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Comment by treflop | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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 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

> 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.

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.

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