winter;

If somebody could show me just a bit of kindness, a friendly “hello” or even a smile, I’m sure that would lift my spirits so much.

staff: 

Exhibit A: Yahoo paid $1.1 Billion for Tumblr in 2013

Tumblr was already the way tumblr is in varying degrees of appalling before 2013. So. Yahoo bought it even after it was plateauing. The truth of the matter is that Yahoo bought tumblr to be another social media site, a mixture of Deviantart and Livejournal. They did this because they didn’t understand tumblr’s true value, which doesn’t have to do with traffic ads at all!

Exhibit B: Automattic paid less than (but conceivably close to) $20 Million for Tumblr in 2019

Automattic owns Wordpress and has a bunch of other smaller-name properties under its umbrella. It’s a company that is ‘trying to make the web a better place’ and honestly we should have let Pornhub buy Tumblr BUT I DIGRESS. Automattic bought Tumblr for multiple millions of dollars in 2019 because they knew what Yahoo did not: That tumblr’s value isn’t ads but in fact Big Data. 

Big Data, n., definition: extremely large data sets that may be analyzed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations, especially relating to human behavior and interactions.

Tumblr is a trend hub, a place where twitter jokes show up months in advance, where pop culture phenomenon are born and where meme trends appear before anywhere else. It’s self contained and pretty appalling but it’s one of the only sites where ‘discoverable’ content is still a common thing. We’re all using our favorite characters hashtags, communicating via messenger and generally being stupid without the filter of ads and brand accounts. This is a Kodoku of cultural trends and content, a melting pot where the best rises and can easily be observed.

Had you ever seen a gif set before tumblr? Exactly.

Tumblr’s information is what they want, not to sell us anything. They are doing the bare minimum to keep people here, filtering out the spam (porn accounts which aren’t giving them usable data, bots, etc.) and creating a data factory they can apply to their other sites and hopefully get a ringer out of one of them! Wordpress is all about user ease and hosting, but there are a bunch of other sites no one cares about on their homepage, and if Automattic is being smart they’re datamining all that Tumblr does (including UI complaints and Xkit which provides free coding for them BTW) to form roadmaps for their other properties. And probably also selling what they learn (which doesn’t qualify as ‘our data being sold’ btw because it contains no identifying information) to other major corporations and technology companies.

So yes, Tumblr is a hellsite where no one listens to you, but it’s not because they don’t hear. It’s because what you’re asking for won’t feed the beast behind the curtain.

Enjoy your blogs, enjoy your content. Enjoy the unregulated (except for porn because these people are prudes) internet in the last bastion of insanity on the light half of the world wide web. 

Temuera Morrison as Boba Fett

Tony: Nebula, we need to stop by Mars.

Nebula: …Why?