http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Website/Tumblr

Modern social media at both its best and worst.

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Tumblr is a "short-form" multimedia blogging platform. It was a project initiated by then-high schooler David Karp, who eventually fulfilled his goal in 2007.

It steadily grew from modest beginnings to becoming the place to blog, allowing users to connect with one another over interests and discouraging the sort of real-life friends and family environment (and thus feuds, embarrassments, and hiding of interests) of Facebook, while also boasting much more posting utility than sites such as LiveJournal or Twitter. The many differing post types and the flexibility of blog creation and theme production led Tumblr to become the fastest place a user could begin exploring their own interests and setting up their own little home. LGBT activism took full steam, as did the social justice movement, the latter of which led to mockery from a lot of the internet for the perceived "social justice warrior" attitude of the site.

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On May 20, 2013, Tumblr was purchased by Yahoo! for $1.1 billion. This led to a veritable panic from the userbase for two reasons. One, Yahoo was (at the time, jokingly) threatening to make the site child-proof and thus devoid of all sexual content. Two, Yahoo had a documented history of acquiring, killing, and then selling sites. As neither of these (immediately) came to pass, people forgot their worries. Later that same year, a convention known as "DashCon " was announced and, by June 2014, had garnered incredible excitement and anticipation. The con was nothing short of a disaster (full details are on our TroubledProduction.Other page), and the aftermath caused the site's entire culture to change.

Like a deflating balloon, Tumblr's rapid-fire Keet personality depleted. Activism contained itself only to those passionate for it, fandoms began more self-examination, badly-behaved but popular bloggers were called out, and the site's humor took on a more snarky and memetic tone. The term "dashcon" became synonymous with a cringier, more immature time that haunts those who were on the site long enough to see it happen. Around the same time, site staff started to become the target of outright loathing from users. Numerous changes and updates rolled out despite the heavy resistance from users, and said updates were often accompanied by the site going down for days at a time, earning the staff a reputation for incompetence. This worsened when the staff stopped answering emails, leaving the site's problems (such as child porn, neo-nazism, and virus bots) to fester and grow.

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In 2017, Verizon bought out Yahoo and placed ownership of Tumblr under their "The Oath" branding. On December 3rd, 2018, after the Tumblr app was removed from the iOS store for allowing users to access child pornography, The Oath announced that all adult content on the site would be banned. Following a large purge of the userbase in which thousands of blogs were deleted, the ban was enacted on December 17th, 2018. Said adult content ban turned out to be The Last Straw for its userbase. The 6 months following the ban saw a mass exodus of users to more relaxed sites, which caused Tumblr to lose close to a 33% of its once-massive userbase, a percentage that only rose higher as the weeks wore on. Finally, on August 12th, 2019, Verizon sold Tumblr to Automattic (the parent company to Wordpress) for less than $3 million.

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