5 ms·

Tumblr's Internet Legacy

49 points by gripfx 5y ago

kingcharles 5y ago
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.
- rralian 5y ago
  I'm sorry to hear that. Maybe I can help. Will email you to get details.
  - busymom0 5y ago
    How are you connected to tumblr?
hellbanTHIS 5y ago
> 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.
- rainonmoon 5y ago
  > 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.
userbinator 5y ago
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.
- jeedomer 5y ago
  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?
  - throwaway684936 5y ago
    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.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    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.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  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.
jart 5y ago
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.
- suction 5y ago
  I don't understand what you mean...?
- nopenopenopeno 5y ago
  It wasn’t advertising-friendly, so it was only a matter of time before it became racist too.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - astrange 5y ago
    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.
- ByteJockey 5y ago
  > 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.
beckingz 5y ago
Implying that tumblr is over. The golden age continues.
- pixel_turkey 5y ago
  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.
  - astrange 5y ago
    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".
Apocryphon 5y ago
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.
- Izkata 5y ago
  If anything it was a cross between Twitter and phpbb forums.
- Macha 5y ago
  I think for a certain subset of users it was definitely the heir to livejournal
JustARandomGuy 5y ago
Whatever 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.
gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
> 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.
- burnished 5y ago
  Sauce? I'm always interested in tales of social engineering
  - gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
    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.
firecall 5y ago
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!
JoeyBananas 5y ago
Tumblr's legacy: that website that used to have some really fantastic porn
burnished 5y ago
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.

49 points by gripfx 5y ago

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.

rralian 5y ago
I'm sorry to hear that. Maybe I can help. Will email you to get details.
- busymom0 5y ago
  How are you connected to tumblr?

hellbanTHIS 5y ago

> 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.

rainonmoon 5y ago
> 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.

userbinator 5y ago

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.

jeedomer 5y ago
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?
- throwaway684936 5y ago
  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.
- Izkata 5y ago
  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.
KerrAvon 5y ago
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.

jart 5y ago

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.

suction 5y ago
I don't understand what you mean...?
nopenopenopeno 5y ago
It wasn’t advertising-friendly, so it was only a matter of time before it became racist too.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- astrange 5y ago
  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.
ByteJockey 5y ago
> 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.

beckingz 5y ago

Implying that tumblr is over. The golden age continues.

pixel_turkey 5y ago
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.
- astrange 5y ago
  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".

Apocryphon 5y ago

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.

Izkata 5y ago
If anything it was a cross between Twitter and phpbb forums.
Macha 5y ago
I think for a certain subset of users it was definitely the heir to livejournal

JustARandomGuy 5y ago

Whatever 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.

gunfighthacksaw 5y ago

> 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.

burnished 5y ago
Sauce? I'm always interested in tales of social engineering
- gunfighthacksaw 5y ago
  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.

firecall 5y ago

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!

JoeyBananas 5y ago

Tumblr's legacy: that website that used to have some really fantastic porn

burnished 5y ago

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.