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.
They didnt really try to.
A lot of the new money making features were half assed, and got abandoned pretty quickly after release. Lots of users who wanted to support them have complained that they seem to not want the money.
They’ve also added features no one wants. For example, the recent “Tumblr Live” nonsense, which is basically Twitch meets Shorts. It’s at the top of your feed and you can’t permanently turn it off - you can turn it off for what was a week, then a month. They wasted money and time to get that feature going, one that you know cost a lot because hosting video isn’t cheap, when NO ONE goes to tumblr to look at random cam girls.