Surprise! Tumblr is Still Alive and Well

In fact, many Tumblr users prefer it over any other social media.

When was the last time you heard about Tumblr? You may recall back in the day when legitimate businesses would have Tumblr blogs, or you would find actual celebrities with blogs. Then in 2013, Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion, and it seemed as if the blogging site totally died off.

It didn't. The purchase left its user-base scrambling in a panic over whether the acquisition from such a large corporation would suck the life out of Tumblr, though. It saw a decline in its user base in 2018 when they banned explicit content, too. When it sold again in 2019, WordPress paid a tiny fraction of what Yahoo had paid just a few years prior. While the user base is smaller, the website is just as alive with smaller ecosystems forming for fandoms that feel just like the large community Tumblr once had.

These smaller ecosystems thrive the same as Tumblr did back at its peak. Each has its niche, and users who are part of ecosystems often keep to their own groups with the occasional fandom post "breaking containment" as users like to say, leaving the Tumblr users outside of that fandom unknowingly reblogging a post that is usually made about popular TV shows. That is part of the user experience, though.

Each ecosystem makes up part of the larger overarching ecosystem. There are parts of the user experience that every user will have at least once, such as celebrating one of the themed days of the week like Out of Touch Thursday where they reblog a video of anime characters dancing to "Out of Touch" by Daryl Hall and John Oates. Some variations go around fandoms using specific characters, too, leading this overarching trend to have its own versions within different fandoms.

Something else that brings users together is the running joke about the Tumblr mobile app always being broken. Every user has experienced a bug or even just the annoying but treasured "Tumblr gradient" when photos are slow to load.

There are a lot of other jokes, such as bringing up color theory on any post about the color red or blood due to a post about a children's hospital redecorating with red blotches in the hallways and another user coming in and missing the point that it looks like someone dragged a dead body across the floor, talking about what red means in color theory, instead. It's like an inside joke for several million people.

On Twitter, you will always find a fight, which can be exhausting. The case is the same with Reddit. On TikTok, you can't even say the word "kill" without potentially having your content taken down. Tumblr is free of censorship, letting its users make any sort of joke. You can also curate your experience on Tumblr like no other site.

You can filter out tags and filter out any blog you want. You don't have to see anything you don't want to. The tagging system is one of the most well-liked systems online. Tags are not part of the text of the post, so they are not attached to every reblog.

You can use the tags in many ways. Some use them as a sorting system for their blogs, tagging their fandom posts, the form of posts, and their original posts with certain tags that let you filter anything you want to out along with being able to find anything you want to. Other people will comment on posts they reblog through the tags so they don't actually add anything to the version of the post that goes around, as reblogs stay attached to the post, and it's Tumblr etiquette to not add to a post unless it is actually a good addition.

There is also a queue system. It is currently a little broken, but the only non-functional feature is choosing how many posts go up per day. When the queue is fully functional, you can set how many posts you want to be posted per day, a chunk of time you would like them to be posted in, and what gets posted. Many content blogs run on a queue, filling their queue up with gifsets to be posted to keep the blog running when they are not making original posts or when the user is offline for a while. As of recently, you can even fill your blog's queue with up to 1,000 posts. You can even schedule as many posts as you want for whenever you want.

While Tumblr's features are often broken, the functionality and options available to run your blog are much more vast and versatile than options for social media such as Twitter.

Tumblr lets you write posts with up to 250 paragraphs. This lets users post long-form content that Twitter doesn't support, along with being able to put up to ten photos or gifs in a post. This lets content creators thrive. The community of gif makers on Tumblr is unparalleled on any other site because Tumblr is designed to share visual media in this form.

One of the most popular features is that you don't have to have anything to do with an algorithm if you don't want to. Any algorithm options on Tumblr can be turned off or ignored. You don't have to see the best posts firsts, or posts based on your likes, or go to the recommend posts page. This leaves any user who opts out virtually untouched by algorithms that many people dislike or find invasive on social media such as TikTok. Not many sites let users opt-out.

Tumblr is great at responding to the users, too. They listen when they get dragged for whatever disliked feature they put out, and they change things accordingly. They are also transparent about the changes made in every update, having an official blog to post update information. This lets users know that the staff knows about x bug or y disliked feature and what they are doing to change things.

Lastly, as of late, Tumblr has been rolling out some ways to actually make a profit and to be able to afford the cost of running the site. It has been a long-standing joke that Tumblr is worth negative dollars and that each post tanks the value even further (and the users like it that way), but WordPress needs to make a bit of profit to pay employees and keep servers running. First, they announced a feature called Posts+ which did not go over well.

They received a lot of backlash at the idea of paying a Tumblr "funnyman" for their posts along with the potential of legal issues for fandom bloggers making money from making content that is not their own. While Post+ is still implemented, they have released other ways to help support Tumblr.

For a long time, the bizarre ads of Tumblr were yet another running joke about how bad the website was, how it was so unmarketable they had to use any advertiser they could, and there are still a lot of bizarre ads, but advertisers with real, not nonsensical ads work with Tumblr now, so there isn't much fun left in seeing the ads. So Tumblr introduced an ad-free version for either $4.99/month or $39.99/year. For those who browse Tumblr daily and use it as their main social media, this is an appealing offer. They can simultaneously not see the same ad for manscaping every four posts and support Tumblr.

The fan-favorite feature, however, is called Tumblr Blaze. With Blaze, a user can spend as low as $10 to promote a post to anyone. This is particularly exciting for the user base because part of the fun of Tumblr is the horrible posts. Now users can pay $10 to make other users see whatever they want to put in their posts. The possibilities here are endless.

Users recognize that when they subscribe to ad-free browsing or pay to make anyone look at their purposely-bad post, they are supporting Tumblr and allowing the staff to avoid turning the site into the PC, squeaky-clean, and advertiser-friendly site that the majority of users would up and leave because then the blogging platform is no better than Twitter or Facebook.

So no, Tumblr is not dead. It may not be as popular as it was at its peak, but it is thriving with a strong sense of community while being the preferred social media for many of its users because of its unique features and its differences from other social media. It is alive and well, plus it may finally be profitable again. This may even lead to a resurgence, especially with users from apps like Twitter and TikTok, where there is a lot of censorship, migrating over.

Tumblr never really died, and viral text posts never stopped going around. It was just highly unremarkable for years. While it was dormant, the ecosystem evolved into what we have today. It is self-sustaining and way too bizarre for most outsiders to try to break into, which is just the way the users like it.