Is Tumblr on its way back to the top? | Hacker News Reader

Is Tumblr on its way back to the top?

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14 pointsgmays7 comments

Hope not. A culture of self-harm, suicide, and toxicity permeates on it, at times being worse than 4chan.

You must have seen completely different ones than I do.

Social networks (or anything else) don't usually climb out of the dead pool so I'd only assume one might if its user #s were rising.

This article claims Tumblr has had a "a surprising boost in users", but without pointing to any source. The only one I can find is Similarweb, which shows some growth in the past 3 months; but its user numbers are still significantly lower than they were a couple years ago (at which point Tumblr was already considered dead).

Curious to see any better proof of Tumblr's actual resurgence that anyone might have.

Where's the proof that Tumblr "died"? This meme seems to contradict the experiences of actual Tumblr users.

As a niche site, sure, it has users. It died as a competitive social network, which is the context that I'm responding to this article in, since it distinctly asks in the headline whether Tumblr is heading back to "the top".

I asked for proof.

And you could find it yourself. But I'm mildly interested so...

2010: 1.5 billion pageviews per month, 4x-ish YoY growth: https://techcrunch.com/2010/07/19/tumblr-stats/

2011: growth plateauing, sold to Yahoo for $4.8 billion

2013: sold to Verizon (against user objections) for $1.1 billion

2018: adult content banned, traffic dips

2019: sold to Automattic for peanuts (supposedly <$3 million, Automattic refuses to confirm)

You can find various graphs on Statista. This one shows user growth basically vanishing post-Yahoo (this is just new users, not reflective of lost users): https://www.statista.com/statistics/426531/tumblr-us-user-gr...

So in context of Tumblr having a shot at being a top social network -- the actual history is a decline from being competitive with Facebook, to being a barely-unicorn, to basically selling for nothing and having no user growth. But again, if there's some evidence of an uptick I think it would be great to see. I'd much prefer Tumblr/Automattic over Facebook/Meta.

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