Another blow came when Tumblr issued a blanket ban on adult content-something it had become known for-in December of 2018 and promptly lost thirty per cent of its traffic. When Verizon acquired Yahoo, in 2017, it bundled Yahoo and Tumblr under the parent company Oath. But, in 2016, the company did a writedown of seven hundred and twelve million dollars on the acquisition after Tumblr failed to grow advertising revenue. In 2013, when Tumblr had seventy-three million accounts, Yahoo acquired it for more than a billion dollars. The platform became known as a petri dish of Internet quirkiness, cultivating subcultures such as “bronies” (male fans of the cartoon “My Little Pony”) and “otherkin” (people who identify as non-human). “You could have more text than on Twitter, but it was a cooler community than Facebook.” “It was right at a time when everyone was getting cell phones “you could take a picture from your phone and post it on the Tumblr app,” Sharon Butler, a painter who used Tumblr for her art blog, Two Coats of Paint, said. Long before Instagram launched, in 2010, Tumblr was a home for curated imagery. Users could design their own home pages post text, images, GIFs, or videos and follow a feed of others doing the same. (Facebook began in 2004 and Twitter in 2006.) It was built to be a simple, social blogging platform, but its multimedia approach set it apart. Tumblr was founded by David Karp and launched in New York City, in February of 2007. According to the leaked Facebook Papers, the company now known as Meta estimates that teen-age Facebook users are likely to drop by almost half in the next two years. That’s the same demographic that Facebook and Instagram are concerned about losing. Tumblr’s C.E.O., Jeff D’Onofrio, told me recently that forty-eight per cent of its active users and sixty-one per cent of its new ones are Generation Z. Tumblr’s very status as a relic of the Internet-easily forgotten, unobtrusively designed, more or less unchanged from a decade ago-is making it appealing to prodigal users as well as new ones. Once prominent, innovative, and shining, on equal footing with any other social-media company, it sank under the waves as it underwent several ownership transfers in the twenty-tens. Tumblr is something like an Atlantis of social networks. It has rejoined her regular rotation of social media, alongside its much more popular competitors Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. “I fell back into it quite easily.” Since then, she has spent time on Tumblr every day. People I followed a long time ago were still posting stuff, which I thought was very strange,” she told me. “My dashboard”-the main Tumblr feed-“was still weirdly active. But during the early months of the pandemic, on a whim, she logged back on. (She is now a photographer in London.) In late 2016, when she left home for university, her Tumblr use trailed off there was plenty of cultural discussion to be found at art school. On the site, she would look at GIFs and images from the TV shows “Doctor Who” and its spinoff “Torchwood.” Tumblr was Forward-Hayter’s main access to culture-her rural town had no museums, galleries, or art scene. “Proper picturesque English countryside,” she said. The machine sat on a dark wooden desk in a hall off the porch. In 2013, when Jennifer Forward-Hayter was fourteen, she would log onto the social network Tumblr from the desktop computer in her family’s working farmhouse in Dorset, England.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |