Yahoo is a notorious repeat offender. Yahoo is the reason the “if you’re not paying money for a service, then you’re not a customer, you’re the product.” saying exists.
Here is some fully general advice: If you’re the user of a free-to-use website, and you learn that it’s being bought by a large company, then this is always, and forever, bad news. If it’s not an acquihire, then it’s something worse. You’re not a customer, you’re the product.
If we’re lucky, this will be a Livejournal-style buyout, where the site just gradually disintegrates over the course of several years. If we’re unlucky, then it’ll be a Posterous-style buyout, and Tumblr will be shut down when Yahoo goes bankrupt in six months. It is vanishingly unlikely that being owned by Yahoo will benefit Tumblr users at all.
Predictions:
More ads. Karp has a weirdly principled dislike of ads, for a guy running a free social network. Marissa Mayer is unencumbered by morals, here. If you spend a billion dollars on something, you’re gonna want a return on income.
NSFW content is probably going to be banned, or heavily restricted. (As in, “verify your age by giving us a credit card number”) Ad networks hate and fear porn, and Yahoo is going to run more ads. No other Yahoo property allows NSFW content, for precisely this reason.
They might try to restrict fan content, due to copyright/CP concerns, as Livejournal did; they might not.
Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!
I called it, five years in advance.
The prophecy was right there and we all ignored it.
i dont really… WANT… to leave tumblr. ive been here since 2011
no other platform has the right format for me to just randomly barf actual thoughts, joaks, and genuine creative content all in the same breath. i dont know how to compartmentalize
every other platform you gotta be a real person. Here you are you’re icon and username and whatever your hyperfixation is at the current moment
on tumblr you can make a post that just says “minecraft” and get 50k notes, where on twitter you have to steal tweets and instagram you have to be hot. tumblr is more like a bunch of kids let loose in walmart where there are no rules and the only god is a bald swedish man
If there’s one thing I’d like to say before Tumblr also starts monitoring what you say on their platform it’s - “you suck hard Tumblr and I hope you lose a ton of business and that this platform dies because you’re now just another IG and we already have one of those. YOU. FUCKING. SUCK. TUMBLR.”- TUMBLR FUCKING SUCKS.
