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what the platform “is supposed to do and, by extension, implies how it can be used and by whom” (Light et al. 2018: 889). In this section, we identify three phases in tumblr’s vision, guided by changes in ownership. We review tumblr when it was an independent company (2007–12), when it was owned by Yahoo! and the corporations that subsequently bought it (2013–18), and, finally, when it was most recently sold to Automattic (2019–time of writing). While there is not yet evidence that Automattic will run tumblr differently from Yahoo!, the separation is based on the cultural imaginary of Yahoo! having “ruined” tumblr. We will come back to this shortly.

      A brief note. You might have noticed that we do not capitalize the word “tumblr.” We use the small “t” when we talk about tumblr as a social experience and a platform, and capitalize it when we discuss “Tumblr Inc.,” the company that developed it. The small “t” is folkloric. It reflects how people across our personal and research experiences have referred to the platform since its inception. This preference for a lower-case “t,” in turn, reflects the developers’ design choices. tumblr’s logo and app icon have both always used lowercase “t”s.

      Independent tumblr

While Karp attracted investor enthusiasm and raised capital from the get-go, he was explicit about his focus being less on business and monetization and more on what he called the product. “I didn’t care how the bills got paid, or about facilities or H.R. stuff,” Karp is cited as saying in the New York Times (Walker 2012). Karp’s vision for tumblr seemed to stand on the three pillars of ease of use, design, and creativity. tumblr’s public facing texts (e.g., About page, FAQ, press clippings posted on the site) highlighted simplicity, customizability, interest-driven community, and creative self-expression. tumblr was positioned as making it easy to share “everything you find, love, hate or create” (tumblr 2007), an “effortless” way to “share” and “express yourself,” because “everything” is customizable (tumblr 2008). In 2012, corporate rhetoric shifted toward prioritizing creativity. A “what tumblr is for” segment was added to the Guidelines, stating: “Tumblr celebrates creativity. We want you to express yourself freely and use Tumblr to reflect who you are, and what you love, think, witness, and believe” (tumblr 2012). In 2015, “witness, and believe” was changed to “standing for” but other than that the mission statement has, to date, remained unchanged. The tagline, too, was updated in 2012 to “Follow the world’s creators” and has not been changed since. Karp’s interviews during the period focused on ease of use and creativity. In 2009, he is cited as saying that “the world would be a better place if more people could find, love and create things more easily” (Dannen 2009).

      Karp wanted tumblr to be “a product-orientated company” (Cheshire 2012) like Google or Apple, rather than a social graph-driven one like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. Those, he claimed: “are not tools built for creative expression,” adding that “nobody is proud of their identity on Facebook” (Schonfeld 2011). Trade journalists and the experts they interviewed seem largely to accept Karp’s vision of the period – tumblr was typically described by third parties as a stunningly simple, beautifully designed place for intelligent social networking and original self-expression. In terms of business, it was often called an investor darling guided by feeling. This focus on “product” paid off in terms of the site’s popularity with users. Numbers grew rapidly, reaching a point that Karp described as “we made it on the map” by 2010 (Schawbel 2013).

Yahoo! tumblr

      In May 2013, Karp sold Tumblr Inc. to Yahoo! for US$1.1 billion. In terms of communicating the platform’s vision though, Karp remained true to creativity, maintaining that if they got it right with Yahoo!, tumblr would in five years “be home to the most aspiring and talented creators all over the world” (Lapowski 2013). Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo!, in turn publicly promised to “not screw it up,” while also emphasizing the potential to bring in more money by selling ads. Under Yahoo!, Karp’s comments on creativity shifted to emphasize creative expression of one’s unique self, on the one hand, but also something enacted by an empowered “creative class” who will change the world (Lapowski 2013), on the other. Increasingly, curation was mentioned as a form of creation. Karp told the BBC that “curation is a new, more accessible way to express yourself” (Mason 2012). In 2014, he said that while other social media platforms are “giant directories of profiles,” tumblr gives people a community where they can be themselves, fulfilling the promise of the internet as “a space where you could really create … an identity that you’re really, truly proud of” (Hamburger 2014). Karp argued that, unlike the “Valley,” where engineers are the shapers of the vision and the experience, tumblr is not interested in data-driven categorization of users, but, instead, instils a mindset that creators, empowered by tumblr, “are going to show us the way” (Hamburger 2014). However, tumblr’s image among trade presses and marketing professionals started to waver. While many stories continued to highlight that tumblr was aesthetically superior and loved by its users, attention was shifting to its revenue-earning potential, as per Mayer’s aim.

Although user numbers kept growing, tumblr’s revenue appeared to come to a standstill (Fell 2014); by the end of 2014, Mayer, under pressure, publicly promised that tumblr would make more than US$100 million in revenue in 2015. She merged Yahoo! and tumblr’s ad sales teams, placing both under a new executive, whose image as a “shark”¹ perhaps explains the mass exodus of tumblr employees that followed. A couple of months later, Mayer reorganized Yahoo!’s leadership, placing David Karp himself under Simon Khalaf. Khalaf would later gain infamy for showing up to a tumblr staff meeting only to perplex everyone with an announcement that tumblr would “be the new PDF” (Fiegerman 2016). Retrospectively, 2015 is marked as the year when Yahoo! completely derailed tumblr. In those retrospective imaginaries, the pre-Yahoo! tumblr is described as having been “the hottest thing on the internet,” a platform that “built strong communities, launched Internet memes, led to countless book deals and helped shape the culture, online and offline,” but also a “vibrant network of powerful cultural commentary,” and one of the more beloved private tech companies in the world (Fiegerman 2016).

      In June 2017, the telcom giant Verizon acquired Yahoo! – and tumblr with it. Later in the same year, it merged Yahoo! with its other acquisition, AOL, renaming the group OATH. Shortly after, tumblr’s founder and “mascot” David Karp announced that he was leaving the company, but he did not confirm whether this latest acquisition was the reason. Karp’s goodbye email further reinforced what tumblr’s vision had been under his tenure, stating that he looks back “with so much pride at a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders that have redefined our culture, and who we have helped to empower” (Menegus 2017).

      Automattic tumblr

In an attempt to make tumblr more palatable for advertisers, Verizon enhanced its filtering of sexual content in 2017, and by December of the next year it announced a plan to ban all sexual content from the platform (see Chapters 1 and 6). This generated, next to public uproar, a drastic drop (estimated at 30 percent in the first three months) in user engagement and traffic (Sung 2019), and spawned a crop of tumblr clones targeted at those with interest in sexually explicit content. By May 2019, news surfaced that Verizon was looking to offload tumblr. Pornhub expressed interest, but in August, Verizon announced a sale of the platform and the company to Automattic, the owner of the blogging platform WordPress. The price tag was less than US$3 million, a phenomenal drop from the US$1.1 billion that Yahoo! had bought it for. Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg echoed the popular sentiment of tumblr being something beautiful but ruined by Yahoo!, and had a hopeful vision that under Automattic the “magic” and “frisson” that tumblr once brought to blogging could be reinvigorated. “I would love for tumblr to become a social alternative,” Mullenweg said, while arguing that tumblr had always brought substance to social discourse and possessed a certain friendliness and supportiveness that other platforms lacked (Patel 2019).

      Magic and frisson

But what was this “magic” and

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