The blogging platform used to be amazing. Now, it looks doomed.
Take it from an old-timer: Tumblr ain’t what it used to be, especially where the politics community is concerned. I wrote about it for The Week.
In the early days, Tumblr worked a bit differently than it does now. There was a list of maybe 30 or 40 prioritized categories, or tags — topics like art, music, travel, books, food, and politics. In the latter was where I made my home. For a while each tag had a weekly election of sorts where you’d solicit votes from your followers to move up in that week’s rankings. If you got lots of votes (and I estimate “lots” as a double- or, at most, triple-digit number, at least in the politics community), your blog would be featured at the top of that tag’s list of topically relevant accounts, called the directory. The stakes were high, because directories were shown to every new user.
I played the directory game well, and my follower count began to snowball. It helped that I’m a libertarian: Tumblr’s political scene has always skewed very far to the left, so I stood out. I picked up follows from libertarians, anyone right of center, and those in the pro-civil liberties, anti-war progressive crowd who could stomach our differences on economics.
The directory system was eventually shut down and a new center for Tumblr’s political community (as well as those 40-ish other tags) was introduced. It was a feed of hand-curated content, with about a dozen rotating editor positions assigned to prominent users by Tumblr staff. This system was oddly personal and aristocratic and engendered a fair bit of complaint, but it served with some success as a common space for each curated tag’s community. I was an editor for several months and enjoyed it.
That’s all gone now. There’s no more directory or curated tags. There’s no center to the politics community at all. Well-intended functionality changes have made in-depth conversation and debate more difficult. Nearly all the well-known political bloggers have deactivated or abandoned their accounts.
On a larger scale, corporate buyouts — Tumblr by Yahoo in 2013 and Yahoo by Verizon in 2017 — have been poorly received by users. Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer promised “not to screw it up,” but consensus holds that Tumblr did indeed get screwed.
Tumblr has always held its data close, so this is speculative, but I’d estimate a majority of blogs on the network are defunct or close to it. (I personally maintain a single active blog while sitting on four inactive ones I have no intention of reviving or shuttering.) External analytics indicate user growth, traffic, and creation of new posts are all way down. The total blog count keeps rising, but what good is that if half or more are deserted?
Read the rest here.
