Tumblr's Internet Legacy(theatlantic.com) |
Tumblr's Internet Legacy(theatlantic.com) |
When you logged into the Tumblr dashboard, you were presented with several options to post - link post, image post, text post, etc. Other blogging platforms presented you with this huge text box to fill - with the implicit expectation that you should write a huge post. Tumblr was the first that really encouraged sharing this cool new thing you found, or to quickly write down a random thought.
It invited a lot of people to blog, including myself, and I personally consider tumblr as a huge part of the history and legacy of blogs.
From my memories of the meme wars and the last time I checked in on tumblr, tumblr had a lot of niche communities. A lot of those revolved around sexuality.
There were some nazis, but there was also a lot of bad poetry and art. Also porn. Porn was everywhere. When porn got banned, enough people left and enough communities were exiled that the nazi communities (without growing at all) passed some arbitrary percentage of users that declaring the entire site racist became in vogue.
That's why I refuse to consider big platforms "a community": At best, they're platforms on which many communities can form, but anyone trying to tell you a million people can be in one community is either an incompetent marketer, extraordinarily naïve, or, perhaps, attempting to tar a huge number of different communities with the bad actions of a single community, or even a subset of a single community. Ask yourself: If someone told you that Manhattan was Neo-Nazi because someone once saw a swastika flag flying from an apartment window, would you take the claim at face value?
We're lost in this cruel place your voice above
Young soul from out my heart be still in love
Worth this cruel place your voice from the deep snow
That this is the night of the world so slow
Will leave me as my hopes have flown before
Which answered not with a love that was more
I'm sitting in this kingdom by the grave
Your clothes by your voice at the stillness gave
She's gone to the floor floating on our side
She speaks in the earth and the truth inside
Have naught but the pain you feel the bright eyes
Beyond the waves wipe out my heart denies
Your voice from the laugh of the desolate
You're looking for the moon is full of hate
Forgive if I could change the time has come
We're lost in this world is not like a drum
They also had more young subcultures that liked spending money, so native advertising like Instagram should've worked. The only young people who like consumerism on Twitter are the kpop fans, everyone else is a communist.
> Tumblr was often criticized for its purity culture—conversations could go nuclear as soon as someone was deemed “problematic,” or once their “fav” had been declared “canceled.”
The first paragraph caused the second one. That’s not a conversation, that’s broadcasting to your narrow group of like-minded followers.
Fatal UI decision ultimately, and it was probably done because comments were considered toxic.
But nothing was ever as toxic as challenging some of the crazy ideas on there (one I remember getting tangled up in was “feminism means men can hit women”) and having that person’s personal army come after you.
So RIP Tumblr, you sucked and made the world a worse place.
Well, it also created a robust essay culture for a while that allowed long, considered writing to exist in conversation with other pieces in a pretty unique way.
I remember reading about a user called Vade (since inactive) while catching up on internet drama. They successfully weaponized that tendency to frightening effect and IIRC had the power to summarily deplatform challengers within their various fandoms.
As a 4channer I’m not quite sure how cliques form and authority/status is brokered on tumblr, but it was a big thing at the time.
Nothing extra decent I can link you that you won’t find from a search engine.
I appreciate the achievement that is WordPress, but hate it in oh so many ways!
Tumblr has everything most people needed, and should have been the blog engine of choice for the masses!
But yet somehow WordPress rules the world. Probably because of the ability for 3rd parties to make money from Plugins!
That and hacked WP sites a big thing for spammers, I guess?
I really hope Tumblr survives!
The golden age continues.
The way they censored adult content blog essentially made them unusable - going to any link inside the blog redirects to its front page and none of the functions like search/archive work, yet they're all still on the page. And of course when I say "adult content blog" I actually mean "anyone's abandoned personal blog their AI thinks is adult".
Try getting support since they were bought by Matt. My gf's account was banned by some AI stupidity and it is as hopeless as trying to get back into a locked out Gmail. Lights on, nobody's home. Someone needs to realize that these decisions have real consequences - most of the people my gf talked to and relied on for mental support were only known through Tumblr and now she has no way to contact them.
I'm inclined to agree; it's not about the website format so much as how the admins/mods handle the community. See Twitter vs the various twitter clones, or reddit vs communities.win - the websites are designed almost the same, but the moderation policies are totally different, so the communities end up totally different.
The problem is that people do see a subset of a whole site, or a subset of a whole city, or a subset of a whole country or ethnicity or culture, and come away thinking they've Seen The Thing. Take that far enough, and you get nationalism, or racism, both of which spring from the underlying notion that broad groups of humans can be classified minutely as if they were species of insect, as opposed to being large numbers of endlessly complex individuals, each with a distinct life and set of experiences.
It's like saying the average Hacker News user doesn't know what a computer is. You're picking an extremist, extremely small amount of users as an "average," despite them being nothing close to it.
https://worldheritagepostorganization.tumblr.com/post/674066...
But most of them have left now. I don't think you remember the spirit of the site properly if you think people on there are doing, like, normal stuff that makes sense.
(Remember in 2017 when a user turned out to be faking having HIV so they wouldn't be cancelled for writing real people fanfic about Lin Manuel Miranda? And they were called out by someone else who wrote real people fanfic about him where he was a cannibal?)
The period you're describing was several years after Marco left. And besides, David was technically the sole "founder" (see e.g. [1]). In any case, David was ultimately responsible for the product direction.
I don't mean to minimize Marco's contributions in any way, as his efforts were absolutely massive and utterly essential to Tumblr's success. But with respect to the community and culture, product direction matters a lot more than the backend implementation in this context. (And I say this despite being one of Tumblr's first backend engineers myself!)