Remembering Tumblr

[jayeless]

I should say I'm not really a Tumblr refugee – I hadn't been using the site for some time by the NSFW crackdown of last month. I am still happy to take advantage of the uptick in activity on, and enthusiasm for, Dreamwidth. As LiveJournal declined I'd always hoped my circles would want to follow me over here to DW, but no one really did, and when people finally did stop using LJ it seemed to be more modern social media sites they moved to – including Tumblr.

So, I really started using Tumblr in 2011. I'd had an account before that, but… eh. Never used it. Until I did. As a platform, clearly, it always left something to be desired. My experience was that it was only ever barely usable once browser-extension'd to within an inch of its life. I mean, there weren't even timestamps on the dashboard! Replying back to replies was a pain. The same post could appear on your dash 657458745684 times – sometimes with slightly different commentary – if everyone you followed kept reblogging it.

Yet nonetheless, for me Tumblr became a fantastic space to indulge my fannish side. I've never considered myself a “big fandom person”, but Tumblr made it accessible. People would post gifsets of the best bits of all my favourite shows, and I could reblog them and enable everyone else to relive the joy. There were loads of interesting discussion posts, on things like character archetypes and tropes and whatnot. In terms of music, people would post loads of obscure B-sides, live performances, covers and fan-made mash-ups which could be a real treasure trove of previously-unknown stuff. Plus, there was lots of great non-fandom stuff on there too: everything from art to news/current affairs to cute animals to political theory to literary quotes to sexy photos. (Yes, sexy photos – and for all Tumblr's execs have tried to blather about there being tons of places to find adult content on the internet, I really valued the type of adult content I found on Tumblr: photos that highlighted men's vulnerability, or women's desires and pleasure. It was instrumental in me realising I'm bi, tbh – and sure I'd seen porn that featured women before, but only ever as the objects of male desire, which wasn't a framing that appealed to me. It's weird to think that if not for Tumblr, I might never have realised or accepted that.) And, just like LJ at its height, a bunch of people I knew IRL were active on Tumblr as well (and cool people, not the “old high school classmates and your most conservative relative” who seem to dominate most people's Facebook feeds). It's that era of Tumblr I miss, honestly.

Because yeah, after that I soured on it, for much the same reasons as everyone else: it got toxic. I'd regularly see fucking bizarre arguments on my dash, like that intermarriage is immoral because it's “assimilationist” for POC to marry outside their race, or that science is all a garbage colonial endeavour because some scientists are and have been racist/sexist/etc. so how dare you say that modern medicine offers better treatments for cancer than like, prayer and raw vegetables?! Obviously I didn't bother arguing against these people, but then I'd follow people who would, and this would mean I'd sometimes see the same ridiculous OP two dozen fucking times before I'd remember I had a browser extension that could block all further reblogs of a post from appearing on my dash. It also seemed like sometimes, the most random fucking thing could make it to the wrong circle and incur the wrath of dozens of people… like once I made a post about my experience of my own (physical) disability, and then got ripped into by a crew of randoms who believed I was trying to say invisible disabilities didn't exist because I hadn't included them in my post (which was only about me!!). Looking back at all that, it's a wonder I stuck around as long as I did.

I quit using Tumblr in 2015, although I did return for a while in 2017–8 when I got really into The Sims 4 (then faded out again once I was bored). Judging by the graph in this interesting article on the rise and fall of different platforms within fandom, Tumblr only continued to rise in popularity after I left. Will the NSFW ban – which, it's important to note, goes well beyond a ban on those pornbots everybody hates – signal the beginning of Tumblr's demise? That's hard to say – after all, LiveJournal remained an active, thriving place for years after the Strikethrough debacle. Also – and perhaps this is a little selfish – but if all those toxic people are going to demand a home on the web somewhere, it would be kind of nice if they'd contain themselves to a well-defined entity like Tumblr. What it has brought home for me, though, is that if I want the kind of place where I can squee about my favourite shows or follow well-reasoned discussion, I can still have that – but I have to seek it out and create that space for myself. So, that's kind of what I'm hoping to do here.