Wow. Did not expect Tumblr to be doing better than Twitter.
They should bring back the porn.
They sort of kinda did. You can post nudity now. Not porn, but nudity.
And the dirty little secret about Tumblr is, people were still posting porn, this whole time, they just weren’t caught because Tumblr wasn’t actually looking for it that hard.
Partially true: they want to bring it back but payment processors wouldn’t like that (the post i am linking is from the CEO of Tumblr’s parent company, who bought it from Verizon in 2019)
Oh yeah, I forgot but I had heard something about it around that time. Shame.
I don’t get why credit card companies have beef with porn though…
I’m guessing from the unlimited money hose that was Silicon Valley venture capital.
Problem is, and the reason we’re hearing about this now, the money is being redirected to AI, and all these negative income companies don’t have enough capital to keep going.
That’s why it seems like the entire Internet is going to shit all at once. The corporate money that tried to monopolize everything we access online has been cut off.
But the good news is that compute, bandwidth , and storage has gotten cheap enough to host powerful FOSS alternatives ourselves.
I’m cautiously hopeful this leads to a golden era of the open Internet.
We had the golden era, and we squandered it by chasing centralized platforms and raising up the shittiest people and corporations.
What we will hopefully see is a resurgent era, but the internet will never be as open as it was ever again. The corporate interests run too deep, the giants have too many levers to control how people experience the internet, and they’re going to abuse that.
And I promise in like 5-8 years, were going to start seeing heavy lobbying against decentralized platforms after some instance gets caught with child porn or something. It’ll be right around the same time conservatives are floating regulation of VPNs to “protect the children” or some shit.
I’m cautiously hopeful this leads to a golden era of the open Internet.
Amen, oh brother.
I’m feeling so hysterically easy seeing all this unfolding. The bastards really managed to milk the herd of lamers for so long they thought it was going to last forever. Only now that herd believes in AI, cause it thinks a computer can think for them. There’s a new perspective field for selling snake oil, so they are finally going to stop shitting on ours.
What I want to know about these “unprofitable” tech companies is where all the money is going? Wikipedia, which is run entirely on donations, has an operating budget of ~$150 million. Reddit, Twitter, etc… make many times this amount and even with the greater number of employees and salaries it still sounds like some creative Hollywood accounting that they’re unprofitable. It feels like a big chunk of money is just going to investors/C-classes so they can just say they’re not actually making any money while the big players get their payday.
That was my reaction when I heard Spez whine about reddit not being profitable.
How much money did you waste on bullshit? If you’d just focused on running the damn platform I instead of reinventing it into the monstrosity it is now, how much better might you be doing?
That valuable and incredibly useful NFT tech ain’t gonna develop itself! /s
Trend chasing like this always shows me what CEOs are just morons with no vision
What this number suggests to me is that Tumblr has revenue less than 20 million dollars. I figure:
- about 100 employees
- based in new York
- average $100,000 salary
- 10m annually in humans
- 2-3m annually for office expenses
- 20-30m annually for hosting
Some of these numbers can be up or down, but when I worked at a similar company in New York, we had operating expenses in the same range. (Coincidentally, we had revenue on the same range, and got sold off in a fire sale)
Really good point, and great reminder that I don’t appreciate Wikipedia enough. They’ve been doing the same thing for 20+ years with no ads and only the occasional ask for money. And I think they know better than to try and make money or go public when all of their content is user-generated.
If they had just sherlocked xKit and left the site alone — not adding the live video shit, etc — most users wouldn’t care about the ads. I swear it’s like every social network is just copying each other, remember when everyone added stories because of Snapchat, and how everyone is adding TikTok style videos now? Tumblr’s biggest mistake was doing that, it should’ve just stayed as it was. People are on tumblr because they like tumblr. If they wanted TikTok, they’d download TikTok.
Tumblr was THE place to be for artists. Someone should make a federated alternative.
