
The secret lives of Tumblr teens - davidiach
https://newrepublic.com/article/129002/secret-lives-tumblr-teens?curator=MediaREDEF
======
noelwelsh
I found the discussion of the culture of Tumblr interesting, but I was left
wondering more about the broken business model of Tumblr. They really don't
seem to want to share with their influential users the value they generate.
The lack of transparency into Tumblr's actions would also be worrying to me if
I was involved in the platform. Watching Twitter drop the ball in similar ways
makes me think there is a market opportunity for a social network that gives
its users basic rights that we demand in our offline world. I'm growing more
to like the "social network at a utility" model that I believe some in Twitter
unsuccessfully argued for in its earlier days.

~~~
michaelwww
Tumblr treated it's users very poorly in my opinion. They deleted popular
blogs with no warning and no recourse. At least give the teens a chance to
align themselves with the terms of service by issuing a warning first. It
makes me wonder what Tumblrs real motivation was. If hosting blogs that bring
fun and interest to the lives of millions of teenagers is not part of their
business model, then what is it?

~~~
adamwong246
I think you can blame Yahoo for that. Didn't that fallout occur right after
tumblr was bought by yahoo?

~~~
leppr
A few months later yes, after they kept repeating how " _nothing is going to
change for the users_ ". Made me truly grok how talk from a big company is
just that, PR, while any sensible person could have guessed what was going to
happen at the mere sound of "billion" and "dollar" in the same sentence.

~~~
chrstphrhrt
Given how badly Yahoo seems to be doing financially, and considering other
high profile "failures" like Parse being shut down by Facebook and Apple being
challenged by the state: I wonder whether these big companies can continue to
extract rents after open sourcing and retrofitting everything with
decentralised protocols, encryption etc.

That seems like a preferable direction from a consumer point of view than
forcing society to rebuild everything from scratch, despite the fact that
things like GitLab, blockchain and p2p social networks are not inherently
inferior. Adoption is hard. "Charity" is the same as PR, so there might be
more side benefit than the original speculators hoped for with the failed
centralised business models by opening up and decentralising.

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mulle_nat
I like this quote from the article:

"At first you loathe the teens, because you know nothing about them and think
they’re idiots, beneath you. Then you love the teens because you figure out
they are smarter than you, and you make peace with the death of your cultural
relevance, because you know you’ll be in good hands. Finally, you recognize
the shape of the adults they’ll become, corrupted by money and vanity and
hubris just like everyone else."

And so the world goes 'round.

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adamwong246
I think tumblr excels because, lacking a front page like reddit, the user's
that hate each other never interact. And I'm increasingly sure that this is
the only method for obtaining non-dysfunctional societies online- non-
overlapping tribes of users. Why should the subscribers of /r/stormfront try
to coexist with /r/BlackLivesMatter? It's like trying to house wolves and
sheep in the same pen. Give each their own echo chamber.

~~~
listic
I thought that Reddit has originally solved the problem of tuning each user's
front page to their own tastes. Have I misremembered?

~~~
adamwong246
Yeah, you can tune the front page. But it's filled with popular subreddits by
default. You'd have to opt-out of the frontpage by manually pruning your
settings.

~~~
aikah
pro tip:

click on
[https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/](https://www.reddit.com/subreddits/)

then open the console in your browser and type this :

    
    
         setInterval("$('a.option.active.remove.login-required').first().click()",400)
    

I didn't find the option to remove all default subscriptions at once in the
settings, it might exist though. setInterval is needed because for some
reasons ajax communication is throttled by reddit.

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JulianMorrison
I have a feeling nobody really understands Tumblr (definitely not its own
staff). Of all the social networks, it's the absolute champion at connecting
you to people who think alike. So for you, whoever you are, Tumblr will be a
particular thing. And it won't be a bit like that for the person next door.
Every variation of "Tumblr is full of ..." just lays bare who it is you choose
to find and follow.

~~~
riffraff
> it's the absolute champion at connecting you to people who think alike. So
> for you, whoever you are, Tumblr will be a particular thing

While this might be true, I believe tumblr definitely has a shared culture.

I am saying this based on me setting up a dozen different tumblr accounts for
testing stuff and seeing a lot of similar stuff over and over.

E.g. I am a straight male but the amount of gender identity/LGBTQIA content
seems a lot more than elsewhere, presumably because of the "a lot of anonymous
teenagers" user base.

~~~
JulianMorrison
It connects you to people who think like you. Not necessarily to people who
are identical to you. You evidently follow people who follow people who
support trans and queer politics. If you followed Trump supporters, or, I
dunno, people into knitting or SCUBA, you'd get a different mix.

~~~
riffraff
I failed to express myself: I meant that I setup a lot of accounts but I am
not using them actively, so mostly they are just setup with random stuff, yet
the sort of things that comes out is quite homogeneous.

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kdamken
Didn't read the article yet, but whoever designed/coded the styling on this
page deserves a gold star. The parallax was smooth and really cool.

~~~
yoodenvranx
Scrolling this article on my Motorola Moto G2 was an absolutely non-smooth
experience.

~~~
kdamken
Yeah mobile and parallax are usually bad news bears. I'm surprised they didn't
have a simpler version for it.

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Outdoorsman
Teens need a "hangout"...some place to be themselves, away from adults, with
like-minded friends...a place where they are "understood"...

There's nothing wrong with that...it's been a need for that age group for
centuries...

Let them breathe...

~~~
mason240
Actually, this third stage of life between childhood and adulthood is new
phenomenon.

(Broad generalization incoming) Before the industrial revolution, teens would
have spent most of their time around adults (like their parents), and very
little time exclusively around people their own age.

~~~
Outdoorsman
Good point...

Populations were distributed more broadly...kids were expected to work at a
younger age...no phone or Internet...apprenticeships at a young age were
common...

I guess they still had a few other opportunities...school, picnics, sports,
swimming down at the creek, church, civic youth groups, summer camp, etc...

~~~
carlob
> I guess they still had a few other opportunities...school, picnics, sports,
> swimming down at the creek, church, civic youth groups, summer camp, etc...

Most of these are also pretty modern things. Long education and leisure time
did not exist for most people until somewhere around ons hundred years ago,
depending on where you lived. Stuff like boy scouts was not invented until the
beginning of the 20th century and it took time for them to become popular
across social classes.

Some historian argue that even childhood is a modern invention.

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danso
One of the best articles I've read about modern Internet culture I've read in
a long while. I enjoyed Tumblr as a place to post photos...I've stopped using
it but I'm glad I at least tried it because I don't think there's any other
way to understand Tumblr than to just jump in and use it. This article
reminded me of the kinds of articles that were written when the Web was new,
about teens making worldwide reputations and untold thousands of dollars doing
some nichey tech thing while their parents were completely unawares.

Good to know that kind of thing can still exist in today's Facebooked world.

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shortformblog
This reminded me of both the amazingness of the culture of Tumblr and a lot of
the reasons about why I left. I could create useful, informative, viral things
there, but there was no way I could make a decent amount of income on the
large amount of work I was putting in.

I never went so far as to do any of the things mentioned in here—no raspberry
ketone treatments ever came from ShortFormBlog—but the closest I got was a
one-time sponsored post deal I did with Federated Media. That was nice—and the
advertiser was also legitimate and high-profile—but it was just a one-time
thing.

By choosing for years not to do anything to help creators make money off their
websites, Tumblr created a situation where some of their best users did
questionable things just to make money from their websites. It's too bad—had
Tumblr been more decisive, it could have been a YouTube-type
situation—allowing both them and their users to make lasting revenue.

~~~
wyclif
If your goal is to make money, you're much better off with a blog where you
own the content than you are with Tumblr.

~~~
shortformblog
One thing I'll say is that on Tumblr, you don't give up ownership of the
content, you just give them the right to reproduce it anywhere. So you don't
lose ownership; you allow virality.

But that said, I agree that building your own way is the better route. It took
me a while to get to that point, admittedly. But you have to remember as well
that Tumblr offers something that's really hard to get in other places without
a lot of work: A way to quickly build an audience.

Now I'm not saying that I was completely in this to get paid—I also wanted to
have something I could point to in interviews and say, "hey, this is what I do
with my free time." (That part of the equation worked, by the way.)

But the thing is, ShortFormBlog would've never survived without Tumblr. It
dealt with short, blurby pieces of news—perfect in length for Tumblr, but not
something with a long lifespan. So building SEO was a no-go, and it was hard
to build an audience outside of Tumblr with a strategy like that.

My current website and newsletter where I build stuff is way more focused on
evergreen stuff—and it offers a lot of the creativity that Tumblr did for me,
but on a smaller scale. I'm happier with the result—I don't feel like I'm
building stuff just to get a bajillion likes or reblogs anymore, but instead
things that make sense as creative projects.

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mozumder
Tumblr always seemed to me like IRC in the 90's or BBS's in the 80's. It
exists as its own subculture. It's not influentially creative - there's very
original works - but just exists as more of a commentary subculture.

~~~
mozumder
^ meant to type 'very little original works'

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davidu
This was a surprisingly good overview of the very complicated and nuanced site
that is tumblr.

~~~
ultimatejman
Completely agree. I have tried to use tumblr on so many occassions, but have
poked around for a while, become overwhelmed and gone back to reddit or
similar..

~~~
davidu
I didn't mean tumblr is complicated, I meant explaining what tumblr means for
people is complicated. It's the ultimate long tail site which means it serves
very different purposes for different groups of people.

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listic
I feel like I don't understand social networks, Tumblr included, at all.
Having had Tumblr account since way back doesn't help.

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drhayes9
Pretty sure some federated social network is gonna win. Enclaves that are run
by some tech-minded friend like BBSes, I dunno.

~~~
aikah
I was thinking about a decentralized social network. Syndication is easy ( RSS
) , communication between 2 websites in a secure way is tougher (ping backs?).
RSS + ping backs + openid, open techs should be enough to setup a network or
websites without a central authority. Obviously it's neither in Facebook,
Twitter or Google's interest since they want people to visit their website in
order to build an audience. But the tech is there.

~~~
drhayes9
Yeah, absolutely. I think you could do a circle of trust thing with other
networks so that if A trusts B and B trusts C then messages could flow from A
to C and back again. That could mitigate the pingback spam problem: not just
anybody could pingback, they have to be trusted. And if your enclave gets too
big then you can splinter it out and web it back together.

If it's small enough it could sneak under the free limits of most PaaSes. And
despite needing some kind of techy admin I think the shibboleth thing could
provide a layer of cool needed to sell the thing.

Not that I think this could make money. ( =

~~~
detaro
You (or the GP) might be interested the Vouch extension for Webmentions:
[http://indiewebcamp.com/vouch](http://indiewebcamp.com/vouch), and the
indieweb ideas in general.

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MBlume
As a friend of many of the people in the original thread, I find it hilarious
that the New Republic assumes they're all 'teens', especially when one has an
icon in which he's holding his child.

