Tumblr Is Tumbling (medium.com)

Alex Barredo, a technology writer, shares his observation on Tumblr's popularity over the past few years: Tumblr is the home of some of the most creative online personas, and now it is dying. Or so it seems. Founded on early 2007 by David Karp with a new formula for really simplified blogging, it quickly took off. With each passing quarter, most of their stats were crushing it. It was the new star of the New York tech scene. The East Coast had a good social platform after years of Californian monopoly (MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Twitter, etc), at last. In May of 2013, Yahoo snatched it for a cool $1.1 billion: $990 million plus liabilities. Less than a year after the deal was closed, Tumblr peaked in activity. By February of 2014, there were more than 106 million new posts each day on the platform. Today that figure has been slashed by two thirds to around 35 million. David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, said today he was leaving the company. Karp founded Tumblr close to 11 years ago with Marco Arment. He wrote: I beg you to understand that my decision comes after months of reflection on my personal ambitions, and at no cost to my hopefulness for Tumblr's future or the impact I know it can have. The internet is at a crossroads of which this team can play a fundamental role in shaping. You are in the driver seat, and I am so excited to see where you go!

Comments

It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[DontBeAMoran]

Stop using the words "killer" or "dying" when talking about companies or objects.

Re:It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[Anonymous Coward]

Yo bro, companies are people too!

Re:It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[DontBeAMoran]

No they're not. People are idiots, lawyers even more so.

You can pass a law that oxygen is pink with green dots, that won't make it real.

Re:It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[religionofpeas]

Especially don't claim anything is dying before Netcraft has confirmed it.

Re:It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[Thelasko]

Yo bro, companies are people too!

As idiotic as it is...this is the world we live in.

Re:It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[Hal_Porter]

That's not what CU is about

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Justice Kennedy's majority opinion found that the BCRA section 203 prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and unions violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech.[28] The majority wrote, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."[29]

Justice Kennedy's opinion also noted that because the First Amendment does not distinguish between media and other corporations, the BCRA restrictions improperly allowed Congress to suppress political speech in newspapers, books, television, and blogs.[7] The Court overruled Austin, which had held that a state law that prohibited corporations from using treasury money to support or oppose candidates in elections did not violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court also overruled that portion of McConnell that upheld BCRA's restriction of corporate spending on "electioneering communications". The Court's ruling effectively freed corporations and unions to spend money both on "electioneering communications" and to directly advocate for the election or defeat of candidates (although not to contribute directly to candidates or political parties).

The majority ruled that the Freedom of the Press clause of the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Corporations, as associations of individuals therefore, have free speech rights under the First Amendment. Because spending money is essential to disseminating speech, as established in Buckley v. Valeo, limiting a corporation's ability to spend money is unconstitutional because it limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues.

I.e. the First Amendment gives individuals a right to speech. It also gives them a right to speak when organized into a corporation.

If you look at the background SCOTUS decision you find

Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (known as BCRA or McCain-Feingold Act) modified the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, 2 U.S.C. section 441b to prohibited corporations and unions from using their general treasury to fund "electioneering communications" (broadcast advertisements mentioning a candidate in any context) within 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election. During the 2004 presidential campaign, a conservative nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization, Citizens United, filed a complaint before the Federal Election Commission (FEC) charging that advertisements for Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, a docudrama critical of the Bush administration's response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and produced and marketed by a variety of corporate entities, constituted political advertising and thus could not be aired within the 30 days before a primary election or 60 days before a general election. The FEC dismissed the complaint after finding no evidence that broadcast advertisements featuring a candidate within the proscribed time limits had actually been made.[11] The FEC later dismissed a second complaint which argued that the movie itself constituted illegal corporate spending advocating the election or defeat of a candidate, which was illegal under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974. In dismissing that complaint, the FEC found that:

The complainant alleged that the release and distribution of FAHRENHEIT 9/11 constituted an independent expenditure because the film expressly advocated the defeat of President Bush and that by being fully or partially responsible for the film's release, Michael Moore a

Re: It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[Zero__Kelvin]

If nobody claims it how can they confirm it?

Re: It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[Zero__Kelvin]

Wierd, because in this case it is neither of those; it is "tumbling".

Re: It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[DontBeAMoran]

In the title, yes. But it's dying in the summary.

Re:It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[Hal_Porter]

Don't be a moron, DontBeAMoran.

Re: It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[Reverend Green]

Nice wallotext! Shills be shillin' =)

Re: It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[dwillden]

Read it moron. It explains quite well why Citizens United is not the joke so many make it out to be. That the ruling is sound jurisprudence defending the freedom of speech.

Or you can just accuse someone who simply cited Wikipedia on the case and ruling of being a shill for simply stating the facts.

Re: It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[Reverend Green]

But muh "facts"!!!!1!1!!!

How's that corporate bootleather taste?

Re: It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[fafalone]

It's defending free speech based on the principle that money is speech and corporations are no different than any other association of people. That's where the disagreement is; it's not unreasonable to contest that one or both of those are covered by free speech. In fact that's far more reasonable than the more recent opinions of the left, which think hate speech isn't covered by free speech.

Re: It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying"

[Hal_Porter]

A documentary is clearly speech, even if it cost money to produce.

And before the CU decision you had the bizarre situation that a documentary produced by Michael Moore's Dog Eat Dog films, a corporation was speech but one by CU, another corporation was money.

That makes no sense. And the SCOTUS ended up ruling that the government had no power to prevent either under campaign finance laws.

Re:Yahoo snatched it for 1100 billion?

[PopeRatzo]

Yahoo snatched it for 1100 billion?

The actual amount was eleventy million million.

Re:Yahoo snatched it for 1100 billion?

[forkfail]

Because having to count digits when reading a number like 461073354 (quick: what order of magnitude is that?) adds so much to the flow of a document.

Re:Yahoo snatched it for 1100 billion?

[DontBeAMoran]

AFAIK you need to write numbers this way when programming.

I think I can explain the crash in popularity...

[Kierthos]

When did Tumblr ban porn?

Re:2 words - liberal shithole

[Baron_Yam]

One of the problems with the Internet is also one of its great strengths - it allows people who are not geographically adjacent to form communities.

Normally these edge cases would be socially isolated and unable to cause trouble, but when they find each other online they can form a mob, and a motivated mob (whether rational or not) is a force. It's a case of the organised and passionate minority overpowering the disorganised and ambivalent majority.

Thankfully... eventually there's pushback. You just have to hope it doesn't go too far in the other direction.

Re:2 words - liberal shithole

[DontBeAMoran]

If there's a company that really needs nut jobs, it's Planters Peanuts.

Can Buzzfeed go to?

[wjcofkc]

The world would become a better place overnight. All that organized hatred... gone in a swarm of bees.

Re:Can Buzzfeed go to?

[Zontar The Mindless]

Go to where?

Re:Can Buzzfeed go to?

[wjcofkc]

Straight to /dev/null

As an aside. Despite my current ID, I have been on this site since 1997. I remember it being announced on Chip n' Dips. Looking at the comments and scoring, I am rather disgusted by the amount of SJWs that are hiding out here.

Re:Can Buzzfeed go to?

[wjcofkc]

Although it does explain a lot.

No shit, it's a social networking site.

[SeaFox]

Like any social networking site, its popularity is very fragile and dependent on who its userbase it.

Just like Friendster, and MySpace, at some point it will fall out of favor. It's kinda like nightclubs. If it becomes too easy to get into it and starts being populated by blue-hairs and corporate shills, all the cool kids will move on and it will cease being the cool place to hang out.

Tumblr being bought by Yahoo was the first major step to that status.

All these social networking sites want to reach a place in the online landscape where they are not a fad, and become an institution of the online world (like Wikipedia or Rotten Tomatoes). That has not happened yet.

Re:No shit, it's a social networking site.

[pz]

Yes, you're right. Absolutely. Up until the last sentence, though. The now-exemplary social network is Facebook, and, like it or not, it is an institution. Don't believe me? It has a global Alexa rank of 3.

Not 300, not 3000.

3.

That's about as institution-like as you can get. (2 and 1 are Youtube and Google, respectively). Wikipedia is 5. RT is a paltry 397.

Tumblr, for comparison is 54 globally, 23 in the US. Those are also institution-level numbers. While yes, there is expected to be ebb-and-flow in usage and popularity of a site, Tumblr is among the big players. As others have pointed out, Yahoo has a strong history of either buying at the worst possible moment, or of buying and destroying through ineptitude or neglect, and that's far more likely to be driving it's current loss in traffic.

Re:No shit, it's a social networking site.

[Frosty Piss]

Like any social networking site, its popularity is very fragile and dependent on who its userbase it.

Just like Friendster, and MySpace, at some point it will fall out of favor.

And what about Facebook? What's their "secret sauce"? I think it's the huge staff of psychologists who have turned it into a platform for manipulating people's minds...

Re:No shit, it's a social networking site.

[SeaFox]

Yes, you're right. Absolutely. Up until the last sentence, though. The now-exemplary social network is Facebook, and, like it or not, it is an institution. Don't believe me? It has a global Alexa rank of 3....That's about as institution-like as you can get. (2 and 1 are Youtube and Google, respectively). Wikipedia is 5. RT is a paltry 397.

Tumblr, for comparison is 54 globally, 23 in the US. Those are also institution-level numbers. While yes, there is expected to be ebb-and-flow in usage and popularity of a site,

Alexa popularity ranks are only snapshots of that specific time they are run. They will fluctuate or drop completely. What was MySpace's peak rating?

Also, unlike a social networking site, reference sites have lasting value in their databases and archived articles. Social networking is created to be a communication platform and a way of keeping up-to-date with people. Like a news site that never gets new articles published, it soon becomes irrelevant except to historians (and since social networking is not a valid reference source for citing, it doesn't even have that going for it).

Tumblr is among the big players. As others have pointed out, Yahoo has a strong history of either buying at the worst possible moment, or of buying and destroying through ineptitude or neglect, and that's far more likely to be driving it's current loss in traffic.

I agree on this. Long term, Yahoo's management will be what really causes Tumblr to go, but it will only exacerbate what would have happened naturally.

Re:No shit, it's a social networking site.

[SeaFox]

And what about Facebook? What's their "secret sauce"? I think it's the huge staff of psychologists who have turned it into a platform for manipulating people's minds...

There is no "secret sauce". Facebook just got much, much, much bigger than the other networking sites. The higher it gets, the longer it will take to fall to Earth. We have already passed "Peak Facebook" in the U.S., its continued growth in user numbers is driven by emerging markets getting online. With the recent revelations about Russia and other governments using it to manipulate public opinion and influence politics, you will see fewer people use it as a news source, which will further weaken the reason to visit it.

Re:No shit, it's a social networking site.

[Kjella]

Just like Friendster, and MySpace, at some point it will fall out of favor. It's kinda like nightclubs. If it becomes too easy to get into it and starts being populated by blue-hairs and corporate shills, all the cool kids will move on and it will cease being the cool place to hang out. (...) All these social networking sites want to reach a place in the online landscape where they are not a fad, and become an institution of the online world (...). That has not happened yet.

Except the by far largest and still quickly growing social network is everything but cool. It's now the social network where you talk to your grandma and all the other not-so-hip people that you can't have hanging out at your cool place. I don't think you've understood how deeply entrenched Facebook has become as the least common denominator. And everything is being sucked down that gravity well, more and more doesn't have a web page or forum anymore - they have a Facebook group. If anything I think it's email that'll become a ghost town before they stop being a "fad".

Re:No shit, it's a social networking site.

[s122604]

as big businesses mature there is natural tendency to gravitate towards large near-monopolies...

You can see this is cars, aircraft, and lots of other stuff.. Social media, and the tech industry in general is inexorably falling into this pattern...

Re:No shit, it's a social networking site.

[colfer]

FB was the probably the first site with a large audience that micro-target ads easy to buy even for very small buyers. It is relentless in pursuing advertising dollars rather than waiting for 1. Idea 2. ??? 3. Profit!

FB even pays outside firms for info on its users in order to strengthen its ability to sell targeted advertising, according to the author of "World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech," a book by a well-known journalists published by Penguin, not some claptrap. It's not just selling intelligence on people, it's buying it, in order to make its position in the ad market even more unassailable.

Re:No shit, it's a social networking site.

[colfer]

(edit) ...made...

Re:Yahoo snatched it for 1100 billion?

[grub]

The 1.1 trillion dollar purchase must have escaped the headlines.

Re:I think I can explain the crash in popularity..

[magarity]

Ban porn? I thought that was all Tumblr was.

Re:I think I can explain the crash in popularity..

[Anonymous Coward]

Tumblr didn't ban porn .. it's a major porn site. What they did do recently was encourage their many porn posters to mark their accounts 'adult' so a visitor has to log into Tumblr for to view the porn.

Re:2 words - liberal shithole

[jellomizer]

There is the core issue between Liberals and Conservatives.
Liberals strive for change, while Conservatives keep things as they are.
Both ideas have good and bad points. While Change is necessary to fix problems, not all changes are good and you should put stock in the method that has been slowly fine tuned over the long run.

That said. For News media, Interesting stuff is usually what is new (hence News) so Liberal ideas will normally get the head lines, because the Conservative ideas are not new. Now this had created "Conservative News" which is really just bashing the Ideas as to keep the outrage towards the group high.

Now onto sites like Tumblr where you are expected to post new material and like and share what others have posted. Being that new material is needed to keep the site functioning, it needs Liberal minded people to provide the creativity. While the conservative people will more likely be the ones who would share existing material, and bring up older material. To make it worse, they may just keep bringing up the old ideas over and over again to a point where it isn't interesting. So the Conservative person will not have a strong Tumblr presence.

Now when I say Liberal and Conservative. I am not talking about what politics has labeled them. They are a lot of conservative Democrats, and Liberal Republicans. They just don't call themselves that because of the political label.

Re:Maybe...

[Comboman]

Tumblr, Flickr, del.icio.us, MusicMatch, Geocities, Inkatomi, Summly, Broadcast.com ...

There isn't webservice that Yahoo can't destroy it.

Translation

[Luthair]

My contract period expired. Peace out b....es!

Re:2 words - liberal shithole

[TFlan91]

Double-edge sword.

We are seeing the same break away from the right. Hopefully some decent, moderate group will meet in the middle.

Footage

[religionofpeas]

Here's actual footage of Mr. Karp saying goodbye.

http://reactiongifs.me/wp-cont...

Re:2 words - liberal shithole

[i286NiNJA]

Hardly a fascist rant.

Tumblr has a large number of extremely toxic communities including ones for shoplifters and hard drugs. Their SJW community is absolutely insane with most of the members claiming a large number of mental disorders and dysphorias that are used to justify their bad behavior. You'll run into people who think it's ableist to ask them not to be a dick because they have multiple personalities and most of the personalities have cluster b personality disorders of their own. All self diagnosed, and you're oppressing them for expecting them to treat other people with respect.

Go for a stroll through the crazy weird part of tumblr you have to see it to believe it.

Porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Tumblr has made it hard to find porn with out logging in and changing your settings. This probably killed half of their traffic.

Re:Yahoo snatched it for 1100 billion?

[FFOMelchior]

Depends on the language, and it's a pretty nice feature when available. C# 7.0 allows for underscores, eg Int64 i = 1_000_000_000_000;

Re:Verizon...

[Chris Mattern]

where companies go to die

Unless they're video game companies. Then they go to EA.

Easy to understand why

[smooth wombat]

First they don't bother to get rid of the rape videos or pictures, and there is no way direct way to notify them of such.

Second, in an effort to make Tumblr more exclusive, they're forcing people to sign up to see most of the tumbles, specifically the ones where men and women are naked (gasp!).

Third, they recently implemented a Facebook-like process for their app which works on trending or some such, and is killing traffic to people's blogs. According to posted shots of traffic logs, folks are seeing a huge drop in site visits as a direct result.

So yeah, not surprising at all.

Re:Easy to understand why

[StormReaver]

Second, in an effort to make Tumblr more exclusive, they're forcing people to sign up to see most of the ** tumbles**

Third, they make up nonsensical names for forum posts....

Re:Easy to understand why

[Howitzer86]

To expand on your second point:

1. 1. Most internet users are on mobile.
2. 2. To view Tumblr beyond just a couple pages on mobile, you need to install the mobile app. Desktop Mode doesn't alleviate this.
3. 3. To use the app, you need an account.

"Fuck it" can happen between 2 and 3. I didn't do 2 for the longest time because I didn't want to install the app. When I finally did to verify my claims in this post, I needed to login or sign-up. I then uninstalled the app.

Re:Maybe...

[Anonymous Coward]

There isn't webservice that Yahoo can't destroy it.

Can we get Yahoo to buy Facebook?

Re:I think I can explain the crash in popularity..

[Anonymous Coward]

Shortly after Yahoo took over, since then it has been increasingly user hostile. I run a NSFW art side blog and as of last week it's no longer visible unless you are logged into tumblr. By default search results remove NSFW blogs and advertising is disabled on NSFW blogs.

Recently they instituted a change to the dashboard which has always been a chronological view to a "best stuff first" further burying creator content in favor for whatever is popular, this has seen several content creating blogs suffer.

Many of us are slowly migrating to twitter which seems less stupid at the moment. It's a real shame though tumblr could have really continued to grow but Yahoo couldn't figure out how to squeeze the userbase for cash so is doing all kinds of shitty things to systematically destroy it.

Re:Verizon...

[DontBeAMoran]

If one day I read "EA buy rights to Amiga brand" I won't even be surprised.

Re:What is Tumblr?

[DontBeAMoran]

usually pictures/gifs/animations

Sounds like the hentai websites I vi... heard about.

Re:Maybe...

[DontBeAMoran]

I bet we'll only learn once it's too late, but maybe Yahoo is a Highlander.

Re:2 words - liberal shithole

[DontBeAMoran]

It's a case of the organised and passionate minority overpowering the disorganised and ambivalent majority.

"We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win." — Douglas Adams

Re:I think I can explain the crash in popularity..

[DontBeAMoran]

IMHO infinite scrolling is the worst idea ever coded. We don't have infinite memory on our computers.

Aha!

[DulcetTone]

Found the problem right here:
"In May of 2013, Yahoo snatched it for a cool $1.1 billion"

Re:I think I can explain the crash in popularity..

[Anonymous Coward]

What makes even less sense is that infinite scrolling is more design around phone hardware than desktops, despite the fact that phones only have about half the memory of desktops (though thanks to Razer we'll probably see next year's flagships shipping with 8GB).

Also fuck whoever decided that clicking an image on an infinite scroll page shouldn't open said image in a new tab by default.

Re:I think I can explain the crash in popularity..

[Nonesuch]

When did Tumblr ban porn?

Requiring a login and removing pages from search results is one step shy of shadowbanning.

More recently, Tumblr has been abruptly terminating NSFW accounts, no notice, no explanation.

Re:2 words - liberal shithole

[Anonymous Coward]

Classic false dichotomy. There are at least 4 options for a case like this:
Take none.
Take SJW over alt-right.
Take alt-right over SJW.
Take both.

The first one would be the most prudent choice for any mentally sane person.

Re:I think I can explain the crash in popularity..

[Wrath0fb0b]

Uh, what makes you think you need to keep infinite memory to support infinite scroll? Items that are in the direction of scroll are preloaded, objects that are beyond the view window in the other direction are purged. Pretty basic UI stuff, we've been doing this for years.

In my mind, it's one of the more useful UX improvements rather than the idiotic "next page" BS that came before it.

Re:Yahoo snatched it for 1100 billion?

[Wrath0fb0b]

We generally don't let the limited syntax of computer languages dictate our representation of human languages.

Humans can perfectly well understand: "Oh the chainsaws? He bought 2, 3 days ago" because we have context-aware parsing and realize that, in this sentence, the comma symbol makes more sense as a punctuation operator than a numerical divider.

Re:Good riddance.

[originalGMC]

my sentiments exactly. Fuck Tumblr. They straight up deleted my favourite tumblr for no posted reason. https://web.archive.org/web/20...

Re:2 words - liberal shithole

[i286NiNJA]

As a liberal I'd appreciate it if you didn't claim tumblr. It's representative of the lunatic fringe. Claiming tumblr for the left is as stupid as if John Mccain got on television and claimed that the daily stormer was the mouthpiece of the mainstream right.

Tumblr SJWs aren't really liberals.

[i286NiNJA]

Tumblr is mostly porn and that's the best thing you can say about it. Every other community on tumblr is a toxic cesspool.
Communities for shoplifters,
Communities for meth users,
Then there are the so-called SJWs but I don't even think it's fair to associate tumblr's particular brand with the rest of the fringe left. Their version of this community is almost exclusively crybullies competing for who is the most disabled and disadvantaged. There is little actual political discourse involved so I don't even know it's fair to call it the fringe left, more like a cargo-cult version of the left. You'll never meet so many PoC disabled, multiple system, trans, queer, etc people... who all invariably turn out to be white chubby teens/20 something girls who still live with their parents and have no mental diagnoses. Literally white kids who wish they had real problems, pretending to be black or disabled or gay.

Every time I mention this I get voted down which is funny because it means you're not going to look for yourself. If you've ever wondered where it is that this crazy left-fringe boogyman that the right likes so much, you can go interact with it on tumblr. Go look at the weird part of tumblr it's not even a left/right thing, it's just fucking nuts!

Porn haven

[Stan92057]

Sorry tumblr is nothing more then a porn palace. they lump porn with mature content so trying to filter it is useless. plus the stupid members not tagging the porn/nudity at all its a 10000% unsafe site. Mind you i have nothing against porn but this Being a family PC Tumblr is blocked as their is no way to safely visit tumblr without porn and nudity,erotica not being seen. They do a poor job of keeping thir site clean. that's why i don't go their anymore.

Re:The * is at a crossroads.

[Thud457]

Surely Millennials are killing Tumbler...

Re:Good

[thinkwaitfast]

You remember when you were little and people called you names (four eyes, chinese, short, ugly) and elders would tell you that you are not a label?

The opposite of that.

Re:I think I can explain the crash in popularity..

[quonset]

All of what you said is exactly what I said further down. I just couldn't remember the name of what they changed to their Facebook-like app.

https://slashdot.org/comments....

Broken Website & Broken Base -

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two major problems with Tumblr that have gone unaddressed for years now. Being a longtime user who sought out the website for its art community, I used to be an avid proponent of the site, but now I can barely be bothered to even check my activity page between uploads. The website and its community are a hot mess right now, and only one of those problems can actually be solved by the operators of Tumblr itself.

The first of those problems, the solvable one, is that as a website it runs like dog shit. Seriously.

To be perfectly fair to Yahoo, this was becoming an issue long before the buyout was finalized, but practically everyone I know who uses Tumblr noticed that shortly after the buyout, the quality of the site's code and its performance across every browser really began to tank. It's slow, unresponsive, and extremely intensive for a website that does what Tumblr does, and all of these objective declines in performance haven't been accompanied by the introduction of compelling new features to justify the trade-off, or really any new features at all. (That is, besides a really lame direct messaging system to replace the perfectly functional old one: A feature that was introduced for the express purpose of making Tumblr look and act more like Facebook, probably in order to make it more attractive to a clueless potential buyer.) It reminds me of how bad Twitch was getting before they basically rebuilt everything from scratch, but unlike Twitch, there was actually a prior point in time when every single feature of Tumblr didn't run like garbage. Something went majorly wrong on the technology side of things, and as a result the site is no longer enjoyable to use in any capacity. It is honestly a chore, both for me and my aging laptop computer, to even log in and look around.

Dumb interface changes and alienating policies concerning NSFW content don't even qualify as the proverbial icing on the cake, because what's running under the hood is a great big frosted turd. It also goes without saying that the mobile version of Tumblr is even worse, and more and more, content on the site can't even be viewed on a mobile device without downloading their worthless app. (Remember, one upon a time the site actually worked just fine.) Fixing the performance issues with a rollback or an overhaul of the site would go a very long way toward making Tumblr useful again, but at this point it seems as though Tumblr's ship has already sailed, or sunk depending on how you look at it. Most of my friends who use(d) it have already migrated to Twitter to use it for the exact same purposes, even though Twitter mauls practically every image that gets uploaded to it that isn't a photograph. Considering that a website which does this is now a more attractive option for artists should say a lot about just how bad Tumblr's user experience has gotten.

The other problem with Tumblr, however, is much tougher nut to crack. Tumblr's community is like a smoldering underground fire at a landfill that shows no signs of extinguishing itself anytime soon, and it's been that way for a very, very long time. There's more than a little kernel of truth in the stereotypes of Tumblr users, and especially among other artists who use the site. You can see the kind of person that Tumblr has become infamous for coming from a mile away, no matter which flavor of asshat they happen to be. The overall tone of the website seems to be of one of tolerance for casual bigotry and a very rigid set of outlandish and often contradictory cultural standards, and precious little else. Being someone who grew up during the Bush years, it's especially astonishing to me to see what passes for the political-left these days going on to produce their very own mirror image of bible thumping conservatives, right before my very eyes. The imitators are no less hostile, intolerant, and irritating to be around than their right-wing counterparts, and the notorious 'callout culture' that thrives on Tumblr has definitely had a chilling effect on the site. It is an abs

Re:2 words - liberal shithole

[Hal_Porter]

Normally these edge cases would be socially isolated and unable to cause trouble, but when they find each other online they can form a mob, and a motivated mob (whether rational or not) is a force. It's a case of the organised and passionate minority overpowering the disorganised and ambivalent majority.

https://phys.org/news/2011-07-...

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame."

As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. "In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks."

The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E in an article titled "Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities."

An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

You can imagine this being the mechanism that totalitarian movements - Communists, Nazis, Islamists etc - take over once they hit 10% of the population. Well that, and violence or threats of violence against their critics.

Re: Good

[k6mfw]

Easiest access to information in human history, and people remain willfully ignorant.

new term for the 21st century to replace the 19th century meme, "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."

David Karp?

[cyber-vandal]

I always thought there was something fishy about Tumblr.

Re:2 words - liberal shithole

[hai_Priesty]

Sometimes....... At least until their obsession bleeds into mainstream totally unchecked and gradually turned up to the 11, then the ambivalent majority has to care.

The gender bathroom spectacle apparently has annoyed quite a large amount of people - just not annoyed enough to initiate backlash. 20 more SJW spectacles of the same intensity each pushing more and more ridiculous policies, then perhaps finally some parent of their boys (specially snowflake ones) found to their horror that their grade school starts to gender-segregate their boys from their girls into different classes, in their vain attempt to "prevent" sexual assaults, "harassment" and "microaggression" (the term can mean almost anything) in older of the grade school kids. Then maybe the mainstream will be forced to care when their snowflake boys gets "discriminated" enough.

Re:I think I can explain the crash in popularity..

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't bookmark your infinite scroll position nor can you jump to the bottom and read everything in the order it was written. The primary drawback of 'next page' was that almost every site had their pages numbered backwards. Page 1 should be the oldest content, not the newest content. You can't ever keep your place when the content of the pages keep changing while their address stay the same.

Basic UI stuff was abandoned long ago.

Re:2 words - liberal shithole

[jellomizer]

Yes it is. However it is a freaking slashdot post, done to rest my brain from working for a few minutes

Re:I think I can explain the crash in popularity..

[schleimkeim]

They didn't. That's what I still use it for.

Re:Maybe...

[mjwx]

There isn't webservice that Yahoo can't destroy it.

Can we get Yahoo to buy Facebook?

Facebook is doing a pretty good job of destroying itself.

Re:2 words - liberal shithole

[Baron_Yam]

>microaggression

A microaggression is anything you say that hurts the feelings of someone (often a third party) who is irrationally willing to get pissy about it because they feel empowered by what they read about SJW crap in the news and on the Internet.

Re:Maybe...

[houghi]

I think that Yahoo is some kind of reverse King Midas where everything gold they touch turns to shit. I almost feel a bit sorry for them.

Re:SJWs shat in their own house

[Khyber]

"The sonic echo chambering is what is what made people stop using it"

And SJWs are the masters of echo chambers.

Re:Yahoo snatched it for 1100 billion?

[Ol Olsoc]

Yahoo snatched it for 1100 billion?

The actual amount was eleventy million million.

I talked to Chef's father, and said it was more like tree fiddy.