At the risk of covering this subject to death and then some, I wanted to write a bit about Tumblr - and my reasons for walking away from it. I made a lot of friends there, and I probably owe it to them to explain a bit more than the “goodbye message” I posted.
I had been a member of Tumblr since before they launched to the public back in 2007. I remember Leo Laporte talking about the new upstart blogging site on This Week in Tech, signing up, liking it a lot, and returning repeatedly over the years.
Tumblr always seemed to be the scrapbook, and in the years before the masses started to arrive, most people treated it as a mid-way point between a micro-blog (Twitter, Identica), and a “traditional” blog (WordPress, Blogger, TypePad). That all started to change in 2011 with explosive growth as Tumblr became the darling of the US hipster crowd - and following that all the college kids, and then the rest of the internet surfing world.
The arrival of lots of people meant Tumblr suddenly had a community - or rather, a number of communities. A heady mix of fashionistas, photographers, bloggers, writers, teens, and every conceivable cross-section of society you might think of.
At first the potential audience to share your day with was seductive. You could post the scrapbook happenings from hour to hour, and a sea of smiling faces would “heart” your photos, conversations, notes, and memories. You would follow each other, and collectively cultivate firehoses of like-minded people. Or so you thought.
Somewhere back in the misty origins of Tumblr, the decision was made to not support comments on posts. Eventually (after everybody began leaving), the development team half-heartedly added a “reply” feature for posts - with no opportunity for the author to reply back.
Therepercussionsof the missing comment functions have beendisastrous. Think about it; if you have followed several hundred people, and they have all posted more than once during the day, which is easier - clicking a “heart” symbol on the posts that stand out, as they scroll past, or actively posting a comment that you know cannot be replied to.
Why would you ever respond to a post when you know the author cannot respond? Perhaps if you have nothing useful to say - and that’s exactly what the feature got used for. Rather than engage each other in conversation and grow friendships, Tumblr remains shallow.
You can follow people, but you cannot group them. You can reply to friend’s posts, but they cannot reply back. You can reblog content even if you have no right to do so. You cannot restrict who can see your posts beyond “all or nothing” password access. You can flag your content as “adult”, but cannot filter adult content from search results. Friends from the Tumblr ecosystem visit your blog via the backdoor (the “dashboard”), which causes analytics to become utterly useless.
The combined result of the lack of basic features fostered a community I wasn’t comfortable being a part of.Those who wished to write longer form thoughts and opinions continued to do so - on real blog platforms. A proportion of the active remainder left at Tumblr evolved into a perverted popularity competition, posting increasingly candid photos of their daily lives, and private thoughts that should never have been published in a public forum - from the moment they woke in the morning, to the moment they fell asleep at night.
No facet of their life was unworthy of a post, or a “heart”. Marriage breakups were dissected, lip gloss was compared, ex partners wereberated, and drunken shenanigans were all put out there for the world to see. Even when the passing river of content wasn’t controversial, it seemed to follow the rule of “I have nothing say, and I’m saying it”.
I have often wondered if my view became distorted by the choices I made in who I “followed”. Many of those choices - the people this post is really for - were wonderful, caring, open people. The kind of people I would have been friends with in the real world. They were massively outweighed by the shallow, the thoughtless, the manipulative, and the exploitative though.
One day I woke up, and while looking at the Tumblr dashboard on my mobile phone, realised that the time had come to walk away. To move on. To grow up. It was a personal decision - not aimed at a specific person, or event - but rather a creeping realisation that Tumblr wasn’t the place for me.
I guess I can close the book on it now.