3 ms·

Tumblr is completely underrated. I'm using Tumblr for almost a decade and I never found any other place as convenient or as cheap (free and without ads) to hav

Tumblr is completely underrated. I'm using Tumblr for almost a decade and I never found any other place as convenient or as cheap (free and without ads) to have a blog. It's dead easy to start one, to post or to make a custom theme (if you feel like). You can even use your domain for free and you even have "kind of" a social network. I know that keeping a "fun" blog is not fashionable anymore but Tumblr is really good at it.

ironmagma 5y ago
I always found it weird that people call Tumblrs blogs. A post on your blog there is more like a tweet; people can pile on, amplify it beyond what your intended audience could have possibly been. This can be great or disastrous. It’s yet another social network — hardly resembles a blog at all.
- pndy 5y ago
  Blog is a generic term that most people is familiar with but the more accurate description for both tumblr and twitter (hell, even mastodon) is microblog - due to small, short form of the posts
- ravi-delia 5y ago
  It's a lot more like blogs than it is like twitter, but overall it's almost closest to MySpace. I think if you wanted to write long form content on a social media platform, there isn't really a better pick.
- galfarragem 5y ago
  It's a blog (e.g. https://archimodels.tumblr.com https://archimodels.tumblr.com). The main diference is that your posts appear on followers feeds also.
  - echelon 5y ago
    I remember Tumbler lacking actual dates and timestamps for the longest time. It was also sometimes difficult to know the provenance of the things you were reading, especially after nested reblogs and comment chains. These are two really odd design decisions for blogs and trying to read content written by experts.
    - evanelias 5y ago
      Dates and timestamps have always been available. From the blog view, it's entirely dependent on the blog's chosen theme. Some themes may omit dates/times for whatever reason; it's up to the theme author, and up to the blogs choosing that theme. From the dashboard (as a logged-in user), you can see a post's timestamp by mousing over the top-right corner.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  >A post on your blog there is more like a tweet; people can pile on, amplify it beyond what your intended audience could have possibly been. People could do that with blogs.
  - ironmagma 5y ago
    Could, but the platform doesn’t facilitate it. A difference in ease is a difference in kind.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      On blogs you can have links to posts other blogs. I am pretty sure its facilitation was the biggest idea behind the web itself.
- ttepasse 5y ago
  Very early blogs often had more of a Twitter/Tumblr feel in single-sentence posts. The style of longer articles/essays with titles only developed a little bit later. Take a look at one of the earliest weblogs, kottke.org in 2000. The posts there displayed have titles, but that is a post facto artefact of the CMS and current theme, not how kottke.org looked in 2000. If you imagine those titles and metadata away it looks more like a Tumblr. https://kottke.org/00/01/ https://kottke.org/00/01/ Most blogs in the early 2000s evolved into longer articles; but some weblogs kept the style and evolved it into another direction, mixing short posts with links, images, quotes and such. A term for that new mixture was tumblelogs. https://web.archive.org/web/20050722001616/http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/tumbleloggingAssortedLarvae.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050722001616/http://redhanded.... https://kottke.org/05/10/tumblelogs https://kottke.org/05/10/tumblelogs https://leahneukirchen.org/anarchaia/static/faq.html https://leahneukirchen.org/anarchaia/static/faq.html http://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2005/04/thoughts-on-vooly.html http://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2005/04/thoughts-on-v... That was all 2004/2005ish, before Twitter and Tumblr. So yes, Tumblr has is original inspiration in the the early blogging scene and I suspect the name too. But you’re not wrong, another essential part of Tumblr is the builtin social network and the new mechanism of commenting and reblogging. If I remember correctly those came a little bit late.
noaheverett 5y ago
I too wish there were more "fun" blogs out there, however I do see a good amount of dev's who keep a fun/techy blog. There have been a handful of services over the last 2 decades that made it quick and easy to spin up a blog (geocities, blogger, medium etc) but Tumblr had the cool factor (plus the social network behind it) and really nailed the posting experience I think — Tumblr was the best chance at a Twitter competitor back in the 2009'ish era IMO. My own project Glue[1] is taking a stab at this segment so I have vested interest in this space. Trying to marry all the various content types into a single UI experience has been a fun challenge (short text, audio, quotes, code snippets, blogs). [1] https://glue.im/noah https://glue.im/noah
systemvoltage 5y ago
Tumblr marketing is awesome: > Tumblr is so easy to use that it’s hard to explain. > We made it really, really simple for people to make a blog and put whatever they want on it. Stories, photos, GIFs, TV shows, links, quips, dumb jokes, smart jokes, Spotify tracks, mp3s, videos, fashion, art, deep stuff. Tumblr is 541 million different blogs, filled with literally whatever.
henrikschroder 5y ago
Six years ago I was looking for a place to host a simple "archive" of blog posts with embedded media, and Tumblr was the easiest and most flexible by far, and the audience was already there in the form of the fandom for a couple of very specific TV shows. A lot of the fandom exists on Tumblr and Instagram and Twitter as well, but on the latter two, you can't have any permanence. It's all about the ever scrolling feed, and it's about getting on people's feeds again and again and again with new posts, new content all the time. And the type of content you can post there is extremely limited. Tumblr allows this style as well, and a lot of users engage in it. But it also allows for being an archive, a curated collection of long-form posts about a subject, tagged and organized and easily browsable, no matter how long ago the posts were made. I do not regret choosing Tumblr six years ago, and people keep discovering my stuff, keep liking it, keep reblogging it, which shows it was the right show. Let's hope Verizon doesn't fuck it up.
- smcnally 5y ago
  > Let's hope Verizon doesn't fuck it up. The owner is now Automattic https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20804894/tumblr-acquisition-matt-mullenweg-ceo-automattic-wordpress-verizon-changes-vergecast https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20804894/tumblr-acquisiti...
  - henrikschroder 5y ago
    Right, I had completely forgotten about that!

ironmagma 5y ago

I always found it weird that people call Tumblrs blogs. A post on your blog there is more like a tweet; people can pile on, amplify it beyond what your intended audience could have possibly been. This can be great or disastrous. It’s yet another social network — hardly resembles a blog at all.

pndy 5y ago
Blog is a generic term that most people is familiar with but the more accurate description for both tumblr and twitter (hell, even mastodon) is microblog - due to small, short form of the posts
ravi-delia 5y ago
It's a lot more like blogs than it is like twitter, but overall it's almost closest to MySpace. I think if you wanted to write long form content on a social media platform, there isn't really a better pick.
galfarragem 5y ago
It's a blog (e.g. https://archimodels.tumblr.com https://archimodels.tumblr.com). The main diference is that your posts appear on followers feeds also.
- echelon 5y ago
  I remember Tumbler lacking actual dates and timestamps for the longest time. It was also sometimes difficult to know the provenance of the things you were reading, especially after nested reblogs and comment chains. These are two really odd design decisions for blogs and trying to read content written by experts.
  - evanelias 5y ago
    Dates and timestamps have always been available. From the blog view, it's entirely dependent on the blog's chosen theme. Some themes may omit dates/times for whatever reason; it's up to the theme author, and up to the blogs choosing that theme. From the dashboard (as a logged-in user), you can see a post's timestamp by mousing over the top-right corner.
whatshisface 5y ago
>A post on your blog there is more like a tweet; people can pile on, amplify it beyond what your intended audience could have possibly been. People could do that with blogs.
- ironmagma 5y ago
  Could, but the platform doesn’t facilitate it. A difference in ease is a difference in kind.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    On blogs you can have links to posts other blogs. I am pretty sure its facilitation was the biggest idea behind the web itself.
ttepasse 5y ago
Very early blogs often had more of a Twitter/Tumblr feel in single-sentence posts. The style of longer articles/essays with titles only developed a little bit later. Take a look at one of the earliest weblogs, kottke.org in 2000. The posts there displayed have titles, but that is a post facto artefact of the CMS and current theme, not how kottke.org looked in 2000. If you imagine those titles and metadata away it looks more like a Tumblr. https://kottke.org/00/01/ https://kottke.org/00/01/ Most blogs in the early 2000s evolved into longer articles; but some weblogs kept the style and evolved it into another direction, mixing short posts with links, images, quotes and such. A term for that new mixture was tumblelogs. https://web.archive.org/web/20050722001616/http://redhanded.hobix.com/inspect/tumbleloggingAssortedLarvae.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050722001616/http://redhanded.... https://kottke.org/05/10/tumblelogs https://kottke.org/05/10/tumblelogs https://leahneukirchen.org/anarchaia/static/faq.html https://leahneukirchen.org/anarchaia/static/faq.html http://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2005/04/thoughts-on-vooly.html http://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2005/04/thoughts-on-v... That was all 2004/2005ish, before Twitter and Tumblr. So yes, Tumblr has is original inspiration in the the early blogging scene and I suspect the name too. But you’re not wrong, another essential part of Tumblr is the builtin social network and the new mechanism of commenting and reblogging. If I remember correctly those came a little bit late.

noaheverett 5y ago

I too wish there were more "fun" blogs out there, however I do see a good amount of dev's who keep a fun/techy blog. There have been a handful of services over the last 2 decades that made it quick and easy to spin up a blog (geocities, blogger, medium etc) but Tumblr had the cool factor (plus the social network behind it) and really nailed the posting experience I think — Tumblr was the best chance at a Twitter competitor back in the 2009'ish era IMO. My own project Glue[1] is taking a stab at this segment so I have vested interest in this space. Trying to marry all the various content types into a single UI experience has been a fun challenge (short text, audio, quotes, code snippets, blogs). [1] https://glue.im/noah https://glue.im/noah

systemvoltage 5y ago

Tumblr marketing is awesome: > Tumblr is so easy to use that it’s hard to explain. > We made it really, really simple for people to make a blog and put whatever they want on it. Stories, photos, GIFs, TV shows, links, quips, dumb jokes, smart jokes, Spotify tracks, mp3s, videos, fashion, art, deep stuff. Tumblr is 541 million different blogs, filled with literally whatever.

henrikschroder 5y ago

Six years ago I was looking for a place to host a simple "archive" of blog posts with embedded media, and Tumblr was the easiest and most flexible by far, and the audience was already there in the form of the fandom for a couple of very specific TV shows. A lot of the fandom exists on Tumblr and Instagram and Twitter as well, but on the latter two, you can't have any permanence. It's all about the ever scrolling feed, and it's about getting on people's feeds again and again and again with new posts, new content all the time. And the type of content you can post there is extremely limited. Tumblr allows this style as well, and a lot of users engage in it. But it also allows for being an archive, a curated collection of long-form posts about a subject, tagged and organized and easily browsable, no matter how long ago the posts were made. I do not regret choosing Tumblr six years ago, and people keep discovering my stuff, keep liking it, keep reblogging it, which shows it was the right show. Let's hope Verizon doesn't fuck it up.

smcnally 5y ago
> Let's hope Verizon doesn't fuck it up. The owner is now Automattic https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20804894/tumblr-acquisition-matt-mullenweg-ceo-automattic-wordpress-verizon-changes-vergecast https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20804894/tumblr-acquisiti...
- henrikschroder 5y ago
  Right, I had completely forgotten about that!