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Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg details Tumblr’s future after re-org

This week, WordPress.com owner Matt Mullenweg in light of the social blogging site’s continued financial woes. After acknowledging and explaining the meaning behind a leaked internal memo detailing the staff changes, Mullenweg then went on to field a…

DBy Danielle FrostNov 13, 20233 min read

This week, WordPress.com owner Matt Mullenweg in light of the social blogging site’s continued financial woes. After acknowledging and explaining the meaning behind a leaked internal memo detailing the staff changes, Mullenweg then went on to field a number of questions about Tumblr’s future in an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session on , noting that 139 of the site’s workers would be moved to other projects at

But Mullenweg’s AMA offered a lot more insight into how the company plans to run Tumblr, the blogging site it picked up from Verizon — the business itself is That necessitated the re-org.

Below are some of the key takeaways from Mullenweg’s exchange with Tumblr users during the AMA, which shed light on what’s ahead for Tumblr in 2024 and beyond.

Mullenweg said the changes to the Tumblr team will happen on December 31, 2023. He said the team will be presented with other projects at Automattic and will be able to rank their top three picks, as staff is reassigned. The team impacted is known as “Bumblr” which is the internal name for the product side of Tumblr.

The move was not a surprise, he added — the Tumblr team has known for over a year that if it couldn’t get the revenue up, some of them would have to work on other things that make the company money.

Tumblr staff being reassigned will be able to choose from the following: WP.com, WooCommerce, Jetpack, Day One, Pocket Casts, WP VIP, .Org, Applied AI, Texts, self-serve advertising (Blaze), Newspack, Pressable, and Gravatar.

Why were some people laid off without being reassigned?

Mullenweg admitted that the company, like many, does engage in performance management reviews and sometimes that means people are let go.

“Automattic is continuously hiring and firing people to try to create the best open web tech team in the world,” he wrote.

This week, WordPress.com owner Matt Mullenweg in light of the social blogging site’s continued financial woes.
Danielle Frost · Thehackingpost

In other words, some people were laid off but it wasn’t because of Tumblr’s financial woes.

Will Tumblr’s localization plans be impacted by the staff changes?

Mullenweg confirmed that translation and localization will continue, and are not impacted by the changes.

What does success at Tumblr look like?

The WordPress exec said a successful version of Tumblr would see it becoming a place that “everyone goes to hang out online” with a “billion micro-communities.” He didn’t share specifics, like how much money that would require, though.

Tumblr today offers a subscription which is currently the best way to support the site, Mullenweg said. Users can choose from either the In terms of missed opportunities, Mullenweg lamented the demise of the

that Tumblr users haven’t liked — could be chopping block. He said that in 2024 Tumblr would “streamline some of the extra things that were launched (like Live) that haven’t gotten the adoption we hoped.”

In responses to other questions, Mullenweg also said that Tumblr would “sunset or rollback some things we tried that didn’t work,” and even outright stated that Live itself will be re-assesed in January 2024 as to “whether it should be a part of the Tumblr app anymore.”

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The troll question was a bit off-topic in terms of Tumblr’s future as a business, and instead spoke to the future of the site’s culture. Mullenweg said that he believes “super trolls” only account for less than 0.5% of Tumblr’s user base. Still, they can have an outsized impact, he admitted.

Despite the staff changes, the company plans to increase its investment in Trust & Safety — the team that deals with bots, trolling, attacks, and hate speech — and will ban accounts engaging in these behaviors. It will also prevent those trolls from registering new accounts and repeating their behavior, he said.

What’s going on with the ActivityPub integration for Tumblr?

In the AMA, Mullenweg only vaguely cleared up the confusion over the state of the project by saying that:

“Every future for Tumblr that I’m involved in will include it being more open, supporting more standards, APIs, and open source.”ÂÂ

Nope. , but not “hardcore stuff,” Mullenweg said.

Based on reporting by techcrunch.com.

AI transparency. This article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence and published under human editorial oversight. AI systems can make mistakes. Read how we use AI (EU AI Act, Art. 50).
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