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Comment by simonswords82 | Hacker News Reader

What blows my mind is how positive the HN crowd were about the acquisition of Tumblr at the time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5737185

Everybody on HN now appears to be firmly in the camp of "Tumblr was a terrible acquisition, it was obvious at the time, what a disaster". Now we read about the other 52 companies that for the most part are also disasters.

My questions are:

How did Marissa manage to purchase a whopping 53 companies and waste so much money before somebody realised that Yahoo was collapsing from the inside out?

Is this all on her shoulders?

Surely the board signed these deals off? Are they equally culpable here?

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No, that thread was talking about it being positive for Tumblr, and the community thereon. Or at least not destroying it by trying to clean up the NSFW blogs.

I can't see any of those posts saying it would be great for Yahoo or its investors.

Did you see the very first comment?

"I really think Yahoo's back in the game now. I would never have used yahoo before. Now hundred thousands of people are. And they are from the new generation."

She was brought in to stop an ongoing collapse, so I guess you could say she did it after everybody realised that Yahoo was collapsing from the inside out.

Yeah, this is sort of like blaming the fire department for burning down your house.

Only if the fire department showed up without water opting instead to spray money at the fire in the hope it would fix itself.

And if the house was Yahoo and the fire was Yahoo circling the drain for years. You're pushing the metaphor to a place where it really doesn't make sense.

That thread doesn't seem that positive to me, besides the first post and a few comments about the Tumblr post itself.

Comment threads are not reliable for gauging what a community thinks. The selection affects for comments can be extreme.

You're right.

It is very, very hard to integrate different companies, so is it any wonder that buying 52 of them isn't going to work out too well?

All those founders must have been laughing all the way to the bank though.

> What blows my mind is how positive the HN crowd were about the acquisition of Tumblr at the time:

Self-selection bias. Those who post in a given topic are not always the same people.

What blows MY mind is how it is possible to wonder how in huge groups of people there can form sub-groups (through self-selection, in this case) who hold very different views. Yes, that happens. HN isn't a person.

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