Tumblr President Steps Down | Hacker News Reader

Tumblr President Steps Down

john.io

19 pointsmschonfeld24 comments

I'm absolutely flabbergasted by the quality of writing. Speechless.

It feels more like one side of an IM conversation than an essay, what with the missing periods and stilted

spacing

I feel for the guy, for if you read between the lines of the latest news about Tumblr and one or two of his recent blog posts, he was obviously ousted by his board. So maybe it was a very difficult post to write.

However, I'm still astounded that this quality of writing could come from a company president.

Definitely sounds like an ousting rather than wanting to step down.

And based on the recent decision to start selling advertising, it sounds like it's related to his inability to produce a top-line, or perhaps his aversion to the prevailing winds at the board about the timeline and methods to produce revenue.

Do you think it was the board, or Karp?

The inconsistent substitution of 'with' with 'w/' confuses me. Why do people even do that? On qwerty I know I find '/' to be much harder to strike than 'ith'.

People do it because it's two fewer keystrokes.

Is it actually easier though?

On my keyboard at least, yeah.

My guess is that the missing periods at paragraph breaks indicate he wrote this on an iDevice. Space-space: period added. Enter-enter: no period added.

That seems like a fairly sever oversight. Is there a reason for that behaviour?

Why an iDevice? Does Android add periods by default? (Space space doesn't on most Android devices, neither does Enter enter).

He could have written this on any mobile computing platform.

That being said, he did use short hand texting "speech" with his "w/".

Presumably if he was adding periods manually, he wouldn't have skipped them at the end of paragraphs.

Quick test on a text field in chrome on my Galaxy Nexus shows the same behavior listed above: two spaces automatically ends the sentence with a period, but two carriage returns does not.

It reads like a speech, rather than a letter.

Maybe he had to write it on an iPad from the serenity of a first-class flight destined for a vacation.

I refuse to believe this was something that a grown man spent time to write on a laptop or desktop. Or maybe that's what tumblelogging does to people's writing proficiency.

If you look at his archive, his other posts (at least the few ones that have words) are that way too. I guess it's a standard thing with him.

To be fair, with Tumblr there was just no forward thinking plan. The first thing they should've done was consolidated content. Thus if someone uploads a picture that's already on the server, it should automatically become a reblog. This would've promoted greater content creation and thus promoted the harnessing of content creators. Everything else falls into place on that solid foundation. Promoted posts, inline advertising. It would've all been there for Tumblr to cultivate in a manner which users can embrace.

Instead the idea seems to have started out as a micro-blogging system that's grown into a full-fledged blogging system but seems to lack real direction and instead seems to on the fly to meet the needs that suddenly develop from usage statistics and shoehorning.

Lots of logistical issues with auto-reblogging. I could upload a picture of every color, flower, car, etc. and reap the reblogging rewards.

I also fail to understand how this edge case feature would generate revenue. Ads? Greeeeeat.

Ads are a part of life. If you don't wanna see em, you like many others install adblock. For the people that don't, they create revenue.

As for installing every colour, flower, car. That's fine and dandy but stuff like that would be flagged and dealt with.

Does anyone know why he was ejected? From an external perspective Tumblr appears to be doing well.

What's with the lack of periods?

He's a graduate of the Jerry Yang School of Management.

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