Owner of Tumblr confirms site’s shift from “surging” to “small and focused”

Who would have thought all of our bad decisions would make us unpopular

-Tumblr

I miss old Tumblr. It was so easy to find great blogs to follow and find the content and vibe you were after. A piece of escapism to the world where you wanted to live.

From the article .. the "artistic, supportive part of Tumblr is one of the best places on the Internet." .. is well said.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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."

After quotes and anecdotes about love, loss, mountain climbing, and learning on the journey, the memo notes that nobody will be let go and that team members can make a ranked list of their top three preferred assignments elsewhere inside Automattic.

The phenomenon of microblogging, or "Tumblelogs," low-commitment personal blogs that contained snippets of text, images, audio, or other ephemera, were shaped into a product that launched in early 2007.

CEO Matt Mullenweg at the time called Tumblr "one of the web's most iconic brands," and said he intended to maintain the adult content ban and hoped the site would complement Automattic's other products, like WooCommerce, Jetpack, Longreads, and others.

Edward Snowden's leak of highly classified documents in 2013 spurred government surveillance higher-ups to create an "IC on the Record" tumblog, a very odd fit that somehow continues to this day.

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