It’s not quite the end of Tumblr, but when management is supposedly sending memos with the Lord Tennyson quote about having “loved and lost,” it doesn’t look like there’s much of a future.
Internet statesman and Waxy.org proprietor Andy Baio posted what is “apparently an internal Automattic memo making the rounds on Tumblr” to Threads. The memo, written to employees at WordPress.com parent company Automattic, which bought Tumblr from Verizon’s media arm in 2019, is titled or subtitled “You win or you learn.” The posted memo states that a majority of the 139 employees working on product and marketing at Tumblr (in a team apparently named “Bumblr”) will “switch to other divisions.” Those working in “Happiness” (Automattic’s customer support and service division) and “T&S” (trust and safety) would remain.
I tried to be a tumblr user to learn what it’s all about. I never got the feeling that engagement was authentic, it always felt like it was interacting with bots or posting into a black hole.
Somehow the Tumblr app on my phone needed my password again to login so I just deleted the app instead.
The app is kind of bad. I respond to something someone reblogged and get comments I can’t actually view on the original blog post. It happens to me all the time. Plus the porn bots. Always the porn bots.