The Ever-Mutating Life of Tumblr Dot Com

Okay funny story - I wrote the below little post over a year ago, and for some reason, never published it. Instead it was hiding in drafts nearly lost to history and my memory.

Spoiler Alert: I did end up rejoining Tumblr, but then got back off of it around the change of the year as part of a general rejiggering of my internet/media/art-experiencing habits and routines. I do miss some aspects of Tumblr (again) but not enough to got back…

Anyway, original year-old post follows:

As a service, Tumblr’s lack of commerciality and consistent inability to successfully monetize itself is part of its whole appeal. There’s a whole genre of Tumblr posts that just screenshot and mock the bizarre hosted ads that spawn on the dashboard like mutated fish in a radioactively-poisoned river.

But it’s a loving kind of mockery—users seem, for the most part, to be genuinely grateful for the state of the site. For many, it’s a refuge from the dystopian insanity that the rest of the internet has come to represent. “It’s like anti-social social media,” says Bec, regarding Tumblr’s continued paradoxical appeal.

[…] for those who value creativity without the pressures of “hustle culture,” and wish to avoid the current-events performative outrage that has crept in, kudzu-like, and swallowed up almost every single other area of open expression online, Tumblr remains ideal.

The corollary of that, of course, being that those who appreciate that creativity without necessarily needing or wanting to express it themselves can also find happy homes on Tumblr, as spectators to a healthy culture of simply liking things.

Source: The Ever Mutating Life of Tumblr dot com

Tumblr was absolutely my social media “home” for a long time - though I never saw it has a social media platform, per se. It was communal blogging and celebration of cool shit. It was the only platform I ever amassed any sort of following on, and the only one I ever saw my self wanting a following on.

I deleted my account and my tumblogs (hell yes, that is what I did and will aways call them) when the porn ban came down - mainly because the site/admins/corporate overlords were handling it, oh so badly. But it sounds like a lot of that has calmed down now…

And now, I’m nostalgic for it? I am feeling… things? This will not do, not at all.

I’m not considering getting back on Tumblr? …am I?

Oh no.