TUMBLR

At one time, Tumblr was the world’s most prominent microblogging website. It was founded by David Karp and Marco Arment. To quote the Urban Dictionary, “Tumblr: the world’s first digital insane asylum” and “An inverted social network where the more ridiculous you look the cooler you are.” It used to be that 22% of the site was porn and people posted a massive collection of their own porn (pics and gifs) on microblogs known as Tumblogs. Tumblr also stood out as a safe space because David Karp wanted to avoid mean-spiritedness and so he didn’t allow people to leave comments. Then, in 2013, Tumblr was purchased for $1.1 billion by people who had no idea what they were doing. The yahoos banned porn on Tumblr and pretty much killed the site, until it ended up being owned by even bigger yahoos who banned all sexually explicit materials from Tumblr. In 2019, while pretty much on life support, Tumblr was purchased for $3 million by Matt Mullenweg (the founder of Wordpres) and his company Automatic. While Automatic inititally said they were keeping the no-porn rule in effect, in late 2022 someone at Automatic figured out that people actually like sex, maybe even the people who own and work at Automatic, and they began to allow “nudes” but no porn. Hopefully, the line between nudes and porn will once again blur at Tumblr, and Tumblr might actually return as a safe place for the good kind of insanity.