#automattic

[sheepgirlmaidtummy]

My friend Rita has been harassed by TERFs, and bullied by Tumblr staff for the better half of a year now. Afew hours ago they nuked her off the website after threatening her with the FBI

the "threat of violence" in question:

Rita's name has been dragged in the mud and the literal CEO of tumblr decided to join in too.

please consider helping her out. she's a disabled sex worker just trying to get by and anything you give would go a long way.

paypal / cashapp: £MoiraHopz

#predstrogen #trans #transgender #photomatt #automattic

[lindsay-lohannibal]

PSA! TUMBLR IS SELLING YOUR ART TO AI COMPANIES

I've just been warned by a coworker who spoke to people inside Tumblr's parent company Automattic that they plan to sell all original images uploaded to this hellsite to Midjourney AI. Here is that warning in his words:

In other words, your OC will be used to train AI without your consent, and your art style will be stolen by the AI.

DELETE YOUR ARTWORK NOW!!!

Spread this post so more artists will be aware of this blatant theft!

#ai #ai art is theft #ai is not art #ai is theft #ai art theft #no ai art #tumblr #automattic #midjourney

[sreegs]

the post-automattic tumblr employees (automatticians, iirc) that are publicly posting as staff and trying to argue with tumblr users who vehemently hate the site are so adorable. this is how it's always been. users pretty much hate staff. this is why, in the old days, it was discouraged to identify as staff unless you had the stomach to put up with a bunch of hate mail and arguments.

you're also not going to win over any users by describing tumblrinas as ungrateful for the site's existence, or unreasonably angry over recent changes. you're just gonna look like a 30+ year old engineer taking pot shots at teenagers.

tumblr's current owner (automattic) got some trust back early in the acquisition when they greenlit some changes users had wanted, and ad-free went over mostly smoothly, but any trust you had was shattered with Tumblr Live. The snarky posts from automatticians are making it worse, the worst offender being the person you have running emporium.

this is how tumblr users have always acted before automattic came in and bought tumblr. this is not new. this is why users say things like "staff is out of touch".

y'all need to understand this before you try to snap back at angry users, or before you make vagueposts insinuating the tumblrinas are ungrateful.

maybe examine why tumblr users are angry, what they're angry with, accept they're valid reasons to be angry, and question why these business decisions are being made. like, "hey yeah why is tumblr live still there if everyone hates it?" or "why does moderation seem worse these days?".

then maybe if you understand what's causing the anger when users say "fuck staff" and you'll know not to take it personally. maybe you can take the urge to post snarky replies and redirect it to questioning your bosses' decisions to go ahead with these features that are universally hated

learn, adapt, overcome.

read, comprehend, post.

or just stop posting

#tumblr #automattic #seriously someone please take the keyboard away from emporium

[maybetheyregiants]

#tumblr #staff #photomatt #matt mullenweg #automattic #avery #predstrogen

[racefortheironthrone]

According to this article, they're discussing an opt-out model of harvesting data, which is definitively worse than an opt-in model (because a lot of people are not going to go through the logistical hurdles to avoid their stuff getting stolen) and very much a bandaid on a open wound.

Needless to say, everyone should be screaming about this to @staff because the more friction the better, and backing everything up if they need to shut shit down rather than have their work be "legally" stolen by a bunch of Silicon Valley vultures who are all going to lose their shirts in a couple years.

Not exactly sure what Plan B I'm going to go with yet, but needless to say my interest in getting an independently hosted wordpress.org blog (because that's distinct from wordpress.com) and/or checking out Squarespace or the like has just gone way up.

#tumblr #wordpress #automattic #disruptors

[petraforgedyke]

i’m seeing a lot of fear today about Tumblr Shutting Down (Real) (Actually True) today and let peepaw seg tell you a story

i’ve been on this webbed site for fifteen years, believe it or not, since way back in the days of Tumblarity. now i was but a wee lad at the time, so i don’t remember the fine details, but rest assured, it doesn’t matter much for the story i’m about to tell you.

you see, i remember when tumblr was owned by tumblr. folk called its ceo (david karp) “daddy”, and were enthusiastic about his communications, even if on our own blogs, we’d bitch and moan about tumblr making changes to things we were used to. i remember the hubbub when tumblr removed tumblarity, and how this was surely going to be the end of tumblr.

all those fifteen (though it might be sixteen) years ago.

layouts changed, and we’d bitch and moan, and tumblr’d get sold, and we’d know for sure that This Was The End Of Tumblr, For Real This Time. this happened again and again and again, because this webbed site, you see, it makes no money, and companies, greedy things as they are, like money.

the porn ban, under the reign of YaHoo that was, was seen as another death knell. tumblr was going to die, for real, for sure, and i’m not proud to say that i was one of the ones who fell for it. peepaw seg needed to sow hir wild oats on other platforms.

now, i say this happened under yahoo, but it’s important to remember that this ban came in the wake of both the apple app store banning the tumblr app on account of real life csem being hosted on tumblr, and the new usamerican law SESTA-FOSTA being implemented, which made it so that companies such as tumblr would have to moderate the explicit content on them to make sure none of it breached sesta-fosta. tumblr, being a small fish in the grand scheme of thing, didn’t warrant that amount of financial effort on yahoo’s part, as the site was still not making any money, and it’s easier and cheaper to blanket ban than it is to moderate. all this to say, it’s important to vote, because if you don’t, your internet freedom will be curtailed.

and now we’re here, some sixteen years on, and i’ll say automattic has been not all good, but definitely not all bad for the site. they changed stuff we liked to our discontent (layouts), and added stuff we hated (live), but they also gave us stuff we like (polls) and an amount of open communication about tumblr’s inner workings not seen since the days of david “daddy” karp. and now they’re putting just a skeleton crew on the tumblr project.

and that’s going to be The End Of Tumblr For Sure For Real Actually This Time. Really. Promise. Abandon Ship.

and we come to the crux of this story.

which is that this has happened before, and it will happen again, because tumblr is surprisingly immune to making any money.

what we’re likely to see in the coming time is no new features (that’s reserved for projects that make money), and an increase in ads, until one day, and this might be in a few months, and maybe in a few years, there’ll be an announcement that tumblr’s been sold to one direction to a new company.

and we’ll start the whole rigmarole again. and this company might be good for tumblr’s userbase, or it might go against everything the tumblr community holds dear. no way of knowing which way it’ll go.

until one day, some parent company will have had enough, and will pull the plug.

but for now… well, i’m gonna sit here on my porch (blog), and we’ll see what happens. i'm not worried, tumblr’s survived worse things.

#tumblr #but also legit #i've seen some 'oh if you give tumblr money you're a bad leftist' takes before #and like bestie how do you think this website is gonna keep running? #investors aren't going to be interested in a cow that's run out of milk #which leaves ads and data selling and yes user driven income #as far as parent companies go automattic's been decent enough to the userbase #it could be so much worse #automattic #seg.misc

[settlercolonialismisbad]

hey staff, how’s it going with this? it has been 4 years. can we hang out with my fediverse friends?

#image description in alt #automattic #tumblr staff #a&m #open source #oss #technology #fediverse #federate #mastodon #activitypub

[themandownstairs]

the one pickle in this shit sandwich here on the self-appointed hypermarketable "queerest place on the internet" is that never in my life have I seen more posts adequately relaying the terms of service and holding firm on reasonable interpretations of them. I'm seeing people who don't Have Opinions on this sort of thing and typically keep their head down talk about it, including people who didn't like avewy or her styles of posting

#predstrogen #tumblr meta #automattic #transmisogny tw

[tyote]

"Hey guys, Tumblr here. We're gonna sell your data to an AI company. But there'll be an opt-out. Except we've already been scraping data, and even scraped some stuff we shouldn't have, so... we're really hoping the people we're selling this to will honor the user's data preferences retroactively."

Source: (requires an account but the article is completely free)

#tumblr #wordpress #automattic #ai #openai #midjourney #news #signal boost

[taikeero-lecoredier]

I am quite distressed at hearing about the post stating that Tumblr will be run by a Skeleton crew.

I cant reblog it so heres a link

https://www.tumblr.com/gammija/733497657349242880

The clarification make things sound less dire than I feared but i cant help but beg staff to set up a donation button a la wikipedia or ao3 style so that we dont lose this platform,its one of the latest best bastion for this Era. Losing it would mean losing so so much.

Please if any moderator sees this i would love clarification, anything.

#Tumblr #Tumblr update #Tumblr staff #automattic #please please if Tumblr shut down so many things will be Lost

[sreegs]

do you think the 2019 tumblr acquisition was made on a more optimistic note? In terms of how they thought the site could have been made profitable or at least self-sustaining.

yeah it felt good at the time because tumblr was owned by Verizon. switching hands to a company that was at least aligned with what tumblr does (blogging) and a private company made it feel like Tumblr had a chance to refocus and reprioritize, but Automattic was not a good fit for Tumblr culture

because tumblr was mostly nyc based and had things like, observed public holidays, and an office (this was pre-pandemic). there was this transitional period where tumblr was treated with some exceptions while they adjusted to the Automattic way of things. this strengthened the divide as seasoned Automattic employees saw us as getting special treatment like sub-competitive wages (as compared to absolutely not competitive wages) and a day off during national holidays.

this transitional policy was loosely documented and adhered to, and was unceremoniously ended by a decree from the top that Tumblr no longer has holidays off. i'm not going to say which national holiday triggered this change of heart but, lol, it's a doozy

additionally there were only a handful of automattic people who understood what tumblr was, and much less who understood the vibe of Tumblr's userbase. i know there were at least a few people who thought Tumblr was an analog of wordpress and didnt even know the dashboard existed

Tumblr employees started leaving en masse because their benefits and compensation were cut. Mullenwig's seagull style of management and the general disconnect between Automattic and Tumblr culture accelerated the exodus. I remember reading on Automattic's anonymous employee-only message board (yeah.) employees expressing their happiness that the "lazy overpaid Verizon acqui-hires" (the Tumblr staff, who had lower salaries than other tech companies and never identified as Verizon or Yahoo or anything except Tumblr) were being shed like dead weight and soon it will be Automattic in charge of everything

Also, side note: Automattic is weirdly anti-profanity as an unofficial workplace policy ordained from the CEO. How's that gonna fit with Tumblr?

So the initial feelings of freedom from Verizon and opportunity to work on things that might turn Tumblr around were dampened under the wet blanket of pay cuts, benefit cuts, cuts to time off (Automattic has "unlimited" vacation, lol), bad management, and an unwelcoming attitude from naysayers

The remaining old pre-2019 staff are very, very few in number. It's mostly Automattic's show now, and you can see how that's working out for them. i was once hopeful it would work out for Tumblr but that hope has long waned. it would not surprise me if the biggest advances toward profitability have been due to employees leaving Tumblr and not being replaced

#tumblr #automattic

[the-old-man-has-the-phonebox]

So the news of Tumblr basically being put on life support effective immediately is going to haunt me indefinitely.

Where the fuck do I go? Where do we go?

Twitter is gone.

TikTok is overrun by bitchy children in fandom spaces (not to mention their entitled attitudes towards fan content and their freakishly-puritan beliefs about said fan content).

Instagram’s algorithm is so fucked, we’d never find each other there.

Facebook… obviously not.

Shit, DeviantArt has apparently gone to the dogs, too. AI is running rampant stealing people’s work on there, last time I checked in.

We’d basically need a multimedia equivalent of Ao3, where we funded it to keep it alive to prevent this from happening again. And honestly I don’t think there’s enough people to get one off the ground in regard to actually having the know-how to make it.

What the fuck do we do?

I cannot survive another Vine. I cannot deal with the emptiness I felt those years after, because I had safety nets back then. A friend group irl and other sites like Tumblr and Twitter. Now there’s nothing.

I know it probably makes me chronically online and cringe or whatever-the-fuck for being this upset, but… I can’t handle this. This was one of the last places I had, and there’s now a good chance it won’t be here this time next year or in two years’ time.

This is one of the last places on the entire internet that wasn’t designed to be a doomscrolling hellscape that you got lost in for hours with an algorithm designed to feed you certain posts versus the content you’re actually looking for.

This is probably the last true bastion for queer people online.

I am so fucking scared.

#Would’ve worded this WAY better if I had known it was gonna get notes #automattic #tumblr

[netscapenavigator-official]

I can’t say that I’m surprised, or that I care, about the announcement that Tumblr might be closing its doors soon. When this site refused to back down on its adult content ban, I promised I’d dance on its grave the day it died. The day Yahoo was forced to sell this place at an unimaginable loss, I cheered; and frankly, my feelings haven’t changed in the slightest. It’ll be a shame to watch the mutuals, friends, and community I’ve built here, crash and burn, but tbh, after years of staff disproportionately flagging queer and trans content, and a refusal to even remotely lift the ban preventing artists from coming back, I can’t say I’ll exactly miss this place once it’s gone.

#rambles #tumblr #staff #apathetic #tumblr closing #shut down #tumblr shut down #automattic

[nimx]

no way he found a looney toons threat scary

#automattic

[phoenixyfriend]

I love that Automattic didn't even do anything very noticeable for the first like... two years that they had the site (admittedly this was at least a little bit down to the pandemic), just seemingly held on to it and did 'nothing.' Except I'm confident a lot of that was cleaning up the back end with the many glitches and so on. The new editor isn't everyone's favorite, but it contains a lot of features that were previously only available on mobile, unless you managed to glitch into it through screen resolution shenanigans; it does have its own set of problems, but it also has an autosave feature and lets you edit tags without having to rewrite them, lets you put more images in, etc.

iirc, in-app/account blacklist was introduced after Automattic acquired the site. The app glitches less. The porn ban was loosened (as far as legally possible). We're given weekly emails on things that have been changed or fixed or adjusted.

I'm fully convinced that Automattic spent two years fixing up the hellsite to make it so that once they did start asking for money, it was for a product they were already proud of and had put a lot of work into making functional, rather than asking us to invest in a possible future.

#tumblr #phoenix talks #personal #sorta #automattic