6 ms·

In 2018, Tumblr Is a Joyless Black Hole

34 points by Tiktaalik 8y ago

bumblebritches5 8y ago
Uh, duh? Tumblr has been a shithole for a long time now. It's literally a platform (almost solely at this point) for angry women to bitch and whine and spread rumors and believe lies.
VohuMana 8y ago
My personal experience with Tumblr was weird. A friend of mine had it and talked about all the cool friends she made on it which sounded super cool, so I joined. From there things got real weird because in my experience the community is very clique based. My friend wouldn't tell me her screen name since she ranted about life in her blog and I was in there, so I just started liking things I thought were cool and reposting. Talking to people on the platform though became clear that the "real" Tumblr users actively despise new users over fears that Tumblr will be come too popular or something along those lines, this was around the time Yahoo was looking into it. Needless to say it was a very hostile community and I ended up leaving after 2 weeks.
fruzz 8y ago
Was on there from 2009 ~ 2016. Being queer & trans, it was the first online social platform where I could be exposed to new narratives and interact with others. Previously it had been forums and YouTube, but neither felt as personal. I ended up meeting a former partner and current one on Tumblr. Tumblr however was hemorrhaging money. The way they commercialized it following Yahoo's purchase discouraged trans authors: content was marked as NSFW no matter how innocuous and no longer readily accessible to unregistered members, tags that were used to find trans content became inundated with prn spammers. Nothing has really filled the gap left by Tumblr.
- ihuman 8y ago
  > content was marked as NSFW no matter how innocuous and no longer readily accessible to unregistered members Why is this a bad thing? I've seen people mentioned this before in a negative way, but I don't understand why it hurts tumblr.
  - fruzz 8y ago
    It meant trans content disproportionately faced a barrier to access. It hurts trans youth in particular, who are less likely to stumble on content, but could really have used seeing it there.
    - ihuman 8y ago
      Was the content voluntarily marked NSFW, or did tumblr force the NSFW warning onto the content?
      - fruzz 8y ago
        For what I was referring to, it was Tumblr putting NSFW warnings on content. Also censoring content outright. One video I did covering how I did estrogen injections, for example, was auto-removed for being obscene. There was no nudity.
        ihuman 8y ago
        Ok, that's the part I was missing that lead to my misunderstanding. I (incorrectly) assumed the posts were marked NSFW by the creators. Thank you for clarifying that for me. That's pretty awful of tumblr to do that.
  - schreiaj 8y ago
    Presumably, because it's humiliating? If you're talking about a perfectly normal problem that is in no way NSFW (I'm not familiar enough with this space to give an example, I'm sorry) but it is marked as NSFW because it has something to do with being trans... I would assume that the feeling one would develop would be "my existence is NSFW" and eventually you disengage because nobody wants to feel they aren't accepted. To me, it would really just be "this thing is calling me as different when all I want is to find a community that accepts me". But if someone with more experience in this wants to correct/expand on this I'd be grateful for the opportunity to understand better.
  - speeder 8y ago
- amyjess 8y ago
  TBH, Reddit has always been considerably less toxic than Tumblr when it comes to trans stuff. Sadly, the some of the larger trans subs have taken a turn for the toxic in the last couple of years or so, but 2013-2014 was a golden age, and even the current state of the trans subs is better than Tumblr ever was.
  - ralusek 8y ago
    If you'd like to see content for a subject moderated differently than how it is done in other subs, there are probably other likeminded people that would quickly join if you started another subreddit.
digitalsushi 8y ago
Can a building host a party so toxic that the building itself is socially irreparable? We have a different obligation to software than we do to physical things; digital hangouts are after all just a computer program. What makes a thing popular seems to be a product of the number of people present crossed by the social weight of the people present. We might say that a party becomes uncool once a certain class of people has joined, or is uncool once a certain class of people have left. The article says that the people on Tumblr are often horrible to each other and that it ruins Tumblr; we can burn that digital building down but it will just be rebuilt, with the same swelling of cool people coming and going, and undesirables lingering, in a cycle that cannot be broken. I think that social media must necessarily follow the forest fire model, with lots of expected, regular burnings-down to allow for regrowth.
- stcredzero 8y ago
  We might say that a party becomes uncool once a certain class of people has joined, or is uncool once a certain class of people have left. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
- temp-dude-87844 8y ago
  This already happens. Sites that vest their entire survival in user-generated content take a big risk, because the brand will become associated in people's minds (though personal experience or hearsay) with the behavior of particular elements in the community. While people will have different experiences, some good, some bad, the reputation of the site will keep some away. Platforms that host communities that are editorially distinct -- like Discord, Reddit, even 4chan -- insulate some of the mayhem that radiates out of one channel from completely spoiling others. Tumblr (and Twitter) have no such mechanism, they don't have "Channels" or "Groups", all content is propagated through follows, reblogs, and un-namespaced public tags. Communities exist solely in the minds of their participants, but are not enforced or enabled by any platform feature, and thus are both trivially infiltrated, and offer no protection from the goings-on of the wider ecosystem. The only way to seek refuge from this to leave the platform altogether.
- 8y ago
stcredzero 8y ago
Affective death spirals: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Affective_death_spiral https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Affective_death_spiral Evaporative cooling of group beliefs: (Where heat == intelligence) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
- Misdicorl 8y ago
  Heat should be seen as diversity of viewpoints rather than intelligence
  - stcredzero 8y ago
    That's arguably better. In the original formulation, I think it's that the sub-population that is genuinely intellectually curious gets jaded, while the sub-population that is into capitalizing on group-think starts to take over. In this way, it's also related to intelligence.
    - Misdicorl 8y ago
      Eh, I think that's mostly a consequence of the group considered rather than fundamental behavior. See e.g. the discussion about the same effects in science as they develop their own group think (jargon)
PaulHoule 8y ago
Somebody still uses Tumblr?
- dang 8y ago
  Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.
Grue3 8y ago
Says Kotaku. Talk about joyless... Also looks like a stealth ad for another web site (pillowfort).
temp-dude-87844 8y ago
Despite the hyperbolic title, the article dwells into the reasons for Tumblr's perceived and actual decline. Among them: reliance on user-generated content being a blessing and a curse, issues around learning and navigating emergent community etiquette, and users' eventual frustrations around discovery, privacy, and harrassment. Some suppositions are made about management style before and after the Yahoo acquisition, but in truth Tumblr was always buggy, new features came out and disappeared, and reappeared with little warning, and Yahoo's impact, aside from more ads and a different account creation flow, was mostly in users' minds. Ironically, the list isn't too different from issues that face other sites based around user-generated content, like Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook. Tumblr was the platform en vogue for many who coalesced around an interest or an identity, for entertainment and self-exploration alike, but the same ease of discovery that allowed Sherlock fans to find each other, or Questioning individuals to explore LGBTQ+ communities, make now-revoked or now-offensive posts easy to find, and make it easier for malicious actors to target, troll, and harrass. The pendulum is swinging back towards more closely moderated, more closed communities, that even if they represent groups that are marginalized in the overworld, are more homogenous around a particular set of attributes. This migration is slowly leaving Tumblr feeling stale. Given enough time and enough people, another platform will grow to fulfill the same social purpose that Tumblr once did for a different generation of users, and some time later those unhappy with that platform will migrate to somewhere more public to benefit from greater exposure and a more diverse cavalcade of content.
- mmt 8y ago
  > the list isn't too different from issues that face other sites based around user-generated content This was what caught my attention at being remarkably non-unique: > Another structural problem of Tumblr is that deleted blogs don’t really go away. Once a blog has been reblogged to someone else’s Tumblr, they are essentially posting it again as a copy of the original. It's a well-aired controversy for the Web at large, including the EU's "right to be forgotten", hardly specific to Tumblr. It made me wonder if the article isn't more a lament that Internet discussion forum platforms in general have failed to adapt to modern usage/expectations. I hadn't considered the pendulum idea until you brought it up. I had merely assumed there isn't enough moderation labor available given the increasing number of users, but that wouldn't apply to a closed community.
amyjess 8y ago
> “In my formative time in fandom [before Tumblr], learning the rules and etiquette of the space was not optional, it was baked into the entire structure of fandom,” Danielle said. “There was a hurdle of entry to fandom; it was organized into moderated communities and kinkmemes and other places that had rules, and even more than that had real live people who ran stuff and would prevent drama from boiling over.” I'd argue that this is overblown. Way back in the '90s, most organized online fandom was on Usenet. Usenet had no formal rules. Sure, there was a ton of cultural norms, but there was no enforcement. If you were really tired of somebody, you could put their name into something called a "killfile" which would hide their posts from you (killfiles were entirely client-side). And ultimately despite the "Eternal September", Usenet worked well enough. Trolls came and went. Every once in a while a group would be dragged into the Meow Wars. But it was still less toxic than LiveJournal. I mostly remember the LiveJournal age (and the UBB/vBulletin/phpBB age that existed alongside it) as something that was dominated by moderators who cared more about bikeshedding and wielding power than actually keeping awful people out. Rules enforcement was more like "You didn't format your post exactly the way I want it, this is your only warning, next time you're banned!". And in the meantime toxic people would just run rampant with concern trolling and/or attacking other fans for every little thing and the mods would just sit there and do nothing. On UBB/vBulletin/phpBB boards, it wouldn't be uncommon for half the threads on the front page to be locked often with the threads ending with snarky moderator comments like "Use the search function next time dumbass". Or for all discussion on a particular subject to be shoved into a "megathread" with no threaded comments (god, I hated those forums; I miss WWWBoard). Fandom has always been toxic. Edit: Though I'll say that Tumblr's software and organization is godawful. The fact that until very recently the only way to comment on someone else's post was to reblog their post and add your comment at the bottom is just bizarre, nonsensical, and not conducive to any kind of productive discussion. And how reblogs and likes all got shoved under the "notes" category. You see a post gets 700 notes: you have no idea if it's a good post that got 700 likes or a shitty post that got 700 reblog-comments calling it out. And straight reblogs are treated the same way as reblog-comments too, so "soandso reblogged this post" is worthless. Are they sharing your post or replying to it? Gah.
duckerude 8y ago
Using Tumblr is a challenge. When I first started reading Tumblr blogs I was confused about the themes people used. Depending on the layout, the far side of quote pyramids often becomes so ridiculously narrow that all characters are stacked on top of each other. Conversations become unreadable. Some other, modern themes use a different layout that doesn't have that problem. I wondered why people put up with the old style until I found out that the usual way participants look at conversations is on their dashboard, which discards themes and uses the modern layout. People don't look at their own blogs. Blog themes aren't designed for reading. Only people without accounts have to deal with that, but they can't complain because they don't have accounts. The whole reblogging system is a disaster. It's like a comment tree, but you can only look at one branch at a time.
- djajshgsjja 8y ago
  I remember experiencing that myself, closing the window, and leaving with a sour opinion of tumblr. This sounds like a very solvable problem, and one that could have measurable results with a high ROI if fixed. Wonder if they’ve tried it.
justboxing 8y ago
Tumblr was mostly a free porn-stash portal in the beginning, and even though David Karp denied it[1] it's still the case even today. Just do a site:tumblr.com <porn_keywords_here> and you'll find plenty of NSFW tumblogs... [1] Source: 2011 What Is Responsible For Tumblr’s Recent Explosive Growth? => http://oobly.com/2011/01/30/are-the-p0rn-blogs-cloacked-as-nsfw-responsible-for-tumblrs-recent-explosive-growth-traffic_95/ http://oobly.com/2011/01/30/are-the-p0rn-blogs-cloacked-as-n...
wetpaws 8y ago
SJW shithole is criticizing SJW shithole for being SJW shithole.
- dang 8y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

34 points by Tiktaalik 8y ago

Uh, duh? Tumblr has been a shithole for a long time now. It's literally a platform (almost solely at this point) for angry women to bitch and whine and spread rumors and believe lies.

VohuMana 8y ago

My personal experience with Tumblr was weird. A friend of mine had it and talked about all the cool friends she made on it which sounded super cool, so I joined. From there things got real weird because in my experience the community is very clique based. My friend wouldn't tell me her screen name since she ranted about life in her blog and I was in there, so I just started liking things I thought were cool and reposting. Talking to people on the platform though became clear that the "real" Tumblr users actively despise new users over fears that Tumblr will be come too popular or something along those lines, this was around the time Yahoo was looking into it. Needless to say it was a very hostile community and I ended up leaving after 2 weeks.

fruzz 8y ago

Was on there from 2009 ~ 2016. Being queer & trans, it was the first online social platform where I could be exposed to new narratives and interact with others. Previously it had been forums and YouTube, but neither felt as personal. I ended up meeting a former partner and current one on Tumblr. Tumblr however was hemorrhaging money. The way they commercialized it following Yahoo's purchase discouraged trans authors: content was marked as NSFW no matter how innocuous and no longer readily accessible to unregistered members, tags that were used to find trans content became inundated with prn spammers. Nothing has really filled the gap left by Tumblr.

ihuman 8y ago
> content was marked as NSFW no matter how innocuous and no longer readily accessible to unregistered members Why is this a bad thing? I've seen people mentioned this before in a negative way, but I don't understand why it hurts tumblr.
- fruzz 8y ago
  It meant trans content disproportionately faced a barrier to access. It hurts trans youth in particular, who are less likely to stumble on content, but could really have used seeing it there.
  - ihuman 8y ago
    Was the content voluntarily marked NSFW, or did tumblr force the NSFW warning onto the content?
    - fruzz 8y ago
      For what I was referring to, it was Tumblr putting NSFW warnings on content. Also censoring content outright. One video I did covering how I did estrogen injections, for example, was auto-removed for being obscene. There was no nudity.
      - ihuman 8y ago
        Ok, that's the part I was missing that lead to my misunderstanding. I (incorrectly) assumed the posts were marked NSFW by the creators. Thank you for clarifying that for me. That's pretty awful of tumblr to do that.
- schreiaj 8y ago
  Presumably, because it's humiliating? If you're talking about a perfectly normal problem that is in no way NSFW (I'm not familiar enough with this space to give an example, I'm sorry) but it is marked as NSFW because it has something to do with being trans... I would assume that the feeling one would develop would be "my existence is NSFW" and eventually you disengage because nobody wants to feel they aren't accepted. To me, it would really just be "this thing is calling me as different when all I want is to find a community that accepts me". But if someone with more experience in this wants to correct/expand on this I'd be grateful for the opportunity to understand better.
- speeder 8y ago
amyjess 8y ago
TBH, Reddit has always been considerably less toxic than Tumblr when it comes to trans stuff. Sadly, the some of the larger trans subs have taken a turn for the toxic in the last couple of years or so, but 2013-2014 was a golden age, and even the current state of the trans subs is better than Tumblr ever was.
- ralusek 8y ago
  If you'd like to see content for a subject moderated differently than how it is done in other subs, there are probably other likeminded people that would quickly join if you started another subreddit.

digitalsushi 8y ago

Can a building host a party so toxic that the building itself is socially irreparable? We have a different obligation to software than we do to physical things; digital hangouts are after all just a computer program. What makes a thing popular seems to be a product of the number of people present crossed by the social weight of the people present. We might say that a party becomes uncool once a certain class of people has joined, or is uncool once a certain class of people have left. The article says that the people on Tumblr are often horrible to each other and that it ruins Tumblr; we can burn that digital building down but it will just be rebuilt, with the same swelling of cool people coming and going, and undesirables lingering, in a cycle that cannot be broken. I think that social media must necessarily follow the forest fire model, with lots of expected, regular burnings-down to allow for regrowth.

stcredzero 8y ago
We might say that a party becomes uncool once a certain class of people has joined, or is uncool once a certain class of people have left. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
temp-dude-87844 8y ago
This already happens. Sites that vest their entire survival in user-generated content take a big risk, because the brand will become associated in people's minds (though personal experience or hearsay) with the behavior of particular elements in the community. While people will have different experiences, some good, some bad, the reputation of the site will keep some away. Platforms that host communities that are editorially distinct -- like Discord, Reddit, even 4chan -- insulate some of the mayhem that radiates out of one channel from completely spoiling others. Tumblr (and Twitter) have no such mechanism, they don't have "Channels" or "Groups", all content is propagated through follows, reblogs, and un-namespaced public tags. Communities exist solely in the minds of their participants, but are not enforced or enabled by any platform feature, and thus are both trivially infiltrated, and offer no protection from the goings-on of the wider ecosystem. The only way to seek refuge from this to leave the platform altogether.
8y ago

stcredzero 8y ago

Affective death spirals: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Affective_death_spiral https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Affective_death_spiral Evaporative cooling of group beliefs: (Where heat == intelligence) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-cooling-of-group-beliefs https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...

Misdicorl 8y ago
Heat should be seen as diversity of viewpoints rather than intelligence
- stcredzero 8y ago
  That's arguably better. In the original formulation, I think it's that the sub-population that is genuinely intellectually curious gets jaded, while the sub-population that is into capitalizing on group-think starts to take over. In this way, it's also related to intelligence.
  - Misdicorl 8y ago
    Eh, I think that's mostly a consequence of the group considered rather than fundamental behavior. See e.g. the discussion about the same effects in science as they develop their own group think (jargon)

PaulHoule 8y ago

Somebody still uses Tumblr?

dang 8y ago
Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

Grue3 8y ago

Says Kotaku. Talk about joyless... Also looks like a stealth ad for another web site (pillowfort).

temp-dude-87844 8y ago

Despite the hyperbolic title, the article dwells into the reasons for Tumblr's perceived and actual decline. Among them: reliance on user-generated content being a blessing and a curse, issues around learning and navigating emergent community etiquette, and users' eventual frustrations around discovery, privacy, and harrassment. Some suppositions are made about management style before and after the Yahoo acquisition, but in truth Tumblr was always buggy, new features came out and disappeared, and reappeared with little warning, and Yahoo's impact, aside from more ads and a different account creation flow, was mostly in users' minds. Ironically, the list isn't too different from issues that face other sites based around user-generated content, like Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook. Tumblr was the platform en vogue for many who coalesced around an interest or an identity, for entertainment and self-exploration alike, but the same ease of discovery that allowed Sherlock fans to find each other, or Questioning individuals to explore LGBTQ+ communities, make now-revoked or now-offensive posts easy to find, and make it easier for malicious actors to target, troll, and harrass. The pendulum is swinging back towards more closely moderated, more closed communities, that even if they represent groups that are marginalized in the overworld, are more homogenous around a particular set of attributes. This migration is slowly leaving Tumblr feeling stale. Given enough time and enough people, another platform will grow to fulfill the same social purpose that Tumblr once did for a different generation of users, and some time later those unhappy with that platform will migrate to somewhere more public to benefit from greater exposure and a more diverse cavalcade of content.

mmt 8y ago
> the list isn't too different from issues that face other sites based around user-generated content This was what caught my attention at being remarkably non-unique: > Another structural problem of Tumblr is that deleted blogs don’t really go away. Once a blog has been reblogged to someone else’s Tumblr, they are essentially posting it again as a copy of the original. It's a well-aired controversy for the Web at large, including the EU's "right to be forgotten", hardly specific to Tumblr. It made me wonder if the article isn't more a lament that Internet discussion forum platforms in general have failed to adapt to modern usage/expectations. I hadn't considered the pendulum idea until you brought it up. I had merely assumed there isn't enough moderation labor available given the increasing number of users, but that wouldn't apply to a closed community.

amyjess 8y ago

> “In my formative time in fandom [before Tumblr], learning the rules and etiquette of the space was not optional, it was baked into the entire structure of fandom,” Danielle said. “There was a hurdle of entry to fandom; it was organized into moderated communities and kinkmemes and other places that had rules, and even more than that had real live people who ran stuff and would prevent drama from boiling over.” I'd argue that this is overblown. Way back in the '90s, most organized online fandom was on Usenet. Usenet had no formal rules. Sure, there was a ton of cultural norms, but there was no enforcement. If you were really tired of somebody, you could put their name into something called a "killfile" which would hide their posts from you (killfiles were entirely client-side). And ultimately despite the "Eternal September", Usenet worked well enough. Trolls came and went. Every once in a while a group would be dragged into the Meow Wars. But it was still less toxic than LiveJournal. I mostly remember the LiveJournal age (and the UBB/vBulletin/phpBB age that existed alongside it) as something that was dominated by moderators who cared more about bikeshedding and wielding power than actually keeping awful people out. Rules enforcement was more like "You didn't format your post exactly the way I want it, this is your only warning, next time you're banned!". And in the meantime toxic people would just run rampant with concern trolling and/or attacking other fans for every little thing and the mods would just sit there and do nothing. On UBB/vBulletin/phpBB boards, it wouldn't be uncommon for half the threads on the front page to be locked often with the threads ending with snarky moderator comments like "Use the search function next time dumbass". Or for all discussion on a particular subject to be shoved into a "megathread" with no threaded comments (god, I hated those forums; I miss WWWBoard). Fandom has always been toxic. Edit: Though I'll say that Tumblr's software and organization is godawful. The fact that until very recently the only way to comment on someone else's post was to reblog their post and add your comment at the bottom is just bizarre, nonsensical, and not conducive to any kind of productive discussion. And how reblogs and likes all got shoved under the "notes" category. You see a post gets 700 notes: you have no idea if it's a good post that got 700 likes or a shitty post that got 700 reblog-comments calling it out. And straight reblogs are treated the same way as reblog-comments too, so "soandso reblogged this post" is worthless. Are they sharing your post or replying to it? Gah.

duckerude 8y ago

Using Tumblr is a challenge. When I first started reading Tumblr blogs I was confused about the themes people used. Depending on the layout, the far side of quote pyramids often becomes so ridiculously narrow that all characters are stacked on top of each other. Conversations become unreadable. Some other, modern themes use a different layout that doesn't have that problem. I wondered why people put up with the old style until I found out that the usual way participants look at conversations is on their dashboard, which discards themes and uses the modern layout. People don't look at their own blogs. Blog themes aren't designed for reading. Only people without accounts have to deal with that, but they can't complain because they don't have accounts. The whole reblogging system is a disaster. It's like a comment tree, but you can only look at one branch at a time.

djajshgsjja 8y ago
I remember experiencing that myself, closing the window, and leaving with a sour opinion of tumblr. This sounds like a very solvable problem, and one that could have measurable results with a high ROI if fixed. Wonder if they’ve tried it.

justboxing 8y ago

Tumblr was mostly a free porn-stash portal in the beginning, and even though David Karp denied it[1] it's still the case even today. Just do a site:tumblr.com <porn_keywords_here> and you'll find plenty of NSFW tumblogs... [1] Source: 2011 What Is Responsible For Tumblr’s Recent Explosive Growth? => http://oobly.com/2011/01/30/are-the-p0rn-blogs-cloacked-as-nsfw-responsible-for-tumblrs-recent-explosive-growth-traffic_95/ http://oobly.com/2011/01/30/are-the-p0rn-blogs-cloacked-as-n...

wetpaws 8y ago

SJW shithole is criticizing SJW shithole for being SJW shithole.

dang 8y ago
Please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]