Tumblr - The Social Media Platform Everyone Used Incorrectly, and How This Has Impacted Mental Health World Wide
A bit of a clickbait-y title, but one that is completely true, and an article we should have written long ago.
Tumblr is a form of tumblog.
Tumblr did not invent this form of blogging, called tumblogging, a form of short, multimedia blog posts. Twitter is a form of tumblog, as is Wordpress. It is generally a public, more casual form of blogging than previous formats such as livejournal and dreamwidth.
Tumblogging, however, was popularized by Tumblr, whose name is obviously inspired by the original term. Tumblr’s company set out to create a platform where an artist’s original content could easily be shared and spread. The entire website’s design and code ethics are primarily built to help spread someone’s content far and wide, much farther than was previously possible on the internet. It worked by promoting your content to others who might like it, allowing you to tag it for finding in a search engine, and for your fans to easily share it with others. All without the trouble of having to save images to your hard drive and repost elsewhere. This was like something never before seen on the internet -- effortless boosting of your work.
And Tumblr still functions, and sets out to function, for this sole purpose. Tumblr’s design ethics have always been focused on promoting artwork and artists. It’s login screen shows artwork from promoted artists, the dashboard is suggesting new artists you might like, and there’s no privacy features to speak of. I mean, why would there be? This isn’t facebook.
But, if you are like any other user, you know that tumblr isn’t just use to promote artists. If you were like our mods, you long used tumblr as a sort of personal -- yet public -- diary. Even like an instant messaging platform. And if you’ve been here a while, you remember how much of a struggle it was -- and still is, to get the tumblr staff to acknowledge how people Actually use the website. We had to use extension, and still do, in order to make the website bend to our will -- to make it function how *we* wanted it to function.
But Tumblr was never meant to function how we wanted it to function.
Discourse. We’ve all seen it, and unless your mutuals are the ones making the discourse, then the posts you’ve seen on your dashboard have likely piled on tens of thousands of notes in the span of a few days. That’s exactly what the platform was meant to do -- boost posts.
But no one in the tumblr staff expected it to be a weapon of political war.
If you have an opinion, and you post it on tumblr, how much it’s seen by other people is directly correlated to how many followers you have to begin with. Even tagging it doesn’t really help. Post an opinion that is as well planned and thought out as one with 10k notes? If you only have 5 followers, it doesn’t matter. Your words are essentially meaningless without the sheer numbers required to get it airborne.
So on this platform, no matter your opinion, if you have the follower-base, you will be heard. That’s what this platform is for.
Or, say, you make a post. A deeply, personal post. On a sideblog with 2 followers. And someone manages to find this blog... and reblogs a post to their blog with 5000 followers... one you meticulously tagged #do not reblog.
It’s now being seen by 5k+ people. All at once. No matter if their followers think it was messed up that they reblogged you. They’ve seen it. There’s no unseeing your personal, private post. Even if that person apologizes for reblogging it and deletes the reblog. But there is no undoing that reblog. People have seen it. It will always be seen.
There is no true privacy features on tumblr to speak of. Nothing to the depths and levels of livejournal, and now even twitter has far more robust privacy features than tumblr. An yet... Tumblr’s users expect privacy, because they expect the entire world to be good just for them, to respect their privacy... and if they don’t, it’s not the fault of the person who posted these things on a website built from the ground up for the publication of content, not the opposite.
And this has had dire consequences.
While of course there are many adults using tumblr, adults who have had the experience of the internet before tumblr -- a time when privacy was something we acknowledged was personal responsibility, and there were websites with intensive privacy features such as livejournal if we wished to speak privately -- we must keep in mind that many of tumblr’s users, are in fact *not* adults. People who have grown up where tumblr was their first major social media site. Even people who their first friends were made on tumblr.
People whose entire worldly experience of socializing is a website where there is no true privacy. People who have never known that there is any alternative.
And I feel this is where a lot of anti-sjw discourse or ex-sjw discourse falls flat. Many people, most of these being adults, do not stop to think what of an astounding impact this website and its blogging format is having on young minds still forming. They chide them for being stupid and not knowing better -- but how could they know any better?
How could they know any better when their introduction to the world’s social stage was a website where no one can expect true privacy, and not only that, users actively deny it to each other?
I’ve seen popular blogs reblog posts from private blogs without their permission because they, in their minds, thought they were doing the right thing. That because this post contained something they disagreed with, they were allowed to go against their morals for the greater good.
Tumblr’s youth have built a surveillance culture.
A culture where trespassing into other’s personal space is deemed as holy and pure because of some other reason they could have possibly just made up. And many children here don’t know that there is any other alternative.
Back when facebook was new, it was heavily criticized for the increasing information it demanded from its users. Personal information that you would not give to a stranger on the street. And back then, people laughed it off. Of course facebook wouldn’t go very far, demanding such personal information from its users. People were smarter than that... right?
Fast forward half a decade later. I’m remaking my facebook account, because one day I accidentally logged out, and when I tried to log back in, facebook decided to permanently lock my account unless I coughed up my social security number so they can prove I was a real person.
My social security number. One of the most vital and personal pieces of information I have. To a website, who demanded it so I could continue to speak to my family members online, because facebook had become the only place I could easily contact them. And when I told my family about this, they had just shrugged and said facebook had done the same to them, and they just complied.
But at least facebook doesn’t demand a list of every single one of my mental illness diagnoses, my genetic racial makeup, my sexuality and gender identity, my opinions... in order to feel safe from other users while using its website.
Tumblr’s youth expects you to carry a detailed form of ID to even be allowed to form an opinion on specific topics. Tumblr’s youth tells you that privacy is of utmost importance -- unless you say something that upsets them. Then you’re free game.
Most of this could have been avoided if Tumblr had had privacy features built in from the get go.
But most of this could also have been avoided if people had realized the Tumblr staff’s main goal with the website from the beginning.
