“If ever there was a moment for a Tumblr renaissance, then it is now. Why migrate to a brand-new platform when there is one right here waiting for us, that we’re already familiar with?,” says one Vogue writer while making the case for a return to Tumblr.
Trying to describe the vibe of Golden Era Tumblr to those who weren’t immersed in it is difficult, in part because it was so sprawling. Lesbian fan fiction about Kristen Stewart lived beside film stills fromsmoking Marlboros in ripped fishnets. Screenshots from Studio Ghibli films sat next to paragraphs about critical race theory, beneath which teenagers argued.
While I was by no means a diehard Tumblr girl with loads of followers, I was still very much enamored with the platform. Where else could you learn about fourth-wave feminism before reblogging a random photo of a goth girl with zero context? I used to spend hours scrolling until 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m., my eyes drying out, my mind filled with images of Winona Ryder and Sylvia Plath and soft butch genderqueer models from Paris.
The Tumblr dream died as quickly as it was born. In 2013, Yahoo! Inc acquired Tumblr for an estimated 1.1 billion dollars, and in 2017, it introduced an opt-in Safe Mode, making it the default in 2018. These changes ultimately alienated massive amounts of Tumblr’s core audience. Gone were the NSFW illustrations, the fetish art, the queer erotica and whatever drew people to Tumblr to begin with. Sex workers left in their droves.
But that was years ago, and times have changed—drastically. With Twitter dying, the need for a slick, word-based platform has become more urgent than ever, especially for those in media, publishing, or fiction. And meanwhile, just last week, Tumblr announced that they were finally reversing its, writing: “We now welcome a broader range of expression, creativity and art on Tumblr, including content depicting the human form .” If ever there was a moment for a Tumblr renaissance, then it is now.
Younger and perkier people will tell you that Twitter was for decomposing millennials anyway, and that you should just use TikTok now. But for those of us who don’t want to create upbeat, talk-to-the-camera video content, that isn’t very useful.
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