Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
The price-tumble is because Tumblr loses a ton of viewership when you implement a "no more porn or other adult content" policy. Verizon did a great job of wrecking the already-ailing properties it bought. :p
Huuuuge loss of value. I don't create adult content but I still had posts flagged by their bot because the hues in a picture were 'fleshy' or there was something vaaaaguely cylindrical. I swear I'm still blacklisted from showing up in search results on the platform, as well.
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Yeah. That was a huge "understand your community" gaff.
Reminds me of when I was working for Digex "back in the day". At the time, as a smaller hosting-provider, a significant percentage of their hosting-customers were porn sites. These were sites that pretty much "just ran". You occasionally had to reboot the boxes, but deep troubleshooting wasn't generally necessary. More importantly, these sites' owners paid their bills on time every time. Reliable income-stream. Then, Digex got new leadership tasked with growing the company. That leadership wanted to chase the business of the companies that eventually became the dot-com bust. Part of that was getting rid of all that "disreputable" adult site-hosting. In exchange, we got high-maintenance customers who demanded root ...and demanded credits for being offline when they used that privileged access to utterly bork their systems. Went from lots of generic builds to lots of special snowflakes. Ultimately, went to lots of consistently-paying customers to customers that ran up tens of thousands of dollar bills per month ...that frequently never paid (even though sales had already booked that billing and paid out commissions, bonuses, etc). Yes, a (very ugly) day of reckoning came, all because they didn't understand what they had or what they were chasing.
This is very interesting! I used to do work for a porn website and they were also very quick to pay their bills. Hasn't it been said that porn has driven innovation on the web and with cell phones? XD
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
Yeah: they also tend to be a lot more security-conscious: if you're going to pick up driveby malware, it's more likely to be from your neighborhood church's web site than a porn website.
There's lots of money in porn. If you're operating a site, you tend to avoid things that will interrupt access (like failing to pay bills on time) - since doing so will interrupt your income - and avoid things that will antagonize your users (since potential users have a lot of choices on where they can scratch their itch).
Been using UNIX since the late 80s; Linux since the mid-90s; virtualization since the early 2000s and spent the past few years working in the cloud space.
Location
Alexandria, VA, USA
Education
B.S. Psychology from Pennsylvania State University
That's been the Verizon way since at least the Bell Atlantic days.
I still remember when I was offered a great job with a UNIX vendor (and another, larger, more technologically-interesting hosting-company) - at a considerable bump. My manager came to me and said, "I'd love to be able to offer you enough to keep you here, but the rules hold me to offering you a maximum of a 10% bump," ...which worked out to about $4K vs. the $20K I was being offered to do more interesting work. I mean, I wouldn't have stayed, even more due to the nature of the new position than the pay-delta, but just illustrates a history of not understanding the market(s) they were trying to play in.
It's remarkable how knee-jerk and sweeping the whole thing was. I think shared content platforms are a delicate concept, one we try to have great care of with DEV. Not an easy task to get right, but inherently deserving of thoughtfulness.
Verizon just decided to take a sledgehammer to a problem that deserved tweezers.
The price-tumble is because Tumblr loses a ton of viewership when you implement a "no more porn or other adult content" policy. Verizon did a great job of wrecking the already-ailing properties it bought. :p
Huuuuge loss of value. I don't create adult content but I still had posts flagged by their bot because the hues in a picture were 'fleshy' or there was something vaaaaguely cylindrical. I swear I'm still blacklisted from showing up in search results on the platform, as well.
Yeah. That was a huge "understand your community" gaff.
Reminds me of when I was working for Digex "back in the day". At the time, as a smaller hosting-provider, a significant percentage of their hosting-customers were porn sites. These were sites that pretty much "just ran". You occasionally had to reboot the boxes, but deep troubleshooting wasn't generally necessary. More importantly, these sites' owners paid their bills on time every time. Reliable income-stream. Then, Digex got new leadership tasked with growing the company. That leadership wanted to chase the business of the companies that eventually became the dot-com bust. Part of that was getting rid of all that "disreputable" adult site-hosting. In exchange, we got high-maintenance customers who demanded root ...and demanded credits for being offline when they used that privileged access to utterly bork their systems. Went from lots of generic builds to lots of special snowflakes. Ultimately, went to lots of consistently-paying customers to customers that ran up tens of thousands of dollar bills per month ...that frequently never paid (even though sales had already booked that billing and paid out commissions, bonuses, etc). Yes, a (very ugly) day of reckoning came, all because they didn't understand what they had or what they were chasing.
HUGE misunderstanding of the community.
This is very interesting! I used to do work for a porn website and they were also very quick to pay their bills. Hasn't it been said that porn has driven innovation on the web and with cell phones? XD
Yeah: they also tend to be a lot more security-conscious: if you're going to pick up driveby malware, it's more likely to be from your neighborhood church's web site than a porn website.
There's lots of money in porn. If you're operating a site, you tend to avoid things that will interrupt access (like failing to pay bills on time) - since doing so will interrupt your income - and avoid things that will antagonize your users (since potential users have a lot of choices on where they can scratch their itch).
That's been the Verizon way since at least the Bell Atlantic days.
I still remember when I was offered a great job with a UNIX vendor (and another, larger, more technologically-interesting hosting-company) - at a considerable bump. My manager came to me and said, "I'd love to be able to offer you enough to keep you here, but the rules hold me to offering you a maximum of a 10% bump," ...which worked out to about $4K vs. the $20K I was being offered to do more interesting work. I mean, I wouldn't have stayed, even more due to the nature of the new position than the pay-delta, but just illustrates a history of not understanding the market(s) they were trying to play in.
It's remarkable how knee-jerk and sweeping the whole thing was. I think shared content platforms are a delicate concept, one we try to have great care of with DEV. Not an easy task to get right, but inherently deserving of thoughtfulness.
Verizon just decided to take a sledgehammer to a problem that deserved tweezers.
we are here to talk about porn