
In 2018, Tumblr Is a Joyless Black Hole - Tiktaalik
https://kotaku.com/in-2018-tumblr-is-a-joyless-black-hole-1827294865
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temp-dude-87844
Despite the hyperbolic title, the article dwells into the reasons for Tumblr's
perceived and actual decline. Among them: reliance on user-generated content
being a blessing and a curse, issues around learning and navigating emergent
community etiquette, and users' eventual frustrations around discovery,
privacy, and harrassment. Some suppositions are made about management style
before and after the Yahoo acquisition, but in truth Tumblr was always buggy,
new features came out and disappeared, and reappeared with little warning, and
Yahoo's impact, aside from more ads and a different account creation flow, was
mostly in users' minds.

Ironically, the list isn't too different from issues that face other sites
based around user-generated content, like Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook.
Tumblr was the platform en vogue for many who coalesced around an interest or
an identity, for entertainment and self-exploration alike, but the same ease
of discovery that allowed Sherlock fans to find each other, or Questioning
individuals to explore LGBTQ+ communities, make now-revoked or now-offensive
posts easy to find, and make it easier for malicious actors to target, troll,
and harrass.

The pendulum is swinging back towards more closely moderated, more closed
communities, that even if they represent groups that are marginalized in the
overworld, are more homogenous around a particular set of attributes. This
migration is slowly leaving Tumblr feeling stale. Given enough time and enough
people, another platform will grow to fulfill the same social purpose that
Tumblr once did for a different generation of users, and some time later those
unhappy with that platform will migrate to somewhere more public to benefit
from greater exposure and a more diverse cavalcade of content.

~~~
mmt
> the list isn't too different from issues that face other sites based around
> user-generated content

This was what caught my attention at being remarkably non-unique:

> Another structural problem of Tumblr is that deleted blogs don’t really go
> away. Once a blog has been reblogged to someone else’s Tumblr, they are
> essentially posting it again as a copy of the original.

It's a well-aired controversy for the Web at large, including the EU's "right
to be forgotten", hardly specific to Tumblr.

It made me wonder if the article isn't more a lament that Internet discussion
forum platforms in general have failed to adapt to modern usage/expectations.

I hadn't considered the pendulum idea until you brought it up. I had merely
assumed there isn't enough moderation labor available given the increasing
number of users, but that wouldn't apply to a closed community.

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fruzz
Was on there from 2009 ~ 2016. Being queer & trans, it was the first online
social platform where I could be exposed to new narratives and interact with
others.

Previously it had been forums and YouTube, but neither felt as personal. I
ended up meeting a former partner and current one on Tumblr.

Tumblr however was hemorrhaging money. The way they commercialized it
following Yahoo's purchase discouraged trans authors: content was marked as
NSFW no matter how innocuous and no longer readily accessible to unregistered
members, tags that were used to find trans content became inundated with prn
spammers.

Nothing has really filled the gap left by Tumblr.

~~~
ihuman
> content was marked as NSFW no matter how innocuous and no longer readily
> accessible to unregistered members

Why is this a bad thing? I've seen people mentioned this before in a negative
way, but I don't understand why it hurts tumblr.

~~~
speeder
I used to read random people's tumblr, some gamedevs and whatnot had posts
there.

What tumblr did was that suddenly all "NFSW" things to US standards (that are
different from say... Japan standards), was hidden, not showing anymore on
google searches, and when trying to click random hyperlinks ending on blocked
content fairly often.

After this happened, I stopped reading tumblr, since I am not a poster, and
have no intention of ever writing in tumblr, I don't feel like going through
all the trouble of creating an account, and finding where they put the opt-in
for NFSW posts, and keep logging on every time I click on a random link that
tumblr moderation bot decided was NFSW.

I have a degree in digital animation, so I had for example tumblr block me
from a blog that contained some references about character movements, because
it featured "naked" characters (more like characters without texture genitals
and clothes, but since women boobs you can't 'delete' from a model without
changing how it works, they are always there, evne if without nipples, but in
US culture that is frowned upon and get tagged NFSW).

Or some christian blogs talking about what is sinful or not, and so on. Tumblr
differently than say... "Medium", is self styled less seriously, where people
are more casual, not a place to find academic essays, so when the content is
hidden, you can assume maybe is not worth your time going out of your way to
register in the service that you have no intention of actually using.

~~~
JackCh
> _" What tumblr did was that suddenly all "NFSW" things to US standards"_

What was honestly expected? Tumblr was an American company and they got bought
by another American company. The brand had a reputation for hardcore
pornography which was doubtlessly toxic to advertisers (most of whom are also
American companies), so expecting Yahoo to turn a blind eye just wasn't
realistic.

If you want a website moderated to the Japanese standard, you should probably
find a website run by a Japanese company that supports itself with
advertisements purchased by Japanese companies (a Japanese company in the
business of selling advertisements to American companies would probably apply
the American standard.)

------
VohuMana
My personal experience with Tumblr was weird. A friend of mine had it and
talked about all the cool friends she made on it which sounded super cool, so
I joined. From there things got real weird because in my experience the
community is very clique based. My friend wouldn't tell me her screen name
since she ranted about life in her blog and I was in there, so I just started
liking things I thought were cool and reposting. Talking to people on the
platform though became clear that the "real" Tumblr users actively despise new
users over fears that Tumblr will be come too popular or something along those
lines, this was around the time Yahoo was looking into it. Needless to say it
was a very hostile community and I ended up leaving after 2 weeks.

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duckerude
Using Tumblr is a challenge.

When I first started reading Tumblr blogs I was confused about the themes
people used. Depending on the layout, the far side of quote pyramids often
becomes so ridiculously narrow that all characters are stacked on top of each
other. Conversations become unreadable.

Some other, modern themes use a different layout that doesn't have that
problem.

I wondered why people put up with the old style until I found out that the
usual way participants look at conversations is on their dashboard, which
discards themes and uses the modern layout. People don't look at their own
blogs. Blog themes _aren 't designed for reading_. Only people without
accounts have to deal with that, but they can't complain because they don't
have accounts.

The whole reblogging system is a disaster. It's like a comment tree, but you
can only look at one branch at a time.

~~~
djajshgsjja
I remember experiencing that myself, closing the window, and leaving with a
sour opinion of tumblr. This sounds like a very solvable problem, and one that
could have measurable results with a high ROI if fixed. Wonder if they’ve
tried it.

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stcredzero
Affective death spirals:

[https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Affective_death_spiral](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Affective_death_spiral)

Evaporative cooling of group beliefs: (Where heat == intelligence)

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-
cooling-of-group-beliefs)

~~~
Misdicorl
Heat should be seen as diversity of viewpoints rather than intelligence

~~~
stcredzero
That's arguably better. In the original formulation, I think it's that the
sub-population that is genuinely intellectually curious gets jaded, while the
sub-population that is into capitalizing on group-think starts to take over.
In this way, it's also related to intelligence.

~~~
Misdicorl
Eh, I think that's mostly a consequence of the group considered rather than
fundamental behavior. See e.g. the discussion about the same effects in
science as they develop their own group think (jargon)

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digitalsushi
Can a building host a party so toxic that the building itself is socially
irreparable?

We have a different obligation to software than we do to physical things;
digital hangouts are after all just a computer program. What makes a thing
popular seems to be a product of the number of people present crossed by the
social weight of the people present. We might say that a party becomes uncool
once a certain class of people has joined, or is uncool once a certain class
of people have left.

The article says that the people on Tumblr are often horrible to each other
and that it ruins Tumblr; we can burn that digital building down but it will
just be rebuilt, with the same swelling of cool people coming and going, and
undesirables lingering, in a cycle that cannot be broken.

I think that social media must necessarily follow the forest fire model, with
lots of expected, regular burnings-down to allow for regrowth.

~~~
stcredzero
_We might say that a party becomes uncool once a certain class of people has
joined, or is uncool once a certain class of people have left._

[https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporative-
cooling-of-group-beliefs)

------
Grue3
Says Kotaku. Talk about joyless... Also looks like a stealth ad for another
web site (pillowfort).

------
justboxing
Tumblr was mostly a free porn-stash portal in the beginning, and even though
David Karp denied it[1] it's still the case even today. Just do a
site:tumblr.com <porn_keywords_here> and you'll find plenty of NSFW
tumblogs...

[1] Source: 2011 What Is Responsible For Tumblr’s Recent Explosive Growth? =>
[http://oobly.com/2011/01/30/are-the-p0rn-blogs-cloacked-
as-n...](http://oobly.com/2011/01/30/are-the-p0rn-blogs-cloacked-as-nsfw-
responsible-for-tumblrs-recent-explosive-growth-traffic_95/)

------
amyjess
> “In my formative time in fandom [before Tumblr], learning the rules and
> etiquette of the space was not optional, it was baked into the entire
> structure of fandom,” Danielle said. “There was a hurdle of entry to fandom;
> it was organized into moderated communities and kinkmemes and other places
> that had rules, and even more than that had real live people who ran stuff
> and would prevent drama from boiling over.”

I'd argue that this is overblown. Way back in the '90s, most organized online
fandom was on Usenet. Usenet had no formal rules. Sure, there was a ton of
cultural norms, but there was no enforcement. If you were really tired of
somebody, you could put their name into something called a "killfile" which
would hide their posts from you (killfiles were entirely client-side). And
ultimately despite the "Eternal September", Usenet worked well enough. Trolls
came and went. Every once in a while a group would be dragged into the Meow
Wars. But it was still less toxic than LiveJournal.

I mostly remember the LiveJournal age (and the UBB/vBulletin/phpBB age that
existed alongside it) as something that was dominated by moderators who cared
more about bikeshedding and wielding power than actually keeping awful people
out. Rules enforcement was more like "You didn't format your post exactly the
way I want it, this is your only warning, next time you're banned!". And in
the meantime toxic people would just run rampant with concern trolling and/or
attacking other fans for every little thing and the mods would just sit there
and do nothing.

On UBB/vBulletin/phpBB boards, it wouldn't be uncommon for half the threads on
the front page to be locked often with the threads ending with snarky
moderator comments like "Use the search function next time dumbass". Or for
all discussion on a particular subject to be shoved into a "megathread" with
no threaded comments (god, I hated those forums; I miss WWWBoard).

Fandom has always been toxic.

Edit: Though I'll say that Tumblr's software and organization is godawful. The
fact that until very recently the only way to comment on someone else's post
was to reblog their post and add your comment at the bottom is just bizarre,
nonsensical, and not conducive to any kind of productive discussion. And how
reblogs and likes all got shoved under the "notes" category. You see a post
gets 700 notes: you have no idea if it's a good post that got 700 likes or a
shitty post that got 700 reblog-comments calling it out. And straight reblogs
are treated the same way as reblog-comments too, so "soandso reblogged this
post" is worthless. Are they sharing your post or replying to it? Gah.

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PaulHoule
Somebody still uses Tumblr?

~~~
dang
Maybe not, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

