There's obviously a lot of talk about Tumblr being shut down, which does not appear to be happening, but do you think the re-organization will be enough to keep Tumblr running indefinitely? Or is this maybe the start of an eventual shut down of Tumblr?
What’s super clear is our previous approach wasn’t working. It didn’t turn around the business to make enough money to support the investment of infrastructure and staff needed to run Tumblr, and a lot of users were unhappy with some of the changes we tried. There have been a few staff changes within the team, but basically what we’re saying is starting January 1, 2024 we’ll try a different structure with smaller, more focused teams working on the core parts of Tumblr that people say they want improved. We’ll sunset or rollback some things we tried that didn’t work.
I’m advocating for this change because I think it has a good chance at success. I don’t do anything hoping to fail. There are lots of examples of products with hundreds of millions more MAUs and smaller teams than Tumblr currently has, and there are amazing examples like OpenAI and Telegram running circles around much bigger players with small teams. That’s what we hope to replicate.
The good news is as well, since people leaving Tumblr aren’t being laid off, they’re just switching to other teams within Automattic, if something doesn’t work or breaks we can always pull them back in to work on it.
nice to hear people aren’t being laid off, and if i’m reading between the lines correctly we may finally be rid of tumblr live and other useless cruft