I was very impressed with the engagement and activity Tumblr has continued to have, and I hope that with this new ownership and investment the product will blossom.
I'm sure you have an interesting prospective based on your experience working at MySQL-friendly shops, in addition to being an engineer at Tumblr once upon a time.
Edit to avoid anyone misconstruing, I'm not trying to imply one thing or another, just that I can't approach this impartially. And in any case, I wish everyone well on both sides of this acquisition. I'm just genuinely curious how they plan to proceed from a technical standpoint, as it's a really interesting challenge.
This appears to be 6 years old. Is it still relevant?
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr-architectur...
Primarily the product backend is monolithic PHP (custom framework) + services in various languages + sharded MySQL + Memcached + Gearman. Lots of other technologies in use though too, but I'll defer to current employees if they want to answer.
Reality big data: Let's shard it across Mysql.
My answer above was limited to the product backend, i.e. technologies used in serving user requests in real-time. And even then I missed a bunch of large technologies in use there, especially around search and algorithmic ranking.
I honestly don't see the draw for Kafka. And by all means I get it, I just don't buy it. Maybe I'm just holding it wrong or something.
For high-volume OLTP though MySQL is an excellent choice.
Regarding Kafka: in many situations I agree. Personally I prefer Facebook's approach of just using the MySQL replication stream as the canonical sharded multi-region ordered event stream. But it depends a lot on the situation, i.e. a company's specific use-case, existing infrastructure and ecosystem in general.
Kafka is not going to replace MySQL specifically because it depends on the task at hand.
If you can't replace MySQL with Kafka, then why not just stick with whatever queue/jobs/stream infra you had before kafka. At least those solutions are quite limited in scope and easily replaceable.
At this point Kafka is a solution looking for a problem.
But there are relatively few situations where that's absolutely vital. And you can solve it with good ol' SQL.
Currently I think Tumblr stores all posts across all sites in one big table? WP.com does different tables per site.
I also think Tumblr's post ids are often above php's int max for 32-bit systems ( 2,147,483,647 ) -- I know I've seen some issues trying to parse tumblr's post ids to integers rather than strings on some old servers years ago.
For an overview of how our systems are run here's Barry, our head sysadmin, talking about six years ago on how the wpcom infastructure is structured:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57EJ8KDDBH0
It's changed somewhat, but not much conceptually. It's a really fascinating talk and I'd encourage anyone curious on massive scale data to give it a look, and see precisely what can be managed with determination and mysql and coffee.
http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/2/13/tumblr-architectur...
Thankfully nothing is 32-bit so no worries about integer overflows. That would cause huge headaches everywhere on the PHP side. In MySQL, a regular unsigned INT column does have that limitation (roughly max 4.5 billion for unsigned, 2.2 signed), so BIGINT must be used there (Twitter had to do the same). Where it gets interesting is PHP doesn't support unsigned integers, so with 64 bit your max integer in PHP is 9,223,372,036,854,775,807, whereas in MySQL an unsigned 64 bit int is double that. I think it's safe to say though that neither Tumblr nor WordPress, even combined, would ever have more posts than atoms on Earth =)
If my math is correct, you're a wee bit off.
9,223,372,036,854,775,807 is 2^63, which is roughly 10^19. The Avogadro constant, which is about 6 * 10^23, is the number of particles (atoms / molecules) in a mole of substance, which for atoms amounts to (atom number of element) grams of mass (so e.g. 12g of C12 is a mole).
At the point when we start this the Tumblr team will have been part of Automattic for the better part of a year if not more, so there will be a lot of learning and evolution of the products on both sides to make any migration easier.
I promise we'll write about it afterward for anyone who is curious.
Find a way to get Verizon to sign off on this, and then get in touch with an established documentary maker. Pair them with an engineer and follow the story of the migration efforts. It will take time, and it'll certainly have a narrative.
Nothing like this has been done before. I struggle with making what I do relatable to people, but having a technical or semi-technical documentary following this large project would be eye-opening.
We'll even crowd fund this if you give us the chance. I'm not kidding.
Please, please, please make this migration a documentary film.
In Automattic, we basically evolved to remove all that :) There would be basically zoom calls and slack discussions. The most ambitious project I worked on in Automattic were just me, looking at the code and trying to understand why something is happening. Or looking up Stripe documentation.
We get to sit in front of our laptops in nice places though :)
We need discussions about how to untangle integrations of your user model with Verizon/Yahoo's auth system, how you'll consolidate all the microservices, which ongoing migrations you'll halt, the puzzled looks you'll have at undocumented code that performs nested eager-loaded lazy migrations of data, etc.
I've been involved in a multi-year migration effort. I expect this may be the same for y'all. It'd be fun to have an account of something that is so prolific and well known.
I don't want to be so presumptuous as to define
an exact approach before the technical exploration
has started
I am, of course, completely ignorant of how WP and Tumblr's infrastructure works. I'm not saying the migration would be a bad idea, technically or financially. Or good. Just honestly curious.
I promise we'll write about it afterward for
anyone who is curious.
1) You come up with a working (if expensive or otherwise imperfect) technical path 2) You define a half-dozen other potential (less expensive, more practical) paths 3) You announce the decision 4) You complete due diligence, and take the best path
There are other ways as well. Announcements and plans aren't binding; they occasionally change. You can make an announcement when you're 98% confident you'll do something. You can pivot if it doesn't work out. There are places this doesn't work (e.g. customer promises), but on something like an internal migration, this is a-okay.
The funny thing is, the incompetence of @staff is the value proposition for Tumblr, as a user - because Tumblr's backend is a rickety tower of matchsticks and paste and the devs couldn't program themselves out of a wet paper bag, it means that they haven't been able to implement - for instance - algorithmic non-chronological timeline ordering, or competent data harvesting / robomarketing. And the comically broken search tools actually give a reasonable approximation of privacy for discussions. The user experience is firmly stuck in the mid-2000s, when social sites were for communities and discussions instead of data farming.
Don't get me wrong, Tumblr's user experience is also awful - search sucks, tags suck, moderation EXTRA sucks, the website's still overrun by pornographic spambots even after the Great Titty Purge - but any development team competent enough to make real improvements would also be one competent enough to squeeze out what makes Tumblr work.
Buying a brand name and some domain relevant developers for that little is probably a good deal.
Talent, a brand, and eyeballs. Even if the ship can't be turned around in the end, presumably all the new hires are top notch.
What you're essentially saying is 'Adult content is hard because the US government is willing to lean on payment providers to enforce quasi-legal, anti-free speech policies.'
Have you considered adopting a federated corporate structure that would legally firewall off a "tumblr-for-porn"?
Most of the goodwill bonfire seems to have been caused not by Tumblr treating adult content differently, but by not even putting up a fight to provide a space for it.
Having a mirror world Tumblr that adult blogs could be kicked to would earn a lot of that back, while presumably amortizing platform development and ops over a larger userbase.
Surrendering because free speech is hard is never a good look.
That is literally the convoluted situation photomatt was trying to avoid.
I also think that the suggestion is hilariously naive. Presumably the founder/head of the company has considered a variety of incorporation structures.
One would think, but apparently neither Yahoo nor Verizon made any effort in that direction.
To the tune of putting approx $1 billion through the corporate paper shredder.
Given that track record of handling, and an ostensibly similar approach, I thought it was a valid question.
Arguably, that happened June 20th, 2013, the day the Tumblr acquisition was closed.
I completely understand that “Adult Content” can cause a ton of headaches for a business but Tumblr’s current definition of “Adult Content” is very broad and I hope when the transaction is complete you’ll at least be open to reviewing the scope of the definition. Right now it includes many things that aren’t adult at all, like “female presenting nipples” which could be seen by children on many beaches in Europe and even on the streets of Boston and New York City. It also includes illustrations of genitalia or sex acts which can be found in biology textbooks and many magazines like Cosmo. The instruction leaflet that comes in a box of tampons wouldn’t currently be permitted on Tumblr. That doesn’t seem right to me nor does it seem like that sort of content would pose any risk to Tumblr’s operations.
I understand where you’re coming from with the adult content but I do also hope you’ll consider liberating the definition a bit. I actually think Tumblr is pretty well positioned to be the “next Instagram” for many young women today who would really appreciate a major social media platform recognizing that Kama Sutra illustrations or a photo of a woman’s nipple is no big deal, it’s just natural.
Also seen by young children when they, ya know, eat.
Rules aren't for moneyed interests, they are to ignore the masses, gatekeep more simply, “read the sign”
Nipples seems a pretty silly thing to start focusing on when he clearly said they weren't interested in adult content.
EDIT: Generally I'd say in Europe while women's breasts are sexualised, they're not considered sexually explicit. The US is exceptionally prudish in comparison and for well-known historical reasons, too.
If you re-read my comment you’ll see that my point of starting with nipples is precisely because they aren’t the adult content that Automattic is understandably interested in avoiding. Why are your nipples nbd while mine are adult content? That seems “pretty silly” if you ask me.
Sorry for being so blunt but I couldn't agree less with. If you leave this to "big porno", you will get the same exploitive, generic bullshit you get anywhere else as well. It's a shame that nobody dares to touch that who isn't in the porn industry already.
That's exactly what Tumblr's ex-users don't want, however.
Those Tumblr users want a place to freely exchange what they like, whether that's cute cats or hardcore porn.
That's what made Tumblr so beautiful. I'm sad to see it (apparently permanently) go.
Then again something nice is coming out of it as well: The main competitor is now the non commercial, federated, ActivityPub based Fediverse, frequently referred to as Mastodon.
I am curious to hear more about the: "...to be more of a Berkshire Hathaway-inspired model and businesses with a lot of autonomy". Could you share some details?
Thanks for building Wordpress. When I used to be a prolific blogger, it was my platform of choice.
even if it was, people have shown over and over that they prioritize convenience over privacy, and businesses simply aren't conscientious enough to try a different way.
People are extremely creative in how they use it, basically turning sites into stores or kickstarter-like campaigns with that little feature. We are looking into extending this functionality.
Could you give us more information about this, since Pornhub once said they wanted to acquire Tumblr.
This also raises other questions:
What is the difference between Pornhub and a pornographic Tumblr? What is the essential demand behind the demand for a pornographic Tubmlr?
A very interesting phenomenon is that since Tumblr announced the ban on adult content, many bloggers have turned to Twitter instead of Pornhub.
Porn = male gaze-y[1], intentionally and overtly about sexual gratification, less about exploration
A free-wheeling blog site = a place open to the exploration of a number of different aspects of identity, of which sexuality is one of them.
In short: If Pornhub were to create a tumblr clone, they'd inherently be enticing people to _produce porn_ rather than producing content which might happen to be somewhat pornographic. There's a huge mental barrier there for lots of people, even if they happen to enjoy viewing porn or producing sexually explicit imagery.
[1] Yes I know women watch porn, the default assumption of porn viewership is still a cis male audience
Pornhub is like a swamp, content wise.
I mean personally I think if e.g. pornhub were to launch a product like that, they should make sure that it's not associated with PH or pornography directly. That creates a stigma - "oh, it's that porn blog" - which in my outsider's perspective was never Tumblr's identity.
>Pornhub Premium launched in 2015, and now has more than 1 million signups. That's nearly the number of people who subscribe to the Showtime channel's streaming service.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/10-interesting-things-might-n...
>According to various reports, currently, the porn industry’s net worth is about $97 billion. This money is enough to feed at-least 4.8 billion people a day. Every year, Hollywood releases roughly 600 movies and makes $10 billion in profit. And how much porn industry makes? 13,000 films and close to $15 billion in profit. The porn industry makes more money than Major League Baseball, The NFL and The NBA combined.
https://medium.com/@Strange_bt_True/how-big-is-the-porn-indu...
Craigslist went through legal hell dealing with NSFW content because of puritanical US States Attorneys. See any remaining dating links on CL?
Matt doesn't need that either.
Yes, Kamala Harris in particular.
Or are you just trying to take this out of context because of a casual tone?
There are more open platforms. There are more popular platforms. There are more independent platforms. How is the new Tumblr going to improve on the existing options?
The future is not centralized. The future is distributed.
been hearing this promise for so long, it's becoming a meme like The Year of Desktop Linux
The dream of decentralized everything sounds wonderful, but there's an implicit assumption that most folks involved are good actors.
It quickly becomes untenable when corporate-backed or state-backed bad actors are introduced.
Here's a very simple thought exercise for anybody who disagrees. Imagine a modest social media team of perhaps 10 paid employees. That's 24,000 people-hours' worth of content generation per year... and it is perhaps multiplied by a factor of ten if they're sophisticated enough to put some work into tooling to automate their work. Russia alone reportedly had hundreds of people doing this sort of work, and surely they're not alone.
Now imagine 10,000 of those teams around the world. That's 240,000,000 people-hours of span and/or bad-faith social media posting. And that's probably an extremely conservative estimate.
How would a decentralized social network possibly combat this?
It's a life-or-death struggle even for a company with deep pockets (and huge cubical farms full of human content moderators) like Facebook to combat this sort of thing.
If one of the decentralized solutions ever reaches any sort of critical mass, it will have to confront this in a hurry, and it will not be able to.
It's arguably harder to do it on a decentralized platforms since they are... Well, decentralized. Those 240,000,000 people hours are then spread over all of the decentralized platforms instead of being focused on one or a few. Also, the cost of moderation is spread over everyone instead of a single entity having to pay for all of it.
The same analysis makes it untenable for centralized platforms, as you noticed yourself.
It is not easy, but it is most definitely tenable for centralized platforms with sufficient funding and motivation i.e. Facebook, Google, etc.
They have:
1. Many millions (billions, in Facebook's case) of users, some percentage of which are willing to click those "Report..." buttons
2. Their own farms of in-house workers
3. Their own bespoke tools and heuristics to identify trends and more easily identify malicious actors/content, for review by the human moderators. this would presumably incorporate reports from users.
It's arguably harder to do it on a decentralized platforms
How does a malicious social media team "attack" Facebook? For the most part, they produce content that winds up being spread virally. They don't spead the information around Facebook; the users do. This would function largely the same way in a decentralized network.
Keep in mind that today's decentralized networks are a bit like the Usenet was before "Eternal September."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September
In other words, these decentralized networks are currently populated primarily with relatively savvy users. Not perfect by any means, but on average, more savvy than your average FB or Twitter user who will eagerly share articles and links without even a cursory vetting. That will change in a hurry if any of these decentralized networks ever gains critical mainstream mass.
Good luck with it anyway - we need more independant platforms rather than a few mono-cultures.
The heydays of "blogging" was/is all BS.