Official Tumblr staff blog announcing product changes, policy updates, outages, and company news such as the Yahoo acquisition.
HN commenters cite it for Tumblr's announcements, such as the Yahoo deal letter, highlighted posts and content attribution, and one notes the Yahoo deal looks lopsided toward the acquirer.
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Phone calls to stop SOPA: http://staff.tumblr.com/post/12930076128/a-historic-thing
Smoking Cessation: http://www.mobilecommons.com/blog/2013/08/national-cancer-institutes-smokefreetxt-has-doubled-quit-rates-among-teens/
Immigration Reform: http://www.mobilecommons.com/blog/2013/04/ri4a-drives-60000-calls-to-congress-and-brings-immigration-debate-to-the-senate-floor/
Here's our job board, we'd love to hear from you. http://www.jobscore.com/jobs/mobilecommons/
During the SOPA debacle, Tumblr informed their entire userbase via their dashboards that forthcoming legislation would destroy the service. They enabled one-click to contact your representative. It generated 87,000 calls. http://staff.tumblr.com/post/12930076128/a-historic-thing
At the time, I remember seeing HN jumping up and down about how great this was. I was excited too, because now I had hard data of a 0.29% response rate. Tumblr as a business died that day.
It doesn't matter how many users you have or what their demographic is if you haven't created a culture of commerce. In the absence of revenue, "rope in millions of users and then reap the profits" seems to scale to about three people profiting per transaction.
2013: "Yesterday, during her call with Wall Street analysts, Marissa Mayer said Yahoo would explore giving Tumblr bloggers the chance to run Yahoo ads on their own pages."
It's 2016 and Tumblr still shows zero revenue on Yahoo's balance sheet.
Introducing: Highlighted Posts
February 3, 2012
Every now and then, a post comes along that’s meant for big things. It
could be pulling the wraps off your new project, promoting your next
show, raising awareness for a cause, or just sharing a truly
incredible photo.
Today you’ll have a new option to Highlight those extra-important
posts. For one dollar, your post will stand out in the Dashboard with
a customizable sticker to make sure your followers take notice!
http://staff.tumblr.com/post/16980189397/highlighted-posts
This seems to be a little different than Facebook's highlighted posts. Highlighted posts on Tumblr are distinguishable and would not be more visible than regular posts. (I'm assuming Tumblr dashboards are not filtered by relevance.)
You (and certainly I) wish to have the amount of traffic [1] Tumblr has, to put it simple, this is an awesome problem to have :-)
With that being said, they didn't take it lightly:
"know that this is absolutely unacceptable to our team, and unacceptable for a platform determined to be the best place in the world for your creative expression" [2]
I mean, what else can they say? Refund the customer's money? They've already done that.
[1] http://www.quantcast.com/profile/trafficGraph?wunit=wtpub%3Apixel%2Fp-19UtqE8ngoZbM&drg=&dty=ar&gl=all&reachType=period&dtr=dm&width=522&country=UK&ggt=large&showDeleteButtons=true&v=1642576819
[2] http://staff.tumblr.com/post/2127872280/downtime
While the overall tone of this letter is really nice one thing bothers me. When you sum up the mentioned benefits for Yahoo! and Tumblr there's a great imbalance towards the acquirer. IMHO from the PR perspective it doesn't sound that good, especially that there's not much about the benefits for the users.
EDIT: you can compare how David Karp handled these news delivery, addressing the possible concerns of all parties: http://staff.tumblr.com/post/50902268806/news
Yes. IIRC, tumblr had a huge community of people with pro-eating disorder sentiment that I think stemmed from deep body dysmorphia. Truth be told, I don’t know anything about the specifics - but I do remember about ~10 years back that this was a Really Big Deal in the media for a bit.
Staff message from Tumblr: https://staff.tumblr.com/post/18563255291/follow-up-tumblrs-new-policy-against/. I believe this is what preceded Google taking action on “pro-ana” content