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Despite the hyperbolic title, the article dwells into the reasons for Tumblr's perceived and actual decline. Among them: reliance on user-generated content bein

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.

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.