a recording of the tumblr CEO Q&A that happened on tumblr live on 07/11/23.
some notes: the very beginning of the video is cut off, but the audio for it is fine. and there are a few small areas in the second half of the video where the audio drops in quality a bit.
all of that is because this whole video is actually frankenstein'd together from several different audio and video sources, recorded by myself, @xccentriktigress, and @fokron, and with extra help from @eiimblr and @sharksfood!
thank you all for working on this team project with me, and for helping archive this so that others can see it! yay teamwork! :D
Below the cut is a clean verbatim transcript of the StaffCon2023 “Live With the CEO” stream. Featuring the CEO of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg [@photomatt], and the Tumblr COO, Zandy Ring [@zingring].
Built from the videos by @secondbeatsongs [x] and @chainswordcs [x]. Additional thanks to my fellow archivists, @eiimblr, @sharksfood, and @fokron.
The stream was about an hour, so there's a lot of dialogue. There are timestamps next to the questions and important statements if you want to skim.
A true verbatim transcript is available by request.
[archive 1]|[archive 2]
PhotoMatt: This is Zandy Ring. Zandy’s the Chief Operating Officer of Tumblr and I’m the CEO of Automattic. We’re here, trying out this experiment where we’ll do a live broadcast and take questions from users and talk about it. And I'm here in the room, actually. This is like the, kinda first ever, in a really long time since… What year was the last big Tumblr meet-up?
*inaudible, off-screen*
PhotoMatt: 2018? *chuckle* Yeah.
ZingRing: Yeah.
PhotoMatt: So, since 2018. So, basically in five years, the first time the vast majority of the Tumblr team is together and so you got a lot of us here in this room. And so pretty much everything there is to know about Tumblr is known in this room. *laugh* So, hopefully, we can answer pretty much anything. Any questions coming in so far?
ZingRing: We have some questions from earlier, and one of the big questions has been one that we just did during our trial run which was uh-
PhotoMatt: I can try this one, the one- what was that, FantastiCait?
ZingRing: Ok, great
[1:08] PhotoMatt: Says, “Why are we making changes right after people left Reddit and Twitter because of their changes?”
PM: *chuckles* I totally get why change is scary. *chuckle* Right? But also if things don’t change, if services don’t evolve I’m certain it’ll die.
ZR: Right.
PM: Now, if we change it, we could mess it up or we could make it better. The good news is that as we change things we’re listening to users, we’re looking at usage, we’re learning. And so we’re learning by doing.
[1:42] PM: Says, “Are you planning any drastic changes to come?”
PM: I mean, kind of? You know. A hundred and something people working on Tumblr *laughs* that’s their job *chuckles* is to change it and make it better. You know, we try to make changes that you all ask for, we try to do changes we think you'll like and we get it right sometimes we get it wrong sometimes, but we just always learn.
ZR: Thank you for the pizza.
PM: Thank you for the piz- ? Oh yeah. Nice *chuckles*
[2:08] PM: “We asked for a better search function.”
PM: Yeah. I agree.
ZR: That’s being worked on.
PM: Search is being worked on, right?
ZR: Yup.
PM: Actually, who is working on Search here?
ZR: There they are.
PM: Okay, we got two people here *laughs* How’s it going?
*inaudible, off-screen*
PM: It’s going well.
ZR: It’s going good.
PM: Is there anything that’s launching soon that we could preview for folks?
*inaudible, off-screen*
PM: Oh, oh yeah. Getting reblogs in search. Ought to be a pretty big one.
ZR: Yeah.
PM: But a good way, if you have ideas for Search, a great thing to do is post it to your Tumblr. *chuckles. Send us a link. We'll check it out. You know, we definitely read a lot of that stuff, and we share it in our Slack channel and things like that. So, we’re always reading Tumblr and listening to users.
ZR: Yeah. It’s a great job, we just get to use Tumblr all day long.
[3:09] PM: “Have you seen the 44 thousand note poll about the algorithm changes?”
PM: Yes. *laughs* I don’t know what it’s about though because we haven’t really changed anything. *laughs*
ZR: Yeah, we’re not getting rid of the chronological feed.
PM: Yeah, chronological feed will always be an option for people. So just, tell your friends. *chuckles* Because there seems to be a lot of misinformation. There’s things people get mad at us that we do and there’s things people get mad at us that we’re actually not doing. *chuckles* And have no plans to do, so figure that out.
PM: How many people do we have on the stream so far? Kind of curious.
[3:52] PM: “Allow us to snooze Tumblr Live indefinitely.”
PM: But then you wouldn’t be here right now.
ZR: Hmm *chuckles*
[3:57] PM: “Can we add stories to our blogs like Instagram?”
PM: Yeah. And we actually developed a story feature over on the WordPress side of things, Jetpack side. I was kinda wondering why we did it there instead of on Tumblr. *chuckles* It does seem to be like a social primitive that users expect from different networks. So yeah, would love to support something like Stories. It’s not currently on the roadmap though, so, I should be *indistinct*
ZR: We have a question that I think already scrolled by. It’s actually from one of the people we talked to yesterday when we did our trial run. BirdRhetorics.
[4:32] ZR: “How do you know that Tumblr is hard to use as discussed in the product direction post?”
ZR: *to Matt* How do we know Tumblr is hard to use?
PM: Oh! *laughs*
ZR: Because it is. It’s something that is-
PM: Thank you for the crab *laughs*
ZR: Oh! *laughs* Thank you.
ZR: We talk with a lot of users and we talk with users that have returned, people who left the site. The reason they’re leaving the site is because they couldn’t find the communities they wanted. They couldn’t figure out Search, they don’t understand trying to follow people or blogs so that their following feed actually will fill up with great stuff. So we’re just trying to make that process much easier for them so that they can have the experience that long-time users have as well.
ZR: I love these crabs.
*laughter*
[5:28] ZR: Thank you Tumblr for giving me crabs.
*laughter*
[5:33] PM: Someone says, “Would you make Live more accessible? I would stream my art but I can’t.”
PM: We’re trying to. We’ve got the OBS stuff now and you can do it from desktop.
PM: I saw kind of a bug report there go by. Did anyone catch that? Something about links to audio posts? Did someone see that go by? Do we know what this bug is?
*indistinct, off-screen*
PM: What was that?
*indistinct, off-screen*
PM: Oh, no no no. This was about links to audio posts or something. He just reposted it? Oh, go to the bottom maybe. He just reposted-
*indistinct, off-screen*
PM: I don’t know if I understand that one. Who was that? Tyote? If you could do a post about that and just tag Staff in it. And tag PhotoMatt *chuckles* as well, we’ll take a look at that.
PM: Oh yeah, we should say our Tumblr usernames by the way.
ZR: We should.
PM: I’m PhotoMatt. P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T
ZR: I am ZingRing. Z-I-N-G-R-I-N-G
PM: Cool.
[6:46] PM: Someone says “If you don’t like Tumblr Live, click around on people. Find people you vibe with”
PM: I agree.
[6:51] ZR: We have one here. “Is Tumblr Live gonna be going international?”
ZR: Yeah, that’s part of our plan. We just recently put into place some of the steps we need in order to roll it out in other countries so…more people will be able to have access to it if they want.
[7:11] PM: Someone says “Does Tumblr Live support OBS?”
PM: Yes, it does.
ZR: Yes, it does.
PM: Woohoo.
[7:15] ZR: Here's one. “Will you be fixing the fact that you can't zoom in on images?” Who can answer that? *inaudible, off-screen* It's already fixed.
7:32 PM: What platform’s the chip on?
[7:38] *off-screen staff member* Sorry they're probably talking about the new Lightbox feature where some zoom capabilities were different and they should now be able to pinch to zoom, tap to zoom, just as they're used to. It just rolled out, so update the app.
PM: Awesome, so if you update your app, hopefully, zoom might be working.
ZR: Yeah.
PM: And definitely run your app updates. I do it every morning, it's the first thing I do.
ZR: *chuckles*
PM: Like, I look at how I slept on WHOOP, because obviously, I don't know how I slept, I just woke up. Then I update my apps. Ah, these are going by kind of fast.
[8:12] PM: “Will there be a filter to determine bot Lives from real users”
PM: Yeah, hopefully, there's no bots. So the moderation team should pick that up if there's bots.
[8:24] PM: “Could you say why 18+ content is not allowed on the site when it does so well on other platforms?”
PM: Actually, since November of last year, we updated our guidelines so a lot more artistic presentations of the human form are allowed now. So, check out the updated guidelines. They’re a lot more in line with other services
ZR: Yeah.
PM: It's still not everything, so there's definitely other sites if you want a particular type of more hardcore content. That's probably still going to be on Twitter or Reddit or PornHub or whatever but yeah. Because Tumblr, we want to be about art and artists and stuff like for Arts. More artistic stuff, we definitely want to allow that.
[9:08]ZR: Yep. Here's one. “Is it difficult to handle a lot of incoming users, such as the ones from Reddit or Twitter?”
ZR: No, because we don't get huge influxes. People have this perception that we have massive growth right now and we really don't. So we welcome everyone with open arms. I think the thing that we need to do is improve our onboarding experience so that those new users find traction right away which is part of what that very long core product post on Staff was talking about but no. That is not an issue we currently face. What a great problem to have.
PM: By the way, I do want to recognize there was the penguin person who said Tumblr staff are heroes so…
ZR: Aw.
PM: Yay. Thank you.
ZR: *to audience* That’s you all.
*Applause*
[10:02] PM: One thing I hope you all get from this, who are watching. One, we want to correct some misinformation. For example, chronological feed is staying. It's not going away. And two, also just show that, like, there's real people behind the screen, building Tumblr, with families and feelings and dreams and ambitions and all sorts of things.
PM: And so yeah. We're trying to do more stuff in public. It's been a little challenging because a lot of it's getting misinterpreted and stuff, but we're just gonna keep trying to make things more public. We even just open-sourced our stream builder so like, how the main feed gets built. So hopefully we can open-source a lot more in the future. We want to engage with the developer community, third-party people doing things around Tumblr, and yeah, make it better and better.
ZR: I haven't been saying usernames as I've read some of the questions that are being sent to me from the feed so I'm really sorry about that. I'm gonna try to say the usernames.
[11:01] ZR: Tyote said “Could a grid view for the dashboard be implemented on desktop Tumblr like the search page has? I have all this extra screen space.”
ZR: We are doing some experiments with the different *chuckles* Better resourced, I guess, view of the dashboard that looks pretty great which I guess is not out to users yet. But more to come there for sure.
PM: Let's see, how many people do we have now? I can't see the number.
*off-screen* 302.
PM: 302, cool. Okay.
[11:45] PM: “We need hardware-level encryption.”
PM: I don't know what that means *laughs* But, okay. *laughs* Maybe we need it too, wow.
[12:02] PM: “How do you intend to help users trust the Lives, if we are keeping them?”
PM: I'm not sure if I know what that means.
ZR: I think it's a question about feeling safe using Tumblr Live. Perhaps? With data?
*chuckles at crab*
[12:23] PM: “Let's toggle off Live without a timer”
PM: Well, Live is…we're trying it out. *laughs* And in theory, this could be something that- You know, when people send gifts, we get a portion of that revenue and so it's something we're trying to help make Tumblr sustainable and allow us to invest more into the site. For, you know, getting servers, making things faster, having staff to fix bugs.
[12:51] PM: By the way, I want to address another thing that people always say whenever we do a post.
[12:56] PM: I forget what the username was but they said “Ban the Nazis.”
PM: *chuckles* Yeah. Nazi-like hate speech is definitely against the terms of service so if you see a Nazi tell us *chuckles* and we'll ban it. The Trust and Safety team on Tumblr has done a really monumental effort over the past few years to clean things up quite a bit. There is some backlog, always, but like yeah. Please report sites if you see hate speech or anything that would be against our terms of service. Which I think literal Nazism is. *chuckles*
ZR: Yeah.
[13:36] ZR: Yep, we got another question about the algorithm style Post Feed so probably bears repeating that we're not getting rid of the chronological feed. It will be its own tab, so do not worry about that.
[13: 57] ZR: Then we had another one about moderation, more transparent. And I've seen another question about this previously, too. Posts that should be fine under the new policies are still being tagged. That's from Yansie.
ZR: Yeah, and that shouldn't be happening. But humans do make mistakes so we try to fix them. It does take time, we do have a backlog, so bear with us. Stick with us, we'll try to do right by everybody.
[14:27] PM: There's a question being asked a lot about LGBT content being flagged?
PM: Yeah, Tumblr is super pro-LGBT. I think it's actually like 25 or 30 percent of our user base. So if there's a mistake in the flagging… You know, again, this is humans. So, definitely mistakes are made. Please let us know, specifically, and have to take a look at it. I wonder what the flag could have been there.
ZR: Not sure.
PM: Yeah.
[15:02] PM: So people are asking to mute Tumblr Live permanently.
PM: How much would you pay for that? *chuckles* Maybe-
*laughter*
PM: Maybe we'll make it an upgrade. Twenty dollars? Fifty dollars? Like, make me an offer. We might launch that in the Tumblr mods.
*more laughter*
PM: Okay, we got 25 there.
ZR: Going once…
PM: 500, wow! We could definitely make it giftable too. You can gift people. *chuckles* It's like an auction. 500 going once, going twice, yeah, wow.
[15:38] PM: They say “Pay streamers”
PM: Streamers can get paid actually, yeah. So, you can make money by streaming on Tumblr Live. So, that's part of the reason we were excited to try out this feature. Yeah, we launched Post Plus and other things. We're very interested in things that can get creators paid. In fact, even as we initially acquired Tumblr and during the turnaround, we actually prioritized the features that got users paid above the features that just got us paid.
[16:06] PM: Let’s see “Why can't we take usernames from older inactive accounts?”
PM: Anyone have an answer there? *silence* Sometimes we recycle usernames.
ZR: Yeah, there is a process to recycle usernames. We just need a request or we don't know that you're trying to use that username.
PM: You're “going to request Karen.” Okay, good luck.
*Laughter*
[16:40] PM: “Let Live direct stream from OBS.”
PM: OBS is supported for Live so maybe- Do we just need to like-?
ZR: On web.
PM: On web. Yes, so you can use OBS. Again hopefully, this system gets a lot more people knowing what actually is the reality.
[17:00] PM: “Why is Live stuck in portrait mode?”
PM: I think that's just how it's designed. It's a portrait experience, right?
ZR: Yeah, that's right.
[17:15] PM: “You can only use OBS for your virtual webcam on the web, not directly.”
PM: Does anyone know about that? Yes.
*Gary, offscreen* OBS can set up a virtual webcam but then you tell Live to use that webcam. But… the better way to do it through OBS is through using RTMP which I think- *indistinct*
PM: Yeah, so this is Gary. He was saying RTMP would be better and I think that's on the roadmap.
Gary: I think it's on the roadmap. Somebody who works on Live would perhaps know better when it's coming but they're working on it.
PM: Cool, and in the meantime, use the virtual webcam feature.
17:51
PM: You want the pretty-haired lady on screen, all right. That’s you, Zandy.
*Applause, Laughter*
ZR: Thank you. Thank you. Oh my God, I love it, I love flowers. Thank you.
PM: And you do have great hair.
ZR: Yeah I do.
PM: Thank you for the compliments. Thank you.
ZR: I didn't mean to say ‘I do,’ I meant to say ‘thank you.’ Here's a good one from VampSprite.
[18:26] “Can you make merch like a normal company?”
ZR: No, because we're not.
*Matt laughs*
ZR: We can make merch like Tumblr.
PM: I think we're definitely leaning into the weird,
ZR: Yeah. For sure.
PM: We're trying to be even weirder than we have been.
ZR: Let's see, uh…
[18:44] PM: People are saying “Can we keep custom themes?”
PM: Yes, custom themes are staying, so don't worry about that.
[18:53] PM: Someone's saying “Don't touch the chronological dashboard” so we'll just say it again, chronological will always be an option for y'all.
ZR: Yep.
PM: Yeah.
[19:05] ZR: Here's one, StormBlessed-Fool “It seems really difficult to appeal staff decisions such as shadowbans, content removal, etcetera. Can that be improved?”
ZR: Yeah, definitely. We are working really hard to make sure that people's content is not removed if it's not violative but we do make mistakes and we have a backlog so it takes us a while, sometimes, to realize that we have made a mistake. That's on us and we're getting better. We have a really amazing Trust and Safety team that's been working really, really hard over the last couple of years to operationalize and improve and make this a better place for Tumblr users so bear with us. I am sorry.
[19:52] PM: I don't know who Peggy is. *laughs* I guess a lot of people don't like- Peggy seems very polarizing but we don't know who she is or who they are. It's a spam account? “Peg is a troll. It keeps coming back on here on Live.” Oh.
ZR: Oh.
PM: Well I bet we can fix that.
ZR: I bet we could fix that.
PM: *chuckles* Watch out, Peggy.
*Laughter*
PM: By the way, I think I'm gonna just move my chair closer to yours then they don't have to pan the camera as much.
ZR: Okay
PM: The pretty-haired lady can be in everything.
ZR: Ooh
[20:33] ZR: “Mind if I ask” This is from WarriorPrincess666 which is a really great username “Mind if I ask why the group chat room was deleted two years ago?”
ZR: And you all have really great usernames. I am sorry for singling one person out.
PM: Just own it, that's a cool username.
ZR: It's a good username. I do not remember why we unwound-
PM: Because no one was using it. *chuckles* I think we had really high expectations for that feature and it was used a lot less. We do try to deprecate things that aren't used a lot to just, like lower the technical debt so… Yeah, now we're both in there.
ZR: Hooray
PM: High five.
ZR: We moved a chair.
PM: We moved a chair.
ZR: We can move mountains.
PM: *chuckles* Yeah. So, one thing about products and code is that every bit of code you have kind of requires maintenance and updating and, you know, sometimes things break. Or interacts in different ways. So the more complex the code base is, the harder it is to maintain. We're not great about this but- Yeah, streamlining the product you know… Someone always uses something but if something's used by just a really really really small percentage we sometimes streamline it. But I think Group is really the only thing we've done that for in a while, right?
ZR: Mm-hmm.
PM: Can y'all think of anything else we've turned off or gotten rid of? Mostly we add things.
ZR: Yeah
PM: That's why the Tumblr code base is so big.
ZR: And complex.
[22:06] ZR: Re-bee-key asked about merch. “Is there any way Tumblr could team up with more artists? I'm sure people would be more open to buying merch.”
ZR: Yeah, absolutely, and not everybody knows about this but we have this program called Creatrs. There's no O at the end, it's T-R-S at the end, Creatrs. That is where we look to artists within the Tumblr Community when brands want to work with us. We try to find people within our own Community who would like to work directly with that brand, get their work out there, build a relationship, and then we try to foster that connection. So, that is a program that not very many people know about and it's been kind of small running over the last couple years, and we want to build it back up and connect artists with brands, those who want to work with them. So, definitely want to amplify the artists on our site in ways that will work for them.
PM: Yeah. People are asking about search and we addressed that a little bit earlier. We do have some folks working on search and there's fixes coming.
[23:23] PM: There was someone named Anon that's, you know, saying that we're missing LGB tags or something like that so could someone message Anon? Like, DM them? Raise your hand if you could do that.
PM: Yes? Okay, over there? Thank you.
ZR: Thanks, Josh.
PM: Thanks, Josh. So Josh is gonna reach out to Anon and we'll try to get some more details there so we can yeah see what's going on.
ZR: That- that might be coming from the Humans account. It may, just so you know.
PM: Maybe also message TittyInfinity *chuckles* who's also reporting this. I can't believe you all just got me to say that. *laughs* I hope my mom’s not watching.
ZR: Here’s one from WormPool. Another very good username.
[24:14] “How much is coming in the way of future monetization and how will it affect the average user.”
ZR: Well, we must monetize Tumblr in some way. We have to either get to revenue neutral, where we make enough to just pay for itself. It would be nice if it made money but we're gonna do what we need to do. We don't want to do things like sell user data or make the site unusable with tons and tons of ads. So, we're going to keep experimenting with different ways to provide value to users. Matt mentioned earlier that we're trying to do more in terms of getting artists paid on the site, like Post Plus. And you know, you can give people gifts through Tumblr Live if you like what they're doing with it. So we're trying to do more things that sort of fall into that area where we can have a revenue share sort of thing. But we're also doing merch and we're selling domains. We have an ad-free subscription, we sell badges, other digital goods. We'll kind of look at everything but there's some rivers we just won't cross because we don't agree with them.
PM: And, to be honest, it has been a little tricky. A lot of the upgrades we launched, just not as many people have subscribed as we were hoping to.
ZR: Yeah.
PM: Like, we thought the no-ads upgrade, which is 30 bucks per year, would do pretty well but how many subscribers do we have for no-ads?
*offscreen* Almost 25 thousand.
PM: About 25 thousand so when you think of the millions of people that use Tumblr only 25 thousand buying the upgrade is pretty low. You can buy it for yourself, you can gift it to people. That definitely helps. To be transparent about the financial gap I think maybe David knows this. Like, what's our current- What would get us to break even? It's like 20, 25 million or-
*indistinct, off-screen*
PM: Yeah, so right now, we're burning. Which means spending more than we make. About 30 million per year more than we make.
ZR: Yeah.
PM: So, that's a lot. We can't do that forever and so that's why we're really trying to figure out things that y'all would value. Whether that's merch or upgrades or badges or gifts or Blaze or other things. Every little bit helps, so please if you really enjoy Tumblr and want it to stay a thriving service buy things, and ask your friends to buy things.
ZR: Yeah, we've got one here that I really like.
[27:12] Somebody write it down, from VForVincente. “Re: merch. Make socks that come in trios instead of pairs.”
*audience enthusiasm*
ZR: Let's do that.
PM: *laughs* Triple socks. Oh, that is- that's an idea.
ZR: It is. It is an idea.
*off-screen* It’s a backup sock.
PM: It's a backup sock.
ZR: It’s a backup, you always lose one.
[27:38] Anonymous asked, “Any plans for next April the 1st?”
ZR: Yes, but we won't know until, like, February.
PM: *chuckles* Someone registered PhotoMattsMom and said “I heard what you said.” That's funny. Y'all are funny. I can't believe you just created an account. Thank you for helping our registration numbers.
[28:01] ZR: *chuckles* Well, people are asking if the Live stream can be recorded.
ZR: You actually can't do that, they're totally ephemeral. That might be something that we can work on in the future but it actually isn't even possible for us right now. We don't store them they're just-
PM: Are we recording this one though? No? So this is- yeah.
ZR: Yeah.
PM: This is ephemeral.
ZR: Yeah.
PM: So it's just for y’all. Just for the 500-ish people here. Whoa, what's that say? Boujee?
ZR: Oh.
PM: Ooh. Bling bling.
ZR: *chuckles* That’s a weird gift to give.
PM: We probably just should have had someone record this on their phone or something *chuckles* Next time. This was just an experiment. Well, we might do this again.
[28:54] ZR: ArialErendeair asked “Is your plan to remain as open about future decisions that you're making for the Tumblr experience so we can provide feedback?”
ZR: Yeah, we do, we want to work in public a lot more. The core strategy post that went out yesterday is a step in that direction. In retrospect, we see how we could have improved on that messaging so it wasn't terrifying to everybody. Because we're not getting rid of the chronological feed. And could have made it a little bit more, like, punchy and maybe short. But, yeah, we're gonna try to keep doing this and do it more in public because Tumblr only exists because of the users. That's it, so we want to be in this journey with you.
PM: Yeah. Please tell your friends that chronological feed will always be an option. So yes, a lot of people- Oh thank you for the kiss there *Matt smooch sound*
ZR: I think it was for me.
PM: Oh. *laughs* Yeah, probably.
[30:03] PM: “How much are we paying the boys that come here and post emojis?”
PM: Nothing.
ZR: No.
PM: Unless they use Post Plus or something. Then they can get paid.
[30:14] ZR: DimensionalAbyss. I'm really sorry for butchering all these “How long is this going on? Please do a sleep stream.”
ZR: Absolutely not.
*laughter*
PM: What's a sleep stream?
ZR: It sounds like you stream yourself sleeping.
PM: Huh.
ZR: You can do it. I'm not doing it.
PM: I actually talk a lot in my sleep. That would be weird.
[30: 38] ZR: I'm not gonna choose this one just for the username but IntergalacticBoner asked “Any plans to expand the Help Desk? It can take more than a week to get a response from support.”
ZR: We are working all of the time to improve our processes. We have an amazing customer support team. We have amazing folks from within Automattic that help us with public support so we are trying to cut those SLAs down. An SLA is a Service Level Agreement. That's like what we promise to users as a response time. So we try to cut those response times down as much as we can. A week does seem like a long time. We can improve on that. Yeah, thank you IntergalacticBoner.
[31:34] PM: “Can we keep reblogs as they are and not condense them?”
PM: We're gonna just do some experiments with the different reblog formats and everything like that. I know that sounds scary but we also use Tumblr so if it doesn't work we'll roll it back or try something new. Everything's always a process, everything's always an experiment. Yay, Pride.
ZR: Yay.
[32:02] ZR: Trydianth asks “I buy the ad-free subscription. Can that also include other options like turning off features not like” which I think is ‘that I don't like.’
PM: Maybe, yeah. I mean, one thing that's tricky is when you add options for things it can add a lot of complexity to the app but, if you notice, a lot of the things that we've launched, we have given toggles for settings for so, in general, we're trying to be the most sort of user-controllable social network out there. And just, if we can, yeah. We'll keep trying that but, like we said, our previous approach is not working. *chuckles* I mean that Tumblr’s growth isn't where we want it to be and the revenue is not, you know. Like I said, we're 30 million below where the revenue needs to be so that's why we're trying different things to see what works.
ZR: Mm-hmm.
[32:58] ZR: “Re: Custom domains.” This is from transientURL “Do we expect to be able to host a Tumblr blog on the same domain as non-Tumblr site content?”
ZR: Salty.
*Matt chuckles*
ZR: I'm not sure I'm parsing that question.
PM: Can you embed a Tumblr blog and something with other stuff probably? Or maybe it's custom domains um-
*indistinct, off-screen*
PM: Second-level domains? What would be a second-level domain? Like a sub- like a subdomain? *indistinct, off-screen*
PM: Like blog dot M-A dot T-V or something? Yeah, yeah. Um yeah, definitely domain features are something we're working on and investing in.
ZR: Mm-hmm.
PM: It’s probably gonna be paid. Just so you all know.
ZR: Mm-hmm.
PM: We charge for domain mapping everything on WordPress dot com and I think we have like 300 thousand map domains so we definitely think that's going to be a good revenue stream.
[34:09] PM: “Tumblr Live is banned in Europe”
PM: It's actually not banned in Europe. We just haven't launched support in Europe yet so it's not banned that's misinformation
ZR: Yeah. And to be clear we collect the absolute minimum amount of information. We collect birth date, because you need to be over 18. And location, so that we know if you're in the US or not. And I think that's it. That's the only thing that we collect in terms of Live. We let you stream from the back camera so you never have to show your face. All the streams are ephemeral, so we don't save them. There's a lot that we try to do in the best possible way for our users' safety and health rather than just collect tons of things that get stored or that we might have to delete or be worried about.
PM: Whoa. Eagle thing, cool
PM: Very patriotic.
ZR: It's very something.
[35:18] PM: Someone’s asked why we need location.
PM: Zandy just said it. We need location because right now it's restricted to the United States so we need the location to tell between the United States.
ZR: Yeah.
PM: But hopefully that should be broader in the future. Also, sometimes that data that we collect helps us fight spammers and bots so that's another reason you sort of have some of that.
[35:43] ZR: WormPool, repeat question asker. “Would there be a way to directly donate occasionally, similar to AO3 or Wikipedia, rather than buy merch?”
ZR: We have talked about this, yeah. I thought for a while we couldn't legally because we're not a non-profit but we can, legally. So that's an option that we may look into in the future.
PM: In the meantime though, like buy the no-ads upgrade, yeah. Probably a good one.
ZR: And you can, if you really like the ads, you can turn off the no-ads upgrade
PM: Yeah.
ZR: After you buy it.
PM: That's how much we believe in user control, you can buy the no-ads upgrade and then turn the ads back on. Or you could just turn Blaze post on, which I really like. So I have the no ads upgrade but I actually turn ads on because I want to test them. *chuckles* Make sure they're good.
[36:36] ZR: Here's another one that's interesting. This is transientURL again “I've seen a lot of people worrying that, like Reddit, Tumblr has external investor pressure to monetize. Want to refute or talk about that?”
PM: Yeah, of course, we have investors. We’re a company and if we didn't have investors we wouldn't be able to spend 30 million a year *chuckles* on Tumblr. It's not just about the investors though. When we work on something we want to see the returns on it, and we want to make sure it's sustainable so that we can make sure that Tumblr’s around for many years to come. So, that's really our main focus.
[37:19] ZR: Mm-hmm. ShadowGirl7, this is one for our ads team “Can you please not have ads be super vibrant? It's really an eyesore for epileptics like me especially when there's no way to stop it” So take note, yeah.
PM: And maybe buy the no-ads upgrade. *chuckles* Because then you won't see them at all.
ZR: Or ask someone to gift you.
[37:40] PM: A lot of people are asking about multiple dashboards. And I do think account switching, which I guess would give you multiple dashboards, different following, being able to do actions with different accounts is definitely pretty high on my personal list for things I'd love to see Tumblr support. Pretty big feature, pretty complicated. But yeah. We just need to bite the elephant there. Was that a metaphor? Maybe I just made that up.
ZR: I don't think you should bite an elephant.
PM: *laughs* Would they notice?
ZR: Probably not.
[38:13] ZR: Oh, FeetAreUnderrated asked, “How large is the Tumblr staff?”
ZR: We have nearly everybody here with us this week and we have 192 people here this week so it's about 200. That's it, yeah.
PM: Yeah, that's a much better answer. I was going to say, you know, it ranges from extra small to extra extra large.
ZR: *laughs* You literally posted, like, yesterday about how many people we have.
PM: Yeah. Oh, that's true. Yeah, wow. Yeah, so I think we have 192 people here together in person, which is pretty exciting. For 59 percent of the people that are here, they've never been to a large meet-up like this so it's our first time getting to see each other.
For those who don't know, Automattic, which is the parent company of Tumblr, and Tumblr are fully distributed so people work from wherever they are in the world. And we mostly coordinate online. But getting together a few times a year is really key to sort of working, knowing each other better, developing our culture, making plans, learning from each other.
You can actually be hired at Automattic with never actually talking to someone. Actually who here was hired purely on text? *chuckles* Yeah, so that's a good chunk. It was like about a quarter of the audience was just chatting on text.
ZR: Mm-hmm
PM: Which is pretty interesting and I actually did kind of the first thousand final interviews. We called them MattChats. But then we were hiring a lot of people and I became a *indistinct* so I had to stop doing that.
Although, I had an idea the other day actually inspired by a donut shed I had for… missing the name but who was it? Well, he was telling me that, I guess he read about the MattChat and he was really disappointed he didn't get one. So I thought that for existing Automatticians we put up something in announcements. You could leave an emoji if you want to MattChat. *laughs* Don't worry, doesn't actually- *chuckles* You're already hired, so it doesn't change that. But I thought we could do two options. It could just be, like, more of a donut where we just hang out and, um. Or if you want a classic-style text one, I still have all the questions I ask and everything. I kind of had a little bit of a format. I would vary it but I had some sort of standard questions I like to ask people.
One of my favorites was ‘If you could require all of Automattic to read a single book what would that be?’ And they got so many different answers and I actually used it to read a bunch. So the books that people would recommend, I would often check out, and really led me down some really interesting things I never would have read otherwise. That's how I read the ‘Bhagavad Gita.’ There was a sort of an interpretation called ‘My Gita,’ which I really learned a lot from that. And, so yeah. It's been kind of a fun thing. It's always been on my to-do to, like, actually collate all the answers. There were some common ones. What was it ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ was a really common one. Who's that guy, the author? David Allen or something or-
ZR: Yeah.
PM: Covey. Yeah, Stephen Covey.
[41:54] ZR: Here's a question. JasmineFlowers or maybe Yasmin Flowers “Are all of you new to Tumblr?”
ZR: No.
PM: No, I was actually a super early Tumblr user.
ZR: Yeah, we have a lot of people here in the audience, that you can't see, who have been users of Tumblr for as long as there's been a Tumblr.
PM: Yeah. Can someone look up my user ID, actually? I'm kind of curious. David, of course, is user id1 *chuckles*
ZR: Right.
PM: David Karp, the illustrious founder of Tumblr, yeah.
*offscreen* Today it's five.
PM: My user number is five?
*indistinct, offscreen*
PM: Yeah, yeah, my WordPress user ID is five.
ZR: That makes more sense.
PM: I think Danica is number one. But yeah, look me up in the Tumblr panel.
*indistinct, off-screen*
PM: What was that?
*indistinct, off-screen*
PM: So I was the 2007th user of Tumblr. *chuckles*
*indistinct, off-screen*
PM: Oh year 2007. 72078. Yeah, so seventy-two thousand. Yeah, so one of the first that was definitely pretty early. Because Tumblr launched in 2007, right? Yeah. Actually, interesting fact. Tumblr used to have a blog on WordPress. Which I thought was pretty cool for its first X number of years. Even though Tumblr and WordPress used to be competitors, we always had a lot of respect for each other. I always took a lot of inspiration from Tumblr and I'm really glad to be able to work on it now.
[43:33] ZR: There's one addressed directly to you. UnadulteratedPenguinCreation says, “Hey Matt do you read fanfiction?”
PM: Oh no. Sorry. Sometimes, I've been linked things and I'll browse it and sometimes there's memes and I'm always trying to figure out what they are. You know I only get so much time to read books so I definitely have a pretty huge backlog. Right now I'm reading Alain de Botton’s uh ‘School of Life’ which is really nice. Probably next I'm gonna read the next book in the ‘Silo’ series, Hugh Howey’s.
ZR: I read fanfiction, not that anyone asked me.
PM: Any favorites? Anything you want to suggest?
ZR: No. No, I'm not gonna suggest anything. That is for me, on my time
[44:37] ZR: From Maiosx “What is the best blog on Tumblr?”
ZR: Oh, there's so many good ones.
PM: I really like @everythingfox.
ZR: Oh yeah, that's so cute.
PM: Yeah, cute animals.
ZR: Yep.
PM: I don't know if it's the best one but yeah. I actually would love to have, like, folders or ways I could have different lists of things I follow because my feed is a little schizo. It definitely bounces around a lot and I do really appreciate some new features. Like, ‘Things You Might Have Missed’ or other things because I would find I would actually miss a post from my friends who might only post once every week or two or something and so I really appreciated that I-
*indistinct, off-screen*
PM: Sorry, what was that? How much money am I willing to pay for not missing my-? Well, 30 million so far *laughs* per year. Paying a lot for it. *chuckles*
[45:33] ZR: We've been getting a question here that's surfaced “Can we talk about the reblog chain thing?” “Can the removal of reblog chains be an optional feature rather than a permanent one?”
ZR: We made some changes to the reblog chain so that things were more consistent across all platforms and would work more like you would expect them to work. Unless you have used Tumblr for a really long time. So, everything we do is an experiment. We try things, we see how well they work, functionally, if people actually will use them. And then we make changes and adjustments and some you can see right away and some you can't see right away. Some we have to put on the shelf and revisit later, as other priorities come up. But any change that we make, I wouldn't consider 100 percent set in stone. Except that we are not getting rid of the chronological feed. As a reminder.
PM: I'm gonna actually open Tumblr. I'm kind of curious what the banner looks like for this. Live with the Tumblr CEO, cool. Oh, joining stream.
ZR: Uh-oh
PM: Inception
[47:03] ZR: LMFAO said, “Do you see streaming to become the main part of Tumblr going forward?”
ZR: I don't know, it's another experiment. If it was insanely popular and people were doing really cool things with it very consistently at a high quality, sure. But it doesn't have high usage right now so it's probably just gonna be something that we continue to play with and experiment with until it either clicks or we go a different way.
PM: By the way, I saw someone said I casually used a slur. Was that schizo?
ZR: Oh, I bet it was.
PM: I apologize, I mess up sometimes. So I won’t do that again.
ZR: Thank you.
PM: Thank you for pointing that out to me.
[47:50] PM: “Are there any LGBT people or neurodivergent folks helping make decisions”
PM: Oh yeah *laughs* We have a ton.
ZR: Yeah.
[48:02] ZR: The-Trans-Fiendling. “Are you going to fix your algorithms so they don't disproportionately target trans users to flag them as mature?”
ZR: We will check into it, make sure that isn’t happening. Or, if it is, that we’ll make changes. We definitely do not want to marginalize trans people, push them off the site, make them feel like this is not the place for them. That's not what Tumblr is about so wherever we have screwed up we'll try to fix it and make sure that perception matches reality as well.
[48:50] PM: “It's basically a stockholder update, it's not going to be entertaining.”
PM: Huh, that's funny.
[49:00] PM: So, I saw someone ask an interesting question. Sorry, I missed the username, but “How do we balance attracting new users versus supporting features that other social network sites support?”
PM: This is actually a really interesting product to design because I do think that there is an expectation. Like, obviously y’all probably also have or have used Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Snap, all the other social networks. And I do think there is an expectation around certain things, like maybe messaging or following, liking, whatever that we need to support. Tumblr has always been sort of on the forefront of innovating, actually, for social networks. So a lot of things that we launched first are later adopted by other social networks. So, I think that's just kind of how technology works, right? Sometimes, we come up with a cool new idea and other people copy us. Sometimes, other people come up with cool ideas, and we can be inspired by that. Maybe we implement it like they did or maybe we riff on it and sort of do our own take on it. It's part of the fun.
[50:05] PM: “What's your favorite XKit feature?”
PM: Do we have April here, actually?
*off-screen* No.
ZR: No.
PM: No? Aw, she couldn’t make it. Yeah, April, one of the XKit- there's multiple versions of XKit, right? Which one does she do? I forget the name but, yeah, actually one of the developers of XKit now works on Tumblr. So I think that's pretty cool.
[50:30] ZR: HomemadeMonsterPants, killing it. “What's the best method of sending feedback?”
ZR: If you have an actual like you found a bug or something is broken, which is the same as a bug, uh send a ticket to Support. If there's things that you just want to give us feedback on you can ping our Work in Progress, WIP group. There's our Humans- @humans blog. You can send me stuff, you can send Matt stuff. When I get stuff that's particularly hateful, I do ignore it. So, if you have a point you really want to make, try not to skew too heavily into how much you hate me personally, and then I'll try to address it publicly.
PM: You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, is that the saying?
ZR: That's- I don't know why you want to catch flies at all.
PM: “Can you remind us of your usernames?” Sure PhotoMatt P-H-O-T-O-M-A-T-T
ZR: And I'm ZingRing, Z-I-N-G-R-I-N-G
[51: 47] ZR: LiveThrowaway, “Have you considered improving the way you orient new users to Tumblr's unique features.”
ZR: Yes, that's something we want to do. We want to keep what's special about Tumblr and what makes it so great, enhance those things. Which is not code for making Tumblr like every other social media site. Enhance those things, but also make it super easy and obvious for new users to get going really quickly with the communities that they care about and the content they care about.
[52:20] PM: Someone said why we're focusing on new users versus existing users?
PM: We focus on both.
ZR: Yeah.
PM: Retention is just as important as new user acquisition. Anyone will tell you that.
ZR: Yeah. Yeah, we look at churn, we look at how many users are coming back, you know, at two days, three days, seven days, thirty days. We want the experience to be really good for both those groups, including the people who have been here with us since the very beginning. I don't think that improving things for new users is mutually exclusive. Like, we can make things good for existing users too, and improve that experience as well. Or give them more options to enjoy Tumblr the way that they would like to.
[53:07] PM: “…be a badge for people who've been here for a certain amount of time?”
PM: Yeah, I think we'll definitely do badges for tenure. I think that's pretty cool.
ZR: Actually I think that's, well…
PM: What's that?
ZR: More to come.
PM: More to come, yeah. Excited for more badges, yeah.
[53:23] PM: “Are custom themes staying around?”
PM: Yes, they are. Chronological feeds and custom themes are staying around. Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. *chuckles*
[53:35] ZR: Karennnnn said, three, four Ns at the end of that “I would like to have music play in the background of my blog, kind of like Myspace.”
ZR: Right on.
PM: You can do that on a custom theme, right? If you do some HTML, you could autoplay some music.
*offscreen* Yes
ZR: Yes.
PM: Yeah.
[53:58] ZR: WolvesAndVisions, “Have you all considered going to conventions to advertise in the host booths?”
ZR: We have.
PM: Yeah, weren’t we just-? Didn’t we do one?
ZR: We were just somewhere. We were at Vidcon. I think we’re going to ComicCon
PM: Ooh.
ZR: New York ComicCon, we'll be there.
PM: Nice, I saw some thumbs up over there. Yeah.
ZR: Our amazing team.
PM: You “would love to host a Tumblr con?” Cool, I'll go to it.
ZR: Yeah, what's your address? *Laughter* We'll be right there.
PM: I do want to do more events in our office space in New York City. Yeah, try to host happy hours, Tumblr meet and greets. There's also a really cool coffee shop downstairs called Cafe Lyria and I think that I want to do some sort of integration with them. Or, like, if you've posted to your Tumblr the past day you get a 10 percent discount or something.
[54:54] ZR: SpectralVulture asks “Where is the ball pit?”
ZR: You can't see it, it's in a room just off stage that way.
PM: Oh, really? It was on stage a minute ago. It's kind of small though. It was kind of a-
ZR: It was a nod. It's a nod to a ball pit.
PM: It was a nod to the ball pit, yeah. I think Gary might be getting it. Someone maybe hold the door for him.
[55:18] ZR: Catboy-Dysphoria. “Are there any changes being considered for side blogs? Ideas for improving them or just changes.”
ZR: We know that side blogs and that whole experience is really uneven and not that great so that is something we would like to improve. Make them more like first-class citizens on the site rather than-
PM: You asked for it. Tada!
ZR: There it is.
*Applause, laughter*
PM: That's a ball bucket. Yeah, it honestly is. Maybe I can juggle.
ZR: This is making me very uncomfortable.
PM: Not so much. Sorry, we're not real entertainers. We just make software.
ZR: Yeah, we are not good at this.
PM: We should also show them the Tumblr blankets. Can someone grab me one of those or hold it up? We have some super cool swag just for people who are here at the meet-up. They're out? There's some in here. But I don't wanna- then the balls might fall down. Anyone have a spare blanket on them? No. We'll get one.
ZR: Oh there's some, if you look at the #staffcon2023 tag, some people have posted their blankets that they got here. We're at time, but I want to do one more.
PM: Sure, yeah, and then we'll wrap it up there. By the way, thank you everyone for joining. Oh gosh, I guess we're up to 765 now. Wow, so cool.
[56:56] ZR: That is really cool. It's a streamer, Tumblr Live question from Tyote. Sorry if I'm saying it wrong. “Could it ever be possible for streamers to share one Tumblr Live instance to collaborate?”
ZR: Maybe not the way you're thinking. I'm not sure. We do have an option for two streamers to be on screen at the same time so that does exist. If that's what you're looking for, yes, we have that. And, if you're thinking of something else, then you might need to send in a more detailed request.
PM: Cool, well thank you all. Also, thank you for all these gifts.
ZR: Yeah, they’re very fun.
PM: Okay wow, UFOs now.
ZR: Yeah
PM: Was that a- wow! We just abducted a fox or something.
ZR: More crabs.
PM: *chuckles*
ZR: *gasps* Oh
PM: A turkey-
ZR: That's dark.
PM: -In the oven *laughs* I guess it’s escaping, yeah.
ZR: Yay, I like that one.
PM: Thank you all for joining. This was an experiment.
ZR: Yeah.
PM: We might do it again, I don't know. We’ll see. We'll talk about it afterward. What do you all think? Should we do one of these again?
*applause*
ZR: Alright, sounds good.
PM: And also, we'll figure out how to record it so we can post it for people who couldn’t be here and other things that are-
ZR: Not in this country
PM: Cool, yeah. Thank you all for using Tumblr. Thank you for believing in us. Thank you for being passionate about it. Thank you for the feedback and we will do our darndest to make the best possible product for y'all.
