Implying that tumblr is over.
The golden age continues.
Tumblr's Internet Legacy
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: Tumblr's Internet Legacy
#12On 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.
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?
Re: Tumblr's Internet Legacy
#13Was 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.
Re: Tumblr's Internet Legacy
#14On 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.
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?
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.
Re: Tumblr's Internet Legacy
#15What 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 anyw…
> 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.
Re: Tumblr's Internet Legacy
#16Whatever 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.
Re: Tumblr's Internet Legacy
#17What 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 anyw…
> 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 com…
It used to be the case that if you pinged tumblr.com you'd get a response from x.66.6.y. If I know one thing for certain it's that there can be no light without the darkness on the web: just sterile corporate sponsored content and then some more in popups. You've got one popup for the website, another for the government, and another for the advertiser. I haven't seen any national socialist popups in my browser yet so remind me again who's making the web unpleasant? In American society whenever the state is unhappy with something they blame it on the enemy they defeated in the last war. It doesn't even matter if the enemy didn't have the Internet!
Re: Tumblr's Internet Legacy
#18> 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.
Re: Tumblr's Internet Legacy
#19Was 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.
If anything it was a cross between Twitter and phpbb forums.
Re: Tumblr's Internet Legacy
#20What 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 anyw…
Any sufficiently large platform eventually attracts every kind of person.
That's why I refuse to consider big platforms "a community": At best, they're platforms on which many communities can form, but anyone trying to tell you a million people can be in one community is either an incompetent marketer, extraordinarily naïve, or, perhaps, attempting to tar a huge number of different communities with the bad actions of a single community, or even a subset of a single community. Ask yourself: If someone told you that Manhattan was Neo-Nazi because someone once saw a swastika flag flying from an apartment window, would you take the claim at face value?