The microblogging site was known for its ‘go nuts, show nuts’ policy. Here’s how the App Store ended Tumblr’s glory days
The quirks and oddities of a social network affect the community that grows up around it. Instagram’s lack of a repost feature pushed users to rely on hashtags to spread their pictures across the network, sowing the seeds of the heavily interest-based communities that still live there today. The anonymity offered by 4chan lead, perversely, to a uniformity of tone, as users conform to the zeitgeist of the site, unable to build a name for themselves as an individual. TikTok – built by people who knew what they were doing – carefully sculpted its quirks to nudge users in its preferred direction, boosting harmless dance trends and discouraging political rants of the sort that litter competitor YouTube.
Over the years, some of the largest social networks have filed those quirks off, pushing for a homogeneity that is more accessible to all, even at the expense of what makes them unique. Twitter’s strict text-only, reverse-chronological, 140-character timeline is now algorithmically curated, offering 280 characters plus a range of multimedia; Instagram posts can be reshared in Snapchat-style stories, which can also contain TikTok-style videos; TikTok pivoted towards political content and now plays a leading role in the culture wars.
“No modern internet service in 2022 can have the rules that Tumblr did in 2007. I am personally extremely libertarian in terms of what consenting adults should be able to share, and I agree with ‘go nuts, show nuts’ in principle, but the casually porn-friendly era of the early internet is currently impossible.”
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