Hey friends 🫂
Be nice with staff today, folks
Ok I wasn't planning to share anything about this because I was waiting for any official comms, but I'm seeing people from outside of Automattic sharing this screenshot in a WordPress-related public discord server, so I guess the cat is out of the bag:
Image screenshot-20231006-005401-2-1 hosted in ImgBB
TLDR: most of the current staff is being moved to other automattic divisions and Tumblr will be run by an skeleton crew
Honestly from everything I've seen in the past few years, social media as a whole is just not a viable business model. Running servers to host the sheer amount of content these sites have is very expensive, and up to this point it has been entirely dependent on the platform getting a big userbase and then using that big userbase as a selling point to convince investors to dump their money into the platform on the promise that eventually that big userbase will be monetizable.
The problem is that any attempts to monetize the userbase in any meaningful way are met with (rightfully) rabid backlash from the users because the entire appeal is being able to access this content freely and openly, and they will jump ship the moment it becomes a bit too inconvenient for them. I don't think selling user data for targeted ads is the cash cow for the platform people think it is (it is for data brokers).
Most of these tech companies also opened up shop during a time when interest rates were at rock bottom, and now that they're going up again these companies are either scrambling to find pennies in the couch or just writing the platform off as a lost cause entirely. Eventually investors are going to get suspicious to social media as a whole.
And of course with Tumblr our userbase consists of perhaps the most unprofitable and unmarketable userbase on Earth: Mostly late 20s-early 30s, self defined, left leaning, anti-corporation, anti-consumer, anti-capitalist, pro-piracy, pro-protest, fuck the police and eat the rich socialist commies who are in no way afraid to openly state they hope all cops, ceos and republicans die a horrifically slow and painful death.
But even if this means no real hope for future improvement and it's effectively becoming the social media equivalent of TF2, so long as it also means no more effort will be put into making bad changes in the vain attempt to try and squeeze money out of this half affectionately labeled hellsite (looking at you, live), I'm honestly down for it. If they were smart they'd allow this site's development to be open sourced. Lord knows we've got the techno geeks who could actually make something meaningful out of it.
