but others endure. Each new blog marked a new project: excerpts from literature I loved, frustrated rants about the hardcore punk scene I was sort of in, screenshots of text conversations that were just too personal to go elsewhere. Like the boxes of letters, photos, and other personal archives under my bed, tumblr curates my passions and transformations. Now, my primary blog is too attached to a public early-20-something self, it is too exposing, not the tumblr self I am now. And yet this blog “follows” other blogs, this younger me, not the me in one of my active secondary blogs. I wish I could swap which blog is my primary.
–Natalie
I was introduced to tumblr when I mentored a group of teenage girls in my youth group in 2008. My main blog is the most respectable of the lot, but then one day I got bored and stopped updating it. But this “old life” still haunts me every time I open my tumblr mobile app, because my main blog is still linked to another twenty-three side blogs. Where I post depends on my mood in the moment. In one, I diary my grief from missing my sister; in another, I curate pretty pictures based on themes (fluffy birds, clouds at sunset, anime foods); still others are memory capsules, like the time I made a post every day for a month as a gift to a friend. Fingers crossed I never lose my phone and have my tumblr lives exposed.
–Crystal
Introduction: tumblr, with a small t
tumblr makes me want to have drinks with people I have never met and Facebook makes me want to throw drinks at people I already know.
(Unknown)
This is a meme that made rounds on tumblr, gathering affirmations from people across different user groups and communities. Fans, queers, “snowflakes,” sex workers, “horny people,” teenage girls with flawless aesthetics, writers, artists: they all seemed to agree, that tumblr is very different from Facebook – and much, much better. The vernacular positioning of tumblr within the social media ecology did not stop at comparisons with Facebook. Another popular meme that has circulated on tumblr at various points in time is a still from the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club, where the five main characters – described in the film as: “a brain … and an athlete … and a basket case … a princess … and a criminal” – were labeled as LinkedIn, Facebook, tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter respectively. tumblr, unsurprisingly for anyone who has ever spent time on the platform, was cast as the basket case of the group.
These comparisons were not merely vernacular. In an early interview with the New York Sun (Martin 2007), tumblr’s then 21-year-old “boy wonder,” founder David Karp, rejected the comparison between both himself and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and the two social media platforms (David’s Log 2008). Karp was cited as saying that it is “lame” when your online experience ends with Facebook, which “really falls short [as a] space on the Web to identify you.” In the same breath, he also called YouTube “a miserable social experience” (Martin 2007). These little glimpses into popular and corporate imaginaries of tumblr open up our discussion of what tumblr is, how it works, and why so many people consider(ed) it special. We start with a journey through tumblr’s history and ownership.
History, ownership, and vision
tumblr was launched in February 2007. In March, the press was calling it “delightfully simple,” “blazingly fast,” and “microblogging done right” (Lowensohn 2007). By the end of the year, US$750,000 had been invested in it and trade blogs called it “the darling of the New York startup scene” (Martin 2007). In the thirteen years since, tumblr has consistently had more active users than Twitter, Snapchat, Baidu, or LinkedIn. During its first months of operation, tumblr gained 75,000 users. By 2012, this number was approximately 147 million, doubling in 2013, doubling again to 594 million in 2017, and growing to 624 million in 2018 (Roser et al. 2020). But then, this figure suddenly plummeted to just 370 million in the first months after the NSFW (Not Safe For Work) ban (see Chapter 1) that went into effect in the final weeks of 2018 (Armstrong 2019). In the global ranking of leading social media platforms (Roser et al. 2020), tumblr was usually ranked fourth to sixth from 2013 to 2018 (although different reports have different numbers and rankings, so these statistics should be taken with a grain of salt). Beyond user numbers, tumblr has always boasted impressive user engagement metrics: it had enviable retention rates – 85 percent of the blogs on the platform updated regularly (Dannen 2009) – and was consistently reported to exceed other platforms in terms of time spent on the site (Perez 2013; Ratcliff 2014).
But statistics have limited usefulness when it comes to really understanding tumblr and its significance. There is even a tumblr meme that argues this point. It started in 2013, when a tumblr user commented on a broadly circulated myth that an average person swallows eight spiders a year, saying that the factoid is based on a statistical error, because “an average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in a cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier and should not have been counted.” The post’s popularity led to the setting up of a Spiders-Georg tumblr blog (Knowyourmeme 2020a), and became memorialized as the “statistical error” meme (memedocumentation 2017). In 2015, a now-deactivated blog posted: “according to USA Today, the average tumblr user spends 2.5 hours a month on tumblr,” accompanied with a GIF of actress Mila Kunis laughing hysterically. This was reblogged with the statistical error meme, with added text that read “the average person spends 0 hours per month. We Georg, who live in caves & spend over 23 hours on tumblr each day, are outliers and should not have been counted.” To say the sentiment resonated with tumblr users would be an understatement. The post has 1,159,527 “notes” (likes and reblogs) at the time of writing.
Most social media platforms are owned by private corporations, which inevitably serve corporate and not public interests, even when governed by laws and regulations. Platform owners’ vision and governance choices often have profound, if unplanned, social, political, and cultural implications. We can recall highly publicized examples, such as Facebook and Cambridge Analytica’s impact on the results of the 2016 US general election and the UK Brexit vote (Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison 2018), or the role that fake news on WhatsApp – owned by Facebook as of 2014 – played in the Brazilian 2018 elections (Pereira and Bojczuk 2018). Similarly, it matters when tumblr suddenly bans NSFW content, as it did in 2018.
By tracking changes in platform ownership, we can trace the “power relationships” and identify “how institutional structures control social enactment” (van Dijck 2013: 37–9). Directly linked to ownership is the owners’ and other stakeholders’ vision for the platform, as well as the public image it has among various constituencies – most notably, marketers, advertisers, end users, and trade presses. A platform’s vision “involves its purpose, target user base and scenarios of use,” and explicitly communicates what the platform “is supposed to do and, by extension, implies how it can be used and by whom” (Light et al. 2018: 889). In this section, we identify three phases in tumblr’s vision, guided by changes in ownership. We review tumblr when it was an independent company (2007–12), when it was owned by Yahoo! and the corporations that subsequently bought it (2013–18), and, finally, when it was most recently sold to Automattic (2019–time of writing). While there is not yet evidence that Automattic will run tumblr differently from Yahoo!, the separation is based on the cultural imaginary of Yahoo! having “ruined” tumblr. We will come back to this shortly.
A brief note. You might have noticed that we do not capitalize the word “tumblr.” We use the small “t” when we talk about tumblr as a social experience and a platform, and capitalize it when we discuss “Tumblr Inc.,” the company that developed it. The small “t” is folkloric. It reflects how people across our personal and research experiences have referred to the platform since its inception. This preference for a lower-case “t,” in turn, reflects the developers’ design choices. tumblr’s logo and app icon have both always used lowercase
