I wonder why people get so fixated on "meme" solutions to company problems, e.g, with tumblr, people inevitably bring up how banning (some) porn doomed tumblr even though this doesn't appear to match what happened.
And the idea that you could just add porn back to tumblr to restore its former glory. It was acquired for $1B in 2013 and then reportedly for $3M in 2019.
Why would someone think that filling tumblr with porn will turn this $0 property that's losing $30M/yr into a $1B property?
With Twitter, I lost count of the number times I saw someone suggest that Twitter could become wildly profitable if they would only add an edit button and get rid of ranked timeline.
Those are both things I want, but an edit button is worth approximately $0 to Twitter and just allowing unranked feed at all is money losing for Twitter. As noted in https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109383845633490300, A/B tests show that, even among users who've chosen the linear feed, switching them to ranked feed is more profitable.
Another example is complaining about how no one makes small phones and how you could print money if you made a small phone. Of the people I know who express phone preferences, about 1/3 say that companies should stop making big phones.
Apple made a small phone with the iPhone mini line of phones, which they discontinued because basically no one buys small phones. I've bought small phones, but zero of the people I knew who complained about how big phones are bought an iPhone mini.
One that feels very similar to me car nerd forums are full of people explaining how BMW (or whatever) could make *so much* money if they'd only release a manual transmission wagon in North America.
My last car was a manual and my current car is a wagon, but these things very clearly don't sell. There have been manual wagons for sale in the U.S. and they just don't sell. Like with small phones, this is something people say they want but then don't actually buy.
@danluu I actually would buy two BMW wagons if they would sell them again, to replace the two we have currently. 🤷🏻♂️
Manual would be ideal, but not required.
@steve For the reasons in https://mastodon.social/@danluu/111342679816775121, if there were a BMW wagon available in North America that used Mobileye's EyeQ4 high or EyeQ5, I'd buy it but I think I'd need to get a sedan or an SUV to get a BMW with that hardware.
Of course I could get a Subaru/Mercedes/Audi wagon, but I'm not sure that any of those are a safety upgrade from my Volvo wagon and they might be a downgrade.
@anEXPer @danluu I would love to have a smaller phone; but when I was looking to replace my last phone, there was an opportunity to get a good used phone kinda cheap, with the huge benefit that it already had LineageOS on it. I went for that and swallowed the drawback of the huge screen.
Also: if I have the choice between "small screen but overall crappy phone" and "huge screen but otherwise good phone" I choose the second one. Since there are only few small phones, that's always the result.
@danluu well yeah, it would give them less to complain about.
The mini owners I know just bought one and rave about how much they like the size. Then they start complaining each time Apple re-cancels it
@danluu
I want a small phone. But I don't want a small screen. And when you're actually playing with the models in the store that's what matters.
Foldable phone? Maybe. The flip phone format is intriguing.
@danluu
Small phones are also disappearing because of a size-to-tech ratio issue. Users expect more and more features but each needs an ever increasing amount of space.
-All-day long battery life, but also powerful chips (which use more power)
-Periscope camera tech to have super high zoom
-USB-C
-5G
-...
In the end, something has got to give. Either further develop expensive miniaturization 
, cut features, or make the phone bigger.
Memes can't overcome reality.
@danluu There are dozens of us! Dozens!
(Posting from my beloved 13 Mini, which I expect to hold on to until my hand is forced.)
@danluu I desperately want a small-ish android phone with a physical keyboard.
But when they discontinued the Droid line, I remember reading an interview with I think a Verizon product veep, who said something like "yeah, I think the keyboard is great. I like it. But we just can't sell them."
I really want it but that doesn't mean it would be a money-maker.
Re Tumblr: I'm not disagreeing with your overall point, which is that "removing porn killed Tumblr" is unsupported.
I'm confused by some comments evanelias is making -- he seems to think that because most Tumblr content wasn't porn to begin with, this didn't affect most users.
Something evanelias does not seem to think, but which I think is true -- sites that moderate "adult content" are scary to LGBTQ people.
It's common for sites to spuriously rule that content containing LGBTQ people (even if it's not sexual) is porn. Or at least brand-unsafe.
From that POV, allowing porn is a trust-related issue. If you're LGBTQ, you want to be on a site that commits to continuing to distribute your content even if it is ruled brand-unsafe.
Pretty much whenever a site does this kind of thing, the friends of mine who are still on the site start asking themselves "Am I going to get kicked off next?" The people I personally knew who were still on Tumblr all jumped ship at the same time for this reason.
But, well, my friends could be weird.
This is heavily anecdotal. I don't know how big a demographic "LGBTQ people" was on Tumblr, or how universal this fear is. I do know that in 2021, Tumblr's marketing team published the estimate "1 in 4 Tumblr users are LGBTQ" -- keeping in mind that's _after_ the decisions that the meme-category critics are blaming. And also keep in mind that it's a number published by marketing and hence kind of meaningless.
I'm actually pretty sure evanelias was in a position to know all these things and I really wish someone on HN had asked him. In theory I expect this was raised to him at some point. It's kind of an obvious thought when there's at least one gay person in the room.
Admittedly, my consistent experience with straight product designers is that they presuppose marginalized groups are too small to be part of an explanation for anything. There's a particular kind of knee-jerk rejection that I've gotten really used to again and again. Based on that experience, I have a gut feeling that this theory, even if someone raised it, probably was not seriously investigated.
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