Tumblr - Crystal Abidin

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that supported my research and writing time. Finally, to Kat and Nat: I still cannot believe that we completed this book in the fragile months of the blessed year 2020. Alongside feeling tired and despondent from the state of The World, I was also coping with So Many Things, and could not have made these words without your companionship, comfort, and confidence. It has been an honor and a privilege to be enveloped by the rare combination of intellect and kindness inside both of you – I am so glad we are friends IRL (and maybe someday even mutuals on tumblr).

      I found tumblr some time in 2010. I was reading a lot of fanfiction and many of the stories used images “from tumblr,” so I decided to find out what it meant. My first blog exists as twenty-five static snapshots in the Wayback Machine. Shutting down that first blog was a sudden and emotional decision and what remains of it fits. No coherent archive, rather a metaphorical stash of ticket stubs, candy wrappers, and phone numbers on stained napkins. My second blog is nine years old. My third and fourth were both set up for research. For each of these, I set up a new email address, and each is a new primary blog. This was the way of my first tumblr tribe, guided by a fervent commitment to avoiding context collapse.

      –Katrin

      –Natalie

      I was introduced to tumblr when I mentored a group of teenage girls in my youth group in 2008. My main blog is the most respectable of the lot, but then one day I got bored and stopped updating it. But this “old life” still haunts me every time I open my tumblr mobile app, because my main blog is still linked to another twenty-three side blogs. Where I post depends on my mood in the moment. In one, I diary my grief from missing my sister; in another, I curate pretty pictures based on themes (fluffy birds, clouds at sunset, anime foods); still others are memory capsules, like the time I made a post every day for a month as a gift to a friend. Fingers crossed I never lose my phone and have my tumblr lives exposed.

      –Crystal

      tumblr makes me want to have drinks with people I have never met and Facebook makes me want to throw drinks at people I already know.

      (Unknown)

      This is a meme that made rounds on tumblr, gathering affirmations from people across different user groups and communities. Fans, queers, “snowflakes,” sex workers, “horny people,” teenage girls with flawless aesthetics, writers, artists: they all seemed to agree, that tumblr is very different from Facebook – and much, much better. The vernacular positioning of tumblr within the social media ecology did not stop at comparisons with Facebook. Another popular meme that has circulated on tumblr at various points in time is a still from the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club, where the five main characters – described in the film as: “a brain … and an athlete … and a basket case … a princess … and a criminal” – were labeled as LinkedIn, Facebook, tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter respectively. tumblr, unsurprisingly for anyone who has ever spent time on the platform, was cast as the basket case of the group.

      History, ownership, and vision

      tumblr was launched in February 2007. In March, the press was calling it “delightfully simple,” “blazingly fast,” and “microblogging done right” (Lowensohn 2007). By the end of the year, US$750,000 had been invested in it and trade blogs called it “the darling of the New York startup scene” (Martin 2007). In the thirteen years since, tumblr has consistently had more active users than Twitter, Snapchat, Baidu, or LinkedIn. During its first months of operation, tumblr gained 75,000 users. By 2012, this number was approximately 147 million, doubling in 2013, doubling again to 594 million in 2017, and growing to 624 million in 2018 (Roser et al. 2020). But then, this figure suddenly plummeted to just 370 million in the first months after the NSFW (Not Safe For Work) ban (see Chapter 1) that went into effect in the final weeks of 2018 (Armstrong 2019). In the global ranking of leading social media platforms (Roser et al. 2020), tumblr was usually ranked fourth to sixth from 2013 to 2018 (although different reports have different numbers and rankings, so these statistics should be taken with a grain of salt). Beyond user numbers, tumblr has always boasted impressive user engagement metrics: it had enviable retention rates – 85 percent of the blogs on the platform updated regularly (Dannen 2009) – and was consistently reported to exceed other platforms in terms of time spent on the site (Perez 2013; Ratcliff 2014).

      Most social media platforms are owned by private corporations, which inevitably serve corporate and not public interests, even when governed by laws and regulations. Platform owners’ vision and governance choices often have profound, if unplanned, social, political, and cultural implications. We can recall highly publicized examples, such as Facebook and Cambridge Analytica’s impact on the results of the 2016 US general election and the UK Brexit vote (Cadwalladr and Graham-Harrison 2018), or the role that fake news on WhatsApp – owned by Facebook as of 2014 – played in the Brazilian 2018 elections (Pereira and Bojczuk 2018). Similarly, it matters when tumblr suddenly bans NSFW content, as it did in 2018.

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