[jart]

What is this mainstream media garbage about tumblr being racist. I used to post gothic poetry on that website many years ago and it would blow up with hundreds, no thousands, of engagements, even though I literally didn't know anyone who used the platform. It's a shame what happened to Tumblr. We live under an oppressive authoritarian regime that systematically bans, blacklists, decimates, and destroys literally anywhere on the Internet where the working class has fun.

[ByteJockey]

> What is this mainstream media garbage about tumblr being racist.

From my memories of the meme wars and the last time I checked in on tumblr, tumblr had a lot of niche communities. A lot of those revolved around sexuality.

There were some nazis, but there was also a lot of bad poetry and art. Also porn. Porn was everywhere. When porn got banned, enough people left and enough communities were exiled that the nazi communities (without growing at all) passed some arbitrary percentage of users that declaring the entire site racist became in vogue.

[jart]

It used to be the case that if you pinged tumblr.com you'd get a response from x.66.6.y. If I know one thing for certain it's that there can be no light without the darkness on the web: just sterile corporate sponsored content and then some more in popups. You've got one popup for the website, another for the government, and another for the advertiser. I haven't seen any national socialist popups in my browser yet so remind me again who's making the web unpleasant? In American society whenever the state is unhappy with something they blame it on the enemy they defeated in the last war. It doesn't even matter if the enemy didn't have the Internet!

[msla]

Any sufficiently large platform eventually attracts every kind of person.

That's why I refuse to consider big platforms "a community": At best, they're platforms on which many communities can form, but anyone trying to tell you a million people can be in one community is either an incompetent marketer, extraordinarily naïve, or, perhaps, attempting to tar a huge number of different communities with the bad actions of a single community, or even a subset of a single community. Ask yourself: If someone told you that Manhattan was Neo-Nazi because someone once saw a swastika flag flying from an apartment window, would you take the claim at face value?

[jart]

Every snowflake is special but a snowflake is still a snowflake. Tumblr as a whole definitely had a certain way about it. Probably inherited from the personality of its founders. Otherwise my gothic poems would have fallen on deaf ears!

[msla]

There's a founder effect, but my contention is that at a certain size, the founder effect is swamped by the Here Comes Everybody effect, or how Reddit turned from being a techy, nerdy site with site-wide in-jokes ("The narwhal bacons at midnight") to being a site you'll get a markedly different impression of if you land in /r/SubredditDrama versus /r/news versus /r/Conservative versus any of the niche fan-subreddits for different things.

The problem is that people do see a subset of a whole site, or a subset of a whole city, or a subset of a whole country or ethnicity or culture, and come away thinking they've Seen The Thing. Take that far enough, and you get nationalism, or racism, both of which spring from the underlying notion that broad groups of humans can be classified minutely as if they were species of insect, as opposed to being large numbers of endlessly complex individuals, each with a distinct life and set of experiences.

[astrange]

I'm not sure the average tumblr user (who seems to be a teen girl running a pink-themed account about something insane like pro-anorexia) has much in common with Marco Arment.

[jart]

Yes but who's there and who isn't there in the initial culture probably had something to do with his biases. In some cases we are who we attract.

[caslon]

That's an insane strawman of an entire subculture.

It's like saying the average Hacker News user doesn't know what a computer is. You're picking an extremist, extremely small amount of users as an "average," despite them being nothing close to it.

[astrange]

Nah, I'm right. In an earlier more sedate era when it was more popular, the average user was a woman into TV fandom who just posted stuff like this all day:

https://worldheritagepostorganization.tumblr.com/post/674066...

But most of them have left now. I don't think you remember the spirit of the site properly if you think people on there are doing, like, normal stuff that makes sense.

(Remember in 2017 when a user turned out to be faking having HIV so they wouldn't be cancelled for writing real people fanfic about Lin Manuel Miranda? And they were called out by someone else who wrote real people fanfic about him where he was a cannibal?)

[evanelias]

> In an earlier more sedate era when it was more popular, the average user was a woman into TV fandom who just posted stuff like this all day

The period you're describing was several years after Marco left. And besides, David was technically the sole "founder" (see e.g. [1]). In any case, David was ultimately responsible for the product direction.

I don't mean to minimize Marco's contributions in any way, as his efforts were absolutely massive and utterly essential to Tumblr's success. But with respect to the community and culture, product direction matters a lot more than the backend implementation in this context. (And I say this despite being one of Tumblr's first backend engineers myself!)

[1] https://marco.org/2013/05/20/one-person-product

[caslon]

No, you're clearly strawmanning. You're taking extreme posts, of individual users not representative of the average in any way, shape or form, and insisting, despite all available evidence, that extremists were the average.

[codezero]

Do you mind sharing a gothic poem, even if it’s not one of your own?

[jart]

Ohh gosh thanks for asking I would totally share the ones I'm most proud of, but then you'd search Google and find the embarrassing ones! But don't worry, I'm not going to leave you wanting! Please accept as a substitute this gothic poem that I programmed my computer to generate:

    We're lost in this cruel place your voice above
    Young soul from out my heart be still in love
    Worth this cruel place your voice from the deep snow
    That this is the night of the world so slow
    Will leave me as my hopes have flown before
    Which answered not with a love that was more
    I'm sitting in this kingdom by the grave
    Your clothes by your voice at the stillness gave
    She's gone to the floor floating on our side
    She speaks in the earth and the truth inside
    Have naught but the pain you feel the bright eyes
    Beyond the waves wipe out my heart denies
    Your voice from the laugh of the desolate
    You're looking for the moon is full of hate
    Forgive if I could change the time has come
    We're lost in this world is not like a drum

I programmed my poetry generator in C++ to use a monte carlo markov chain model with the help of cmudict and isledict trained on a corpus of Edgar Allen Poe, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and select gothic bands. https://github.com/jart/poemy2 You can read the corpora here: https://github.com/jart/poemy2/tree/master/corpora I hope this helps!

[codezero]

Thanks. This is fantastic and I understand the worry of outing your own inner thoughts - hence the sideways request. I am more appreciative than you may ever know.

[nopenopenopeno]

It wasn’t advertising-friendly, so it was only a matter of time before it became racist too.

[astrange]

Tumblr seems to make enough to keep the lights on, which doesn't make sense since their content is all high def images and must be expensive to run. They're just as advertising-friendly as Twitter, although they are even more incompetent at running ads.

They also had more young subcultures that liked spending money, so native advertising like Instagram should've worked. The only young people who like consumerism on Twitter are the kpop fans, everyone else is a communist.

[suction]

I don't understand what you mean...?