Tumblr Is fucken great, you just can't monetise it.
Suck shit
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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the biggest failure was removal of porn from tumbler, they all fled to twitter, and pornhub.
Automattic bought Tumblr after the porn ban.
The ban happened because Verizon was trying to sell it.
Depending on how you measure “success, it may have not made any money but people seem to have fun in there.
yeah well when you buy tumblr and ignore the userbase to push dumb changes what do you think would happen
Well like most CEO's he gets paid no matter what so he doesn't have to think. That's the problem.
Imagine getting millions of dollars to ruin a company. The concept is insane to me.
It’s all gambling when playing with those numbers. And economists build stories that sometimes are just ways to justify it.
i'd say give tumblr back to david karp but i'm literally afraid he's like into crypto now like wil wright (don't tell me cause i don't wanna find out because i dont wanna get sad 🙃)
I checked for you and good news!
Tap for spoiler
He isn't involved in much except investing in mobility aides and was apparently on the Planned Parenthood board for a while.
Quick search showed his most recent activity was being the single largest donor to Mark Kelly's 2020 senate campaign.
Completely normal progressive liberal stuff.
Either they eat the shit and like it or they get nothing! - CEOs
Really, Matt? Nothing else, like how you went scorched-earth on WPEngine and caught a lot of people in the crossfire and destroyed a lot of goodwill in the process? Nothing comes to mind?
Thank you. I knew I had heard his name before and had some "eff that guy" alarms going off but couldn't remember why/where .
Who'd've thunk that not only doing everything your userbase does not want but also actively bullying a large portion of that userbase into leaving wouldn't create revenue? No, being quirky on main and self-deprecating every once in a while won't change that.
Edit: this sounds like "bullying people into leaving" and "what the userbase does not want" are two different things. That's not what I meant. I'm overthinking this. I strongly deny any accusation of ever having pissed on a poor.
Nahhh your comment didn’t come across like you think, it totally makes sense. They really fucked the web site completely.
Since I am out of loop - my bias is still: why wouldn't (furry) porn be profitable? :D
Porn on tumblr was an early victim of credit card companies not wanting to be associated with that filthy filth, like what happened recently with videogames. Iirc, they pressured app stores to take the tumblr app down.
It was Apple. Or rather, regulators and partnering companies leaning on Apple to manage the content on their app store better, including the content that you could find via those apps.
Could say something about how the app stores are a monopoly power, and the chilling effect these wide ranging and heavy handed content policies have, and why the open web (and web apps) are a better option. But we also handed the web over to Google anyway, so it's not that much better.
I can't verify the truth of it, but I heard that the catalyst to the porn ban was a meeting where they were pitching Tumblr advertisements to some company, and wanted to demonstrate how tags and engagement works, so they pulled up the #McDonalds tag live to demonstrate and they got a screen full of Ronald McDonald porn.
I don't care if this is debunked in the next millisecond, this is my head canon from now till the end of time.
That sounds absolutely plausible and is thus now incorporated as Truth into my memory of the goings-on.
I'm loving it
as a long time tumblr user it's so very ironic to me that short after the 2018 porn ban you see the rise of fan sites, and still after that tumblr tried to monetise by adding tips, and various ways to pay your favourite bloggers and just... you already had users willing to post hot original porn, and later you had ways to monetise it, but no, they did it in the wrong order wtf
To be fair, IF tumblr had added the tipping feature while porn was huge on the site, it might have became Onlyfans.
OF wasn't always a porn site. It was trying to be a Patron that allowed adult content, but it became just a porn site.
I argue something similar would have happened to tumblr
Ahh that makes kinda sense!
Tho I'm not interested much in porn - I am very pissed about credit card companies deciding for the users of what they can purchase or not. I believe crypto will help a lot with these overreaches in the future.
"so far"
I'm guessing he's stupid or greedy.
Throw in an ad and the service pays for itself.
That is, unless he's renting hardware like a dipshit.
A bunch of companies have been trying for years to monetize tumblr. They've all failed. Tumblr users are very proud of this.
They do call it a Hellsite for many reasons. Not being profitable is one of them.
At the same time, it has calmed down a bit as the user base has aged up, and the more volatile elements have left for bluer skies.
Oddly enough, other than the mess of the NSFW filter, it's been fairly controversy free. You can still use their API without paying globs of money, for example. Twitter and Facebook have all thrown that out, and Reddit has made other bad decisions, in addition to imploding their third party app ecosystem.
I mean seriously if they just monetised the porn they'd be billionaires