It’s not quite the end of Tumblr, but when management is supposedly sending memos with the Lord Tennyson quote about having “loved and lost,” it doesn’t look like there’s much of a future.
Internet statesman and Waxy.org proprietor Andy Baio posted what is “apparently an internal Automattic memo making the rounds on Tumblr” to Threads. The memo, written to employees at WordPress.com parent company Automattic, which bought Tumblr from Verizon’s media arm in 2019, is titled or subtitled “You win or you learn.” The posted memo states that a majority of the 139 employees working on product and marketing at Tumblr (in a team apparently named “Bumblr”) will “switch to other divisions.” Those working in “Happiness” (Automattic’s customer support and service division) and “T&S” (trust and safety) would remain.
I’m still tiny to figure out why they thought Tumblr Live was a good idea. It seems like a waste of money to chase after…I’m not even sure who, Twitch? TikTok?
Does that function even work? Like, do real Tumblr users even use it? Everything I see is just a reminder to snooze it again, or people who have accidentally accessed it and it crashes. Definitely a feature absolutely no one asked for.
No one I know who uses Tumblr likes it. I don’t know anyone who has done anything other than snooze it the second it turns back on. They really just did not know their user base and how tumblr is used.