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How to buy a social network, with Tumblr CEO Matt Mullenweg

103 min • 13 december 2022

We have to talk about Twitter, right? Elon Musk bought it. He’s making all these changes, and he’s realizing that content moderation decisions are quite complicated, especially when the stakes are high.

But talking about Twitter in a vacuum seems wrong. There are lots of other social networks and community-based products, and they all have basically the same problems: some technical (you have to run the service), some political (you have to comply with various laws and platform regulations around the world), and some social (you have to get millions of users to post for free while making sure what they post is good stuff and not bad stuff).

So, we’re doing something a little different this week. First, I’m talking to Matt Mullenweg, who is the CEO of Automattic, which owns WordPress, the blog hosting platform, and Tumblr, the social network, which he purchased from Verizon in 2019. Then, Verge deputy editor Alex Heath and I are going to break down a bunch of what Matt told me and apply it to Twitter to see what we can learn.

Okay, Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Tumblr, followed by Alex Heath. Here we go.

Links:

How WordPress and Tumblr are keeping the internet weird

GPL - General Public License

Verizon is selling Tumblr to WordPress’ owner

Kanye West suspended from Twitter after posting a swastika

‘Martin Scorsese’s lost film’ Goncharov (1973), explained

Yahoo acquires Tumblr in $1.1 billion cash deal, promises 'not to screw it up'

Verizon is selling Tumblr to WordPress’ owner

Turnaround Definition

Welcome to Tumblr. Now Go Away.

Work With Us / Twitter – Automattic