? I never had that impression. That said I never used Tumblr for longer periods and I don't get how to comment on stuff or really interact there.

Can't speak for OP but Tumblr has a pretty big SJW subculture; screenshots from more esoteric or radical discussions get some ridicule on reddit and elsewhere. Check (the equally toxic) subreddit tumblrinaction for a sample of this type of content. I can't tell you how representative that is of the whole site though as I am also not a tumblr user.

I'd like to point out that you're referencing hand picked, extreme examples of a community. There's a massive bias. You have no way of knowing what Tumblr is like based on these examples.

From my experience, TIA is rather representative once you remove the various art blogs and their reblogs.

As I've stated in another comment, several creators I enjoy have been massively bullied by wider communities on Tumblr until they left.

Tumblr has an indeed very toxic community at times.

Several creators of fanart I enjoy have been bullied of the platform, even receiving death threats if they don't leave for minor incidents or one time even a completely made up reason.

There are still some creators there but I do hope they move to better places in time.

It was fairly soon after she started as CEO, wasn’t it? Possibly before she fully internalized Yahoo’s uncanny ability to make everything it buys just slowly become irrelevant.

On the plus side, Yahoo probably does now have the world’s largest collection of meticulously catalogued porn.

I love how Kyle Kingsbury is bold enough to link out to his own S&M tumblr on his professional website[0]. If only more people were that bold...

[0] https://aphyr.com/about

I'm personally very glad more people aren't that bold. Not at all interested in seeing people I interact with professionally naked or engaged in sex games. Just not the place for it from my perspective.

It tells me that he is free and doesn't have to give a ____. Most people are so worried about "What if my employer sees this?" or "What if my customers see this?" that most boards are choked with throwaway accounts.

I wish more people were as free as Kyle.

the pornography (much like on twitter) was definitely one of the major selling points of tumblr. It was a rare social media site that allowed NSFW materials.

WhatsApp, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. are the popular networks now.

Tumblr naturally declined regardless of Yahoo (which definitely failed at integrating its adtech and never made any money). That's how it goes with social networks, it's a cycle of latest and greatest, and the whims of the public can change in a few short years.

None of those have adult communities in the rounding error of the scale Tumblr does.

...reddit does. Also the adult sites are building their own communities now, no need for a limited separate network.

I don't know if it's only that. I stopped using Tumblr when Yahoo bought it, and actively deleted or abandoned my Tumblr sites when Verizon bought it.

You do understand that only a very small minority would have done that, right? This kind of behavior is irrelevant in the decline of tumblr.

"...imports from Tumblr to WordPress rose from the typical rate of 400-600 per hour to over 72,000...Posterous users fled the service when it was purchased by Twitter, and Instagram users were up in arms over its acquisition by Facebook."

(I also quit Instagram when Facebook bought it.)

https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/20/4347730/yahoo-tumblr-acqu...

Why?

How many people on Tumblr really care that Yahoo or Verizon owns it?

Probably a lot. See my other comment in this thread. Once the core users and thought leaders depart, all that is left is a zombie.

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