How tumblr became popular for being obsolete

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/infinite-scroll/how-tumblr-became-popular-for-being-obsolete

by ingve • 5 years ago

124 85 5 years ago

theklr• 5 years ago

Kinda is amazing outside the pr0n kerfuffle, in essence it’s remained itself. A shame that advertising broke its popularity but glad to see that it’s finally under ownership that isn’t trying to put it against X.

thejohnconway2• 5 years ago

I left when the content filter removed some of my (completely non-pornographic) artworks. The article notes that the content filter is still in place, and still aggressive. I can’t see using it as a blogging platform when such capricious content removal is still in place.

I would go back if they announced a change in that area.

megapoliss• 5 years ago

You are right - platform with censorship doesn't make any sense. They should provide flexible filters instead, so you won't get content that you don't want.

egman_ekki3• 5 years ago

Wasn't that filter put into place (at least to some extent) because Apple pulled them from the Appstore?

thejohnconway2• 5 years ago

I don’t remember the sequence of events very well, but my memory is that the real slide started when it was acquired by Verizon. Whatever the exact reasons were, it was still a series of bad decisions, because it led from Tumblr being huge to being practically irrelevant.

null_object2• 5 years ago

This is like HN bingo - how many posts before someone blames Apple for something totally unconnected.

Yesterday a poster blamed them somehow for Tesla leaving a brake pad off a car..

zimpenfish3• 5 years ago

They were apparently already working on the adult content ban 6 months before CSAM caused them to get pulled from the app store - it just accelerated the implementation timeline.

tzfld• 5 years ago

That content filter once gone bad but didn't saw any wrongly marked post in the last few years. And I use tumblr on a daily basis.

zerop• 5 years ago

Each Social network is kind of a tribe, that's how they are all different. Tumblr has successfully maintained its own tribe over the years. Same goes with all platforms including HN.

MrDresden• 5 years ago

I've never been a big Tumblr user, having only occasionally found my way there through links and search results.

So I am not someone for whom this matters.

However, I never did like the way it would present other Tumblr feeds that I would click on in the page I was on in this side bar navigation way, rather than just navigating me there. The UI felt all rather convoluted to me.

Anyone know why they have stuck with this pattern in particular?

pram2• 5 years ago

The Tumblr UI was schizo. For example clicking an image in the dashboard: Some images would just open in a new tab, some would open in a light box on the dashboard, some would take you to the blog post, some would take you to some weird Imgur-esque display page, and some would just open a completely unrelated link because you could set the href on them separately I guess??

lordfoom• 5 years ago

I recently became aware that my eldest child (13 at time of writing) prefers Tumblr as social media because of its "emptiness"

csbartus2• 5 years ago

After 10 years I've stopped checking my Tumblr feed last year. It's nothing new there anymore in the graphic / web design / typography inspiration area. Everybody left, the algorithm is dumb, no more joy.

However I'm grateful for Tumblr. It shaped my design career considerably, and give me joy every day for years in row.

prionassembly• 5 years ago

Pinterest is a predator on the web, sucking content and walling itself off, but it's full of good stuff if you enjoy the arts (I've been "into" asemic writing for years) or graphic design.

nyolfen• 5 years ago

parasite is probably a better term

tkiolp4• 5 years ago

It's nothing new there anymore in the graphic / web design / typography inspiration area. Everybody left, the algorithm is dumb…

For me, this is a feature.

cproctor• 5 years ago

Where do you go now for "graphic / web design / typography"?

nvrspyx• 5 years ago

Dribbble is a pretty popular one. There's also ArtStation for art and 3D modeling.

csbartus2• 5 years ago

I'm taking a pause and waiting for something new to pop up

galfarragem2• 5 years ago

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.

ironmagma2• 5 years 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.

ravi-delia2• 5 years 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.

galfarragem2• 5 years ago

It's a blog (e.g. https://archimodels.tumblr.com). The main diference is that your posts appear on followers feeds also.

whatshisface2• 5 years 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.

pndy• 5 years 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

ttepasse• 5 years 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/

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....

https://kottke.org/05/10/tumblelogs

https://leahneukirchen.org/anarchaia/static/faq.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• 5 years 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

systemvoltage• 5 years 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.

henrikschroder2• 5 years 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• 5 years ago

Let's hope Verizon doesn't fuck it up.

The owner is now Automattic

https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20804894/tumblr-acquisiti...

skupig• 5 years ago

This article misses (intentionally?) the 3rd important point that keeps me on there: the absence of big money. There's minimal advertising, no astroturfing, no sponsorships, no paid features. It is pretty much the last of its kind in that regard.

Someone is clearly making a push to capitalize on it, and I'm not looking forward to adding it to the endlessly growing list of beautiful things that rich businessmen have destroyed.

egman_ekki3• 5 years ago

There's a subscription feature that's in the works. https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/21/22684089/tumblr-post-plus...

smoe3• 5 years ago

Are.na, although very niche (which I think is a feature), looks very interesting in this regard. Financed trough paid accounts instead of selling user data/ads and being driven by chasing big investor money. It also seems to have a very open api for people to build things upon.

https://are.na

From Wikipedia:

Are.na is an online social networking community and creative research platform [...] Are.na was built as a successor to hypertext projects like Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and as an ad-free alternative to social networks like Facebook, forgoing "likes," "favorites," or "shares" in its design. Are.na allows users to compile uploaded and web-clipped "blocks" into different "channels," [...]

mostlysimilar• 5 years ago

I'm drawn to the idea and the ethos, but wow that UI is hard to look at.

dylan6042• 5 years ago

forgoing "likes," "favorites," or "shares" in its design

I have a feeling that is going to alienate mass populace users.

password1• 5 years ago

But isn't Tumblr userbase mainly teens and their subcultures? What's the value of not having ads, sponsor and astroturfing, if there's not relevant or interesting community to join to begin with?

drdeca• 5 years ago

“All tumblr users are either too young for tumblr or too old for tumblr” - “tumblr teen” argumate (argumate is certainly not a teenager (I think he is probably like, almost 40?) but some news article referred to him as such at one point)

I wouldn’t say there’s nothing interesting on tumblr.

Like, there’s nostalgebraist’s writing on machine learning, Also other people posting some math content.

It is a social blogging site. People write blogs there.

wyre2• 5 years ago

Just because a platform is not relevant or interesting to you or your circles doesn’t mean it has no value to others. Lots of people got a lot of value out of using Tumblr. When Facebook was limited to people you know in real life, Tumblr allowed for anonymity and making friends with people with similar experiences.

Tenoke• 5 years ago

They cite someone saying "There aren’t influencers on Tumblr the way there are on Instagram and TikTok, and the experience for all users might be more pleasant as a result. " they just don't dig further into it.

digisign• 5 years ago

A chronological feed sounds enticing.

GeorgeTirebiter• 5 years ago

Agree. I like it as a quiet place to jot down my thoughts. I don't post often; when I do, it's easy to remember how to get it to do what I want, I've never been hassled. I could do this on my private server(s), and if tumblr gets weird, that's always an option.

null_object2• 5 years ago

I started following some Tumblr blogs just last week after a 2 or 3 year hiatus. I fell in love again with not having to log-in to see the content, or being blocked after simply scrolling through a few user-provided thumbnails.

Articles like this make me worried some ass-hat is soon gonna monetize this newly quiet corner of the internet, and make it shit like everything else.

sva_2• 5 years ago

I've recently been thinking that Twitter has absorbed much of the former Tumblr userbase.

anyfactor• 5 years ago

I know this is a stupid thing but I firmly believe that Tumblr imposing content filter ruined Reddit and to some extent Twitter. The distraught tumblr userbase had a unifying demographic characteristics that wasn't on par with the culture of (old.)Reddit. When this group left reddit was very quick to embrace them and alienated a large parts of it userbase. Reddit created an internal clash by attempting to merge these polarizing groups and trying their best to be marketable at the same time.

It is a very difficult to put into words but I think having a tribe of userbase is far better for a social media than to appeal to majority.

I think instagram and tiktok as social media still provides a good experience for their longterm userbase compared to social media that appeals to majority like twitter, facebook and reddit.

bckr• 5 years ago

Reddit created an internal clash by attempting to merge these polarizing groups

Isn't segmentation of audiences built in to Reddit in the form of subreddits?

libraryatnight• 5 years ago

That's true, but they sort of converge on pages like All and Popular. I'd never thought of a Tumblr exodus affecting reddit, but I remember the Digg exodus.

lozenge• 5 years ago

The quality on the default subreddits kept dropping so they tweaked the front page to bring content from smaller subreddits. Which then dropped in quality &etc.

StevePerkins• 5 years ago

You might be sharing thirst comments about fetish porn pics. Or you might be discussing tips and techniques for artisanal home cheesemaking. Either way, it feels like Reddit.

Different subreddits have different levels of quality and effort in the average post. But "group" != "audience". The culture trends on Reddit are site-wide, even if the subject matter of each sub varies wildly.

I THINK that what parent commentor is trying to say is that pre-Yahoo-Tumbler, Reddit culture was predominately male libertarian Ron Paul fans... while post-Yahoo-Tumbler, there was an influx of "purple hair" female social leftists. And that Reddit's culture has been somewhat fractured and at war with itself ever since.

I'm not sure that I accept this theory (I think simply has more to do with a continuous influx of newbies, and general youth culture shift over the past 15 years). But I do agree with the result, and the timeline happens to match up neatly.

Terretta2• 5 years ago

Agree there was a shift, and while it hadn’t occurred to me before, your timing makes sense.

Reddit used to be that place where you had definitely “read it” first.

Now, to your point, most subs that bubble via algo to all and popular are tumblogs (infinite image/meme scrollers), and posts come after it’s already been on IG and Facebook groups.

I’d chalked this up to IG influence, but Tumblr diaspora makes as much sense, together with your hypothesized shift to pop engagement over niche quality.

Still works that if you dump the subs that show up in all or popular, you can get back to text / long-text niche interests. Most seem to be slowing pace of posts and discussion replies though, so unclear how much longer that will last.

Traster• 5 years ago

Sorry, but I was on reddit atleast since 2008 and it was obvious even then that 80%+ of the redditors hadn't read the articles, the whole reason they were on reddit was to chat to other redditors, not to actually read the article. It's a different story now, where the whole conversation has turned meta though (people arguing obout whether people have or haven't read the article and what the behaviour of redditors says about society in general)

snthd• 5 years ago

What's the closest the fediverse has to tumblr?

Nemo_bis• 5 years ago

Wordpress.com (with ActivityPub)? :)

How tumblr became popular for being obsolete

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