I'll Tumblr 4 Ya

ended up moving to Japan. He worked for a website called urban Baby. For a while, he started a consulting company. He went from high school dropout to web professional to entrepreneur in just five years. So it's two thousand and seven. Facebook had debuted three years earlier and had emerged from

the college scene. Twitter was founded the year before Tumblr was, but it wouldn't really get thrust into the spotlight until a month after Tumblr launched, because that was when Twitter had the big showing at south By Southwest in March of two thousand and seven. That's when the text spear in general actually took notice of Twitter. So Carp was fond of these things called tumble logs, and these are

micro blogs. They are short form log entries online. They took their name from the tagline of a blog called Narcaia, and Narkaia had the tagline experimental impressionistic sub paragraph tumblin. So carp tumbled across a tumble log called Projectionist. Now, this tumble log was, among other things, tracking other tumblelogs across the web, so it was kind of serving as a directory of tumblelogs, and Projectionist had a very nice esthetic, which wasn't always the case with a lot of tumblelogs

out there. The folks behind Projectionist had created like colorful bubbles that could house a blurb, so instead of just being text on a screen, it could really be set apart and pop. They had also created things like frames that would go around a video player so it would set again set it apart from the rest of the page,

and make it look really attractive. It was much more pleasant to look at than a lot of other not just tumblelogs, but blogs in general, because at this point the tools to make blogs were a little complicated for the average user. Like you could learn how to use the different tools and make a really attractive blog, but they weren't always user friendly, and Cart thought it would be really cool if someone were to develop a tumble log platform that gave users access to those kinds of

tools and made it really easy. So if the platform would let users choose like a theme or a skin that would automatically apply and a general esthetic to the content that was posted to the tumblelog, that could be really cool. So you can have like different types of themes or skins, and that would determine how content would

appear when you posted it to the tumblelog. Then the user would just focus on sharing the stuff they thought was interesting or funny or thought provoking or whatever, but they wouldn't have to worry about making it look good because the platform would do that for you. And the whole point was just to post very quick things like not necessarily long thoughts, although you could do that. You could post a live journal like long entry if you wanted to, but really it was about, Oh, I saw

this interesting thing. I'm just going to post it here and share it with people who visit my tumblelog. Not At the time, Karp was running this consulting business and he had a developer who worked with him named Marco Armint, and between a couple of consulting gigs, when they didn't have anything else going on, they decided they'd take a crack at building this microblogging platform that Karp had been thinking about for more than a year at this point.

It took them all of two weeks to build the first version of Tumblr, and according to Karp, in no time at all, their brand new platform had thirty thousand people signing up for it. It was clear that there was a demand for these kinds of tools and that a lot of people who enjoyed tumblelogging really lacked the know how on how to build the kind of tools themselves. So it became a really attractive place to go and

it became the earliest version of Tumblr. Carp said that the real appeal of Tumblr was that you could put anything into it and you could take anything out of it. So by that at what he meant was that a user submitting their content to their Tumbler would see that the platform took care of all the formatting no matter

what kind of content that was. If it was a video, if it was some text, if it was an image, Tumblr would handle the formatting, so you didn't have to worry about it, and Tumblr would make sure that it

looked nice according to whatever esthetic you had picked. As for taking stuff out of Tumblr, well, Tumblr had an application programming interface or API, and it meant that you could actually have it play nice on other sites all right, Like you could have your own website that you operated, and you could use a Tumblr API plugin so that you could pull content from your Tumbler to display on

your owned and operated site. And that way you didn't have to give your users another link to follow if you wanted them to be able to see your Tumblr material. So your one site that could be the focal point for all the stuff that you were active on online could include your Tumblr activity. Now, something else that contributed to the early adoption of Tumblr, particularly among students, was that Tumblr's ascent coincided with the rise of the smartphone.

The popularity of the iPhone and then later on android phones meant that there was a new way to interact with the Internet in general and the Web in particular, and a new way to generate content for the Internet and the Web. You know, smartphones had cameras. Now, y'all, there are entire eras of my life that are largely unphotographed because carrying a camera around was a choice. You know,

you know, you didn't. You didn't have a camera that was incorporated into some other device that you happened to carry with you wherever you went. If you were going someplace and you had a camera with you, it was because you decide you needed to have a camera with you. The rise of smartphones, however, meant that cameras started to become almost omnipresent no matter where you went, right, especially

as more and more people started to buy smartphones. So it really changed the way we generate and consume content on the web. Tumblr became a place that could act as a display for all the stuff that you created or the stuff that you liked and you wanted to reblog. It could be a joke, it could be a video clip, It could be a digital photo. It could be an animated GIF or jiff if you insist on pronouncing it that way. It could be one of any other type of web friendly types of content and it would fit

on Tumblr. And so Tumblr became kind of a web culture nexus. You know, there were entire memes that would gather support and adoption on Tumblr and then spread throughout the rest of the web. Another important element of Tumblr was that, unlike other social platforms, users were encouraged to adopt a pseudonym for their Tumblr account, so the account could be a really accurate reflection of the personality of

the user. You know, it could be an accurate reflection of what they liked and what they valued, and you could get a really good feel for what was important to the user and still not know who the user was because their account is all under a pseudonym, And that meant the user could still maintain some anonymity, which

could be really important. It meant that users actually had a lot more freedom to express themselves without worrying about it perhaps impacting them in other aspects of their lives. Right Like, let's say that you're a kid and you realize that you're queer, but you also are in a really sort of conservative region where you can't really have a safe space to talk about this with anybody else, and so you feel very ostracized and alone and perhaps intimidated.

Tumblr was a place where you could start to explore those aspects of your personality and to express yourself, and the pseudonym could give you some protection from consequences you might face in your day to day life. So it really was an important part of a lot of people's self discovery journey. Tumblr was a big part of that. So besides just being a place to share in web culture, Tumblr served a role in creating web culture. There were entire memes and in jokes that took shape in tumblrs.

The folks on Tumblr developed their own sort of language in references and punchlines, and they would use that as shorthand in communication with one another. And then a newcomer or outsider would look at Tumblr and be totally in the dark and find it just obtuse and confusing. There was a little bit of tribalism going on, and there were of course tribes within tribes, because entire tumbler communities would begin to form around specific topics, a lot of

them being pop culture topics. You had tumblers that would focus on fan theories about specific shows, that kind of thing. You had whole communities that would pop up around fans of a television show who were really hoping that two of the characters on the show would end up in a romantic relationship. Right the so called shipping fandoms, and the discussions in these tumblers, or at least the blogging in these tumblers, because you weren't leaving comments, you were

just blogging in it. They ran the full spectrum, from wish fulfillment fantasies to even scholarly takes on how shows were playing to or sometimes outright exploiting the fan bases by teasing a relationship with no intent on actually following through with it. There are actually some really remarkable video essays on YouTube that look into this. Arrah z has done quite a few videos that focused on Tumblr culture and how various properties exploited that culture. So yeah, really

fascinating stuff. And there were other communities that coalesced around real world concerns, some of which were seen as taboo or socially unacceptable in order order to address them in other types of communities, so users would lean on Tumblr communities as I mentioned earlier, to explore their own identities. They could experiment, they could find understanding and acceptance among others. So on Tumblr you could find a really robust LGBTQ

plus community, for example, and communities within that community. You could also find communities that supported people who had disabilities or chronic illnesses. You could find the sort of communities that just didn't have the same representation on other social platforms or in real world spaces, particularly for people who lived in fairly rural or remote areas, So that was

actually a really valuable thing as well. You also got some extremes in that, and often those would be the ones held up to ridicule or criticism that people would say, oh, here's a tumbler that's completely dedicated to people who are fantasizing about being robots, and then that would turn into kind of a punchline. So there was a downside of

this as well. But I think the value that Tumblr presented toward people who really didn't have a support system in other areas of their lives was something that was really special. Tumblr would actually see its major boost and popularity in the early twenty tens, Like it definitely had early adoption, but that was in the tens of thousands. It would be around twenty ten where you'd start to

see millions of accounts on Tumblr. And we also saw a lot of interesting subcultures form around that same time. For example, do you remember Bronie's That's the term for adult fans male identifying adult fans, usually of the animated series My Little Pony. Friendship is Magic. Technically, the brony culture actually originated on a different website, the message board four chan, but the subculture also put down roots over

on Tumbler and flourished there. For the record, I don't see anything wrong with adults enjoying cartoons, even cartoons that are ostensibly meant for kids. A lot of great cartoon creators actually intentionally into greate cross generational appeal in their works. It would be inaccurate for me to call myself a bronie.

I don't have anything against Bronie's. I just never got into My Little Pony, but goodness knows, I'm a big fan of other cartoons that are meant for kids, like Phineas and ferb and Hey Season five is coming soon anyway.

Tumblr's role in Internet culture grew and its user base also grew, and while the company's valuation continued to increase, nearing an estimated one billion dollars by twenty ten, Kart was determined to prevent the sorts of monetization efforts that he was seeing elsewhere on the web, so he kept Tumblr free from advertising effectively at least until twenty twelve, and even then he was very methodical in how ads could run on the site and the sort of brand

deals that Tumblr would do, and he eschewed the migration toward influencer culture, which was starting to take off at that point. That's why Tumblr allowed for pseudonyms, and it didn't do things like track the number of folks who were following a specific tumbler. In fact, it didn't even allow for comments on posts. You could reblog a post, and you could put in your own take on your reblogging, but you couldn't just leave comments underneath a post that

was there. He was all about removing the barriers between creators and the stuff they wanted to post. He wanted to take as much of that away as possible so that it could have a more pure path from creator to audience. But in twenty thirteen, things would change. I'll explain more after we take this quick break. Okay, before the break, I mentioned things would change for Tumblr in twenty thirteen. In that year, Tumblr had seventy three million accounts and a suitor came calling. A suitor by the

name of Yahoo. At that time, Marissa Meyer was the CEO of Yahoo's She had been part of Google. She was actually employee number twenty at Google, and then she left to become CEO of Yahoo in twenty twelve. And this was a really big move for Yahoo, this acquisition. Yahoo had also been in kind of a decline leading up to Meyer's arrival. There had been sort of a revolving door of CEOs for a while. You know, leadership

was undergoing a lot of tumultuous change. And then Meyer was coming in and attempting to create some stability in the company, and Yahoo made an offer that Tumblr could not refuse. The offer was valued at around one point one billion dollars. Meyer promised not to screw Tumblr up. Now you might wonder why Karp would agree to sell Tumblr in the first place. After all, he previously had been giving interviews to the media saying that he didn't make Tumblr in order to make money. That money was

not the motivating factor for his involvement with Tumblr. He wanted to build a foundation upon which people could create stuff. That's what pushed him, he claimed. But following Yahoo's move their offer to Tumblr, Karp would say that he had a lot of conversations with Marissa Meyer, and he found that Tumblr and Yahoo were in alignment on a lot of topics, including the use of native advertising and branding

on Tumblr. And while he wasn't originally looking to sell the company, the opportunity meant that Tumblr would have massive corporate support while entering into the next stage of its growth, which he said the Tumblr just couldn't do without something like a Yahoo behind it. So Karp would actually stay on with Tumblr. He would serve as the CEO for the Tumblr division within Yahoo. I think it's safe to say that Marissa Meyer and Yahoo had pounced on Tumblr

without really understanding what they were getting into. For one thing, Tumblr was popular, you know, there were more than a million active users in more than seventy million accounts, and sure, venture capital companies have been making investments into Tumblr to the point where the valuation was hovering around a billion dollars. But Tumblr wasn't at all profitable. It really wasn't a

revenue generator. It was running these brand campaigns and stuff, and had made some strategic partnerships with a few brands, but the money coming in didn't even come close to covering the bills. It wasn't covering the operating costs of the servers, let alone the salaries of the people who worked there, and so turning Tumblr into a profitable business was going to be a real challenge. See Tumblr was also extremely permissive when it came to the types of

content that users could share. A lot of that content was of a more mature nature. There were entire communities focused on sexuality, and it wouldn't take a whole lot of searching to actually find pornographic material shared on the platform. So let's say that you run a company. It's a brand company, and you want to advertise to folks, and social platforms can be a really valuable place where you

can set your advertising. But then let's say you're worried that your ad might appear next to a pornographic video or pornographic gif or photo. Plus, the people to whom you're advertising are all operating under pseudonyms, so you don't actually know who those people are. One of the more valuable aspects of most social networks is that the advertiser can learn an awful lot about the customers that they're

advertising to. Targeted advertising is really big business, but it's harder to target users when they are quasi anonymous not impossible. In fact, you could argue that a person's name is one of the least important parts of who they are, but it still was an issue. Now, this meant that when Yahoo tried to monetize Tumbler, they ran into some resistance among companies that were advertisers. The sexual nature of much of the content was on Tumblr was kind of

a non starter for a lot of companies. Advertisers were more interested in other platforms that had a combination of content moderation and users having to create accounts under their actual names and share more information about themselves, more direct information, not just not just indicating who they were through blogging, but outright telling the platform who they were, where they were from, how old they were, etc. So the semi

anonymous nature of Tumblr, coupled with the proliferation of sexual content meant that it was not an attractive place for advertisers. Then we get to the debacle known as dash Con. Originally it was called as tumble Con USA, so this was an in person convention and it had no official connection to Tumblr. It was catering to Tumblr communities, but

in itself was not part of Tumblr. Organizers were all part of various tumbler communities, and they had this ambitious idea to create a live event where Tumblr community members would gather in person and celebrate the stuff that they loved. There would also be live performances, there'd be bands, there'd be a live podcast from Welcome to night Vale, a fantastic podcast. If you've never listened to it, you should

check it out. I really enjoy that one. There would be panel discussions, there'd be meet and greets, and there would be the ballpit. So the story of dash Con is a complicated one. It involved a lot of bad decisions, mostly guided through a lack of experience and knowledge, as well as a lack of capability, which again not a slight on the people who wanted to throw this event. I think originally the organizers really did want to throw a great event. One of them, at least, I think,

was sincere in that desire. The entire time, they weren't up to the task, and that's again not a slide on them. They were tackling something they had never done before. And it turns out that throwing live events is hard, right.

You usually have entire departments of people who are dedicated to specific tasks within throwing a live event to get it to get off the ground, and even then you're going to run into issues, particularly the first couple of years you try and have an event, so it's always difficult, and it was, you know, a long shot at best for this thing to go off. Well, the whole event became legendary for how poorly it was launched and run.

How some of the organizers ended up begging attendees to contribute cash right there at the event in an emergency effort to keep the event going after it had already started. You know, it's kind of like saying, oh, no, we need to lay down more railroad tracks because the train's running out of track to run on. Numerous folks who were meant to appear at the convention canceled because they sensed that the event organizers were in over their heads

and would be unable to meet their obligations. The whole thing became a big joke, and the punchline was almost always that darn ballpit, which, if you've not seen pictures, was a pretty pathetic little feature. Anyway, dash Con wasn't officially affiliated with Tumblr, so it wasn't Tumblr's fault that dash Con was such a total disaster, but Tumblr's reputation still took a bit of a hit just through association. By the way, I already mentioned Sarah Z, who has

done numerous video essays on Tumblr culture. She has also done an incredible video essay, like an exhaustive video essay about the disaster that was Dashcan. So if you're really curious about all the dirt and all the tea being spilt, I recommend going to YouTube and checking out Sarah Zed's It's like Sarah z Sarah Z's video essay on Dashcan.

Back to Tumblr though, so, the user base of Tumbler was slowly growing older because that's how time works, and as they were aging, they were also kind of aging out of Tumblr for various reasons, and so some of them were migrating over to other platforms that were introducing features that they found to be, you know, something that they wanted to do, something that wanted to use moving on. That doesn't mean that everyone left Tumblr, but a lot of people did so folks began to move to other

networks like Facebook or Twitter for different reasons. Tumblr saw a decline in user activity and Yahoo was forced to acknowledge that they had massively overpaid for Tumblr. In early twenty sixteen, Yahoo wrote down the value of Tumblr by more than two hundred million dollars. The company as a whole had posted a four point four billion dollar loss in Q four of twenty fifteen. If that wasn't just Tumblr, that was all of Yahoo, but Tumblr was part of

the problem. One could make a decent argument that Yahoo's acquisition of Tumblr was one of the big booboos and mergers and acquisitions in the tech space. And in twenty seventeen, Yahoo found itself the subject of an acquisition. So as a reminder, Yahoo acquired Tumblr in twenty thirteen, and then

in twenty seventeen, Yahoo itself became acquired by Verizon. Because there's always a bigger fish, so Verizon acquired Yahoo and its subsidiaries, which included Tumblr, and they bought it all for the princely sum of four point five billion dollars. That was the kitten, kaboodle everything of Yahoos. Verizon would love Yahoo in with another acquisition and had made a couple of years earlier, which was Aol, and together AOL and Yahoo became oath within Verizon, which would later get

a rebranding. A few months later, carp announced he was leaving the company. So he had spent a little more than a decade as Tumblr's founder and leader, and now he was walking away. He didn't really give a full explanation as to why he was leaving, other than he wanted to pursue other ambitions. But I mean, Tumblr had already had sort of a fall from grace at this point. So in twenty eighteen, Verizon made a major change to Tumblr's policies by cracking down on adult content. This move

had a huge impact on user activity on Tumblr. Some analysts estimated that there was as much as a thirty percent drop in user traffic on Tumblr in the wake of this decision. Now users objected to censorship and restrictions, and part of the problem was that the filters that Verizon had put in place to detect and prevent adult content from posting to Tumblr were very aggressive, and users argued that often they were flagging some content as inappropriate

when the content should not have been deemed inappropriate. This move had a disproportionate effect on certain subcommunities, particularly the LGBTQ plus communities on Tumblr, and again, Tumblr had served as kind of a safe space for people to sort of explore their sexuality and to kind of learn who they really were. But now they were finding that some of this expression was no longer being tolerated on the platform.

They found themselves unable to express themselves or to engage in the type of experimentation that had previously been facilitated by Tumblr. However, while you could easily say well, that's not good. I mean, you know, this was a healthy place, or at least it could be a healthy place for someone to do this sort of exploration and to learn more about themselves, there was no denying that there was also some truly horrible stuff on Tumblr. Stuff that was

not just in bad taste. Often it was illegal. You know. There were cases in which people found instances of child abuse on Tumblr, like videos and photos and that sort of thing, And there's no way of getting around that. That is truly terrible stuff and needed to be removed.

So from a business standpoint, the move to restrict adult content was totally understandable, right Verizon needed to prove to advertisers that Tumblr was a safe place and that posting ads there wasn't going to backfire on these companies they weren't going to post an ad, and then someone takes a screenshot of that ad appearing next to an image with child abuse in it. That would be absolutely horrible

on every level. But that same decision to restrict adult content meant a ton of folks would just stop using Tumblr, So that also meant there were fewer people to advertise. Two, Like, the people who remained were still faithful to Tumblr, but there weren't as many of them. The thirty percent drop is a big drop, so this was a kind of

catch twenty two. Right, you're doing something to one tell advertisers this is a safe space for you, but you're also telling them, but it means that we're losing thirty percent of the people you wanted to advertise to in

the first place. To illustrate the decline, CNBC reported that in twenty fourteen, a single day on Tumblr would say users publish eighty four million posts at minimum, So on the slowest day in twenty fourteen, there would still be at least eighty four million posts pushed out to Tumblr. In twenty eighteen, the number of posts was down to thirty million, so less than half of what was being posted in twenty fourteen, that was not the direction Tumblr

needed to go in in order to become a profitable business. Okay, we're not done with Tumblr yet. We've still got some more to talk about, including another shift in ownership. But first let's take a quick break. So Verizon had purchased Tumblr in twenty seventeen as part of Yahoo. Right, so really they bought Yahoo and with it came Tumblr. But Verizon's ownership of Tumblr did not last very long. In twenty nineteen, Verizon sold Tumblr off to another company called Automatic.

This was a little ironic because Automatic is the company that operates word Press, the blogging tool WordPress, and way back when Karp was first ide eight ing on Tumblr, when he was first thinking what would Tumblr be, WordPress was often held up as sort of the contrast to what he wanted because Carp saw WordPress as complicated. He thought it wasn't very user friendly. It took a lot of work to make stuff look good on WordPress. He also noted that it was geared more toward long form

content generation, so not meant for microblogging. So in a way, you could say that Karp created Tumblr to be kind of an opposite to WordPress in some ways. And now the company that operated WordPress would also own Tumblr, so a little bit ironic, I guess, in at least the Atlantis Morisset kind of way. And to twist the knife a little bit, there's also the price that Automatic allegedly

paid for Tumblr. So the actual amount was never disclosed publicly, but rumor mill but the sales price for Tumblr at around three million dollars. So remember Yahoo had purchased Tumbler way back in twenty thirteen for one point one billion, and then six years later it sold for just three million dollars to Automatic. Clearly, Verizon, just like Yahoo, had trouble finding a way to operate Tumblr that was either profitable or attractive to users, or preferably both. So would

Automatic succeed where Yahoo and Verizon had stumbled? Well, so far, the answer to that question has been not so much. To be fair to Automatic, the company has had to focus primarily on fixing issues like bugs for the last couple of years because under Verizon's ownership it wasn't really looked after very well. Tumblr was kind of an afterthought. So well, they've had to spend at least a couple of years trying to get things to run correctly. And

then also to introduce some new features. So their goal was really to improve the core experience for users and then try to find ways to make Tumblr more of a revenue generator. Interestingly, while much of the old guard of Tumblr has since moved on to other platforms, younger users have adopted Tumblr in increasing numbers over the years.

In a September twenty twenty two article, CNBC reporter Leah Collins wrote that sixty percent of Tumblr's users are Generation Z. These are the same users that companies like Meta and Twitter are trying to attract and to retain. It's possible that the things that set Tumblr apart from most other social platforms are the features that appeal to younger users

in general. For example, on like Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, Tumblr organizes posts chronologically, not algorithmically, so you actually see stuff in the reverse order of when it was posted, as opposed to you see it in the order that the platform has decided you need to see it. Also, again,

it gets away from that influencer culture. Everything is under pseudonyms, it's not under personalities as much, and so you're kind of away from the whole sort of I don't know, I don't want to call it fake, but at least at times disingenuous environment of influencer culture. I will never think of myself as an influencer, which I think is

on the safe side. I don't know that I'm that influential, but I certainly don't want to be the kind of person who's, you know, trying to orchestrate a perfect moment for camera and assume make everyone assume that that's what my life is all the time and try and sell stuff based off that. That's just not for me. I would be terrible at it if I even tried so, but I have no desire to try, and I think a lot of people who flocked to Tumblr are kind of tired of that whole approach to social media in

the first place. But this doesn't change the fact that Tumblr isn't exactly acting like a gold mine. Earlier this month, a leaked memo from Automatic showed that the company was reorganizing and shifting some teams away from Tumblr to work at other divisions within Automatic. Matt Mullenwegg, who is this CEO of Automatic, later confirmed this news and said that quote, we have not gotten the expected results from our effort, which was to have Tumbler's revenue and usage above its

previous peaks end quote. Mullen Weg said that his teams had put in more than six hundred person years of effort into Tumblr since purchasing the company, and I guess there just has to come a time where you say the return on investment just isn't there and you have to scale back or else you're going to just lose tons of money. Now, to be clear, Tumblr isn't necessarily on the chopping block. It's not like it's going to get sold off for parts necessarily. I mean, maybe it will,

but that doesn't appear to be the current plan. Mullen Wegg says that the plan is for his team to really focus on improving the core functionality of Tumblr in twenty twenty four, and that one function that might get an overhaul or maybe will get phased out completely is a live streaming video feature that Automatic introduced into Tumblr

last year called Tumblr Live. Apparently, the site has not seen widespread adoption the app or Tumblr has not seen a lot of adoption of Tumblr Live, and it just hasn't taken off the way that Automatic had hoped. Mullen Wegg indicated that the company would try their darness to get folks to use live before the end of the year, that that is part of their contractual obligation. But if that doesn't happen, then in January they're going to re assess the feature and make a decision as to whether

or not it even belongs in Tumblr at all. And it sounds to me like Tumblr Live is on borrowed time. There are other features that Automatic introduced since their acquisition in twenty nineteen, and they've also seen some pretty poor

adoption or in some cases outright opposition from users. So mullen Wegg is indicated the next year, Tumblr is likely going to scale down a bit, shed some of these features and maybe roll back other ones, and really focus just on creating the core elements of what makes Tumblr work and to make those better. The smaller team will also reduce the cost of operating Tumblr in the first place, which is important because mullen Wegg indicated the site has yet to make more money than it costs to run.

So I think each owner of Tumblr, maybe not to the extent of Verizon Verizon was buying all of Yahoo, but Yah and Automatic. I think both of these companies thought they saw in Tumblr a way to turn things around and to monetize things in a way that would make both users and advertisers happy. But no one has quite landed on the working formula yet. Doesn't mean that it is impossible or that they won't figure it out. But that's been mostly Tumblr's history since it's acquisitioned by

Yahoo back in twenty thirteen. An interesting story. Tumblr's an interesting platform, one that I never really got that much into. I think I was too old by the time Tumblr had come out to really vibe with the culture of Tumblr. I'm an old fogie and younger communities, with their own languages and their own values and philosophies, are often at a disconnect with my own, Which is not saying that those communities are bad or that I'm bad, just that we don't line up because I'm old. I still don't

really understand what no cap means. Someone tell me before I go sit in the rocking chair for the rest of the day. But anyway, that is the rundown on Tumblr so far. I hope that they do see a renaissance. I mean, obviously, younger communities find value in Tumblr, and I think there is value in it being in operation, there just has to be a way to cover the costs of that operation or else Ultimately it will go away.

No one's going to run it out of just a charitable desire to give young people a place where they can find themselves. That just isn't how the world works unfortunately. Anyway, that's all for today. I hope you're all well, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.