FuckYeahTumblrBlogs: Reflecting on an Internet Relic
Words by Bridget Scott (she/her)
CW: Mentions of paedophilia
The first time I logged onto Tumblr was June 2015. I was fourteen, and the infamous microblogging site was characteristically overrun with memes about fleeing a dinner date with bad opinions, while shoving breadsticks into your purse to go.
Founded in 2007, Tumblr’s popularity peaked in early 2014 with over 100 million posts created daily. Standing in sharp contrast to the curated personal brands dominating today’s social media landscape, the largely anonymous and non-monetized platform allowed subcultures and fandoms to flourish.
Brooke Kinajil-Moran has a passion for cricket and between 2014 and 2016, she accumulated 700 followers on her blog @nzcricket. While attending an all-girls high school she found her mates weren’t interested in the sport and boys assumed she didn’t know anything. Watching Blackcaps’ games alone at the Basin Reserve was alienating and “the fact [she is] an Asian woman” caused people to assume she was dating a player, despite still being a teenager. Tumblr provided an alternative community when real life failed. She shared team updates, cross-posted social media content, and live blogged games, eventually finding around five solid friends to discuss the sport with and occasionally attend matches with. For Brooke, the blog gave her people that “liked what you had to say and listened.”
According to Senior Lecturer of Media Studies, Dr Michael Daubs, Tumblr uniquely lends itself to community. Blogs are easily customisable and when individual posts are shared, the whole post has to be copied to respond—making individual conversations easily viewable and contributable across whole fandoms. Additionally, Tumblr was and remains largely uninterrupted by algorithms: the dashboard shows posts in chronological order and requires users to seek out new content by actively searching across blogs, followers, and hashtags.
As a result, thousands of subcultures blossomed, each with their own hierarchies and celebrities. For some, like third-year student Kate, this allowed Tumblr to function as a public diary: a quiet corner of the internet away from real world stressors. Despite joining the website as a Swiftie, she never sought or really accumulated followers. Instead, Tumblr was a place where all her interests could converge. Taylor Swift, dystopian YA moodboards, therapised essays on empathy, and shitposting all sat alongside one another, without any pressure to homogenise her interests for the palatability of an audience. As one popular textpost reads: “This blog is not a well curated museum. It’s my bedroom and I’m putting things on my shelf and taping things on the wall.” To this day only one person in Kate’s life knows her handle.
Others however, became bonafide celebrities.
Melanie Bracewell is one of Aotearoa’s premier comedians. A writer on Wellington Paranormal, a regular 7 Days panellist and an award-winning stand-up, she was first famous on Tumblr. Known for absurdist textpost humour, her blog @meladoodle amassed over 200,000 followers, at its most popular between 2013 and 2016, and continues to accumulate hundreds of post likes and regular asks from fans to this day. For Melanie, Tumblr required sifting through “black and white photos of scene girls holding flowers” until she discovered textpost bloggers that signified that “[she] was in the right place”. However, reaching the coveted status of Tumblr Famous is a mixed bag. She describes the experience as “surreal” and “a very special thing at the time. I wasn't super popular in school but I could go home and get online and people cared what I had to say.”
But Tumblr is also renowned for intense stan culture and the site imposes almost no consequences for users harassing others anonymously—even without an associated user name. This made Melanie’s online popularity simultaneously “scary” as “people sending anonymous messages were full on and I had to get a thick skin quite quickly.” Brooke reports a similar experience from the other side of the ask box. She began to feel disconnected from the cricket community as other members became “invested in players’ personal lives to a degree that was a little too celebrity culture and disproportionate to the fame they were experiencing.” Eventually becoming “uncomfortable” with the fascination over players’ private lives, she deleted the blog.
The lack of accountability built into Tumblr’s structure allowed massive amounts of toxic content to take hold alongside the fandoms, activists, and rebloggers. One astounding example was the ability to repost another person’s content, edit it completely, and still present it as though written by the original account. This feature was only removed in 2015, after a notorious post made by YA author John Green was edited to appear that he’d penned a 125-word soliloquy on the joys of performing blowjobs to his mostly teenage followers.
In 2018 Tumblr announced a new set of content standards officially banning adult content. Defined by the platform as “Photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life (or photorealistic) human genitals and any content […] that depicts sex acts”. The ban was extremely poorly received.
To users’ furore, the ban was wider than what could reasonably be described as adult content. Queer, body positive, and artistic content were all blacklisted or wiped from the platform by overzealous censors. Furthermore, Tumblr’s historic refusal to mine user data developed its reputation as an organic social media, distinguished from corporate behemoths like Facebook and Twitter. Users expected a reciprocal relationship with site administrators and were blindsided by this development that contradicted the public attitude of CEO Jeff D'Onofrio, who told The New Yorker: “We’re not telling people how to behave, not telling them what to do or how to comport themselves here.”
It was this culture that meant, until 2018, Tumblr was a key platform for sex workers to promote or engage in their work. Notably, due to the lack of algorithm, most of this content remained within the specific sub-cultures with those who had sought it out. Then overnight, massive numbers of blogs becamee only accessible to their creators, thereby stripping sex workers’ abilities to generate income.
For sex workers, social media censorship poses a massive threat to the ability to preserve their sense of wellbeing and safety. Spokesperson for the New Zealand Prostitutes Collective, Cherida Fraser, noted that the one of the benefits of Aotearoa’s decriminalised model of sex work is that it gives workers choices, so if one mode of work doesn’t feel comfortable or safe, they aren’t cut off from opportunities to generate income. Just as important are sex workers abilities to access community. When sex work blogs are banned other workers lose access to specialised knowledge and the ability to “work together, just like any other worker: by bouncing ideas, chitchat and support,” a key method of preventing isolation and loneliness. As a result, the banning of online adult content created real world harm.
Following the ban, Tumblr’s user traffic dropped by 33% and by 2019 the company was sold for $3 million—a fraction of its once billion dollar valuation. Discontent and discussion brewed among bloggers and the company became eager to grow their user base.
Dr Daubs describes how white supremacists saw the opportunity to hijack user discord to spread alt right and conspiracy theories. The same infrastructure that allowed communities to grow allowed whole ecosystems to be corrupted by malicious actors. Hashtags on Tumblr are specific and were used to help groups find, define, and distinguish between each other. But they were just hashtags—anyone could contribute or join them, and private blogs were rarely employed on the site. Mobilised on 4Chan, white supremacists spammed threads about social justice and feminism with massive amounts of hate speech, that was amplified with every reblog, even if the reblog was intended to be innocuous.
Tumblr’s terms of service bans hate speech, but the relative difficulty distinguishing a political post from one perpetuating alt right ideologies is a difficult one. This is especially true when moderation decisions are made by algorithms or people who are given as little as ten seconds to judge content legitimacy. Additionally, the same overzealous censorship applied to adult content has been weaponised against minority voices. Malicious outside actors invade threads, reporting reasonable posts that are automatically flagged as offensive and removed from the site—leaving communities to fight to share their message. Executive management of the platform has remained stuck, turning a blind eye to censorship inequalities and freedom of speech abuses ever since.
In 2022, 9.4 million Tumblr posts are made daily. Unlike some have assumed, the site has not yet eroded into obsoletion. The platform is seeing the spark of new users: first-year student Harry joined the site after being unexpectedly entertained by the bizarre, out of pocket screenshots posted on r/tumblr and deciding to explore further. In fact, nostalgia for a simpler, pre-pandemic age has driven a pop tumblr renaissance. Consider: Olivia Rodrigo’s good4u video, Tiktok mood boards, K-pop fandoms, and Grimes reading Karl Marx as iconic moments with roots in Tumblr culture.
At this stage though, the era represented by the platform is more popular than the website itself. Searching for “Tumblr 2014” on TikTok reveals thousands of videos with hundreds of millions of views. Whether driven by those hitting their mid-twenties romanticising their youth or today’s teens looking for inspiration in unlikely places, the “tumblrcore” aesthetic has become firmly entrenched. Thankfully, the term ‘SuperWhoLock’ remains conspicuously absent.
For the few who never left, Tumblr remains a special corner of the internet. Melanie Bracewell describes it as “microclimate” where “[t]he only people on there now just genuinely want to blog, not fight for fame.” Time will reveal how the site’s resilience evolves for the next generation.