As some of you may have heard, Yahoo! will acquire Tumblr for a reported $1.1 billion. Neither Yahoo! or Tumblr have said anything official, but come Monday I’m sure we’ll hear something from them….
Hey Tumblpunks, I wrote a blog post about why you shouldn’t be scared that Yahoo! is acquiring Tumblr. Really, I think it’s worth a read, as are many of the articles I linked to.
I really hope Yahoo doesn’t fuck up Tumblr like it’s fucked up … well, every single thing it’s ever touched in the history of the universe.
I think we’ll be okay with this one. I trust Marissa Mayer’s Yahoo! will do a better job than in the past, probably because I still think of her as a former Googler. Also, did Yahoo! fuck up Flickr? This is an honest question, I haven’t been active on the site in quite some time.
And why all the hostility towards Yahoo!? I mean sure, they haven’t been on top of their design game since… well, ever. But that’s no reason to think that they’re automatically going to fuck up stuff they touch. It’s this kind of hyperbolization that really pisses me off because it means we’re not saving the same level of sentiment for times when software companies actually do really fuck something up.
But you know, that’s just me. It’s not like I’ve seen some truly fucked up software in my day or know what I’m talking about in any shape or form.
Last night I signed up for a new YouTube account for the first time in years, I was fascinated by what I found out. Watch the above video to see how the whole process works for newcomers to the YouTube platform these days, and subscribe for at http://www.youtube.com/vidthoughts for more of this kind of thing.
TL;DW - YouTube “suggests” a number of channels to be your first sign-up, creating a set of channels the user automatically gets in their feed, despite the user knowing /nothing/ about those channels and having no connection to the content or creator.
In my opinion, this devalues the act of subscribing and idea of what a “subscription” is. It also artificially inflates the sub numbers of a few select channels (including (I think) SciShow) which have huge subscriber growth, but a lot less viewership growth.
