The Weird, the Nerdy, the Horny: What Tumblr Gave Us Before It Changed for the Worse

This is Digital Hope, a column by Jake Pitre that sifts through the exhaustion, poison, and unease in contemporary digital culture to find in it the hope we need today.

In the film First Reformed, Reverend Ernst Toller (played by a weathered Ethan Hawke) tells a man plagued by existential despair over climate change, “Wisdom is holding two contradictory truths in our mind simultaneously: hope and despair. A life without despair is a life without hope. Holding these two ideas in our head is life itself.”

Putting aside Toller’s complex journey of faith, his words have truth to them that resonate beyond the film—particularly in our daily lives. As companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, and so on continue to make changes to our daily lives that we have no control over, we are left only to react, just as we can only react to the transformations promised by climate change, since as individuals, there’s only so much we can do.

And yet, we can learn, we can educate, we can shift the dynamics of power—and we have the ability to cultivate the thing with feathers, that thing we call hope.

I am constantly preoccupied with the everyday realities of our digital lives, and likewise the simplified ways we tend to talk about them. It seems to feel, more and more often, like things keep happening to us (and it’s mostly bad, terrible, or otherwise just plain creepy), and not only is our agency removed from the equation but we nary get a chance to properly unpack what the hell just happened.

You don’t need me to tell you that social media has changed human behavior, in ways that are both obvious and utterly obscure. You know how your Instagram or Twitter timeline seems to show you the same posts or the same people over and over? Or how you decide to just watch the TV show everyone is tweeting about, mostly because you all subscribe to Netflix and have easy access to the same content (why else would I watch Friends from College)? Or how you spend more money than you intended to after an ad appears in your timeline that grabs your attention, or how you seem to automatically fall into different “personas” depending on whether you’re tweeting or on Facebook?

We are routinely beholden to the forces of subjectivation, which the scholars Ganaele Langlois and Greg Elmer describe as the ways in which our personal sense of self is “paradoxically shaped according to processes and forces external to the self.” The extent to which this structure has been monopolized by social media platforms and their owners is becoming increasingly clear.

When Tumblr announced on December 3rd that it would be banning all adult content, the response was swift and overwhelmingly negative. Understandably so, as users and analysts noted how this decision would impact LGBTQ+ folks, sex workers, and anyone with non-normative sexualities. Tumblr has long been a congregating space for women, queers, and other marginalized identities. Culturally speaking, even if you aren’t on Tumblr, you probably know it as a nesting ground for “social justice warriors” and rampant nudity, a place to be woke and a place to be horny.

There is simply no separating the platform’s lenient design, which de-emphasizes indexing or attribution and is purposefully anonymizing, from its unique population, many of whom are interested in a social space online that allows them to post whatever they want and, more significantly, be whoever they want. Tumblr is often thought of as the online equivalent to a teen’s bedroom wall, an endless scroll through every account you follow on the Dashboard, like a stream of consciousness for all that you like and all that you are or can be. Queer folks (and other oppressed groups) risk far more in what they are public with, both online and off. If the wrong person (a family member, a boss) were to gain knowledge of one’s queerness, there could be serious economic, social, and personal consequences. Tumblr was like a safe haven of possibility.

Tumblr, for me, was hugely significant in my adolescent and teenage years, and I’ve only become more sure of that as time passes and as I write more about the platform. I discovered the stirring political consciousnesses there, and was introduced to queer history (I discovered terms like nonbinary and pansexual there for the first time, too), ideological concepts, and a vast array of developing identities. And yes, I know what you’re thinking: part of that process was all the porn.

Some of the reaction to Tumblr’s porn ban was confusion about how the loss of adult content will actually decimate the queer communities there, but you need to understand that the freedom of Tumblr facilitated the sharing of all kinds of porn and nudity, which therefore gave us permission to discover who we are and act on it. We could find ourselves in sexual roles we couldn’t find in mainstream porn, with folks sharing content completely outside the industry’s norms—the porn and nudity helped us articulate our desires, which just so happened to be underserved elsewhere. That’s why this connection is so powerful, between queers on Tumblr and the explicit content it used to host: You can’t have one without the other. The ban, then, feels like a threat to young queers online—where else can they find that growth within such a supportive and permissive social environment?

The Tumblr ban feels like a threat to young queers online—where else can they find that growth within such a supportive and permissive social environment?

In my master’s thesis, I wrote about how we need to understand the ways in which social media networks have reaffirmed the structures of our society and culture, because doing so actually helps us see what is so enticing about Tumblr within that environment. It is these normative structures that dominate and inform the hyper-publicness of massive social platforms like Facebook, which has us connected always to our state-mandated identities through its strict name policies, and sharing as much information as possible about ourselves despite consistent security risks. It should not be surprising, then, that marginalized groups would flock to Tumblr, where they can be anyone and experiment freely.

Certainly not unrelated is Tumblr’s longtime unprofitability, largely due to its lack of ads. As scholar and Tumblr expert Alexander Cho, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Irvine, told me: “One of the things that advertisers never want to be close to is explicit sexual content, and when it’s gay, the bar is that much lower in terms of what they’ll flag as explicit. Suddenly, I’ve started seeing all these ads from very big companies on Tumblr, which I’ve never seen before,” he said, referring specifically to ads from Amazon and Uber.

This illustrates the intrinsic and ever-present tension for Tumblr, between its cultural appeal and its economics. For Cho, then, it didn’t seem like a surprise that something had to give, and Apple’s decision to remove Tumblr from the App Store was “the straw that broke the camel’s back,” he said.

Tumblr said that Apple removed the app due to the apparent presence of child pornography on the platform, which they said slipped through their filters. In any case, particularly since Tumblr (or rather, its parent company, Yahoo) was bought by Verizon in 2017, they have been making incremental changes, “tinkering with ways to modify their platform in order for it be more monetizable without interrupting the community dynamics,” Cho explained.

But the ban on adult content was a much more sudden and expansive shift. Some have speculated that this reflects Apple’s efforts in the wake of SESTA/FOSTA, the laws passed in April of 2018 to take on sex trafficking that have been widely used as excuses to crack down on sexual content more broadly and on sex workers.

The scholar William Jamal Richardson tweeted that the ban is about tech monopolies, “as well as the ongoing efforts by the state to make the internet unsafe for sexuality in general and sex workers specifically,” and that the “solution to child porn/sex trafficking concerns seems to always be banning sex-related anything across the board,” harming sex workers and anyone interested in sexual freedom. It’s tech subjectivation in action: We are being forced to change along these corporate, state-mandated lines.

But as we know, users of social media are only useful in the ways that they are made up of measurable, sellable data. We are turned into subjects whose presence is intended to be consistent across the social web, all the better for advertisers and others to track us across the internet. It’s an unsettling reality, and of course one may be drawn to a social space that asks very little of us. Tumblr, as it exists now, gives a much smaller dataset than platforms like Facebook, because it doesn’t care.

But as a result, there’s nothing for them to sell. It seems a choice was made: Tumblr could either force its users to abandon anonymity and share more data, perhaps off-setting other concerns about sexual content, or they could ban all sexual content without sacrificing its commitment to user privacy. Either choice, though economically sound, betrays its userbase.

I find myself, like many of us, receding from other social networks. Not in a “I’m stepping away from social media for self-care,” kind of way, but in a deep-seated terror over my sense of self on- or offline kind of way. Every tweet, Facebook status, or Instagram post comes with an attendant thought about what it might tell them about me. Sometimes I find myself saying or doing things, like cracking ironic but deadpan jokes or following odd accounts that I wouldn’t normally have an interest in, things that aren’t even true or accurate representations of myself, partly just to confuse them (and partly because it’s fun to be fluid or make myself laugh).

It inevitably sounds kind of alarmist or even evergreen at this point, but Tumblr has always been a full-on safe space in the sense that there are platforms like Reddit that offer much of the freedom, but not much of the community. I spent so much time with the accounts I followed, growing to know them, interact with them, share with them. Often, groups manifested around shared interests—fandoms. Almost as often, these fandoms were queer as hell and did nothing to hide that. I felt comfortable talking about my feelings, my perversions, my obsessions, partly because I knew the only people paying attention were freaks like me. Our lives are lived online, and to ask us to exist homogeneously across all platforms and networks as trackable subjects is a cruel twist of the internet’s potential.

Our lives are lived online, and to ask us to exist homogeneously across all platforms and networks as trackable subjects is a cruel twist of the internet’s potential.

Let’s get some historical context. Tumblr has also been host to countless fan communities, sharing fan art, fiction, memes, and much more. When FanFiction.net, the leading website for fandoms in the early aughts, made the decision in 2003 to ban all adult content, those users moved to LiveJournal. While many factors played into LiveJournal’s slow fall in popularity, its practices by 2007 and 2008 included the deletion of adult content, presumably prompted by its move at the time to an ad-supported model (all of which is nicely documented here).

In came Tumblr, where I could be anonymous (or more interestingly, pseudonymous) and where I could indulge in whatever weird or nerdy shit I was into with the knowledge that everyone else was open to spending time with weirdness and nerdiness, as well as horniness. In Tumblr’s pre-Verizon days, Cho says, it “was less subject to heteronormative surveillance, and porn was part of that. Tumblr’s lenience, especially in terms of niche porn communities, along with the architecture of Tumblr, made it parallel to a queer counter-hegemonic practice.” Does that mean Tumblr’s own ban will have a similar effect? “I’m not sure,” Cho admits, “but probably.”

Moreover, these media cycles are not new in the digital age. Marginalized audiences are often used to gain traction, just as Fox did when it programmed edgy and non-normative series to compete with the major three networks when it debuted in the late ’80s, like Married . . . with Children, Women in Prison, and Alien Nation. Once Fox reached mainstream success and became the fourth major network in the ‘90s, those audiences—women, people of color—were suddenly disregarded. The same thing seems to be happening again, only shinier and with less tact, with Tumblr and other platforms, but even, say, in the case of RuPaul’s Drag Race, which has lost some of its outsider provocation following its move to VH1.

It may just be true that Tumblr, in its existence for over a decade (it debuted in 2007, just in time to catch LiveJournal’s deserters), was not sustainable in its anonymous and free form. Whether or not its hand was forced by Apple, the realities of a hetero-masculine capitalist neoliberal system (I think that’s a Discourse Bingo) necessitates that Tumblr, and its users, either conform or be pushed aside.

This is happening to Tumblr’s users, but it’s important to remember that media cycles can and should be broken. Just because this has happened before—to FanFiction.net, to LiveJournal—does not mean the narrative can’t be different this time. But even if Tumblr recedes into digital history, its users will not.

They will and have found new spaces of congregation, of community, based on my own attempts to look and on some reporting. There is Pillowfort, which claims to combine Tumblr, Twitter, and LiveJournal, and while it functions similarly to Tumblr and is welcoming to adult content, it is still in beta and not open to everyone, seemingly unprepared for the mass Tumblr exodus. Some users, Cho notes, seem to be moving simply to Twitter, but that space feels insufficient. There’s also Mastodon, a sort of blending of Twitter, DeviantArt, and other server-based platforms, but the community there is small and spread out, and the platform is somewhat difficult to use.

We are in the middle of envisioning better environments for cultivating the experimentation and identity work that we need. We’ll do this because we always do, and the oppressive whims of Apple or Verizon or Facebook cannot contain us. The apparent hopelessness of our digital lives, and our (justifiably) perceived powerlessness, are forces worth reckoning with, and worth challenging. That’s why I think what happened (and is happening) with Tumblr is so instructive.

The despair of being online, and the supposed loss of agency, understandably makes us rather cynical, but life is about both despair and hope. Let’s grasp that hope and build the space we need to become who we’re supposed to be.

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