Meaghan O’Connell, Director of Outreach at Tumblr, has posted her response to a user’s accusation (plus an exclusive response to Tumblr users here on The Rumpus) that Tumblr “stole” their domain at “the behest of a corporation.”
For those catching up the “corporation” in question is Pitchfork, and they have now posted their own response:
It could not have been clearer to either us or Tumblr that the account had been abandoned. If there had been an active blog at this URL, Pitchfork would definitely have contacted the user before ever going to Tumblr. We also would have assumed that Tumblr would not comply with our request if there was an active account at that subdomain.
So the user was perhaps domain squatting. But it is worth noting that Tumblr isn’t the first social media party Pitchfork has been late to. Why only today they announced that they’re back “up and running” on Facebook (their page was quiet from June 22, 2009 to January 20th of this year). Pitchfork made the announcement via their Twitter account, @PitchforkMedia, which one assumes they use because @Pitchfork is owned by this guy.
