This was not the fate anyone imagined when Tumblr was founded in early 2007 by David Karp and Marco Arment. It quickly became the brightest in a flurry of truly innovative social media developments of the time. Pronounced “tumbler,” it allowed users to post all kinds of short-form blogs called tumblelogs, which could be followed by others.

And tumble they did, especially the much-coveted teen demo and also the more fringe types who had no interest in the dull blue suburb that was the then 3-year-old Facebook. Unlike that site, which its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, called a “utility,” Tumblr was the hippest club in town, attracting wonderful blogs like Scanwiches (yes, scans of sandwiches) and Garfield Minus Garfield (just what it sounds like) and one of my faves, which I could really relate to at the time, called STFU Parents (“You used to be fun. Now you have a baby.”) And so much terrific art and so many amazing photos and a cornucopia of funny bits and pieces of just about everything.

I even had (and still have) what is now a moribund blog there, called “Graffiti From the Gods,” which I explained a decade ago: “I find signs everywhere. On sidewalks. On walls. Sometimes misspelled. I cannot ignore them. So it is written, so it shall be posted.”

I really enjoyed posting there. And why not? The always twitchy Twitter had only started the year before with significantly fewer bells and whistles and, more to the point, the social networks that would really supplant Tumblr — Instagram and Snapchat — would not appear for several years. That left the field to Tumblr.

Thus, it quickly got its lofty valuation with $125 million in investments from tech’s smartest investors and took off. It hit a billion blog posts by 2010, and when the site started accepting advertising in 2012, Tumblr seemed golden.

Fool’s gold. What plagues the internet today hit Tumblr hard and early. There were the inevitable copyright problems and spam and security problems and product problems. And the content itself, which started as edgy, got rather gnarly, from self-harm sites to neo-Nazis to what really tanked Tumblr: sex.

The very fast growth of sites that were soon deemed pornographic got to be a too large part of the site, a development that got a lot of attention in the frenzy of the Yahoo purchase. While some of those blogs were seen as safe havens to explore sexuality, there was too much hard-core pornography — and that did not fly in a corporate setting.