Throughout the history of the Internet, every social media platform had a different function. MySpace was for budding artists to build a fanbase by sharing their music with their peers. Vine was all about 6-second entertainment. And Tumblr? Well, some might say it was simply meant to be one of the silliest places on the Internet.
If you were on the Internet around 2014 when Tumblr was at its peak, you might have an inkling about the shenanigans its users would get up to – and maybe still do. Today, we're featuring some pages that collect the funniest interactions on Tumblr. For posterity, but for an occasional chuckle as well, we suppose.
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Image credits: RitaJKing
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Image credits: theuglysideoftumblr
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If someone were to ask me what Tumblr is really for, I don't think I could answer easily. But one netizen on Reddit might have done so four years ago when they explained to another lost soul what Tumblr is and what people use it for. If Twitter was for short quips and Blogger and WordPress for long-form posts, then Tumblr aimed to fill in the gap in between.
Tumblr's simple interface allowed its users to share any and all types of content easily in their blogs. Whether it was text, video, pictures, or gifs, the site built a diverse and strong community where people shared and explored their interests like nowhere else on the Internet.
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Image credits: JordanRasko
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Image credits: uglysideoftumblr
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For me, Tumblr was about finding and connecting with the fandoms I enjoyed. Whether they were for TV series, anime, or music, it was a place to find and follow the bloggers and the fan art you find interesting. Granted, it's easy to veer into the weird side of Tumblr really quickly, but I usually stuck with the vanilla side of the platform.
Another great thing about Tumblr was its news feed: it was only the creators you followed in chronological order. Nowadays, most social media platforms have pretty annoying algorithms in that regard. But if you really worked on your Tumblr feed, you'd see exactly what you wanted. Most people say that one person's feed differs wildly from the next.
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Image credits: theuglysideoftumblr
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Image credits: theuglysideoftumblr
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People like to say that nobody hangs out on Tumblr anymore. But is that really true? According to the statistics from Demand Sage, Tumblr still has more than 300 million active users each month. Users publish around 12.5 million blog posts every day, so can we really call it a deceased platform?
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Image credits: uglysideoftumblr
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Image credits: uglysideoftumblr
Recent Tumblr statistics are quite interesting, too. While its demographics are pretty young with 40% of its users being Gen Z and 30% being millennials, its gender divide splits exactly in the middle. The platform saw a jump in new users when Redditors migrated to Tumblr when Reddit began imposing fees on third-party developers.
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Image credits: theuglysideoftumblr
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So, if Tumblr has that many active users, why do some consider it to be finished? Well, some people like to quantify a social media platform's success by how much money it's worth. And Tumblr's situation is quite sad in that department. In 2013, when Tumblr was at its peak, Yahoo bought it for $1.1 billion. In 2019, it sold to Automattic for a mere $3 million.
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Many say that the reason why Tumblr didn't rise to compete with social media giants like Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat was because the higher-ups didn't understand what it was for. They tried to implement changes that would make it attractive to a broader audience while ignoring what made it special in the first place.
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In her 2023 article for Wired, Elizabeth Minkel writes that one of the biggest charms of Tumblr is that it's like an improv space. Users on the platform seem to interact in a "yes, and" kind of way: one user posts a story and another comments with beautifully done art. If you're familiar with the Goncharov meme, you know that some Tumblr users even invent movies and others just go along with it.
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Image credits: theuglysideoftumblr
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Image credits: tumblermemes
At the moment, Tumblr is like a safe refuge for some. No crazy billionaire CEOs, no rampant misinformation; just art, vibes, and (silly)posting. Minkel discusses that the owners should perhaps stop trying to make Tumblr for everyone and trying to attract more users and focus on making it for those who want to be there.
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"Internet person" and expert in online communities Allegra Rosenberg agrees: "Tumblr can be difficult to navigate for the inexperienced, ridden with parasitic beliefs and dangerous memes. You can easily get lost in the tags, sucked into toxic subcultures," she writes.
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"[But] the creativity of Tumblr visible from second-hand glimpses on other platforms is only the tip of an iceberg that encompasses enormous amounts of perpetual creative energy, generated by the affordances of the platform's much-loved functions, traditions, and communities," Rosenberg says, defending the platform.
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Image credits: uglysideoftumblr
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Image credits: tumblermemes
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Image credits: tumblermemes
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Image credits: tumblermemes
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