Tumblr Too

Tumblr is dead, long live Tumblr

Note: this post was adapted from my newsletter published earlier this week. Those interested can sign up here.

Each January, I try to come up with a content gameplan for the year. With an ever-increasing number of ways to express yourself online, it’s impossible to actively keep up with each and every social network and app. So one must prune. One that has been top of mind for a trim this year is Tumblr.

Some of you may know that I’ve run my OG site — ParisLemon — on Tumblr for a number of years now. But if I’m being honest, I haven’t really kept it up with actual regularity for a few years. Between 500ish, Twitter, Instagram, my newsletter, and a few other things (email, ugh) — not to mention, life — there just isn’t enough time or will. I’ve been half-assing it.

As such, I always debate simply shutting it down. But then I go to do that, look around, and get sad. Because Tumblr used to be such a great tool, source of content, place of discovery, and network. But in the years since the Yahoo acquisition (which is now buried under a couple more acquisitions: Aol, Verizon) it’s an understatement to say it has fallen into disrepair. The recent porn fiasco (and worse) just highlighted what many of us already knew: Tumblr is dead, but doesn’t realize it yet.¹

And that’s incredibly sad both because of what Tumblr was, but also because there’s nothing else that has come to fill that hole.

It’s weird, if you wanted to start something as simple as a link blog these days, there’s no straightforward way to do it. Sure, you could set up a WordPress site, but it will undoubtedly be overkill. Medium has gone in another direction. And other things such as the newer Micro.blog are almost too spartan. At its peak, Tumblr was the right combination of guardrails (the distinct content types) and open-endedness.² This bred creativity. And sheer weirdness. It created a network and graph that was distinct from the others.

It’s hard to know what a more modern Tumblr would look like — it would undoubtedly be mobile-first, but would it be better as a paid product these days? One major issue Tumblr had was a complete and utter failure to monetize. Ads seemed like a straightforward proposition, perhaps in a way similar to how they work on Instagram now. But for whatever reason, they never truly worked on Tumblr.³

Could it be a right place/right time thing for a paid social network, truly free from advertising? There are certainly signs. Such a product would never get to Facebook-scale, of course. But it wouldn’t have to. And actually, shouldn’t aspire to. That never seemed to be the success state for Tumblr anyway.

Some combination of Instagram and Twitter is probably the closest thing we have to old Tumblr right now. And some people are even attempting to use these networks in similar ways — bless you, kids. At best, these are hacks layered on top of networks built for other purposes. It’s not the same. It’s just not. And that’s sad. RIP, Tumblr.

¹ Humorously, when logging on recently I received a warning that some of my older posts were flagged as “adult content”. Upon reviewing them: one picture of a Blackberry device, one GIF of an iPhone in use, and one image of Malcolm McDowell from A Clockwork Orange.

² Not to mention that you would publish to Tumblr, the network, but the content would also reside on your own Tumblr site. Again, the Instagram feed/profile may be the closest to this now, but it’s clearly different.

³ And, in fact, they’re fucking awful. You now see the same one or two ads over and over and over again as you scroll through your feed.