Drunkard's Walk Forums

So, a couple months ago, after making the counter-intuitive discovery that your traffic (and anticipated revenues) drop like a rock if you ban the content that draws most of your traffic and make your biggest communities unwelcome while crowing about how you're going to turn fandoms and social movements into corporate profit engines, Verizon started shopping around for someone to take the albatross that they turned Tumblr into off of their hands.

Today it was announced that they've sold Tumblr to Automattic Inc., the owners of Wordpress, for what amounts to a fraction of a penny on the dollar. (Tumblr was valued at one point at US$1.1 billion; while an exact amount hasn't been announced, it's been confirmed that Automattic paid something under three million.)

Sadly, Automattic says it has no plans to undo Verizon's censorship regime (not that they really risk losing money by not doing so), so you'll still have to cope with Tumblr's censorbots catching you perverts when you try to post pictures of bread, bare feet, pre-Cambrian lifeforms, semi-precious stones and other pornographic material.

And so, the eternal dumpster fire rots just a little more...

I'm expecting they purchased Tumblr for the technology. Yes, it would be nice if they'd make the porn filter actually work correctly and aim for false negatives, not the trash inferno that was massive false positives (not that they'd lose any real revenue not changing it, so to speak), and would tackle the bane of all social media, the entitled right wing white males that post there with impunity. But I'm definitely going to not be surprised if they basically leave Tumblr itself to wither further while they extract the software bits they want to integrate into Wordpress.

I actually didn't mind the site for the most part, it was a lot easier to keep stuff you didn't want to see out of your feed with some care. But I did close my account there when it was clear they were going to botch getting the porn off even worse than most places have, after all, I am part of one of the marginalized that tends to get caught up in aggressive anti-porn filters. Which is a shame, because it was one of those sites that you could go and find people on the "edges" of society in that way.

*SNICKER*

"So is it just me, or does every new owner of Tumblr getting announced feel like we’re getting a new Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher?"

the sale is officially listed at 3 MILLION.

That's an amazing trick, losing 1.1 billion dollars in 6 years. You actually have to work for that.

Verizon itself didn't really lose money as much as it did Marissa Mayer.

Tumblr let itself get destroyed by Apple.

Yahoo stumbling onto its Alibaba stake was the equivalent of a lottery ticket.