[cf498]

Do you base that on anything but a suspicion on your part? You are claiming this to be a misconception, can you actually back that up? I have no idea who those new content creators are supposed to be, like everyone else i just saw people with a decade or more of content producing behind them leaving. And not some of the people i knew but all of them. If there are great hidden communities that grew in the vacuum left, please share.

[evanelias]

I am basing my statements on knowledge from personal experience. As I said above, I'm a primary source with first-hand factual knowledge about this topic. (If you do a lot of capacity planning for a UGC / social network infrastructure over many years, you become intimately familiar with changes in growth rate over time...)

[cf498]

First of, thanks for sharing your experience and insight here.

You do however see how that is a bit difficult to just accept without any backing up, considering a former engineer might naturally be a bit biased about the public perception of a former project dying? By no means a personal attack, just picture yourself in my shoes. I do understand however if there is just no such data available.

Like everyone else here I saw whole communities with active people, with sometimes over a decade of content creation behind them, just vanish. And those werent just the complete porn focused ones, hell even the few leftists i followed from soup.io days packed up for good. Granted, just my anecdotal experience but given how many experienced the same, i would be confident to say that some rather big, active and motivated communities died and others lost a great share of formerly active members and especially content creators due to the sometimes bizarre overlap.

So if tumblr isnt dying, which new active communities sprung up to fill that void? Did any with the current public perception of tumblr? How is the rate of content creation and interaction looking pre and post porn ban announcement?

Differently put, what good do lurker numbers do if the content creators are gone? Without them lurkers arent going to be sticking around forever and which new content creators are acquired?

I do mean what I said in the last post and I mean everyone who reads this,

>If there are great hidden communities that grew in the vacuum left, please do share.

edit: I also forgot to mention the most damming part, Verizon selling tumblr for under 3m. They sure are convinced its dead for good.

[evanelias]

> a former engineer might naturally be a bit biased about the public perception of a former project dying?

Personally I'm not too concerned about that. I have other things on my resume.

I'm more concerned that people keep blindly parroting that Tumblr is/was primarily a "porn site", when the internal data absolutely did not bear that out at any point.

> So if tumblr isnt dying

I haven't said anything about whether or not it is "dying". Afraid you've misunderstood. My point is that HN tends to vastly overstate the amount of adult-related Tumblr usage. Far more users slowly left over time long before the adult content ban.

You want public numbers, OK, I'll link directly to the wayback machine info that I previously mentioned downthread:

Jan 21 2014 (random day around "peak Tumblr"): 110m posts [1]

Dec 16 2018 (before adult content ban): 28m posts [2]

Feb 3 2019 (a bit after adult content ban): 23m posts [3]

While daily posting volume doesn't perfectly equate to MAUs, in my experience with UGC / social networking products, posting volume is closely correlated with overall usage.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140121015438/https://www.tumbl...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20181216220821/https://www.tumbl...

[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20190203200751/https://www.tumbl...

[cf498]

Awesome, thanks for clearing that up