The Case for Returning to Tumblr

While I was by no means a diehard Tumblr girl with loads of followers, I was still very much enamored with the platform. Where else could you learn about fourth-wave feminism before reblogging a random photo of a goth girl with zero context? I used to spend hours scrolling until 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m., my eyes drying out, my mind filled with images of Winona Ryder and Sylvia Plath and soft butch genderqueer models from Paris. “It was genuinely cool,” said one friend, when I told her I was writing this piece. “But it wasn’t just about images, it was about words, too. That’s what made it pop. That’s what made it different.”

The Tumblr dream died as quickly as it was born. In 2013, Yahoo! Inc acquired Tumblr for an estimated 1.1 billion dollars, and in 2017, it introduced an opt-in Safe Mode, making it the default in 2018. These changes ultimately alienated massive amounts of Tumblr’s core audience. Gone were the NSFW illustrations, the fetish art, the queer erotica and whatever drew people to Tumblr to begin with. Sex workers left in their droves. LGBTQIA+ users ditched the platform too, after claims that some of their content was being shadowbanned for being too “mature.” I also logged off for good in the late 2010s. I was on Twitter by then, followed by Instagram. Tumblr just wasn’t fun anymore.

But that was years ago, and times have changed—drastically. With Twitter dying, the need for a slick, word-based platform has become more urgent than ever, especially for those in media, publishing, or fiction. And meanwhile, just last week, Tumblr announced that they were finally reversing its ban on nudity, writing: “We now welcome a broader range of expression, creativity and art on Tumblr, including content depicting the human form (yes, that includes the naked human form).” If ever there was a moment for a Tumblr renaissance, then it is now. Why migrate to a brand new platform when there is one right here waiting for us, that we’re already familiar with? Type “Tumblr” and “comeback” into Twitter, and you’ll see that it’s a question people have been asking themselves a lot lately.

Younger and perkier people will tell you that Twitter was for decomposing millennials anyway, and that you should just use TikTok now. But for those of us who don’t want to create upbeat, talk-to-the-camera video content, that isn’t very useful. There is a reason that people are still clinging to Twitter as their primary tool for communication—they want to make conversation and share their work, not scream Gnarls Barkley riffs into a cam with a ring-light or make bleary-eyed vids about being a stay-at-home trad wife to a slowed-down version of “Watermelon Sugar.” The TikTok kids are doing their own thing. But for writers, readers, and those more interested in aesthetics, a mass shift to Tumblr must have potential.