Fun fact: I can't recall the last time I either opened a Tumblr link or saw one in the wild. But maybe that's just me.
There is also, above and beyond that, the ability to make a blog private, by setting a password to access it. A blog with a password is still rendered out to a static site, though, strangely enough; just one with the equivalent of an .htaccess password-gate behaviour.
I'm pretty sure I've never opened a tumblr link in my life, but I see screenshots all the time on Facebook and reddit, and I know what "rebloging" is. So I guess the brand has some value there.
1) Tumblr has turned into such a disaster that Verizon is looking to dump it ASAP, and they're asking for fire sale prices.
2) Automattic thinks they can turn Tumblr around. They will probably get a lot of good will if they reverse the porn ban, and that alone will draw a lot of attention to Tumblr. And if that fails, then Automattic has 200 new employees they can put to work on their in-house projects. At worst, it's an acquihire, and if #1 is correct, it's a cheap acquihire.
>Mr. Mullenweg said his company intends to maintain the existing policy that bans adult content. He said he has long been a Tumblr user and sees the site as complementary to WordPress.com. “It’s just fun,” he said of Tumblr. “We’re not going to change any of that.”
They had the opportunity to be the light weight blogging option. But its various design decisions seem strange to me as an outsider. Maybe it needs to revisit its past minimalism? ala old Twitter.
The worst is people using some old theme that embeds a script hosted on a site that no longer exists and the whole page load hangs until the request times out.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...
I will say though that the "final straw" dropped interest by half overnight.... so it certainly was detrimental but they certainly where losing interest over time.
App store bans and country bans should be better indicators.
Maybe it could be turned around, but it's pretty old-school at this point and seems hardly better to me than MySpace.
My impression is that most people used it pseudonymously, to speak to things they didn't want associated with their public identity, so perhaps you knew people who hosted on Tumblr but didn't know that you knew them.
But hey, I guess they were all just "blogging about genders."
The original appeal of Tumblr was that it was a modern day Xanga, lots of personal, anonymous journaling, weird jokes and photos. I don't recall anybody becoming an influencer via Tumblr, probably because it didn't attract that kind of audience.