Nearly 11 years after launching Tumblr in his mother’s apartment, David Karp announced this week that he’s stepping down as head of the social network. His departure signals a bleak future for the site, which has struggled to grow and turn a profit since it was acquired by Yahoo in 2013 for $1.1 billion. Even Karp’s goodbye email to staffers had a tinge of mourning to it: “I look back with so much pride. At a generation of artists, writers, creators, curators, and crusaders that have redefined our culture, and who we have helped to empower.”
Karp’s not wrong. Before Tumblr was sucked into the purple-paned corporate labyrinth that is Yahoo, it was a hotbed of excellent online content: a lovely, creative community that pumped out original GIFs, memes, and niche-interest blogs at an impressive rate. People went there to be entertained, to connect with like-minded peers, and to ogle pics of hungover owls. But over the years—as competitors like Facebook and Instagram have grown—that creative energy has slowly drained from the site. It’s likely only a matter of time until Verizon shutters the company and dissects it for parts. The question now: How did we get here? Ringer staffers Katie Baker, Hannah Giorgis, Alison Herman, Kate Knibbs, Victor Luckerson, and Molly McHugh weigh in. —Alyssa Bereznak
Let’s start off on a positive note: What are your fondest memories of Tumblr in its heydey?
Molly McHugh: There was once a Tumblr where an artist would draw scenes from Craigslist Missed Connections pages. I loved that. I also really enjoyed making an MRW GIF blog when I lived in the Caribbean.
Alison Herman: I was a party crasher—I first logged on in 2010 or 2011, which I’ve been told is past its *real* heyday. I remember tentatively asking my friend what “what is air” means; I had no idea how thoroughly my brain was about to be broken.
Hannah Giorgis: I met some of my best friends because of Tumblr! Heben Nigatu and I stumbled upon each other's blogs way back in 2010 or 2011 I think. We were both shocked to find another Ethiopian girl grappling with some of the same issues (racism, sexism, etc., at predominantly white institutions and, you know, also in America). Neither of us had ever encountered that IRL. We ended up meeting in person the next year when I interned in New York, and I was connected to so many great folks in her orbit then—many of whom are now my closest friends here in New York, five years later.
Herman: It's mocked for it now, but Tumblr also taught me a lot of the basics of social justice discourse, mostly by just reading the perspectives of people whose backgrounds were different from my own. If Twitter is an ideological silo, Tumblr was a horizon opener.
Katie Baker: I was working in finance in 2008 and bothering a friend with constant emails when he finally responded: “Hey, have you considered starting a Tumblr?” Little did I know that it would be the start of a whole new career. … I felt like I had finally found “my people” even if it turned out that “my people” were, like, weirdos who liked reblogging Joe Biden memes and writing whispery posts about blogger drama. (One of the early Tumblr memes that really spoke to me was the great “Sad Guys on Trading Floors,” which made its debut shortly after I joined. It was weirdly comforting in a time of huge financial and societal upheaval.)
Alyssa Bereznak: I got into Tumblr when I first moved to New York in 2010 (which, yes, is pretty late in the game). I was delighted to find extremely specific pages that celebrated the weirdness of the city, like Halloween or Williamsburg? or Accidental Chinese Hipsters.
McHugh: Just the other day, my aunt texted me that she'd bought a cookbook called Thug Kitchen. I was going to explain that that used to just be a Tumblr, but what would the point be?
Giorgis: To Alison’s note, I appreciate that Tumblr is what helped give me the words for why something like Thug Kitchen, helmed by white people, really is troublesome (beyond just the icky feeling it gave me in my gut).
McHugh: Totally. I was going to explain everything wrong with it, but I think it would have been entirely lost. It was just wild to me that some people see Thug Kitchen as a cookbook that exists on its own.
Herman: It's hard to explain outside the context of Tumblr, right? Tumblr really did give users an almost secret language.
What set the Tumblr community apart from other social networks?
Herman: There’s a really obvious and powerful symbolism to the heart button, I think; pile-ons definitely happened, but Tumblr was always a way more positive place than almost any other social network. It was a home for enthusiasms!
Knibbs: What I always liked about Tumblr was the lack of emphasis on shuttling everything into one feed. It was more about discovery than scrolling quickly through whatever an algorithm told you would be most relevant. It really catered to rabbit holes and niches. Also, Shitty New Yorker Cartoon Captions didn’t exist anywhere else.
Bereznak: I always think about the bone controversy—in which people accused one practicing "witch" of stealing human bones for spells—as a good example for the network’s tolerance for very niche interests and sensitivity toward even the most bizarre topics of discussion. The response to the incident wasn’t, “What is this person doing practicing witchcraft with bones?” It was, “Any knowledgeable witch knows this is a very good way to piss off the spirits.”
Baker: I think for me it was the fact that it even was a social network, as opposed to the other blogging platforms of the time. I remember trying to start a Blogspot blog, because I read and loved so many of them, but I felt like I was just typing into the void and had no idea how to get involved in the link economy or anything like that. (In those days getting a Gawker “Blogorrhea” link was an epic accomplishment.)
Giorgis: Something about the quasi anonymity of Tumblr enabled both community and personal growth in a way that platforms like Facebook and Twitter—which feel very persona driven—don't allow for. On Tumblr you didn't have to worry about your family and friends finding out that you reblogged 500 Misfits gifsets. The site let you explore what you love—and what upsets you—with enthusiasm and energy, and connect with people who might share those with you while also introducing you to different things, concepts, etc.
Herman: Also, to get really basic: the mixed-media aspect! It was pretty to look at AND you could have long-form thoughts/discussions.
McHugh: It allowed for a lot more interpretation. Not just the content, but the design. There is no social network now that gives you even half as much flexibility. Everyone’s Instagram profile looks the same. There’s a lot more monotony across other social networks that I think lends us to scrolling mindlessly and not really FINDING anything. Tumblr was more exploratory partly because of this.
Giorgis: The Wikipedia of social networks!
Knibbs: It also existed in that sweet spot where blogs still mattered, and made it easy to connect those bloggers together.
Baker: At the time, I think even Facebook didn’t have quite the same “self-publishing tools,” if you can call it that, that it does now—I’d have to look up the history of Facebook to be clear on the timeline, but for a while, writing a status update still meant answering the prompt “Katie Baker is …”
Herman: Does anyone remember those “me on Facebook”/”me on Tumblr” memes?
Giorgis: Absolutely. I think a lot of what feels like modern Twitter humor has its roots in early Tumblr memes, especially the vaguely meta ones that reference the platform itself.
Herman: Tumblr also felt friendlier than other famously weird internet zones like Reddit or 4chan. I still felt like I was on a cool detour, but I wasn't in the Wild West, you know?
Bereznak: Yeah! Even the more risky adult content Tumblrs leaned toward sex positivity, not raunchiness. There was never really a fear that you might happen upon a deeply disturbing GIF or something.
Victor Luckerson: I kind of feel like Tumblr’s ability to propagate memes was the beginning of its undoing. I only ever consumed Tumblr content passively, but I primarily recall it as the vehicle through which memes—which I was familiar with as a trawler of message boards since my parents got us dial-up internet in the sixth grade—became a mainstream medium. When What Should We Call Me blew up around 2011, it was kind of jarring to see internet humor suddenly become something that people of all ages and backgrounds consumed. Then this type of humor was quickly co-opted by Twitter/Facebook accounts.
Herman: WHAT SHOULD WE CALL ME! I can't believe a single person invented the concept of the reaction GIF. It's a universal internet behavior that can be traced back to a user who took the practice mainstream. That’s wild.
Bereznak: How is the What Should We Call Me person not included in every “Top Internet Innovators” list of all time?!
Do we think that Yahoo really ever understood what Tumblr was for? What did it do to hurt or help the site?
Bereznak: I should disclose that before this, I was a reporter at Yahoo News, and was forced to use Tumblr as a CMS there. It was not ideal, but I won't say anything more for fear of breaching an NDA and being sued.
Knibbs: It doesn’t sound like the company ever got what Tumblr was, beyond that it was cool with the teens. I’d really love to know whether David Karp thought Yahoo would help Tumblr or if he just wanted that sweet blog money.
Herman: The detail in that Mashable story about an executive trying to hype them by saying they could “create the next-generation PDF” …
Bereznak: Also the fact that some Tumblr employees didn’t know what Yahoo was …
Luckerson: Lol, they were lying.
McHugh: They at the very least knew about Yahoo Answers. The only user overlap between Yahoo and Tumblr is Yahoo Answers.
Giorgis: I will admit that it's a bit hard for me as someone who used to be a very, very regular user of the site to disentangle my reflexive irritation with the Yahoo acquisition news from any sort of objective evaluation of what happened. Did Tumblr users just react dramatically to news of change? Maybe! But what incentive was there to think Yahoo would bring anything good to the site?
Herman: It’s weird—I can't point to any material impact of the acquisition on my user experience, but the decline in relevance definitely started soon after.
Luckerson: Yahoo’s goal must have been to have more content to serve ads against right? Once you refocus Tumblr as a blog for funny GIFs rather than a social network, it becomes much more likely to have its territory taken over by others. Basically, I could find plenty of memes on Twitter or Facebook by the Yahoo years, and that’s all I ever really used Tumblr for.
Bereznak: The narrative of the acquisition was that Yahoo would help Tumblr monetize, something that Karp had always been pretty reluctant to do himself. I always felt like he was protective of the company in that sense, and that his decision to sell it to Yahoo was basically a matter of: I can’t do this to my own child.
Baker: Alyssa, I think that’s a good way to think about it. Karp was too close to his Tumblr son. And also, because of how intimate Tumblr felt, I think the users felt more entitled to weigh in on the decisions he made and take them personally.
There’s a kind of cynical ethos that “everything good on the internet dies.” Do you think Tumblr was doomed before it was ever bought by Yahoo?
Luckerson: There is no way to scale the intimate connections that attracted early users, so yes, if their goal was to become a social media giant, definitely doomed.
Herman: I think a lot of people just outgrew it, too. I know people from Tumblr who are still big on the internet; they just use different platforms.
Knibbs: After we dismantle Facebook and Google and enter the Second Golden Age of Blogging, I think Tumblr could still rise again.
Giorgis: I still occasionally retreat to Tumblr when everything else is Too Much, but it makes more sense for me as someone who’s in a different professional place to primarily use Twitter/Facebook now (ugh).
Baker: Yeah, in some ways it’s the natural life cycle of a cool social network, I guess. If it weren’t Yahoo it would be something else.
Let’s finish it off with your all-time favorite obscure Tumblr dot com site.
Bereznak: Mine, as you may have guessed from the intro, is the hungover owl one.
McHugh: It’s kind of basic, but I enjoyed Cats That Look Like Ron Swanson.
Luckerson: Poor Michelle, about all the times Destiny’s Child’s Michelle Williams was snubbed by fate/cosmic circumstance/Beyoncé.
Giorgis: I don't know that it was obscure, but I still love Things I Learned from Sex and the City. Something about seeing a million screencaps from the show just perfectly highlighted the absurdity of its premises and dialogue—and also why there's still so much to love!
Herman: I’m gonna be extremely on brand here and vote for True Detective Conversations.
Baker: I’m Remembering! made me feel so seen. I lived in gripping fear of winding up on Table for One.
Bereznak: Man, I’m Remembering! was such a gem.
Baker: SUCH. The tag that was like “my brother josh.”
Knibbs: I was and am obsessed with the Old Loves Tumblr.
Bereznak: Macaulay Culkin and Rachel Miner never had a chance.
