Ha ha, no, of course not.
Yahoo is a notorious repeat offender. Yahoo is the reason the âif youâre not paying money for a service, then youâre not a customer, youâre the product.â saying exists.
Here is some fully general advice: If youâre the user of a free-to-use website, and you learn that itâs being bought by a large company, then this is always, and forever, bad news. If itâs not an acquihire, then itâs something worse. Youâre not a customer, youâre the product.
If weâre lucky, this will be a Livejournal-style buyout, where the site just gradually disintegrates over the course of several years. If weâre unlucky, then itâll be a Posterous-style buyout, and Tumblr will be shut down when Yahoo goes bankrupt in six months. It is vanishingly unlikely that being owned by Yahoo will benefit Tumblr users at all.
More ads. Karp has a weirdly principled dislike of ads, for a guy running a free social network. Marissa Mayer is unencumbered by morals, here. If you spend a billion dollars on something, youâre gonna want a return on income.
NSFW content is probably going to be banned, or heavily restricted. (As in, âverify your age by giving us a credit card numberâ) Ad networks hate and fear porn, and Yahoo is going to run more ads. No other Yahoo property allows NSFW content, for precisely this reason.
They might try to restrict fan content, due to copyright/CP concerns, as Livejournal did; they might not.
Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!