like is there even any staff? who knows? it’s bliss.

February 3, 2022 10:19 PM

Kaitlyn Tiffany writes for the Atlantic about Tumblr's history and culture, the deleterious effects of its various buyers, and how the Tumblr-4chan skirmishes—such as "Operation Overkitten"—evolved into today's all-consuming culture wars. Kyle Chayka counters for the New Yorker, emphasizing Tumblr's rediscovered appeal as a social space free from the eyes of brands and algorithms.
posted by one for the books (32 comments total)

Tumblr responds to the mainstream coverage.
posted by a car full of lions at 10:43 PM on February 3, 2022 [7 favorites]

Thanks, that was interesting. The Boneghazi article from 2016 linked from Tiffany's article is also fascinating.
posted by paduasoy at 10:46 PM on February 3, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hey c’mon let us enjoy our little community in the corpse of a social media property in peace.
posted by sleeping bear at 11:15 PM on February 3, 2022 [39 favorites]

the other best place on the internet. <3
posted by wowenthusiast at 12:27 AM on February 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

Archive/non paywall link for the Atlantic, can’t find the New Yorker yet.
posted by ellieBOA at 12:48 AM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

go away! there's nobody home. we're all dead. this is a place of no honor!

::throws rocks::
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 1:43 AM on February 4, 2022 [26 favorites]

[archive for the New Yorker]

I've been a near-daily user of Tumblr since I started a fuckyeahitaly blog there in 2010, which morphed into a pizza blog, which morphed into a "weird shit I found" blog, which then died a gradual death when I realised it was more fun just watching the detritus roll in. The rise of WhatsApp certainly had a lot to do with that death, because I could send images to a targeted and captive audience instead of just into the ether. I subscribe to thousands of accounts by now and only a handful I've ever unsubbed from in all that time, usually because their content changes to something dumb or they increase their posting schedule and flood the feed. I never see ads, I see (mostly) stuff I'm interested in and I can ignore drama with ease. I'm honestly surprised it ever went out of fashion, considering that not much has changed in the end user experience for me in all that time (save the porn ban I guess). Like, where was there to go? Fucking Pinterest?
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 2:18 AM on February 4, 2022 [6 favorites]

I appreciate this kind of internet history writing because I feel like there is SO MUCH of my and subsequent generational cohort's culture shaped by internet ephemera that goes uncommented on.

I skipped Tumblr, going straight from LiveJournal to Facebook and kind of burning out on social media in general around the time Tumblr was getting big, but it was apparent even to me that it was pretty zeitgeist-y.
posted by wakannai at 4:27 AM on February 4, 2022

For all its faults, Tumblr seems to be the hub of fan art and fiction that LJ was twenty years ago, and that's what I am doing there. I feel like I am too old for Tumblr, but I stay because every time I check it I see a post from someone who admits the same thing.

Funny thing is, the porn ban didn't work in a way that you would use the word "work" to mean. I don't see so much bare flesh when I do a search or use the dashboard, but there's always some. And every single day, at least once, you get befriended or commented on by an obvious porn bot with an explicit blog of two or three posts. This will get deleted in a matter of hours, but presumably somebody at the bot company has done the math, and that is long enough to get dumb horny dudes to click through in a profitable manner. Except: does it? Who, on Tumblr, are these men? It is all mystifying.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:59 AM on February 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

Haven't read the article but take issue with the "tumblr-4chan skirmishes" framing because this obscures the real issue... as far as I know, there was no trend of tumblr users going over to 4chan to start fights.

The reality is that it was really only the one side, the 4chan side, making the incursions into the tumblr space to fight those culture war battles.
posted by subdee at 7:15 AM on February 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

Anyway I haven't kept up with it but here's a collection of links on the subject of the fanwars, or what we call "the discourse" on tumblr:

https://www.are.na/subdee-subdee/tumblr-twitter-fanwars

I'm happy to see some mainstream attention on these issues finally... because while you CAN go too far down the rabbit hole (on either side) and lose perspective, the fights over whether it's okay to post explicit fanworks to tumblr are not meaningless, they're yet another front for the culture war, and they're a pipeline to right-wing recruitment.
posted by subdee at 7:21 AM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

ctrl+f "Onceler"

Nothing? Really?
posted by airmail at 7:28 AM on February 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

I love Tumblr in all its weird glory. A while back they banned a lot of random words and the community responded by finding alternate absurd words. It's full of cringe fanfic and some really nice fan art. It has a weird exploitative relationship with Twitter where each site steals the other's best jokes via screenshot.

It's in-jokes all the way down, which get reposted periodically with the tag "the sacred texts".

I never post because everyone else there appears to be 16 and I don't want to scare them.
posted by emjaybee at 7:28 AM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

What I found tumblr was fantastic for was exposing me on a casual but regular basis to alternative conceptions of beauty. Desirability masquerades as a natural phenomenon but it's so constructed, and that construction is more insidious than argumentation in more strictly logical spheres. When, just in your normal browsings, you see people excluded from or deprecated in mainstream standards of beauty (e.g., POC, gender-nonconforming people, fat people) presenting images of people who look like them as beautiful, it can steadily expand your own conceptions.
posted by praemunire at 7:33 AM on February 4, 2022 [6 favorites]

“Yeah, could I trace its exact cultural impact? Like, no,” she said. “I think it’s bled into everything.”

These days, more and more, I find pop culture and writing and media feel familiar, and then I remember it's because everyone my age is grown up and doing the writing now.
posted by airmail at 7:38 AM on February 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

I use it like how middle-aged moms use Pinterest, I think. Just constantly finding neat stuff and collating it in a non-stop stream of my brain in moodboard form. Here's some Star Wars fanart, here's an advertisement from the 50s, here's a weird Twin Peaks meme, here's an Art Deco clock, here's a kitten, on and on and on. I don't create anything, I just digitally stick it on a wall like I'm a teenager and this is my life.

Well, that, and Fuck Yeah, Coelacanths, which I resurrected last year.
posted by Katemonkey at 7:41 AM on February 4, 2022 [7 favorites]

I've only ever been a visitor to social media, but I really liked tumblr back then for what I guess might be called aesthetic blogs? It was fun browsing though peoples' curated streams of images of things, art, architecture, product design and so on all mixed up and juxtaposed against each other. Or, yeah, kinda like what Katemonkey just said. Are people still doing that sort of thing? Have any favorites?
posted by wordless reply at 7:52 AM on February 4, 2022 [2 favorites]

Remember that any article talking about "the history" of Tumblr or Reddit or "what's going on" with TikTok or Twitter is talking about far less than 0.01% of those places (and almost always just a sliver that's in English.)
posted by straight at 8:46 AM on February 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

Remember the 'color of the sky' post? The one that took so damn long to scroll through? Why was such a long post allowed? Anarchy! There was a moment when it clogged every dashboard, giving our scrolling fingers a workout. For years afterward, it would still pop up occasionally and spark fury.

I have fond memories of Tumblr, but ducked out when the anti-porn bot started causing trouble for my very much not porn blog. (Anything from kittens to food good end up labeled as porn.) By then, popular gifs were being deleted for copyright violation. It was obvious the good times were over.
posted by LindsayIrene at 8:51 AM on February 4, 2022

Now I've read the New Yorker article... embarassing that they don't mention the reason all the users left for twitter:

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/12/tumblr-year-review-2019-nsfw-ban-memes/602911/

It was the porn ban.
posted by subdee at 8:53 AM on February 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

But, it's definitely true that it's been much more peaceful on tumblr since the majority of users left the site.
posted by subdee at 8:54 AM on February 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

Now I've read the New Yorker article... embarassing that they don't mention the reason all the users left for twitter: It was the porn ban.
"Another blow came when Tumblr issued a blanket ban on adult content—something it had become known for—in December of 2018 and promptly lost thirty per cent of its traffic." - the New Yorker article
posted by one for the books at 9:07 AM on February 4, 2022 [3 favorites]

Been through tumblr for a while now, and the porn is somehow still really prevalent despite marking a lot of my posts of baked goods, and for some users of the site (see: me) it means that the subgroups that are dedicated to things like sissy porn are still around and makes it annoying.

Not having the eye of brands or algorithms means things like nazis and TERFs are rampant and I can't really visit the site without finding someone telling me to self-harm in my inbox thanks to a half-decade old post that I quickly deleted, but because of how reblogging works is still floating around with people showing up on my blog to throw transphobic nonsense at me at regular intervals, in detriment to my mental health. I could begin again (like many of the accounts in my growing ban list have) but I don't like the idea that I need to basically run and hide. Hilariously I basically gave up on existing on tumblr shortly before the article was posted.

In other words, generally a wretched hive of scum and villainy for people on the margins, even if it's not as curated and bubble-ish anymore.
posted by jamuraa at 9:19 AM on February 4, 2022 [5 favorites]

So much of the internet isn't fun anymore. It's loud and angry and monetized past the point of parody. The internet is a dystopia these days.

Tumblr is fun, though. It feels free the way the internet used to feel free. Posts are robust the way blogs were robust. It's loopy and dumb and pointless and thoughtful and insightful and ridiculous in every way the internet should be.

Tumblr isn't dead, and I'm so scared of all the ways its corporate owners might try to resurrect it anyway.
posted by meese at 10:02 AM on February 4, 2022 [9 favorites]

the porn is somehow still really prevalent despite marking a lot of my posts of baked goods
I think that comes from the tags you are using, most of the discovery on Tumblr is via the tags.

In January this year Tumblr rolled out another iOS ban. This time, targeting some bizarre tags on posts to “remain available within Apple’s App Store.” A Tumblr account called “bannedtags” quickly emerged to compile all of the newly cursed words, and it’s a truly bonkers community-sourced list. Here is a non-exhaustive peek at a few of the banned terms, which could result in a blog being flagged for deletion or completely shadowbanned...

The approach Tumblr are taking with this moderation is insane, but it is all being driven by the arcane rules of the Apple app store.
posted by Lanark at 11:09 AM on February 4, 2022

I use tumblr almost entirely for text posts and conversations, so the porn bots have been almost invisible to me except in the context of other people yelling about terrible characterizations of their photos (which: fair). I also don't use the tags at all as a curation function; most of the time when I find new followers it's by chasing down reblog trains that pop into my feed via reblogs of other people who tend to say interesting things.

One of the things I really enjoy about it as a social platform is how much it revels in the freedom to be a little weird and a lot strange and to talk, long-form, with other people. Tumblr is where I go to trade TERF-identification tips--I have a friend who used it successfully to do a lot of deradicalization work for a while--check in with community members, shitpost about whatever seems fun to go on a tear about, and just... play. It's particularly fun for me as a place to check in with people in a way that is less a curated feed of topics and more a messy feed of people, slower than twitter but way more chaotic than any other feeds I check these days.

I've gone viral on tumblr a couple of times, usually by lunging out of the background to comment on someone else's post but most recently when someone else did that to one of mine (dammit!) and either way it's an interesting if bewildering experience. Tumblr posts really are like one person yelling on a stage while other people randomly distributed in the audience suddenly get up and yell back absolutely wild things.

Re: age, it's the social network I use to keep in contact with my youngest sister, who independently discovered internet fandom and Tumblr itself in similar ways to the way I did, and whose shitposts are fantastic. She is the only member of my family of origin who gets trusted with my pseuds, and vice versa. Anyway, she's been on it since she was an early teenager and has literally grown up with it, and I discovered it in the wake of the LJ/DW migrations and had been on Tumblr doing my text-heavy thing since, oh, probably 2010. The fun thing about Tumblr is that I actually know quite a few folks in the late-thirties-to-early-fifties age bracket hanging out on the site, and a lot of late-twenty-to-early-thirty-somethings like me. There are very few people these days younger than mid-twenties in my feeds, and usually the ones who do turn up there show up when I absently broadcast something related to interacting with your TA out from my account.
posted by sciatrix at 11:16 AM on February 4, 2022 [7 favorites]

Ha, sciatrix, I remember when both of those threads went by on my feed! I loved both of them.

You know, I'm kind of surprised neither article mentioned Dashcon.
posted by meese at 11:44 AM on February 4, 2022

I'm kind of surprised neither article mentioned Dashcon

I was on the bus the other day and I heard a young man say to the young woman he was traveling with, "Yeah, his brother went to Dashcon." I couldn't help but turn and look at them, and they burst into laughter.
posted by praemunire at 12:47 PM on February 4, 2022 [6 favorites]

If you're looking for Tumblr greatest hits, may I recommend worldheritagepostorganization.tumblr.com
posted by sleeping bear at 1:16 PM on February 4, 2022 [4 favorites]

Now I've read the New Yorker article... embarassing that they don't mention the reason all the users left for twitter: It was the porn ban.
"Another blow came when Tumblr issued a blanket ban on adult content—something it had become known for—in December of 2018 and promptly lost thirty per cent of its traffic." - the New Yorker article

Ha! That's what I get for skim-reading and posting to metafilter on my lunch break. Definitely didn't spend enough time on that comment.
posted by subdee at 6:28 PM on February 4, 2022

sciatrix, that's great to hear about the deradicalization, I'm glad that's working! Also, your fannish cohorts sound similar to mine.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 9:53 AM on February 5, 2022 [1 favorite]

The correct way to use Twitter, TikTok, and 4chan is to just use Tumblr and rely on the stronger users here to filter out all the muck and present to you the rare nuggets of gold

This is also the correct way to use Reddit except for when you have very specific questions that you need an unusually dedicated microcommunity to answer.

*views tumblr posts via Metafilter*
posted by zamboni at 12:26 PM on February 11, 2022