December 14, 2022
Elon isn’t the only person who has recently purchased a large-scale social network. Matt Mullenweg snapped up Tumblr back in August for the “de minimis” sum of 3 million (it takes far more than an order of magnitude more than that just to run Tumblr for a year). Nilay Patel has a great interview with Matt, where he behaves like a frickin’ normal ambitious-yet-empathetic CEO. Here’s Matt on the challenges of moderation:
There’s a phrase we use for a huge amount of speech, and that is “lawful but awful.” It might hurt people’s mental health, incite harm, or be really mean, like bullying, but it’s not technically illegal. We’re a private company, so I guess we could host it if we wanted to, but you need to think about your responsibility to society and to your users. It’s as if you were hosting a party. It behooves you to provide a safe environment for everyone there that includes food, water, restrooms, and all those sorts of things. I feel like when you’re hosting a social network, it’s your responsibility to provide a safe and healthy environment.
How hard is that? Shouldn’t the default mental state of the steward of a community be: I want this place to be as safe and good as possible for everyone. I was probably a little more “wait and see” with Elon at first than most, but now I’m absolutely abhorred. Trans “jokes”? For real? I’m done.
I’ll bet you a dollar Tumblr outlives Twitter.
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