At WordCamp Canada 2025, Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg called Tumblr his “biggest failure,” noting the challenge of maintaining the platform’s half-billion blogs while it remains unprofitable. Though plans to migrate Tumblr to WordPress infrastructure are on hold, Mullenweg said he hasn’t given up.
I can’t verify the truth of it, but I heard that the catalyst to the porn ban was a meeting where they were pitching Tumblr advertisements to some company, and wanted to demonstrate how tags and engagement works, so they pulled up the #McDonalds tag live to demonstrate and they got a screen full of Ronald McDonald porn.
I can’t verify the truth of it, but I heard that the catalyst to the porn ban was a meeting where they were pitching Tumblr advertisements to some company, and wanted to demonstrate how tags and engagement works, so they pulled up the #McDonalds tag live to demonstrate and they got a screen full of Ronald McDonald porn.
I don’t care if this is debunked in the next millisecond, this is my head canon from now till the end of time.
That sounds absolutely plausible and is thus now incorporated as Truth into my memory of the goings-on.
I’m loving it