[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.