Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr are all, or once were, popular websites that share an unfortunate common denominator.
When looking at the recent history of many popular and highly successful online sites, there tends to be a certain trend they’re all following: rampant corporate greed butting heads with its original core mission and its user base, all of which eventually leads to major issues for the site.
Several sites in question — Discord, Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr — all share that same fate, despite having very different purposes and suffering through a dissimilar series of events that led to their downfall or tipping point. And, they’re proof that most businesses will eventually hit a point in which management will decide to push profit margins and use bizarre and brutal methods to squeeze money out of it. The horrors of capitalism.
And unfortunately, online platforms, social media, and websites have shown time and again that they aren’t immune to the far-reaching consequences of such money-grubbing tactics. There are plenty of sites that have already met their end by following such a trajectory, and here are four others that are currently on that same path.Tumblr
Originally founded as a simple blogging site, Tumblr quickly grew and became a hub for fandom and LGBT+ users, as well as plenty of adult content including sexual art. Infamously, mismanagement by former site owner Yahoo caused Tumblr’s value to depreciate from $1 billion in 2013 when Yahoo purchased it to a mere $3 million when it sold from Verizon (after Yahoo sold it in 2017) to WordPress owner Automattic Inc. in 2019.
Like many other online sites, it also became a hub for extremely toxic and illegal content, notorious for the rampant presence of child pornography — such to the extent that Apple took the app off its App Store back in 2018. Instead of directly fixing this issue through proper human moderation efforts, Tumblr instead made the absolutely terrible decision of banning all explicit content from the site. This meant purging the site of all adult blogs and decades of artwork without warning, as well as chasing off sex workers.
As a result, Tumblr lost roughly one-third of its user base almost overnight as many adult artists and sex workers fled to other social media platforms such as Twitter. Since then, Tumblr has been trying to recover profits by hosting increasingly invasive ads on its desktop site and app, creating an ad-free subscription for app users to avoid said ads, rapidly downgrading functionality to promote profit-making and making it more social media friendly, and selling merchandise based on popular Tumblr posts and memes.Twitter
Twitter was first created in 2006 and had amassed more than 330 million active users by 2019. It certainly wasn’t a perfect social media platform. Valid criticism was lobbed at it for purposely promoting controversial posts in order to drum up engagement while having an inconsistent reporting system.
