Ode to Tumblr: Why this Hellsite is the Future of Social Media
The year is 2014. The Ebola outbreak reached new heights globally. Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared over the Indian Ocean. Tumblr was at the peak of its popularity and relevance. Everyone who was anyone had a blog on Tumblr. The social media platform seemed to be headed on a very successful and profitable upward trajectory. Yet, after multiple changes in leadership and ownership plus the infamous 2018 pornography ban, Tumblr was a barren wasteland by the end of 2018. Of all the things to come out of 2022, the resurgence of Tumblr wasn’t on anyone’s BINGO card. Yet, surprisingly, here we are. Tumblr is miraculously finding its place in society once again, and it couldn’t have chosen a better time to return. As the world of social media becomes increasingly more difficult to navigate, both mentally and physically, Tumblr’s return might just be what the online world needs to regain some sanity.
Founder David Karp established Tumblr in 2007 with the aim of creating a platform that wasn’t like anything the world had seen before. He wanted to create a blog that was more interactive than Wordpress, a social media platform that had more text than twitter but was cooler than Facebook. Thus, at just 20 years old, Karp created Tumblr. Teens caught on pretty quickly. Early 2010 saw Tumblr landing 100 million impressions a month, it had reached 3 billion by the end of the year. It was the next big thing in popular culture and everyone wanted a piece of it. Tumblr made a name for itself as the home of weirdos, outcasts, and anyone who wanted to see more than just shallow influencers, diet pill cash grab ads, and senseless trolling on their feed. As a blog based social media platform, Tumblr allowed users to post anything and everything they wanted. Selfies and swimsuit shots from some famous person’s latest island getaway weren’t valuable to users, gifs and fan art were. Tumblr thrived off of anonymity, you could be absolutely anyone, or anything on Tumblr. There wasn’t any pressure to appear or act a certain way, everyone was allowed to be their weird selves and the algorithm rewarded that. Tumblr brought obscure fandoms into the lime light and saved dying television shows. It was a platform for self-expression, first and foremost. Tumblr never underestimated the power of being different, of being yourself, and, for a while, it thrived on that openness. Karp sold the platform to Yahoo! in 2013 for a whopping $1.1 billion. At the time it seemed like a great investment, and it was, for a while, but the road ahead for Tumblr was far bumpier than anyone could have imagined.
If you were to speak to any longtime user of Tumblr, they’d tell you that 2014 Tumblr was unhinged, lawless, anarchic, and so much fun. That year saw the creation of posts that were impossibly wholesome, incredibly deranged, and some that were just really cool. 2014 Tumblr was a beacon for free self-expression. People of all different backgrounds, creeds, ages, sexualites, races, gender-expressions, and fandoms could find a little corner of Tumblr to call home. The general public tends to remember the ‘2014 Tumblr Girl’ aesthetic best from this era. A soft grunge aesthetic consisting largely of purposely ripped sheer tights, black nail polish, Dr. Martens, skater skirts, and Skullcandy headphones blasting Lorde, Marina and the Diamonds, The 1975, and Arctic Monkeys. This look defined a generation of high schoolers and remains one of Tumblr’s main claims to fame.
In 2016 Tumblr began to experience some loss in revenue, it’s not quite clear as to why this occurred but the rise of other social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter likely had a bit to do with it. That, coupled with the world climate at the time, much of it relating to the election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States— well it’s easy to see that Tumblr’s free and expressive motto didn’t exactly fit in anymore. On December 17, 2018 chief executive Jeff D’Onofrio banned pornographic images, videos, gifs, and illustrations. The infamous Tumblr adult content ban, as I like to refer to it, was the final straw for its livelihood. Once a paragon of self exploration and discovery, the adult content ban took away much of the freedom users enjoyed. Hundreds of thousands of blogs were shut down as a result of the ban and even more users left due to it. Years of failing to generate ad revenue coupled with the ban caused Verizon, the owners of Yahoo! at the time, to sell Tumblr to Wordpress for an abysmal $3 million in 2019. Since then, the website has been virtually unchanged, merely existing in the ether of the internet, housing only those who dare to go near it.
For the users like me, who’ve remained active on the platform through its untimely demise, it’s been a peaceful, happy space. These last couple of years— besides the usual award show nights, frustrating decisions made by world leaders, and the menace that is Supernatural— the trending page for Tumblr has been all rainbows and kittens. However, recently the website has experienced a sudden and dramatic uptake in their number of users— with the majority of new users being Gen Z, the demographic Facebook and Instagram are currently losing. This sudden and strange rise in popularity can be attributed to Tiktok. Gen Z Tiktokers have been promoting ‘tumblrcore,’ a revival of the 2014 Tumblr Girl aesthetic and a return to the carefree, expressive nature of Tumblr. The millions of videos and views under the Tiktok hashtags #2014tumblr and #tumblr2014 paired with Tumblr experiencing a 55% revenue increase since July 2021, predict a not so dark future for the microblogging website.
Tumblr is fully and genuinely unlike any other social media platform out there right now. Its basicness and refusal to evolve with the times have allowed it to stay true to itself and its original function. It’s a blog and it isn’t trying to be anything else. Tumblr’s algorithm is so archaic and random that it’s impossible for anyone to become famous off of it. There are no influencers clogging the feed with ads upon ads of hair growth gummies and diet pills. Any post can become infamous within hours. There’s less pressure to be gorgeous or have an interesting life or be super rich. In fact, there’s absolutely no pressure in even being yourself. Tumblr is one of the last social media platforms to allow its users to be completely anonymous. Most people don’t use their full names in their blog titles and most people never post pictures of themselves on their blogs. And no one cares. There is power in images, jokes, quotes, videos, audios etc. on Tumblr, but there is little power in being perfect. That’s what’s always drawn young, curious, free thinkers to the platform; evidently young people need it more now than ever.
This could all just be a fluke, a random increase in popularity that will inevitably end in the website’s demise, once again. Yet, I’d like to believe that this upward trend for the website will only continue, and it’ll one day be in the big leagues with Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook once again. The world needs a place as wholesome and weird as Tumblr. A place where users can escape the taxing toxicity of real life and just blow off steam.
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