History Platform / Tumblr

It steadily grew from modest beginnings to becoming ''the'' place to blog, allowing users to connect with one another over interests and discouraging the sort of real-life friends and family environment (and thus feuds, embarrassments, and hiding of interests) of {{Website/Facebook}}, while also boasting much more posting utility than sites such as {{Website/LiveJournal}} or {{Website/Twitter}}. The many differing post types and the flexibility of blog creation and theme production led Tumblr to become the fastest place a user could begin exploring their own interests and setting up their own little home. [[LGBTFanbase LGBT activism]] took full steam, as did the social justice movement, the latter of which led to mockery from a lot of the internet for the perceived "[[SoapboxSadie social justice warrior]]" attitude of the site.

On May 20, 2013, Tumblr was purchased by Website/{{Yahoo}} for $1.1 billion. This led to a veritable panic from the userbase for two reasons. One, Yahoo was (at the time, jokingly) threatening to make the site child-proof and thus devoid of all sexual content. Two, Yahoo had a documented history of acquiring, killing, and then selling sites. As neither of these ([[TimeDelayedDeath immediately]]) came to pass, people forgot their worries. Later that same year, a convention known as "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DashCon DashCon]]" was announced and, by June 2014, had garnered incredible excitement and anticipation. The con was nothing short of a disaster (full details are on our TroubledProduction.RealLife page), and the aftermath caused the site's [[NothingIsTheSameAnymore entire culture to change]].

** In 2014 they encouraged users to upgrade to "Tumblr Pro", not explaining what was so special about it. Those who clicked it received nothing more than a fedora placed on their avatar for the rest of the day.

* AscendedMeme: [[https://accessibleposts.tumblr.com/post/161902577685/could-you-explain-the-post-about-shoelaces-and One meme]] from the site's userbase dating back to 2012 involves a code phrase ("I like your shoelaces") and response ("Thanks, I stole them from the president") for identifying Tumblr users. When the official Tumblr store opened in 2022, one type of product offered was shoelaces, with one of the color options being "Presidential Purple". The front page of the store declares: "Where else would the president get his shoelaces?"

Like a deflating balloon, Tumblr's rapid-fire {{Keet}} personality depleted. Activism contained itself only to those passionate for it, fandoms began more self-examination, badly-behaved but popular bloggers were called out, and the site's humor took on a more snarky and memetic tone. The term "dashcon" became synonymous with a [[IHatePastMe cringier, more immature time]] that haunts those who were on the site long enough to see it happen. Around the same time, site staff started to become the target of outright loathing from users. Numerous changes and updates rolled out despite the heavy resistance from users, and said updates were often accompanied by the site going down for days at a time, earning the staff [[IncompetenceInc a reputation for incompetence]]. This worsened when the staff stopped answering emails, leaving the site's problems (such as child porn, neo-nazism, and virus bots) to fester and grow.

It steadily grew from modest beginnings to becoming ''the'' place to blog, allowing users to connect with one another over interests and discouraging the sort of real-life friends and family environment (and thus feuds, embarrassments, and hiding of interests) of {{Website/Facebook}}, while also boasting much more posting utility than sites such as {{Website/LiveJournal}} or {{Website/Twitter}}. The many differing post types and the flexibility of blog creation and theme production led Tumblr to become the fastest place a user could begin exploring their own interests and setting up their own little home. [[LGBTFanbase LGBT activism]] took full steam, as did the social justice movement, the latter of which led to mockery from a lot of the internet for the perceived "social justice warrior" attitude of the site.

* AllForNothing: This was the salt in the wound with the adult content ban: aside from being rather obviously enacted over a potential loss of revenue in the app store, the ban failed to impact ''any'' of the problems that inspired it (if anything, the spawning and activity of porn bots ''increased''). The image recognition tech was quickly discovered to be rather faulty (as in, it flagged ''[[https://gizmodo.com/tumblrs-porn-filter-flags-its-own-examples-of-permitted-1831151178 its own post of allowed content]]''), so it was ditched in favor of tag-based post deletion... which meant that users that really wanted to post porn could simply change the tags and avoid getting flagged. Worse, many LGBT tags (such as #gay and #lesbian) were cleared due to a large amount of porn in them, while tags such as #fascism and #fashwave were left almost entirely untouched. For all intents and purposes, Tumblr was left in worse shape than before the adult content ban was enacted.

* StylisticSuck:
** A certain [[https://static.tumblr.com/internal/1664078372/tumblr_sponsored_day_hero_web_pre.png banner ad]] for shoelaces from the official store is just the words "Shoelaces $19" crudely drawn onto a white background.
** There's also a [[https://static.tumblr.com/internal/1664565940/tumblr_sponsored_day_hero_web_pre.png "dark mode" version]] in which the colors are inverted, the words "(dark mode)" are scribbled onto the bottom, and the last "s" in "Shoelaces" has a straight black line crossing it as if from a careless pen stroke.