I believe the fact is that everything changes, and, because of its permissive architecture, tumblr became PRIMARILY an amateur or user-controlled porn site. And what killed it was banning all that. I suspect that was way over half of their traffic, and without it they became mostly irrelevant and were abandoned by a good fraction of their users. While this isn't contradicted by anything in this article, I think it's the elephant in the room that the article barely acknowledges.
7
Thank god someone did.
1
Probably, if the internet became all unrestricted porn, all the time, it would be burned out of our attention in two weeks. This would be a nightmare for the advertisers, who depend on our repressed guilt to sell us junk with disguised sexual references all day long.
5
Why don't platforms try to regulate religious extremism and hate with the vigor they applied to representations of sexuality? Would that bring the platforms down just as quickly?
6
Tumblr didn't die. Nor did Flickr. Both services were owned by a holding company that didn't care for them (or itself, it seems), and now they're owned by companies trying to give them the attention Yahoo! wouldn't under Verizon and its Oath structure. They got caught up in a merger by a company that wasn't interested in them, just their parents. Verizon doesn't know what to do with them, or spend resources on them, so it was more convenient to sell them off at discounts.
At least they weren't killed off, as happened with the GEnie online service when it was bought by a telecommunications company that didn't understand it and let it lapse on Y2K.
3
I suppose, like business, like nature: it's survival of the fittest. No matter who or what killed Tumblr, the environment can be a brutal test of fitness.
". . . endless flood of news that flashes so fast past your eyes like bright headlights on a dark road that it brings only blinding disorientation and little illumination." I have no idea what Tumblr is . . . was . . . but this is an excellent piece of descriptive writing. Kudos Kara.
2
Good piece and I agree with the overall sentiment but Ms Swisher, you leave out the most puzzling, arguably troubling, chapter of the Tumblr story. Tumblr was already hobbled, maybe even down for the count, well before Yahoo acquired it. Tumblr had basically run out of all that previously free flowing VC cash and despite Herculean efforts to raise more, failed, due to the overwhelming presence of graphic sexual content (porn? depends on who is looking ) the company. The Board and existing investors were between a rock (writing off their rather large investments) and a hard place (throwing more cash at what looked like a fatally beached whale) and were reluctantly in process of keeping the company alive with a minimal cash infusion - in which some existing investors had decided to not participate.
Then, magically, along comes Marissa Mayer, who not only either doesn't care or notice that she is buying PornHub, but agrees to a truly outrageously inflated acquisition price, not even remotely tied to any multiple or comparable.
So Yahoo didn't ruin Tumblr. Tumblr ruined Tumblr. Or the internet did. Or we all did.
Ms Swisher, us Ms Mayer a close friend? Her abscence from your reporting sticks out - as you of all people know the scuttlebutt...
2
@Harry Mylar I was so hoping that Marissa Mayer wouldn't go the way of Carly Fiorina. Sadly they were both more style than substance, more fit for Vogue or Glamour perhaps than the corner office.
1
What deserves caution, Kara Swisher habitually views with alarm. Now, apparently, this includes sex. By the way, there’s a word to describe “hardcore sex,” it’s “sex.”
Choose; sometimes add a warning label; do not censor.
7
I had no idea porn was so mainstream before reading all these comments! I guess I've been living under a rock here in the Granite State! I'm not quite curious enough to find out what I'm missing.
2
Heaps of porn on the net! The providers of the service may not really care; they just enjoy the service.
"it has led to defections and outcries by some of the company’s communities."
Some? You mean 98% right? Once you took away the adult content which included a huge chunk of the artists all you've got left are the Nazis and a few really weird blogs that long ago migrated to Instagram.
3
Seems like you missed the incredibly supportive, connected, and brilliant communities on Tumblr for a variety of alternative sexual practices who were actively reporting non-consensual or child pornography. We wanted a space that wasn't some dark corner to have our communities and discussions. Those communities have shattered because of moralizing idiots who don't know how to handle anyone's sexuality without judgement. Tumblr was amazing for us. And, clearly, those communities made up a pretty large component of the site. Your ridiculous moralizing aside, apparently we are profitable communities to have around.
8
Hmm, I stopped looking at Tumblr because there was too much porn. Porn is gross, and most of it is violent and degrading. Call me a prude if you want, I don't care. I am a young woman who feels disgusted by how the internet depicts young women.
You're telling me the porn is gone now? Maybe it's time to give Tumblr another chance.
3
I find it interesting that Tumblr's downfall coincided so closely with their sex ban. Maybe this sex thing is more than a trend. Maybe some people actually like sex. Maybe sex sells.
11
Pornography or Erotography? I have been told by more than one individual that if it weren't for porn the internet itself probably wouldn't exist. As long as human beings are sexual beings erotography will flourish. I say erotography because I don't believe there is anything "dirty" about one's natural interest in and appreciation for portrayals of human sexual likes, behaviors and preferences. If tumblr "failed" it failed because it stopped providing folks with what people wanted tumblr to provide for them. Excesses, of course, must be controlled. Extreme S & M, child erotography and examples of non-consensual sex (rape, intimidation, etc.) must be guarded against. People should not be ashamed to admit they like erotography and tumblr should be awarded for providing a much needed and wanted public service. (Choke on that, hypocrits!)
5
I really don't understand the "back in my day!" mentality of this op/ed. Lamenting the downfall of tumblr? Seriously? Just add it to the pile with Myspace, Ask Jeeve's, Netscape, Vine & everything else & light a match. This is like lamenting pagers, answering machines, pocket calculators & fax machines.
What you should be talking about was how tumblr was the internet's first true "rabbit hole." Specifically designed to suck you into its downward shame spiral & keep you there endlessly--something everyone now is talking about in relation to YouTube.
And, for the record, sex & pornography has been one of the biggest, if not the biggest, aspects of the internet from the very beginning (not just recently, as you infer). Just like sex & pornography were there at the beginning of the moving image, the still photograph, the painted figure & the written word. You sound as if you want to put a fig leaf on everyone's computer screen.
3
Social media has not gone to hell so much as come to fruition. It was a false promise from the start: free expression, no cost, no accountability. What could go wrong??
Anyone who didn't see 2019 coming in 2011 hasn't read their Flannery O'Connor. Smart people at Woodstock saw Altamont slouching out of the mud.
18
I'm a stodgy sort in some ways. I don't mind posting publicly here on the New York Times or on Quora, but i have my semi-anonymous spaces. I rarely use Facebook or Twitter as I do not trust the former and find the latter too vapid too often.
Tumblr does seem more freewheeling than Livejournal and Dreamwidth in some ways, and I appreciate them, but it still doesn't draw me in the way it does the other adults in my home. They were both quite annoyed by the adult content crackdown there.
Sometimes I still miss my Usenet days, but whenever I pull up a handy map with real-time traffic--an impossibility for the public back then in the 1990s--that longing fades away.
As I read the Times here on the internet (and make comments as all of us are), check my email, pay my bills, research investments and forecast retirement finances, order a water filter for my refrigerator delivered to my door so I can spend time with a grandchild instead of calling appliance stores and driving all over town, explore vacation spots and book the trip without paying a travel agent, consider entertainment for the evening and print out my tickets, I might think the internet is okay if I took the time to worry about it.
Oh, and I just cut the cable so my home entertainment comes over the net at a lower cost. Now I just have to figure out if having literally thousands of choices on my smart tv tonight really makes my life any better.
7
I don’t know enough about social media to answer this but when doing my MS in economics we often studied how inefficient systems became embedded in our society. One of the most prominent examples of that is the QWERTY keyboard. Designed to be inefficient, to slow down the user to keep the keys of a typewriter from jamming. Many people have designed more efficient layouts, but none have been able to overcome the QWERTY keyboard. Could the demise of Tumblr to other social media apps be another example of this?
2
It's a great lesson in censorship. The question is : why did Verizon buy Tumblr in the first place, if it was going to censor it, and radically change it. The worst thing that can happen to any of these free platforms, is that a big corporation buys it, that will be the death knell that will drive people away from it. People go where the fun is. Big corporations have trouble breaking things down to the people level. Instagram, Periscope/Twitter can still thrive because they are still run by people rather than a boardroom.
It's amazing that the internet is still so wonderful, that it's still open and free, it's amazing that the censors haven't destroyed it. It is human nature for powerful people to want to spoil the fun for everybody else. It's only a matter of time before they take over the internet and wash all the fun out of it. The minute the government steps in and says: we are here to help and keep everybody safe-that's when it's all over. So enjoy it while it lasts, like all good things it has to come to an end...people like it to much. It's the worst aspect of human nature, the need to fix the thing that needs no fixing...and the need to control how people think.
7
There is a pairing down of the internet, and that killed Tumblr more than anything, its all a learning curve. Right now the big four social media sites are Youtube, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, with Snapchat not far behind. Tumblr was okay but Instagram is much better and easier to use. Ease of use is very important, as is the amount of users who daily use the site. The bigger the audience the better.
I found Tumblr hard to use, and I became bored with it, I suspect many felt the same way, Instagram came along and did the same thing but did it much easier, and kept improving it's game. It added live videos called stories, which works very well. Competition is good. Tumblr simply couldn't keep up.
The best way to understand the difference between Instagram and Tumblr is that with Instagram everything is right there right in front of you, while with Tumblr you had to constantly open doors to get to more doors, and some of the doors led to deadends. And it always seemed to be the same content, while Instagram it's always new and fresh.
2
Great column Ms. Swisher......I've been around the early days of social media, too (we know some of the same people,) and there were actions platforms could have taken back then that could have averted a whole lot of the disasters we are seeing now. First, all these fine young entrepreneurs/developers needed some wise women advising them on what might happen in an unfettered electronic ecosystem. Someone like Sherry Turkle or Danah Boyd. But that was rarely, if ever, the case. Consequences be darned.
Second, enforcing of Terms of Service. Every single platform's Terms of Service says it reserves the right to take down offensive speech--that data belongs to them, etc. Yet, these ToS have rarely been enforced,. Because to enforce them would effect data collected. After all, the only money making product of platforms is data--for the highest bidders. The data has to be significant, and therefore, must include the lower end of the bell curve--the worst of the worst outliers. This is all promoted as Free Speech, but in several court cases, the idea of Free Speech on a platform was always relative to the owner enforcing the ToS. If the owner cared about civility, it would remove offensive material swiftly, quietly.
The whole thing has always been about how to make money: to pay off venture cap investors, to get an IPO, etc. When your product is data, how can there be any civility? Even data from negativity has value, after all.
36
I get it. I worked on the first so-called Massively Multiplayer Online games, though we didn't call them MMOs back then.
We were idealists delivered into an unexpected paradise we earnestly believed would change the world. Imagine, throwing away the vapid world of movies and television, and creating a medium of narrator as sole author - a narrative told by the audience. Just like those humble blogs the author fondly recalls.
I left a career on Capitol Hill for that. Fled the dystopia created by the Reagan Administration for that. And, for a time, it was all true, all the promise of an alternate world where everyone was judged by their conduct in that world alone.
And, in this parallel universe, people would discover dimensions of themselves denied to them in physical space. The consensual conflict of the game denying, as it must, our carefully constructed selves, reveals us for who we really are, thus accelerating the development of genuine bonds among people. All deep bonds are born of conflict.
But it couldn’t last. Most people live lives out of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. They need their saving lies. Most have no creative, clever aspect seeking expression. And, despite whatever core decency they may possess, they still need the constraints constructed over thousands of years to behave in a reliably civilized way.
For now. The Internet is neither good nor evil. It’s a work in often painful progress.
39
@Jonathan Baron
I agree with you on the problem, but not the cause. We have invented a technology that has outpaced our evolutionary capacity.
The internet was originally sold as a parallel existence free from consequences and western morality. Then it became popular (aka revenue generating), it was arbitrarily decided by the proletariat that real-world morality needs to be applied to the internet.
In a "world" of electronic impulses, what is considered "civilized" when nothing you do (sans a computer-> mechanical interface) has no real consequence, no different than having a thought?
It's not that people need constraints, it's that humans aren't evolved enough to handle hearing the raw emotions of people without the filter/abstraction of being "civilized"
9
@Justaguy
If that is the case--that humans arent' evolved enough to handle etc.-- perhaps that is exactly why some sort of "civilizing" must be done...
Have you ever read the Epic of Gilgamesh? In it, the uncivilized wildman Enkidu is civilized by a "prostitute." However I'd say that the "prostitute" is more a woman who knows how to teach men to be more self-aware. That, actually, might be the problem with platforms like Tumbler and Facebook: there have been no worldly-wise women advising the headstrong young "genius" entrepreneurs on how to deal with the more wild aspects of human nature. Where you see humans and "people" as uncivilized, I see young men, young builders, who misunderstand what it means to be civil and that no world, digital or otherwise, can be evolved enough to, as you say, "handle the raw emotions" of others. It's not just those awful people who need civilizing, but, the young wild men developers who needed a clue.
6
Did I actually just read here that online gaming would be the best source of genuine bonds between people?
7
I wonder if Tumblr also suffered because the people who thought Tumblr was so cool in 2009 are older and have been replaced by a new crop of young people that -- as seems inevitable -- arbitrarily adopted other platforms as the cool places to be.
My point is that arbitrary or at least somewhat random perceptions of coolness seem to be a key driver of site use, and coolness is a tough thing for a business to chase.
59
@Cary I was thinking the same thing. These sites have a faddish quality to them - few have been sustainable. Facebook's sheer huge number of users probably has helped insulate it, but it too is likely to eventually fall off. There have been too many to count - from the original community bulletin boards and alt user groups to Myspace and one of my old favorites, StumbleUpon. For me, a real turn off is advertising. I wonder if someone will create a site, like Craigslist originally, that simply rejects any advertising. I detest the ads that pop up on Times pages, for example, and don't get me started on public radio; WNYC has an ad like every 5 minutes it seems!
31
@Cary I don't know. I used Tumblr in its heyday (as a youngin) & would gladly still (as an oldie) if not for the ads & terrible tweaks no one asked for. There really isn't a good platform out there to replace what it was when it was its best.
9
@Joe
Yea, I just don’t understand why any of these ventures and institutions have to be so egregiously profit-oriented. It used to be that a good salary which allowed you to live a comfortable life was enough for most people since there are so many other things in life that are more important and, frankly, far more interesting than making more piles of money than any one person needs or deserves at the expense of humanity and the environment.
Journalistic institutions should all be non-profit, public-interest entities and web platforms that create and facilitate community should be as well. That’s why Craigslist and Wikipedia really shine. The owners don’t treat them as ATMs or lottery tickets and really do seem to care more about helping humanity become more educated, connect with one another, or to recycle and barter, ways of living that are critically important for the ultimate survival of humanity.
Unfettered capitalism and the vulgar greed it’s inspired since the Industrial Revolution is pretty much responsible for most of what’s ailing humanity today. Until we face this fact, we’ll remain stuck on the hamster wheel of history. Unfettered capitalism is also what destroyed the Internet. Everything else, its rampant hostility, fake news proliferation, the rise and fall of platforms, and more, is just the wreckage.
14
In the sage words of Avenue Q, "the internet is for porn." People wanted a place online to explore sex and their own sexuality, and Tumblr offered a totally open and social place for people to do that. This was a boon to everyone, but especially to the marginalized LGBT community.
Then they removed the porn, and the stock tanked to less than 1% of its prior value. It isn't rocket science to put two and two together. If you want to be puritan, live your life as you wish. But if you want to be a capitalist and a puritan, for god's sake do not buy a porn site.
91
Tumblr never died. It kept going, judging by the literal hours a week my wife still spends on the site. It survived despite the intentions of the owners, which seems to be a small miracle. It survived because of a dedicated and creative community, and that never changed despite Yahoo's worst efforts.
56
@Simon DelMonte
Yahoo groups was going as strong as tumblr till they finally got rid of it.
don't conflate niche with universal appeal.
2
Unless someone is inciting violence then they should be allowed to speak. Yes, even neoNazis.
Trying to control what people believe and say is just a game of whack-a-mole. The Daily Stormer is still up and running on the net as is 8chan. And those are mild compared to what one can find in the danker corners.
Is there sex on Tumblr? Yes. You need to search for it and even then specifically ok your access to the sites. Just like all the other sex on the web.
What devalued Tumbler was not the range of product but 1) Verizon's misplaced efforts at censorship and 2) Tumblr's failure to match the immediacy and interactivity of newer sites like Twitter.
The internet is still worlds of fun and positive interactions. The trash talk and hate get all the PR but then I'm not a Twitteratti and I simply avoid those sites. Instead I learn Indian cooking from a grandmother in Delhi and woodcrafts from a guy in Russia and talk with ornithopterists all over the world.
It is easy to avoid the toxic and believe me, you won't miss it.
76
@Barooby
I said the same thing to Kara in a post two weeks ago when she was wanting to shut down 8Chan... "I may not like what you're saying but I'll fight for your right to say it..."
I was rewarded with specifically being called out as wrong in a video she made and then passed around twitter. For defending the first amendment.
It's not as easy to avoid the toxic as you'd think.
9
@Barooby
You are, as it is so often done, conflating freedom of speech with corporate objectives.
If i was spending money on advertisements, I would not give money to ANY of Verizon's business units if they were hosting blogs for nazis on Tumblr.
That's the problem. Nothing more, nothing less.
7
Of course, the basic premise behind this article is that social media is a necessary thing. Perhaps it would be better to examine this assumption and consider whether society really benefits from this 'fill a space' form of technology.
111
@Michael
I love how all conversations about "fixing" social media seem to have "social media is a net good" as a given.
8
Sex didn't kill Tumblr. The banning of it did. The fact is that Tumblr was once a spot where amateur sexual content, especially that aimed at the LGBT community, had a safe home. They killed it, and this is what killed the site.
Instagram has a place for straight sexuality. It has a place for women in pasties and shirtless muscular guys. Deviate from the beauty standards by a little bit and you are shut down, shamed, and humiliated.
Tumblr was safe. Now it is just another bland place for bland opinions by bland people. Sex has been pushed to more exploitive venues.
And those who produce alternative amateur pornographic art for the LGBT community? You and corporate America are actively oppressing us.
For those who think I am evil for producing LGBT sexual content for adult men and women? You are why the internet is so toxic. If the only place that publishes is PornHub, a site dedicated to oppressing adult performers, then only oppressive porn will be created.
231
@Edward Allen
No one is stopping you from starting your own Tumblr, were you can post whatever you want. No One. pretty sure 4chan's code is open source, it's basically tumblr.
Do not conflate a corporate business decisions to not host porn as "oppressing you" when SO MANY americans are ACTUALLY oppressed.
14
@Edward Allen
It sounds like you perceive a need. Why not start one?
@ Edward Allen. Interesting. I remember a segment on the PBS News Hour of all places regarding the effects of the Tumblr ban on pornography. Interestingly, the commentator referred to “pornography” in general, but lamented the lost forum for LGBTQ “sexuality”. Why is that, when heterosexual, it’s referred to as pornography, but when LGBTQ, the images and videos reflect “sexuality”?
4
My impression is that the adult content blogs on Tumblr were the magnet that brought so many people to it and inspired much of the edgy, non-pornographic content on so many other tumblr pages. Rather than find a way to accommodate the sex sites with some non-lethal form of regulation, Tumblr owners decided to kill the main draw to their platform. It's sad and short-sighted. I always had the impression that the special interest communities on Tumblr were fairly well insulated and that it was possible to avoid anything that was personally unwelcome. The tools to enable personal choice seemed to work well enough to allow shielding from uninteresting, or offensive content, and the format was inspiring to many creative and curious users. Tumblr's change marks a blunder, maybe not surprising for corporate involvement with social media.
19
@Kurt But life in the internet doesn't work that way. The insidious reach of adult/porn content is a major reason why the internet can be such a discouraging and even dangerous place. What is non-lethal regulation, anyway? Offensive content was never more than a click or two away, and I am glad that Tumblr dealt with it accordingly.
1
@javamaster
Ehh offensive? Says who? The problem is that tumblr was a good source of non-traditional adult content. The stuff there isn't just a click away. I dunno. Somehow I've never felt like the existence of adult content has made the internet discouraging. It's easy to avoid it if you don't want to see it. I can recall approximately zero occasions where I stumbled upon unwanted adult content.
6
For me Tumblr was, is, and always will be, where I go to find nature photography.
As far as I can tell people in the Pacific NW spend a LOT of time wandering around in the woods, sitting in super comfortable looking vans, and hanging out in nice(in a rustic but somehow not sort of way) cafes taking pictures and posting them to Tumblr.
Some sex ended up in my feed but not a great deal(and at the end of the day I don't see why everyone gets so riled up about sex as long as it isn't thrust in their face).
I moved on to Instagram which is nice but the nature pictures seem as much about seeing 20 something women in leggings as much as they are sweeping mountain shots.
So it goes. I see it as a not so subtle hint that I need to get out and see those views myself.
1
Kara Swisher, we still have the Internet . It’s much more than fascinating. I can’t begin to say just how much.
Before the Internet, one had to rely on encyclopedias for answers. They were cumbersome and took time. Some of us had to go to libraries. Now we have one-touch Wikipedia, for a start, and then on to so much more.
With the Internet, I found the recordings of Sylvia Plath; herself, reading her poems. I never considered her genius before that, because her written words themselves seemed to me, something like an American girl expressing self absorbed ideas so I didn’t read them carefully. But wow, she’s really something. She knew how to read. Hearing her creates a whole new perspective on her ideas, like with T S Eliot and even Yeats. (Don’t listen to Yeats’ recordings, by the way; they’ll depress you.)
Then, there’s politics. One can read, and hear over and over, ideas that are hard to grasp if you don’t happen to have genius mentality, like me. I’ve heard William Binney, and Glenn Greenwald, speak, and have discovered the very wise and clever Karen Garcia, right here in the dull old, Bernie Sanders hating New York Times. I just googled her name, and there was her fascinating blog. I can’t live without it!
Reading the classics on-line is a wonder. They’re mostly public domain, so they are free. The books provide a dictionary of choice at one touch, and Wikipedia for names and places that aren’t within one’s grasp.
My comments are too long, I’ve been warned.
5
The internet wasn't innocent in 2008. It was innocent in 1998.
1
May have to try that, fun? What a concept.
1
Because of all its “puritanical filters” (if I may use that expression) omnipresent passwords and “blocked content, Tumblr has become completely impossible to use....This is why it is a non entity....
6
Have I understood correctly... Verizon owns everything and tumblr moved from it, to its subsidiary automattic?
Just followed you. These are great photographs. Apparently, you carry around a camera. A lot of my work goes up on Tumblr, and I still love it. I don't understand why people can't just ignore the sex sites if they find them offensive. Don't follow them, don't look at them, don't linger. I don't find sex to be the problem. In America, it's always Americans who are the problem. America will always find sex offensive because Americans are so morally hypocritical and Tumblr became their latest victim. There will be more. There always is.
Americans never have sex, right.
Americans are uncomfortable with life. Anyone who blazes a new path needs to be constantly looking over one's shoulder because Americans will get you and destroy you with impunity. Tumblr got in their gun sights. How do you remain edgy and obscure the sex. As a writer, that is the fundamental problem that as a novelist, I am condemned to grapple with, and never successfully.
Tumblr was hot dope for a while. Today, I swim through it, but there's nothing that is ecstatic about being there, being alive, just being and celebrating that with photographic flurry. I am a photographer, too, and can't stop posting there even though the literary haters who hate me, and my books, found a vulnerable place to burn down my addiction. But I have written under many pseudonyms, and now use one at Tumblr which is a take-off of my own name. Tumblr is both the past and the future of the Internet.
Tumblr is a dance with life.
4
Never too much into Tumblr. Remember MySpace though which also was fun and exciting. All these great sites killed by the yawning, gaping pit of mediocrity Facebook is and was. I’ll give Zuckerberg credit, at least he knew it is a utility - as he makes money off our very existence.
I’m always surprised how poorly Facebook as a website runs after billions of users and untold development. Low expectation content, low expectation performance.
Social media in general and Facebook in particular always remind me of a saying of the late, great social commentator, Frank Zappa;
“....they’re like press conferences for idiots”.
1
What is Tumblr? What ever it is I don't care if it is gone.
Another whatever piece of junk, will replace it.
It will be managed by the likes of Zuckerberg and Sandberg.
I and zillions of others dont care about this and we had nothing to do with it's demise. willyon46
@willyon46
If people didn't want what tumblr provided they wouldn't have tuned in to it in such vast numbers.
i had a daily photo blog on tumblr for five years (scottmarcbecker.tumblr.com, fwiw). it let thousands of people see and share and follow my work; i got to see a lot of contemporary and historic images as well. erotica, gender exploration and porn were out there but at least 98% of my time on tumblr allowed me to immerse myself in a vast ocean of creativity (i didn't use a content filter, but you could if you wished). i moved on for my own reasons but tumblr was a fantastic platform, for its ease of use and a joyous sense of community. i'm much more troubled by the bad behavior of facebook and the swamp of twitter — under wordpress, i hope tumblr can regain its former stature.
2
Sex didn't kill Tumblr. Prudery did.
10
These are the meandering ruminations i used to have about Usenet before everyone left for "Social Networks"...
2
I think most commenters have covered the bases, so I'll just say I loved your first paragraph.
2
The "early internet" ideal: I have an interest in (some obscure, niche thing). I know no one in my usual social circle with this interest; it's pretty obscure, and I live in Randomplace, Iowa. But look, here's a site that provides a venue for (this niche thing). I can correspond with other (niche)ists! This is cool!
When the niche is odic poetry, early 20th century stamps, the Mekons, or left-handed quilting, it's fun. When the niche is alternative lifestyles, it could be affirming or it could be upsetting for some people. And when the niche is white supremacy or child pornography, we need to call the cops, except the cops are hard to find in this space.
Real freedom is hard, and we have so little experience with it, we make mistakes.
But who curates the niches? Do we really want a curator? Without one, we get white supremacists and child pornography.
5
At one time I also reveled in the creativity, freedom and pure joy that was on bountiful display on Tumblr.
I have not been a member nor visited it in over a year and I have stopped paying attention to the mess that it has become. The seeds of its destruction were sown when it was bought by our corporate digital masters. Facebook is their vile spawn, not a platform as free and full of joy as Tumblr once was.
1
When I received my "dis-invitation" from Tumblr over the nature and content of my photography, I knew it was only a matter of time until nostalgia would be the lingering aroma. It was grand. Now it is not.
6
1969 is a year that is currently under a microscope of nostalgia and the questions around “What went wrong?” I am struck by how the magic of Woodstock, a peaceful gathering of 400,000 that worked in August was relatively concurrent with Altamont’s ugliness and mayhem in December that year.
A quick read of the various websites in this article which rise, become perverted from their original intention and then quickly crash, provides a cautionary tale about the human condition. Yes Dickens, a time very much like our own.
2
Nostalgia is the real Fool’s Gold. Stop wishing for what was, and start dreaming about what will be.
13
@Ron
Exactly my thought. But it's the drive in most things we do...
@Ron
That would require what will be potentially having something worth dreaming about.
Unfortunately, unless you are very blessed(wealthy, physically attractive, well educated, whatever) there isn't a lot of that around.
If you are in the US around half of the country intensely hates the other half, the jobs that are available simply don't pay enough, people are having less sex, etc.
1
Cultural Marxists, always the desire to control what others are doing: "Which is why, sometimes really late at night when it is quiet, I think about an alternate universe for the internet: one in which the internet actually managed to remain a pretty nifty place, as it was in the early days."
In case you missed the movie, Prohibition doesn't work--but keep up the fantasy if it keeps you away from the Prozac.
25
No one is talking prohibition. Maybe you’re too young to remember the internet’s golden age. It really did use to be fun. No Prozac needed.
29
One more bright light in American amateur intelligentsia who's never bothered to read Marx and thinks social mores are for losers.
Yawn.
36
I joined Tumblr to read some Laura Nyro sites. They weren't much better than what I saw elsewhere, but a friend was posting his poems there, so I stayed for that. Didn't last. I haven't been there for months. I still enjoy my friend's poetry, especially in person.
Good. Never knew I did this, but happy to help.
.
Now, on to Twitter and Facebook.
.
See y'all at the "social" media cemetery.
7
Unless tumblr is drowning in debt, I’m sure Wordpress got a great deal
1
Netscape; Altavista; Lotus 1,2,3; Word Perfect; Gateway; Comodore; Tandy; Print Shop; AOL; Myspace.... sound familiar?? Tumblr is just another in a long litany of computer, software, and web company’s that either failed or were acquired. Others will follow, and new blooms will blossom. Nothing new under the sun.
7
Tumblr?
9
Best post to this article. One word with punctuation and says it all. I love it! Thank you Mary. Please sign in to your AOL account to retrieve your prize.
1
The decline is correlated to getting rid of porn. Tumblr lost a large portion of it's traffic and userbase when it removed porn.
I can empathize with the decision to make a kid friendly 'E for everyone' platform while simultaneously having to face the fact that the majority of users on your platform use it for porn. I imagine in order the fit Tumblr into the Verizon/AOL/Yahoo culture there wasn't much of an argument for allowing porn that wasn't purely economical, so after filters proved ineffective a content restriction was set.
This decline shows how tough it is to compete for space amongst corporate friendly platforms. Tumblr was an established forum and could not grow it's user base (without porn). It sacrificed the majority of its traffic to become an established corporate friendly app and failed to so, so far. I guess we'll what happens and where Tumblr goes from here.
12
C’mon folks. If you’re not a journaliist (sorry for your situation) just say “no” to Twitter. Credit to Nancy Reagan.
10
So true. It is completely unnecessary. I bet it would take less than5 days to go cold turkey and get hours of your life back.
1
@Ad Astra per aspersions
Totally agreed on this. Twitter is a pox on us all.
1
It's funny how all the journalists who write about the Tumblr story refer to its "ban" on pornography. Thousands of pornographic posts continue to appear on Tumblr every day. Is Tumblr's software totally ineffective in weeding out these posts, or isn't it trying? This story, like many others, shows how lazy journalists can be. Did the author of this piece actually look at today's Tumblr?
10
Tumblr died of fright.
11
In just 4 words. Speaks volumes. Nicely done.
@northlander Better than dying from a broken heart
Pretty self-righteous writing from someone who is widely agreed to be the queen of snark and nastiness in Silicon Valley. Kara Swisher's body of work is rife with celebrating and pushing forward the downfall of all tech, most notably Yahoo, Tumblr, Facebook, Uber, etc. Instead of using her platform for holding tech to high standards, her writing devolved into snarky nastiness which masqueraded as journalism but was just really mean commentary. Yuck
9
"...While some of those blogs were seen as safe havens to explore sexuality, there was too much hard-core pornography — and that did not fly in a corporate setting...
Actually, Tara – the mainframe industry had made its peace with the notion that more than half of the electronic network bandwidth and non-volatile storage capacity would go to porn...
A half-century ago...
This was one area they didn’t have to prophesize for...
They just looked at what'd gone on in the cinema industry, for the half-century prior to that...
There're probably still Zoetropes out there, where it'd be
a crime to turn the crank – even just a bit...
Unless, of course, it’s in the name of academic research into Zoetropic cinema...
Yeah - "erotic" is embedded...
It's a puzzle clue – so sue me...
Better still, subscribe to my digital edition – but I digress...
PS
If religion was the opiate of the masses – until it was abusively over-prescribed...
Could violent video games be the methadone to porn addiction...
Or the other way around...
PPS
Like you said at the outset:
“...after all, It was you and me...
Some sympathy and taste – sorely lacking, these days...
5
Reminds me of that club that was so hip last year, but closed last week. Nothing Tumblr did was new or unique. It was the flavor of the month that made some folks rich and made some other folks (Marissa Meyer) look stupid.
A business without a business model is worth zero.
3
What’s Tumblr?
4
"...this is the ugly place where we live now, and it’s very hard to figure out how to find our way out. Are you completely exhausted by it?...
Are you asking me or the Big Guy...
2
My view. Billions of dollars spent to buy nothing of value. At some point it will be 2001 again. The giant tech bubble will go pop. But now with interest rates at rock bottom, money continues to chase stupid.
1
The majority of Tumblr users were there for the porn; consenting adult porn. And more power to them. Once Tumblr banned porn, consumers fled.
All that remains is the intersectional victimhood crowd. good luck with that.
19
@The Libertine
Correct. Consenting adults was key. Making everything kid friendly and suburban friendly was the death knell.
4
I dunno what tumblr you’re looking at, cuz mine is still an amazing global pornography gallery, which is just the way I like it.
4
Who cares what killed Tumblr?
1
I want to offer one more take: there is a demand for porn. It can be made by exploiting young women, or it can be made to empower the performers. When exploitive sites, like PornHub, were the vast majority of the content is made by studios who exploit their performers (full time sex work with no medical benefits is about as exploitive as it gets), are the only source of porn, then only the worst sort of porn will be made. The censoring of sex on Tumblr is a significant attack on "empowering" porn and non-commercial porn. It makes the Internet dirtier, not cleaner.
12
I miss the Tumblr you write about! It was pure fun, with a great presence of (I thought) really smart, fun employees microblogging along with everyone else.
As I ran out of Internet free time (or had a baby and got boring, if you will) I visited less and less often. I’m fairly shocked to see that others thought it was primarily a vehicle for porn.
I eventually moved on to Instagram, have had a few joyless affairs with Twitter. But nothing so far has brought me the joy I felt when I was scrolling my old Tumblr feed, discovering incredible art and silly jokes and the community you seem to have been a part of once.
Thanks for memorializing what was once a Good Thing on the Internet.
10
She's not promoting censorship. She's bemoaning the corporate scrubbing as much as the degrading of artistic work by hateful material like white supremacy and child pornography. Is it possible to have an open forum on the internet that doesn't devolve into these two poisons?
I still post on Tumblr and a few people see it. I love what I come across there by accident. But I'm not trying to see into the dark corners.
4
Pay over $1 Bn and sell for $3mil. shows the Valley elite are just not that smart.
3
Things have been going swimmingly for me since I switched to Insta-Sociopathic-Gram.
1
"We all" didn't kill tumblr. (A curious and baldly clickbait headline, since you never in the article actually talk about how "we all" killed tumblr)
Tumblr killed itself when it gleefully bent to apple's insistance on puritanical rules for the platform so it wouldn't be dropped from their store, yet was dropped anyway and didn't reverse course despite pleas from its community. They put supposed profitability before the interests of their consumer base and the platform died as a result. I didn't kill tumblr, tumblr's incompetent management killed tumblr.
17
The www was great when only a relatively few people had access to it. But once the masses gained access, then it reflected the mores of the masses: ignorant, bigoted, violent, selfish and exploitive. I don't doubt that business exploited these masses to make a buck, but the problem lies with the basic nature of Homo sapiens, the worst species to ever inhabit this planet.
14
What destroys the internet is what destroys societies, and I fear eventually civilization itself: the fact that we don't all agree on what we're here for, and the fact that we spend more time, money and energy enforcing random ideas of what's wrong than on fostering what's right.
I was charmed by the idea, after our recent ills, "sometimes…I think about an alternate universe for the internet: one in which (it) actually managed to remain a…nifty place, as it was in the early days."
At first blush I thought, well at long last we're going to start the civic discussion about how to create the world we want to live in.
So pictures of lunch. Cartoons minus the cartoon. Parent shaming. Graffiti. (…Okay.)
Let's move to the dangers of this world we'd prefer to omit. Self-harm. (The heart aches.) Neo-Nazis. (Absolutely.) And the thing that really ruins everything: Sex. (…I'm sorry, what?)
Two paragraphs later you get to "child pornography," and I think we can all agree we don't want that in our world.
Sex among consenting adults, however, is not an area of agreement. Especially for the LGBT community, most of whom grew up starved for healthy, sex-positive representation in either life or media, corralling it within corporate paywalls in virtual worlds misses the point.
Re-reading the postulate in this light it sounds awfully similar to Republican entreaties to "take our country back." I see why it's a nice place for them to revisit, but we don't all want to live there.
12
There IS a social networking site that is completely free from advertising. It's called MeWe. There IS a social networking site that doesn't track you, or collect or sell ANY of your data. It's called MeWe. There IS a social networking site with lots and lots of interesting groups and pages covering a huge range of topics and interests. It's called MeWe. There IS a non-algorithm-bound social networking site that does not control or manipulate what you see. It's called MeWe. There IS an alternative to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and the other privacy-invading corporate sites. It's called MeWe. It's at www.mewe.com
For heaven's sake, Kara, give it a look! Why not report on something that's growing and working well for users sometimes, instead of focusing on lamenting about what's not?
7
Gosh!! A company started out fast, messed up, and failed. I wonder if that has ever happened before?
3
Tumblr seems vaguely familiar. What is Yahoo?
3
90+% of all Internet apps are trendy garbage that teenagers think are "high-tech" but are instead personal information-gathering time vampires.
But when adults get caught up in these nonsense pastimes you really start to wonder if the human race was always this easily fooled.
8
Let’s reframe this entire discussion: the end of the day, when the hipsters leave for the next shiny thing, people will come and stay for that thing that caters to everyone’s basic biological need, sex. Why does this have to be a bad thing?
9
I can say for sure who killed the wonderful G+. It was Google!
2
Once upon a time I enjoyed Tumblr a lot. I had three blogs, my favorite of which was called Face Museum. There was art everywhere on Tumblr, and because the BBC's Sherlock was new, there was a lot of Benedict Cumberbatch. I made a friend in France who I'm still in touch with. She has a new baby, lives in England now and loves Gene Kelly. I have a husband with dementia, live in Vermont and adore Fred Astaire. We met online because of Doctor Who. We met in real life at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The next visit will see us at the Tate Modern.
Thanks for the memories of the halcyon, pre-porn (and pre-Trump) days. I'll have to wander over again sometime soon.
3
I don't get it, at all. Are you really devoting this time and energy to mourning the demise of a dead site? This is lost on me.
2
Maybe...
Wordpress is just what Tumblr needs.
1
There was also trash and borderline smut on the early Tumblr, not that I belong to the purification league.
2
@dave the wave
One wo/mans trash, is another wo/mans treasure.
Humans come in all shape, sizes, tastes and morals.
1
I don't really disagree with the article, but it would be simpler to say that Tumblr was a porn site that banned porn. It essentially committed suicide.
14
Several years back I read David Karp sold Tumblr for $200 million dollars. All the Artists I know who posted on Tumblr
never made a penny in profit. The pay off was getting 'likes'. Which scientists say releases dopamine in the brain and gives a moment of egoic pleasure. Pathetic.
2
Tumblr is social media? I guess that is like Facebook or Tweety-bird or whatever those things are.
Why do people even care about social media? What nonsense and waste of time.
I am retired. My wife and I spend every minute together. In the past 8 years, since she retired, we have cycled 16000 miles in 10 states, have traveled 55000 miles in our pickup camper( camping in the most remote BLM areas of our country), have hiked just under 4000 miles (rarely on established trails), have learned to play ping pong, have become killer ballroom dancers, and now have taken up swimming which we do every day we aren't out camping and hiking.
I soooooo miss hearing about everybody's gripes or having to deal with porn or having to worry about likes or caring about other such silliness.
Call me old fashioned. (or call me the happiest man on the planet because my attention isn't on any social media but, instead, is on my awesome wife).
14
@Travelers And you still have no need to document, chronicle and post all your daily activities? What are you..antisocial? Your experiences aren't real unless released for public consumption. Get with it man, mount the mini cameras on the handlebars and demand a live satellite upload and eventually your own reality show! Get real needy and fit in!
1
Yet, you're here.
You may not agree but a NYT comments thread is really no different from any other social media, right down to the pseudo & tag line. It may be slower to post (not always) but that only gives the smug illusion of proximity to that pre internet creature, the letter to the editor, which comments definitively are not.
5
@Travelers
Why do people care about social media?
Ironically, if you added a couple pictures, this is exactly the kind of thing people put on social media.
You’re already an expert. :)
5
All these sites (including this one) with their mountains of incessant, inane opinions are destroying the earth. Does anyone care?
2
The trouble with social media is that it has allowed the very worst of humanity to come out and damage whomever and whatever it wants. The only way to fix that is for sites to very carefully police themselves, but that cuts into profits, so don’t expect it. You can’t fix evil, you can’t fix greed, just like you can’t fix stupid. The only thing you can do is stay away from it as much as you possibly can.
6
You are nostalgic for a golden age of the internet that never existed. Joseph Weizenbaum had it pegged back in the 90s, when he said that the web was like one of the trash heaps outside of Calcutta. You see desperate people digging through them, and occasionally they find a shiny piece of metal or some trinket that they can sell, but it's still a trash heap.
4
At night I either watch a old movie on TCM or some type of British murder mystery on BritBox or a documentary to unwind.
5
I still use tumblr. I follow photography users and post some of my own. I write little poems there - "Little Ditties from Nowhere".
I like it there.
shoofoolatte.tumblr.com
3
I worked at Tumblr for 3 and a half years (and now work at NYT).
A decade ago Tumblr felt like the type of place the internet was built for. People were kind to each other (for the most part), it was funny, it teemed with creativity, and there was something for everyone. It was both a refuge for the small town teenager trying to connect with others when their interests weren't mainstream while also place where New York Media People talked amongst themselves (and you could join in!).
I met countless friends that I still talk to every day through Tumblr (before working there myself). I discovered so many great artists and personalities. It was the utopian vision of the internet for a while.
This is a great article, but I disagree with the central premise of what killed Tumblr. It wasn't sex or the now lack of sex.
Tumblr never really changed from what it started out at in 2007. What it started out as then (a place to post anything, with a standardized feed but creativity on your outward facing site) was revolutionary. Twitter's current functionality is essentially what Tumblr was a decade ago. What killed Tumblr was that it never innovated or changed much. From my point of view it seemed Yahoo bought Tumblr thinking they didn't really need to invest in the product itself. Look at how differently FB behaved with IG. People may not like it, but they innovated the product and more people used it. Tumblr's biggest problem was that it never embraced mobile.
5
This article could/should have been much shorter. Verizon killed Tumblr, just like what happens to just about every company bought by stodgy, out of touch executives at really large, bureaucratic, old-school companies.
6
This is satire, right? It is clueless, to be sure, if it isn't. I remember the social media site Orkut which was taken over by Brazilians, mostly prostitutes, swingers, and travestis as they are termed in Brazil (not cross dressers). That was a wild social outpouring of Brazilian social behavior, deemed antisocial by US standards, that caused Google to close it down. Maybe this woman didn't see it because it required an understanding of Brazilian Portuguese to read much of it; that was likely why it took Google so long to shut it down. It was the end of the wild-west internet. It was the only meaningful social media site that ever existed on the internet and it was not in a world in which this "worldly" internet authority existed. That was when the internet was fun. US regulation of the internet has turned it into a pop culture center of commercialization with no adventure and certainly no innovation. Just like the US.
6
@J Chaffee
One of the more interesting sites was run by a Brazilian professor who studied travestis (shemales who did not want to give up their male sexual organs, but who wanted to be aggressively feminine males and often did their own medical work, including how they balanced their hormones so they could still perform but not have facial hair, even doing their own breast jobs) and they made a lot of comments. Many of them were prostitutes and prostitution web sites were common and legal in Brazil, and most carried these travestis, that as a group were called bonecas (dolls formally, though it was what they call giria, ie slang). They were generally not particularly petite from what I saw on the sites. Anyway, reading their comments about their feelings and why the chose the methods they used to facilitate their sexuality was informative. The Sao Paulo newspapers had plenty of articles about travestis working the streets on the edge of the upscale neighborhood Moema and using people's yards and doorways to service customers. Eventually that led to a crackdown.
Another thing one found was commentary about various swing clubs in Sao Paulo and other cities by participants. Public swing clubs were common and well attended. On a given block in Moema one would find schools, restaurants, bars, brothels (straight and gay), flower shops, grocery stores and swing clubs; no zoning.
1
@J Chaffee
By site in the first sentence above, I meant discussion groups on Orkut.
Tumblr was infested with salacious material from the day it went live, it just got worse as time passed. I moderate on a couple of technical support forums - we had so many complaints about the offensive images shown alongside innocuous screen shots that we blocked the site and told members to post their screen shots elsewhere.
2
Just another “gift”from somebody who inherited a lot of money....but not much in the way of character.
Yeah, Tumblr is very much alive and well for fandom culture and is a pretty decent place to be a community member.
There are still times when the internet is magic! Read this other story in today's times: He Gave a Bike to a Refugee Girl. 24 Years Later, She Got to Thank Him.
2
It’s hot in Silicon Valley. It’s the night of the August full moon, and Kara is in full howl. Really, with the retro rants lately. And the comment blaming Marc A. For the ills of the internet is precious.
Humans are what they are; you have to accept that their humanity will show up full throttle in all its glory and horror. We are frankly pretty awful. Welcome to the internet where humans are embarrassing themselves by being human. It’s a necessary mirror.
R,
D-
2
Sadly, idealists are almost always wrong as humans are so much uglier. I never use social media. Have my smart phone turned off almost all the time. Read the news from reputable outlets and watch cable news except for fox. Don't do much else and much happier for it. What I do read, hear, and see is depressing enough.
2
Maybe Tumblr was an endangered species.
For refusing to treat any adult over the age of 16 as an adult who might enjoy hard core sex fantasies or other healthy adult fun, however thoroughly NSFW, Tumblr's censorious owners have made their now boring product exactly as valuable as it deserves to be.
Whilst child pornography is wrong, that does not apply to a healthy human delight in every form of consenting fun among adults freely exploring or ignoring other adults having adult fun, who are by definition not the delicate children that Tumblr's puerile school mams of the worst type think them.
12
Interesting. I remember a segment on the PBS News Hour of all places regarding the effects of the Tumblr ban on pornography. Interestingly, the commentator referred to “pornography” in general, but lamented the lost forum for LGBTQ “sexuality”. Why is that, when heterosexual, it’s referred to as pornography, but when LGBTQ, the images and videos reflect “sexuality”?
4
@KJ are trying to "Make America Great Again?" Tumblr was also a great soapbox for that.
1
I never knew it existed. Of course, I have never tweeted or booked face either. They all seem childish and self indulgent. I know that I have missed nothing.
If we didn't have twitter would we have Trump as president? I suspect not.
4
It’s hard not to blame Fios, what they buy and fix “ain’t woke” to abscond with a contemporary euphemism.
They bought AOL email which turned into a significant degradation of their previous email platform. And have you tried to one-click tape a tv show on FioS? Well make sure you tape the next show behind it if you want to see your ending was supposed to look like because they can’t do that right either.
So Tumblr is a mess?
Of course it is...
The REAL problem is the thinking 'if you are not rapidly and constantly growing you are dying'. In trying to do this continuous growing companies screwup; and leave gaps where others cam quickly step in. Timing is key -
2
When Tumbler banned adult material, that very day, was the end.
9
In its heyday, Tumblr provided fascinating blogging and connective capabilities in underserved specialized areas, such as Japanese anime, trainhopping, robot battles, amateur photography, cameras, urban exploration, Dekotura (the fascinating Japanese art of decorating 18 wheeler trucks with lights), LBGTQ issues and similar communities, that were eye-opening viewing for both its casual and diehard users.
In its earlier days, Tumblr also offered something magical and provocative, that no other social media platform or website has ever really gotten right: not just porn, but CURATED porn, curated by real people, selected and picked with flair and personality, with individual people seizing on the powerful pull of erotica and sharing their own tastes and quirky minds, with fascinating and cerebral results.
You could find Tumblr porn blogs curated by actual lesbians for other lesbians, or fetish experts joyfully deploying the full array of their knowledge and expertise, for other similar enthusiasts. Such peer-to-peer setups are completely unheard of in the standard straight-male-dominated world of capitalist/chauvinist, ugly pornography.
For a short time, the individually CURATED Tumblr page was perhaps the greatest innovation in pornography in decades, but of course it couldn't last. Whether it was the corporations or the users themselves who ruined it, I cannot say. Maybe it just got too big for itself, and couldn't sustain what made it great in the early days.
14
It's not only the content and lack of security on Social Media,
but the amount of time people spend allowing this
tainted vehicle to shape their psychological makeup.
1
I don't know how to change the entire Internet, but I think it is not rocket science to change the user interface, or "skin." It would rely on a forum like group system with feed capabilities that does not track users and provides actionable information that drives sustainable, good-for-earth-and-for-people transactions. Based on principles of curation, or "knowledge infill."
I call it fabric, call it what you will.
2
In 2013 I did a shtick on Tumblr. It wasn’t much. My thing was for people in our town who would be in a nursing home with limited opportunity, and so I made the rounds of our little town and posted photos. I made sure the photo work was tops. Maybe the best was a bit of luck with grabbing the name, Outside News. I’m glad Wordpress has it.
2
While perhaps smaller than it once was, Tumblr (at least from my perspective) is hardly dead. Despite attempts from budding platform Pillowfort and others like it to capitalize on the Tumblr's mismanagement, the reality is that there is no other mainstream social media platform as perfect for fandom and quirky/niche communities as Tumblr. Many if not all of the other major social media sites are tied to your real identity; on tumblr thousands of people will follow your anonymous shitposting and otp headcanons. Yes Tumblr's owners have made it less welcoming than it was before, but I have seen posts relishing in the fact that Tumblr is so incompetent that they can't properly mine our data to sell ads and therefore turn the site into the capitalist nightmare that Instagram has become. Ultimately, I don't think Tumblr is sustainable it is my hope that fandom will be able to create their own platform (similar to AO3) or that Pillowfort will actually develop into the platform it dreams to be. But until then Tumblr and many users will still be there. Where else is there to go?
7
@Kat
The tab open next the Times on my browser is tumblr. I'm not as active as I used to be there 9 years ago, but I still check in most days. A lot of what's always been good there is still good. I'm not sure a social media site run by a non-profit like OTW could work bc a volunteer force buildling and managing a large social media site would be A LOT. I've been poking about in Pillowfort for 18 months, but it's still pretty sleepy. We've been through this before with livejournal. Many people loathed it by 2007 - 2008 and tried to convince their communities to move exclusively to clones like dreamwidth. Few people did. Then tumblr happened and in 2010 and 2011 LJ communities made a great exodus to tumblr. But I think how you experience tumblr depends on how you use it. I use xkit to blacklist things and I stay out of the tags these days. Meanwhile Tik Tok is everywhere and I'm tired.
4
They need to create ephemeral social platforms so they can stay true to what they were intended to be. For one year or two and then that’s it.
I think people would jump on it.
2
"'It’s just fun,' Mr. Mullenweg said to The Wall Street Journal in an interview."
Sorry. It's just a facsimile of fun.
Don't settle for "a little bit better." Go for leaps-and-bounds better to a time when people had fun in the dynamic presence of one another instead of trying to replicate that fun in the static remnant of the posted images,
Want to have real fun, delate ALL your accounts. Be human gain.
28
@CFXK
If you were in a coffee shop and saw someone reading a newspaper would you go over and tell them they're not human bc they're not talking to the other people quietly reading in the coffee shop? You'd probably be banned from that place if you did. You don't know what people are doing on their phones and laptops. I work, I correspond with my doctors about chronic health problems. I read the news, do crossword puzzles, talk to my family and friends, and when I'm sad I look at cat gifs.
I know when I'm having fun and it's almost never when someone starts talking at me in a coffee shop while I am working or reading a book. I have had good conversations in coffee shops too. Miraculously I can do both those things at different times depending on my workload and mood.
Some people do not live near people they can trust or relate to. Online communities give them friends, resources, and hope. Instead of telling those people they are not human and their friendships aren't real, you might want to educate yourself and be a bit more compassionate if you want to, you know, be a good human.
27
@CFXK
So says the guy typing away to send a judgmental post to an social media sight.
2
By your logic we’d also not be allowed to enjoy books.
2
Any internet site will not last unless it has a hook (new, edgy and trendy) or it has become ubiquitous. (a hub or platform)
Even if you are one of the two, and start to abuse your clients (or content providers) with overlord convictions or advertising saturation, and you can become uncool in a nanosecond.
It also seems to me that society at large (let alone the digital community) is getting away from the written or blogged word for audio (podcast) or video. (streaming) That trend reflects us all at the most basic element as even schools do away with cursive.
Just look at our President that encapsulates not reading or having the attention span of a gnat. Our bleak future.
16
@FunkyIrishman
Podcasting is for the lazy or illiterate. But nice they have a place to go. Would have been Stalin's favorite means, too.
1
Ten years ago, I was an enthusiastic user of Twitter and Facebook. Then, in one of those middle-of-the-night epiphanies, I realized that if you are not the customer, you are the product.
I closed my social media accounts and never looked back. (Well, almost never!) Nevertheless, I don't regret not swimming in these digital sewers. They are ultimately an open invitation for the worst (and laziest) of human expression.
48
@Randomonium that axiom is actually inaccurate. you're not the product. you are the factory that creates the raw material for the real product: predictions about your behavior that are sold to advertisers and other companies interested in behavioral control for their own profits. you're neither the customer nor the product. it's worse.
2
@Randomonium That's a fact. I couldn't care much less about the NYT content; it's just the kindling for what I really come here for--the reader comments. WE are the product.
3
@Noah - Is there really a difference? Your data is all about you, and FB's paying customers, marketers and the media companies who serve them, just want to sell you something.
This is what happens when online platforms become dominated by corporations and turn against what the userbase is using it for. Corporations are notorious for wanting to keep themselves clean of anything controversial.
It's happened to Facebook, Youtube, and Reddit. It is slowly happening to Twitch as well. The only content corporate marketers are comfortable with are those that are family friendly and open to all ages with little to no controversy or hurt feelings involved.
22
When looking for the root cause of the runaway use of guns in our country, we converge immediately on one thing : The outsized influence of the NRA. Similarly, I have one name for you regarding why the Social Media and Technology is careening toward the precipice : Marc Andreessen.
Andreessen and Horowitz have been the principle architects of stopping any sensible regulatory conversation dead in its track because it affects the value of their venture capital investment.
We have somehow come to implicitly associate technical smarts with sincere intent. Uncouple the two and you will see clarity.
16
Someday there may be an actual social media site or social network, but all we have so far are a variety of popularly contests. Popularity contests have been rigged since antiquity. I can’t think of one that hasn’t eventually become corrupted.
7
The best way to clean up the Internet would be automatic doxxing. People participate in online conversations in the privacy of their own home, and emotionally they feel it is private. If everyone knew what their next door neighbor was posting, the posts would become much more polite.
13
@Glenn Those who are confident their community will at least humor, if not support, their views would be free to post whatever stupid, superstitious cruelty they feel like. One has only to look to facebook for evidence of that.
On the other hand, many people who can only safely express themselves and connect with others anonymously - LGBTQ, Jewish people, atheists, and others in less enlightened regions - would need to go back into the closet.
4
I predicted all of this back around 2007, with the rise of open platforms like Tumblr and Twitter and FaceBook, that allow any yahoo to publish. Coming from the world of curated content, as a print journalist, but by then more than a decade into a business career at Microsoft, I had been on the front lines of consumer and B2B web services and was thrilled by their value proposition, to empower consumers and small business, to make their lives easier, but with curated content and tools. Then came the developers who wanted to build open, non curated platforms, which is a great business model because you don't have to pay for content. But I was skeptical, knowing these platforms would be saddled with bad stuff eventually. And it has played out much worse than I predicted, as the platforms have become a threat to our civil discourse and our democracy.
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@JS,
You end on this note of despair: "the platforms have become a threat to our civil discourse and our democracy."
But in fact it's when only "curators" "curate" "civil discourse" that we can be sure we're not living in a democracy, but are instead living under a dictatorship that appoints "intellectuals" who serve power and privilege by "curating" only what power defines as "civil discourse."
China is a model for defining "civil discourse" (and thereby controlling its entire population) through the "curated content and tools" that you so value here.
In other words, when we see non-curated content as a threat to democracy, we are demonstrating that we don't understand the very definition of democracy (and the freedom of speech that it requires).
2
@JS
Read what you like; ignore the rest. It’s called freedom.
Loosely monitored or un-monitored sites, particularly of the "social" kind have turned out to be a horrible idea. Humans have to work to be civil with each other face to face. Allow people to be anonymous, well you get what see with Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook, etc. etc. Furthermore, these sites have totally dumbed down what passes for social interaction these days. Go to restaurant where there are lots of teenage kids at a table. Chances are non of them are talking to each other. They are just heads down staring at and thumbing their phones.
With that said, there happen to be some great public websites on the internet, but these, more often than not, are focused on a specific purpose and are closely monitored. Stackoverflow happens to be one of them. It's a public site where members help each other with coding issues.
One of these days corporate sponsors will get around to understanding they don't really want their good names sullied by, what is primarily garbage in the social media sites.
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@CA John
As someone who has worked in "Social Media" as long as it has existed, I can fully agree with you.
@CA John
So those kids are interacting with many others, just not in the way you are comfortable with.
As sit typing to post at a social media platform yourself.
2
The entitlement and internal tribalism of Tumblr users destroyed the platform as much as any of the executives did. In many ways, Tumblr was a seer stone into the future of online communities.
Like many users of Facebook and Twitter, they refused to acknowledge they were using a private platform, where someone could set [arbitrary] rules. They broke the rules, have blogs taken down, and then turned against the very platform they used.
I have 0 sympathy for either Tumblr the company, or Tumblr the community, they both brought this upon themselves in equal strides.
9
Tumblr was a heaven for SKAM followers. The Norwegian series, which was aimed a teenagers and had a very important LGTB+ content, exploded globally in 2016 through Tumblr blogs that distributed the content, made subtitles, GIFs... But the best thing is that created a wonderful community around the world that cared for these characters.
10
Getting rid of porn killed tumblr tbh
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Porn was not just a few communities on Tumblr. It was a huge proportion of it.
Who did all that porn? We did. It is the largest part of the whole internet, with a huge proportion of searches. Ms. Swisher is being judgmental of many of the very users who read her here, and all other normal users. Porn is normal now.
Tumblr was destroyed when it turned on its own users. It was too good for them. That meant it was too good for itself.
There is a blindness there, judgment that is badly distorted. Internet users like porn. A lot of them. There is nothing wrong with that.
229
Bingo. A shame Mullenweg is keeping the ban thus far. He's usually more liberal about things like hate speech, and a supporter of free software. Let's hope he learns.
A prudified, corporatized, SOPAfied, de-neutralized internet may as well be basic cable—except with ads that can harm your computer and phone home your files.
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@Mark Thomason
Just because you aren't bothered by porn, and many people, like myself, under 35 aren't bothered by porn, still leaves around 50% of the population who thinks porn is immoral.
If you can't see why when Verizon wasn't making much money off Tumblr, they wouldn't risk their overall revenue streams by being associated with a site that distributes porn, I really hope you don't do business deals.
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@Mark Thomason Mostly male. Maybe the internet is for women only, the only ones sensible enough to handle the responsibility.
4
Still struggling to adjust those glasses.
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@Dan J My thought exactly! C'mon, you can do it!
I thought Tumblr was a porn site and that the removal of porn was what killed it. I suppose the article is a more sophisticated take.
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@Colin Maybe you're right, but if the author said it as succinctly as you did, she wouldn't get paid for her piece.
5
I don't exactly see a high valuation as a good sign for an internet community anymore, given how that money is generated and who (not what) the products are.
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@Roarke
High valuation is usually the sign of a cesspool where every kind negativity goes unchecked. It's all that negative speech, and the data it generates, that generates the money.
How did Tumblr make money? I honestly don't remember ...
8
This is why we can't have nice things.
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Sweet nostalgia, which many of us feel for whatever caught our fancy when we first got busy on line and saw all the marvelous possibilities. Nearly all of which have turned sour. Far more powerful than the quirky impulse to share offbeat content, far more impactful than the true pleasure of finding old friends and making new ones (actual friends, not "friended" persons), have been the erosion of attention spans, the dumbing-down of conversation, the hollowing-out of print media read from both sides (formerly "all sides") of the political landscape, the openings created for selective fact-believing, rumor-spreading, the hostility of the alienated, recrudescent racism, the small and large invasions of privacy, the displacement of debate by competing surges of outrage...all that plus international espionage and cyber-warfare, financial fraud, deep risks to infrastructure and security, revenge porn and worse....Pandora's box can't be closed now, but - yes, we were better off before. And "before" is farther back than Ms. Swisher dates it.
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@Seraficus
buh with tumblr gone I lost my MEMEs :(
The body parts that Tumblr decided to ban seem to be impossible for the algorithm to properly detect, leading to images with polka dots and plates full of pickles disappearing into adult-territory-banishment, according to the posted complaints on blogs I follow.
The game of fool-the-algorithm seems to be ongoing, however, but the thrill is gone. New content gets skinnyr, and ideas fewr and farthr between.
I do like the pug pictures though.
16
Not to mention that they only banned flesh colored nudity from what I heard. If the bodies are purple or green they don’t get flagged. People just discussing sex work or organizing got booted off however, without photos or pornography.
3
Symptomatic of the degredation of much of the open internet. When looking into practically any topic these days it seems that most of the interesting content is over five years old and on moribund sites. There has to be a better way to thwart the omnipresent chancers trying to turn a quick buck.
12
The interface was clumsy and hard to use. Not surprised it is going down.
6
Thanks for this. I too dream of this place.
8
Considering how much time I spend every week on Tumblr, following my various fandoms, I can assure you that it is hardly dead. It's still a very active site despite the mishandling by its various owners over the past few years.
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@Ravnwing
I never knew there was a “porn” problem on Tumblr because I never once saw it. I liked Tumblr for the Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Star Wars fandoms it sheltered and where I could spend hours marveling at the creativity and passion shared by fellow fans. Occasionally, those fans, usually female or gay, created beautiful erotic art involving favorite characters but that’s not “porn” in my book. I never once saw any of the kind of male fantasy-centered, female-degrading material I consider to be “porn”. I wonder if by “porn”, the author and corporate overloads mean nudity or sexuality that veers from the patriarchal definition of small-minded, insecure heterosexual males.
6