Automattic struggled to boost Tumblr revenues and reduces its staff to the minimum
In an internal post from Automattic, later confirmed and made public by CEO Matt Mullenweg, it was revealed that Tumblr's staff has been significantly reduced and redistributed to other projects within the parent company, leaving only a minimal team of Trust & Safety and support workers to manage the blogging platform.
This development indicates that since Automattic's acquisition of Tumblr in 2019, the company has struggled to boost Tumblr's activity and revenue. The CEO acknowledged this in his statement, saying that they have "not gotten the expected results from their effort."
The news does not necessarily mean the end for Tumblr, but it does raise concerns about the platform's future. However, despite the staff changes, Mullenweg stated that starting January 1, 2024, the company will experiment with a new structure involving smaller, more focused teams working on key areas of Tumblr that users have requested improvements on.
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External links
- Internal post about TumblrMatt Mullenweg • Official source
- Tumblr to run on skeleton crew as parent company Automattic absorbs staffTechCrunch
- Tumblr’s staff is reportedly reduced to a skeleton crewEngadget
Comments
It could thrive more if federation had been considered more to begin with. Never too late, in my opinion.
Hopefully, they refactor for ActivityPub, allow post bookmarking, and set things so that hashtags at the bottom of a post are automatically added - the current implementation makes it so that you have to manually add each hashtag in a "hashtag editor"?, unless I'm missing something.
The only other thing I'd want to be made better is the "Add a page" feature. They should give you the option of a rich-text editor with buttons to format your text.
Other than that, IMHO Tumblr is technically the best social (but not exactly social media) platform available.