Tumblr's Internet Legacy
theatlantic.comWhatever Tumblr’s political legacy turns out to be, I will always value it for the UI and how it encouraged more people to blog.
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.
What is this mainstream media garbage about tumblr being racist. I used to post gothic poetry on that website many years ago and it would blow up with hundreds, no thousands, of engagements, even though I literally didn't know anyone who used the platform. It's a shame what happened to Tumblr. We live under an oppressive authoritarian regime that systematically bans, blacklists, decimates, and destroys literally anywhere on the Internet where the working class has fun.
> What is this mainstream media garbage about tumblr being racist.
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.
It used to be the case that if you pinged tumblr.com you'd get a response from x.66.6.y. If I know one thing for certain it's that there can be no light without the darkness on the web: just sterile corporate sponsored content and then some more in popups. You've got one popup for the website, another for the government, and another for the advertiser. I haven't seen any national socialist popups in my browser yet so remind me again who's making the web unpleasant? In American society whenever the state is unhappy with something they blame it on the enemy they defeated in the last war. It doesn't even matter if the enemy didn't have the Internet!
Any sufficiently large platform eventually attracts every kind of person.
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?
Every snowflake is special but a snowflake is still a snowflake. Tumblr as a whole definitely had a certain way about it. Probably inherited from the personality of its founders. Otherwise my gothic poems would have fallen on deaf ears!
There's a founder effect, but my contention is that at a certain size, the founder effect is swamped by the Here Comes Everybody effect, or how Reddit turned from being a techy, nerdy site with site-wide in-jokes ("The narwhal bacons at midnight") to being a site you'll get a markedly different impression of if you land in /r/SubredditDrama versus /r/news versus /r/Conservative versus any of the niche fan-subreddits for different things.
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.
I'm not sure the average tumblr user (who seems to be a teen girl running a pink-themed account about something insane like pro-anorexia) has much in common with Marco Arment.
Yes but who's there and who isn't there in the initial culture probably had something to do with his biases. In some cases we are who we attract.
That's an insane strawman of an entire subculture.
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.
Nah, I'm right. In an earlier more sedate era when it was more popular, the average user was a woman into TV fandom who just posted stuff like this all day:
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?)
> In an earlier more sedate era when it was more popular, the average user was a woman into TV fandom who just posted stuff like this all day
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!)
No, you're clearly strawmanning. You're taking extreme posts, of individual users not representative of the average in any way, shape or form, and insisting, despite all available evidence, that extremists were the average.
Do you mind sharing a gothic poem, even if it’s not one of your own?
Ohh gosh thanks for asking I would totally share the ones I'm most proud of, but then you'd search Google and find the embarrassing ones! But don't worry, I'm not going to leave you wanting! Please accept as a substitute this gothic poem that I programmed my computer to generate:
I programmed my poetry generator in C++ to use a monte carlo markov chain model with the help of cmudict and isledict trained on a corpus of Edgar Allen Poe, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and select gothic bands. https://github.com/jart/poemy2 You can read the corpora here: https://github.com/jart/poemy2/tree/master/corpora I hope this helps!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 drumThanks. This is fantastic and I understand the worry of outing your own inner thoughts - hence the sideways request. I am more appreciative than you may ever know.
It wasn’t advertising-friendly, so it was only a matter of time before it became racist too.
Tumblr seems to make enough to keep the lights on, which doesn't make sense since their content is all high def images and must be expensive to run. They're just as advertising-friendly as Twitter, although they are even more incompetent at running ads.
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.
I don't understand what you mean...?
Was a Tumblr ever seen as a spiritual successor to earlier internet also-rans like Xanga, Livejournal, and MySpace? Platforms that unlike Facebook were much more user-customizable, even if it often made things much more garish.
I think for a certain subset of users it was definitely the heir to livejournal
If anything it was a cross between Twitter and phpbb forums.
> Because of the site’s design, conversation happened in a nesting-doll structure—to comment on anything, users had to reblog the original post onto their own page and make their additions beneath it.
> 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.
> Fatal UI decision ultimately, and it was probably done because comments were considered toxic.
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.
> Tumblr was often criticized for its purity culture—conversations could go nuclear as soon as someone was deemed “problematic,”
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.
Sauce? I'm always interested in tales of social engineering
There is no good source, only old tumblr posts directed towards the drama and some pages written by people who document this stuff.
Nothing extra decent I can link you that you won’t find from a search engine.
FWIW I'd much prefer Tumblr to still be a thing than WordPress!
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!
Implying that tumblr is over.
The golden age continues.
I only joined a little over a year ago. Site seems a bit buggy (some gifs fail to transcode to their gifv format yet still succeed in making a new post?). If anyone from tumblr is reading here, I just submitted a support ticket.
It's extremely buggy and doesn't really seem like they fix anything.
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".
Interesting article. I followed some links and ended up on a tumblr list of problematic people and their transgressions and it was.. interesting. There were a couple examples of rude behavior but for the most part I found that they ended up being strong endorsements of the person being discussed? Which I suppose is a credit to whomever curated the lists. They provided enough direct links that I could go see the condemned persons words and make up my own mind, even if their own take was verrry stereotypical tumblr. If anyone ends up seeing the same list it was the entry on Dan Savage in particular that I felt this way about.
Poor Tumblr. I still love you for what you were.
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 sorry to hear that. Maybe I can help. Will email you to get details.
How are you connected to tumblr?
On the rare occasions that I've looked there --- usually because of finding technical content, which is definitely a tiny minority on Tumblr --- I noticed the clear political bias the majority of other content there has. It's certainly one of the weirder places and somewhat a left-wing echochamber.
Someone else replying to this post strongly implies there’s heavy neo-nazi content on Tumblr. Seems like it’s just whatever bits you happened to run into on a particular day.
Regarding it being a "somewhat left-wing echochamber" I wonder how different websites attract different communities. 4chan and tumblr weren't created to lean right or left but it happened. Is it to do with what types of conversation the UI encourages?
Chan-type sites very, very strongly encourage right-wing social behaviors by nature; it's a constant struggle for social dominance on a post-by-post basis. Survival of the wittiest. All interactions are throwaways, and there is no reputation to maintain. So of course as soon as anyone gets frustrated, the filter goes off and the prejudices come out. Ad hominem after slur after flamebait. It's a feedback loop from there. Heavy-handed moderation can make it slightly less bad, but only by so much.
There is a meme something along the lines of "given enough time, any community will turn right-wing without heavy left-wing moderation".
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.
Tumblr's legacy: that website that used to have some really fantastic porn