as someone who was on tumblr during the yahoo years, it was an awesome time because we basically just ruined everything so bad we caused a company to lose billions which is why i’m shocked elon hasn’t realized what pissing off his users can do
Take from the rich (themselves) and give to the poor (overvalued startups).
They have quite the history of throwing ridiculous sums of money at companies not at all worth what they paid and ending up with worthless acquisitions.
Literally one of the investors on Shark Tank is only massively rich because Yahoo made one of the worst acquisitions in history.
They regularly took huge sums of money and threw it around like a toddler with creamed carrots.
I still wonder if they tanked it on purpose. Hanlon’s razor and all that, but it’s just weird how many left-leaning social media sites get bought by right-wing assholes who immediately piledrive it into the ground against all capitalistic reason.
As much as I think it could be malicious I am more inclined to believe incompetence. They saw a profitable business and thought they could improve efficiency and keep the market. Little did they account for how much the market wasn’t there for their ideas.
The decision to buy is made by numbers before the purchase: returning visitors, time spent etc. “look at how many hours of eyeballs we’re buying”
The decision to kill the porn is made by social pressure after the purchase: “hey we’ve noticed that in your stable if brands you have some questionable materials. We can’t be associated with that kind of filth, you’re damaging our brand.” - cc processors, advertisers etc. “my wife went on that platform we just bought and you won’t believe what she found” - half the members of the board.
Most boards are collectively moronic - rarely do you have competent people that can hold serious tense discussion and can reach conclusions without either descending into massive infighting or just coast along the dominant political players.
Most are there for the kudos and cocktail parties. They really don’t give a shit about how anything is going if it’s not sudden unless it reflects on them personally. It can’t reflect on them personally if they don’t get personally involved and just coast along instead.
So did they just blatantly want tumblr to burn, or was it kind of a situation where they wanted to “make the platform more advertiser friendly” and then decided to make that decision without consulting their userbase or understanding the statistics of their userbases’ use?
I dunno. This current model of advertisers bankrolling the infrastructure that makes up the internet isn’t really working out, though, especially when most of these advertisers are super prudish, or, more likely than not, use prudishness as an easy way to basically just have iron-fisted control over these platforms. So kind of through that mechanism they can totally control the platforms that people are using.
You’re attributing too much intelligence to morons. They bought it because they saw user numbers and thought it would make them money. They shuttered porn after their advertisers demanded it, and they thought that porn wasn’t a big enough part of Tumblr to sink the site.
Yahoo had no idea what they were buying, had no idea what to do with it once they had it, and so they sold it at a tremendous loss after they realized they couldn’t make money off it. No malice, no shadowy conservative cabal trying to police morality, just a bunch of airhead MBAs thinking they know something about tech.
I wasn’t even thinking of a shadowy conservative cabal as much as just like- “Tailor your platform to encourage more watch time! Tailor your platform to encourage it’s users to be more tolerant of advertisements generally! Tailor your platform to promote more content that is related to our ads, and more easily bought out creators! If you don’t, we’ll pull our ads under the guide of moral policing!” kind of a thing.
But yeah it’s probably more of a hanlon’s razor kinda deal
It was. It was just people posting very specific types of porn.
One of my favorites was called imprefect10. Which was women that didn’t conform to the standard definition of beauty but were amazingly hot nevertheless. It was such a subjective way to categorize certain types of people… It really emphasized the old saying beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Remember when Newscorp bought MySpace for $580 million dollars and then immediately wiped the user database? What in the actual fuck were they thinking? Talk about not knowing what you bought.
I might be wrong but I think might be misremembering something, Myspace lost all it’s user data but not till like 2016 which was years after news corp sold the site.
They didn’t delete the users, but they deleted everyone’s blog posts, and i think wall posts and settings too. It has been decades now, but I remember a bunch of content disappearing right after they bought it, which drove more people to check out Facebook. Then later I think they wiped the pictures from people who hadn’t been active in awhile. I know at some point all of my pictures disappeared, and that’s when I finally completely gave up on the site.
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