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.
Dan Luu
Jason Petersen (he)