How tumblr became popular for being obsolete
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Someone is clearly making a push to capitalize on it, and I'm not looking forward to adding it to the endlessly growing list of beautiful things that rich businessmen have destroyed.
From Wikipedia:
Are.na is an online social networking community and creative research platform [...] Are.na was built as a successor to hypertext projects like Ted Nelson's Xanadu, and as an ad-free alternative to social networks like Facebook, forgoing "likes," "favorites," or "shares" in its design. Are.na allows users to compile uploaded and web-clipped "blocks" into different "channels," [...]
The application part itself I quite like. Some of the color contrasts are way to low and style over substance (my first impression was, that it must have been designed by a Swiss Architect), but what I do like a lot is, just how little noise there is.
I have a feeling that is going to alienate mass populace users.
There are already plenty products aimed at the mass populace, I would love to see again more communities built for the niches. Not just in terms of topics (subreddits et al), but functionality and interactions. Because honestly I came to the conclusion that communities only work if they stay relatively small and focused. I haven't used Are.na enough to say anything about their community specifically, but their approach resonates strongly with me.
The main thing I want from that sort of social media is to see original content from people that I know. I don't want to see the best cat video; I want to see my friend's cat video.
Sounds like a key feature.
I think we've learned by now that mass adoption is the death signal for any platform since it will bring in the spammers, advertisers and other undesirables which ruin the experience.
I wouldn’t say there’s nothing interesting on tumblr.
Like, there’s nostalgebraist’s writing on machine learning, Also other people posting some math content.
It is a social blogging site. People write blogs there.
I'm using Tumblr for almost a decade and I never found any other place as convenient or as cheap (free and without ads) to have a blog. It's dead easy to start one, to post or to make a custom theme (if you feel like). You can even use your domain for free and you even have "kind of" a social network.
I know that keeping a "fun" blog is not fashionable anymore but Tumblr is really good at it.
These are two really odd design decisions for blogs and trying to read content written by experts.
From the blog view, it's entirely dependent on the blog's chosen theme. Some themes may omit dates/times for whatever reason; it's up to the theme author, and up to the blogs choosing that theme.
From the dashboard (as a logged-in user), you can see a post's timestamp by mousing over the top-right corner.
People could do that with blogs.
Most blogs in the early 2000s evolved into longer articles; but some weblogs kept the style and evolved it into another direction, mixing short posts with links, images, quotes and such. A term for that new mixture was tumblelogs.
https://web.archive.org/web/20050722001616/http://redhanded....
https://kottke.org/05/10/tumblelogs
https://leahneukirchen.org/anarchaia/static/faq.html
http://leahneukirchen.org/blog/archive/2005/04/thoughts-on-v...
That was all 2004/2005ish, before Twitter and Tumblr. So yes, Tumblr has is original inspiration in the the early blogging scene and I suspect the name too. But you’re not wrong, another essential part of Tumblr is the builtin social network and the new mechanism of commenting and reblogging. If I remember correctly those came a little bit late.
My own project Glue[1] is taking a stab at this segment so I have vested interest in this space. Trying to marry all the various content types into a single UI experience has been a fun challenge (short text, audio, quotes, code snippets, blogs).
> Tumblr is so easy to use that it’s hard to explain.
> We made it really, really simple for people to make a blog and put whatever they want on it. Stories, photos, GIFs, TV shows, links, quips, dumb jokes, smart jokes, Spotify tracks, mp3s, videos, fashion, art, deep stuff. Tumblr is 541 million different blogs, filled with literally whatever.
A lot of the fandom exists on Tumblr and Instagram and Twitter as well, but on the latter two, you can't have any permanence. It's all about the ever scrolling feed, and it's about getting on people's feeds again and again and again with new posts, new content all the time. And the type of content you can post there is extremely limited.
Tumblr allows this style as well, and a lot of users engage in it. But it also allows for being an archive, a curated collection of long-form posts about a subject, tagged and organized and easily browsable, no matter how long ago the posts were made.
I do not regret choosing Tumblr six years ago, and people keep discovering my stuff, keep liking it, keep reblogging it, which shows it was the right show.
Let's hope Verizon doesn't fuck it up.
The owner is now Automattic
https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/14/20804894/tumblr-acquisiti...
However I'm grateful for Tumblr. It shaped my design career considerably, and give me joy every day for years in row.
For me, this is a feature.
I would go back if they announced a change in that area.
Yesterday a poster blamed them somehow for Tesla leaving a brake pad off a car..
This really shouldn't be a surprise to anyone but CP happens from time to time on all large platforms, you get reports and you remove it, it's just a fact of life if you do a lot of third party content hosting. Tumblr doesn't have the means to pre-screen all of the content on their network, so they chose to eliminate all potentially problematic content before it gets published using an aggressive ML porn detector (probably Yahoo's open_nsfw), rather than face Apple's wrath on it. Again, for what was probably a few specific reports on a few tumblr accounts Apple was threatening to (and temporarily did) remove an entire platform from the store that billions of users require to install it.
This is absolutely a consequence of their monopolistic and arbitrary control of their store and their policies that leave no room for error in content moderation. Apple is absolutely altering the nature of the web when they do things like this, and deciding through fear what kind of content is going to be allowed by scaring platforms into adopting a lower floor of controllable risk.
Whether you agree that Apple's infamously closed off bureaucracy should be the content mods or not for any platform that requires use of a phone camera, criticizing them about it is absolutely within the bounds of valid discussion here because they absolutely played a key, major role in a change that wiped out an enormous percentage of Tumblr's users, the vast majority of whom were not violating any laws.
Now I should mention they certainly have the legal right to do so, just as Twitter had the same legal right to ban a Twitter account for a ToS violation, but this feels a lot more concerning to me. It would be like if Apple was telling Twitter to dump an account for their ToS violation or they would remove Twitter from their app store.
Which they were already preparing. It wasn't a reaction to the app store removal - they had been planning it for months and this just prompted a quicker activation.
> so they wouldn't get their app permanently removed from the app store
No. They were going to do this regardless of the app store snafu. You can't blame Apple for this move on Tumblr's part (but you could possibly blame Apple for perhaps overreacting to "a few reports" although I don't think we've ever got the full story of what went actually on...)
Vs.
How effort is it to allow porn but have some algorithm or reviewers determine what is porn but is allowed vs what is CSAM? Obviously images of abuse of a 10 year old are clear, but much more content than that is disallowed, yet you're going to get a lot of shit for taking down self-taken images of that young looking 20 year old when your policy allows porn, and if you overcorrect the other direction you'll get even more shit for not taking down images of that older looking 16 year old.
Well, perhaps they're mutually dependent.
Articles like this make me worried some ass-hat is soon gonna monetize this newly quiet corner of the internet, and make it shit like everything else.
It is a very difficult to put into words but I think having a tribe of userbase is far better for a social media than to appeal to majority.
I think instagram and tiktok as social media still provides a good experience for their longterm userbase compared to social media that appeals to majority like twitter, facebook and reddit.
Isn't segmentation of audiences built in to Reddit in the form of subreddits?
Different subreddits have different levels of quality and effort in the average post. But "group" != "audience". The culture trends on Reddit are site-wide, even if the subject matter of each sub varies wildly.
I THINK that what parent commentor is trying to say is that pre-Yahoo-Tumbler, Reddit culture was predominately male libertarian Ron Paul fans... while post-Yahoo-Tumbler, there was an influx of "purple hair" female social leftists. And that Reddit's culture has been somewhat fractured and at war with itself ever since.
I'm not sure that I accept this theory (I think simply has more to do with a continuous influx of newbies, and general youth culture shift over the past 15 years). But I do agree with the result, and the timeline happens to match up neatly.
People talking about reddit degrading reminds me of people talking about when music was the best; it was great when you weren't quite new but weren't quite jaded about it yet.
Reddit used to be that place where you had definitely “read it” first.
Now, to your point, most subs that bubble via algo to all and popular are tumblogs (infinite image/meme scrollers), and posts come after it’s already been on IG and Facebook groups.
I’d chalked this up to IG influence, but Tumblr diaspora makes as much sense, together with your hypothesized shift to pop engagement over niche quality.
Still works that if you dump the subs that show up in all or popular, you can get back to text / long-text niche interests. Most seem to be slowing pace of posts and discussion replies though, so unclear how much longer that will last.
And yes, in a niche sub the idea was to discuss the post, and yes, just as in class or at the local book club, as reddit became more popular soon 80% didn’t read the assignment.
We were talking about tumblrization though. I had intended to make a point about image “content” vs. post or article content, the thing the comments you’re talking about hang off of. Whether for comments or content, there had been more text.
So. I’ve gone and looked it up. Here’s a picture of the home page from Dec 2005:
- https://i.imgur.com/tsisrVy.jpg
- https://web.archive.org/web/20060104090150/http://reddit.com...
No image thumbnails, no subs, and a lot more article upvotes than discussion comments.
And of course, a post about “signal to noise ratio” and another about “the Flickrization of Yahoo”.
So I am not someone for whom this matters.
However, I never did like the way it would present other Tumblr feeds that I would click on in the page I was on in this side bar navigation way, rather than just navigating me there. The UI felt all rather convoluted to me.
Anyone know why they have stuck with this pattern in particular?