Tumblr CEO publicly spars with trans user over account ban | Hacker News Reader

Tumblr CEO publicly spars with trans user over account ban

techcrunch.com

Based on the article alone, the CEO’s comment sounds reasonable tbh.

I’m pretty gay and I definitely think some people get offended too easily. You know, I care if you are for me or against me more than anything you say.

That said, I think as CEO, you should shut up. You shouldn’t give a face to your company because it really complicates everything and you basically have to be a perfect human, which no human is.

But regardless, Tumblr shutting down all those communities a while back left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths and I can’t imagine any website ever recovering from that. They might as well as give up tbh.

Tumblr is pretty much a total shitshow at this point. I used to have an account there ages ago, but I haven't touched it in over a decade.

I cannot for the life of me fathom what the strategy was there. Buy a website and ban the biggest traffic driver to it? Tumblr is a ghost town now compared to what it was. Everyone moved on. Lighting $5B on fire to warm your house would have been more productive than what they did.

Unless I'm mistaken it's Verizon who decided to do the ban, then automattic bought it for much cheaper because it was a ghost town. Don't get why Automattic doesn't reverse the ban though.

They've written a lot about it. Short answer: App Stores.

Also, they're still losing absolute boatloads of money on it, despite trying seemingly everything.

It's a shame. They seem incredibly competent, but have an impossible task in front of them.

PWA time; fuck the app stores

> CEO, you should shut up

But then people will blame you for being a faceless entity and question how useful you actually are despite not knowing a single thing about either the situation or the business.

My view? It doesn't matter what you choose, its a spectacle, give the people a show from time to time. You don't even have to be right, you just have to be entertaining.

> I definitely think some people get offended too easily

That's basically the established culture of much Tumblr since forever.

It's surprising the CEO doesn't know that and doesn't know to not overly-engage, unless there's a clear objective. Especially as corporate tech authority figure on social media, which doesn't gain you any credibility among users.

Usually you'll never win or make them happy unless you're deeply in-group in their various community subcultures and learned the elaborate dance needed for social approval (Tumblr especially). CEOs of tech companies should have more important things to do than that and delegate.

Better to be hands off as much as possible, engage from the outside or via dedicated community employees who makes it their job, and work to make the communities as lively/happy as possible without getting into the weeds with individual users.

> They might as well as give up tbh

They already did, Tumblr loses millions per month, only has a skeleton staff left and it's widely believed to be shut down any minute.

When you're a CEO, don't you have people to deal with this stuff for you?

If you have problems with ban evasion, your policy teams should be dealing with them. If there are death threats on other websites, legal should be dealing with them.

What kind of leader has time to bullshit like this instead of running the company?

Likewise, some would argue that Steve Jobs was a 'hands on' CEO. It's not wrong, just different.

> What kind of leader has time to bullshit like this instead of running the company?

From the article:

    Matt Mullenweg, CEO ... is supposed to be on sabbatical.

To me, it sounds like the common "finds it hard to disconnect from work" problem when someone is on leave.

Hopefully he manages to disconnect properly and get some real rest/recovery happening, leaving stuff like this to others as you've mentioned. :)

The people they hired to do it for them, sold moderation as a service, according to the article.

Worth noting that

a) Tumblr, under his leadership, has already had to settle a lawsuit over desperately poor moderation, leading to massive harassment, especially of trans women—and said settlement required them to make significant improvements in said moderation, which self-evidently has not happened,

b) Mullenweg himself admitted that they had some contract moderator who was actively going after trans women, in a criminal breach of contract, and all Tumblr did was to silently let that contractor go,

and c) according to other employees of his, Mullenweg has had a problem with these kinds of toxic blowups since he was just the head of WordPress.

> This led her to post that she hopes that the CEO “dies a forever painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere.”

Seems like a pretty fair reason to be banned

Arguing online is rarely a good idea, doubly so when you're a CEO and arguing with an anonymous-ish user. I guess Lord Elon would disagree though. Overall, it's still not as bad as when Mr Uber decided to get into an argument with one of his employees driving his drunk-ass around.

For those curious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTEDYCkNqns

Argument starts at 3:56

It's always depressing when a bunch of drama erupts between people who all seem to be kind of bad at posting. Matt's posts were wildly inadvisable and the user he banned was obviously asking to get her account nuked. (This isn't a judgement of whether their complaints about Tumblr are valid, just the supposed justification for the ban).

Nobody comes out of this mess looking like a winner and continuing to post just makes it worse.

Hard to know when to post through it.

This is a non issue. The CEO is leading the co pan's vision and accountable for its execution. Of course you want them to be opinionated. They do need to be sensible and grow value, but requiring CEOs to just ignore everything and smile is not necessarily good.

@dang any chance I could edit the above so it says company and I don't look so bad at typing please. Noticed just now

I will never understand the desire some web platform CEOs have to publicly argue with users. This is something you learn not to do with the tiniest modicum of power - a lesson many of my generation learned being moderators on message boards.

It never ends well and it just makes your job more frustrating - best case scenario, it makes you look like an ass. Worst case scenario, it costs you actual money.

Does not matter if you are tall, short, large, small, any color or credo, who you want to go in bed with and how you idenitify: when using a certain language, threats or harassment things will end ugly. And they did.

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