Tumblr is home to a couple of particularly popular browser plugins:
Tumblr Savior, a post filtering tool (particularly useful for those whose feeds are flooded with a subject one doesn't care about, and especially those with triggers or aversion to porn).
Missing e, a set of tools for improving one's Tumblr browsing experience by adding features such as plainly-visible timestamps and quick-reblog dropdown menus. Unfortunately, since the redesign of Tumblr in 2013, Missing e has been under Development Hell.
XKit, which is an extension similar to Missing e. After Missing e went down, Xkit exploded in popularity; its creator, "the Xkit guy", was one of Tumblr's patron saints but after being accused of harassment, even though there was no evidence supporting the original person's claims or anyone else coming forward with similar incidents, mob mentality kicked in and he was sent a lot of hate mail which drove him from the site and obviously abandoned work on the plugin.
New XKit was created some time after Xkit guy's departure to continue his work.
General Tropes:
Banned in China: Several countries have blocked Tumblr because of pornography, religious extremism or LGBT content. These countries include China, Indonesia, Kazakhstan and Iran.
Fought with and eventually took over LiveJournal's spot as the fandom location on the internet. There are examples of small to medium size fandoms completely abandoning LiveJournal in favor of Tumblr. One example is iCarly, which had a half-dozen or so active journals with regular discussion turn into ghost-towns, as the fandom quit en masse to join Tumblr instead.
To a lesser extent, DeviantArt, as many artists abandoned DeviantArt for Tumblr due to the tagging and reblogging systems being able to make your art be seen by more people.
After the porn ban, several new social media sites began to spring up, all clamoring to take Tumblr's place while highlighting themselves as a safe place for NSFW creators to congregate. Among them are newTumbl and Pillowfort. The latter suffered a significant security issue at one point that made the site go offline for a while, but soon they were back in business. Time will tell if any of these competitors will fill the void that Tumblr left behind.
Fandom Nod: Several shows with big fandoms have their own official Tumblrs.
Newbie Boom: The website has been experiencing this as of The New '20s, largely because — compared to numerous social media websites that have been quick to change themselves in order to Follow the Leader and cash in on what's popular — it's remained relatively the same since its inception, with new users appreciating the change of pace. This was further intensified after Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter and the controversial changes he implemented.
On December 3, 2018, Tumblr announced that effective December 17, all images and videos depicting sex acts, and real-life images and videos depicting human genitalia or "female-presenting" nipples, would be banned from the service. As a result of this, countless blogs that had images of sex and nudity were flagged or deleted off of the site, even before the policy took effect. This did not go over well with the community. Compounding the issue was that several totally innocent and SFW blogs got caught in the crossfire, making Tumblr's reputation take an even harder nosedive. In the wake of the ban, many users decided to migrate over to other sites that still allowed NSFW content such as Newgrounds and Pixiv. It ultimately came back to bite them in May 2019; the massive user loss, resulting in a subsequent drop in revenue, has led to Verizon seeking to sell Tumblr. On August 12, 2019, Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic.
You will find many a person reporting that this "porn ban" cost the property a billion dollars. This isn't quite true, it was just the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. Though Yahoo bought Tumblr for a staggering $1.1 billion in 2013, an equally staggering amount of incompetence on the part of its developers (which is largely the reason Xkit and then New-Xkit were so popular), combined with a veritable wave of attempts to turn the once self-sustaining site into the "next big thing" and draw in bigger amounts of cash, essentially sealed its doom. The value of the site had been depreciating in larger amounts year by year as Yahoo, then Verizon, quickly proved they had no intention of fixing any of the problems plaguing the sitenote Tumblr stopped answering emails on its support or staff addresses a few years back and have been infamously deaf to any complaints. The purge and subsequent adult content ban were only finally enacted when Apple detected child pornography on the site and removed them from the app store, aka the Money, Dear Boy described above. This still largely failed to affect the problem, and if anything, an even larger wave of porn bots descended on the site in response.. Its sale to Automattic, who owns Wordpress, occurred for under $3 million, a Generation Xerox degree self-destruction that puts even Myspace to shame.
Persons involved in the iOS development community have begun to cast disdain on Apple, as the large amount of control it wields over the app store, the lack of organization and oversight, and the degree to which websites will malform in order to maintain a presence on said app store has been found to be a significant cause for the increasingly suffocating amount of censorship on places like Tumblr (though certainly not the only responsible party). Because app store availability can be removed at any time and is reviewed by one of any hundreds of human reviewers with no one clear standard for what constitutes, say, pornography, an app can be forced to be re-submitted dozens of times while its users suffer the consequences.
, a post filtering tool (particularly useful for those whose feeds are flooded with a subject one doesn't care about, and especially those with triggers or aversion to porn).