First of all, let me clear that clearly there are major losers in the short term at least. Recent policy change will affect marginalized people disproportionately and especially given how soon it's going to take effect, many artists and sex workers will absolutely be taking a significant hit out of this. But there's more subtle stuff as well like the simple prudishness of it all and how the external stimulus came from Apple, though a big part is mismanagement by Yahoo and Tumblr itself.

I actually dislike the jokes people are making about this online. This actually really does harm some people's livelihood in a significant way and I can't but feel that some of the jokes are deflection to save from the embarrassment of seen horny on main yet being able to comment on the policy change somehow. And also as Tumblr has long been in decay, I think for many it's kind of a blunder years site. Honestly even the bad political takes and awful fandom behavior is something that's not wholly unique to the site but something that reflects the wider culture - Twitter has quite similar problems with older people and more chuds. Even the policy change has a similar background to problems many other social media sites have dealt with - absolutely refusing anything to do moderation except for little tinkering with algorithms or letting users set useful boundaries. It's a matter of a degree, not of a kind. (As if Youtube/Twitter/Instagram/Reddit were orders of magnitudes better lmao.)

Then there's some smaller issues - Tumblr is basically the foremost repository of many niche communities that are now evaporating behind walled gardens and de facto ephemeral mediums. For example, there was a sociological study made about one of my niche interests that couldn't have happened if not for a boost in recruitment from a well-known blogger in the community. And it was a very diverse sample, actually, too. Like it or not, mainstream media, cranks with ample funding and academia still rule over lived experience so it was valuable that it got recorded. I'm honestly sure that there are plenty of grad students who were miffed about this change too. Then there are of course Tumblr blogs that basically serve as origin stories for animators, comics artists or game developers and so on.

(BTW, I urge people to archive notable and valuable Tumblr blogs onto the Internet Archive, even if it's incomplete. I know just a few, but damn I wish someone saved Drilpencils comics somewhere! But see Jason Scott on this.)

And lastly, I genuinely think Tumblr is the easiest blog platform for an author who just wants to write. There's some value in that.

But I think there are upsides too as frankly, Tumblr deserves to die. It's good if this is the tipping point where the fandom actually starts its exodus from the site. It's definitely true that things like the antifandom ("antis") have been exacerbated by structural issues of the platform. There sorely need to be limits to how much you can pull people from other communities into fights, limits to reblogging and sharing and so on. Anon asks have probably caused more suffering than pleasure. I would enjoy if my niche interests migrated away from the site so that I could finally be freed from Tumblr myself. Luckily it seems like just that is happening.

Thank you for reading this. I started Tumblring back when Adventure Time started and a whole bunch of the crew had blogs on the platform. The site felt like a lemon scented breeze after Facebook and Reddit - a place where I could be away from angry young men and their perspectives for a little while. I think there was value in that.