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Comment by rahuldottech | Hacker News Reader

Not surprising. I don't think Verizon "gets" Tumblr, or knows how to deal with it

To be fair, Yahoo didn't "get" Tumblr either; they just more or less didn't try to do anything with it. Verizon tried to appeal to more advertisers...but completely shot themselves in the foot. I honestly don't see how it can be salvaged. There is a rumor that PornHub could buy it, but I'm not sure how that's possible. It will be interesting how cheap it is sold. Yahoo bought it for $1.1. Billion. I'm sure by now it's worth 1/4th of that.

It's not clear that Tumblr can be salvaged anymore. A name like pornhub could give confidence that Tumblr won't try another porn purge; at least to the people paying attention. But I suspect that the vast majority of users that left would simply be unaware of change of policy, let alone the change of ownership.

And even if they were, the community is gone, and you can't just rebuild that.

How about selling Tumblr to where its community has seem to gone? Twitter. Gives Twitter a long format and a better platform for content.

I don’t think they all went to one place. You say Twitter but my anecdotal impression was reddit.

I have some model and photographer friends who were big on Tumblr and they came to visit me a couple weeks ago. They ran popular tumblr blogs and are fully financed from their Patreons. Their said all their friends who's livelyhood depended on their reach switched to twitter from tumblr. I'm sure the small porn blogs or so just died or maybe went somewhere else. But twitter is where the bulk of the professionals took refuge.

My anecdotal impression was 4chans anime boards.

My impression of Twitter is that it is people hungry to build a reputation and a 'personal brand' and Tumblr trades on anonymity?

Both are as branded or anonymous as you want it to be and I've seen both used for either. I really think the key component for both is how easy it is to share and discuss content that the sharer didn't create with people they don't know with as much or little privacy as they want.

That makes it different from Instagram which is focused on original content with little discussion. Reddit which is focused on new content with much heavier focus on discussion. Facebook which is supposed to be for personal content with familiar people.

Sure - Twitter may not have any specific requirement for you to use a real name, but Twitter will also likely go out of its way to make make your life uncomfortable if you do wish to remain anonymous (not limited to requiring a phone number, excluding you from nice trinkets such as verification, deprioritizing you in its algorithm if you're sharing from a private account, making it harder to RT you). The use case for Twitter is clearly building out a public persona. I'm not aware of many that were trying to do that with Tumblr.

> A name like pornhub could give confidence that Tumblr won't try another porn purge

Not necessarily if the reason was (as people think) to avoid SESTA-FOSTA legal problems. Pornhub would still need to work around those restrictions and it might simply not be economical.

I would assume they already have that infrastructure in place? Seems like they are one of the few companies that would be poised to handle that from the get go.

I was discussing companies who use Tumblr for official communication, like System76 and NPM, on another story earlier this week, and how it's cringy and not a good look IMHO. (My comment was flagged for some reason despite having 5 points and 8 replies. How does this site work?)

I also heard the rumor that PornHub was interested in buying it. I hope they do! Can you imagine how quickly all the corporate blogs would scramble off of the platform to avoid association with a porn site!?

Does Verizon "get" anything at all, though? Haven't heard much of Oath either.

Oath already rebranded as “Verizon Media”

I guess we can say they "got it" in regards to how bad a brand name "Oath" is.

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