What Social Media Platforms are Doing Right (from a Teenage User’s Perspective): Part 3— Tumblr
Hello! I’m Amy, and in this series, I’ll be reviewing several social media platforms I use, why I use them, what makes them special, and what exactly I like about them that keeps me, and all of my friends, avid users.
Part 3— Tumblr
Tumblr is a relative niche social media, and from my experiences, you’re either a user or have no idea what it is. Founded on November 1st, 2007 by David Karp and Marco Arment, Tumblr is one of the most popular microblogging sites still around today.
Tumblr, with around 1,644 new posts every second and the title of the 51st most visited website worldwide, is doing pretty well for itself. (https://techjury.net/blog/tumblr-statistics/#gref)
Now let’s get into exactly why this is.
Personalization
Tumblr is a microblogging site. People use it to share anything from their day to works of literature or art they created. Tumblr content creators run their own blogs, or personal accounts, through which they post stories, pictures, quotes, art, or other content.
Tumblr allows personalization of your blog, allowing users to change the theme and formatting of their posts, as well as create their own formats. This allows for a more individualistic feeling to Tumblr, like the users are free to express themselves to the max.
Tumblr’s blog format options help you add to the aesthetic of your personal blog, allowing you to change what goes where, how posts are ordered, whether likes are shown or not, add a link list, and basically restructure the way you present yourself to the rest of the website. This means that Tumblr has all sorts of interesting blog formats and themes to look at when scrolling for people to follow, something I think really helps add to the general experience and keep things dynamic.
Likes and Reblogs System
Tumblr’s content sharing system is a bit different. It has likes, or ‘notes’, similar to most other social media, but Tumblr also has the ‘reblog’.
Tumblr’s reblog function allows you to post someone else’s content on your dash, therefore recommending it to all your followers. Any likes the post gets will be transferred to the original post and creator.
This is an absolutely brilliant system in my opinion, that works very well with Tumblr’s concept. Tumblr isn’t a social media where you share pictures of yourself or your breakfast, it’s a blogging site. People write full-length novels on Tumblr, share artwork or stories or all kinds of interesting content.
Reblogs offer a really great way of showing your appreciation for a piece of content. Unlike Instagram story shares, it’s permanent and doesn’t disappear after a few hours. Unlike Twitter retweets, you aren’t adding anything or making it a conversation. It’s simply you showing off a piece of content you like to your followers, same as you might show your friends a drawing someone else made because you really liked it.
The concept of reblogging not only helps show support for content creators but also makes it easy for content syndication: a sort of ‘hub’ page, which follows several content creators who make similar content and reblog the best of them. This allows you to find the best parts of a fandom or community all aggregated into one blog, and the likes you give still go to the original creators of the content, while also benefitting the one who runs the blog you’re on.
Relatively niche (and therefore tight-knit) communities
Tumblr is a bit of a crazy place. Part of its appeal is that there are many close communities on Tumblr, more than you usually see on social media. Tumblr is a hub for lesser-known or less popular interests, meaning that those who find each other in Tumblr communities bond tighter.
Tumblr is niche. There’s stuff there that you won’t find anywhere else, lots of obscure communities that only stay alive on Tumblr. For example, the SuperWhoLock fandom (a crossover between three popular TV series, Supernatural, Doctor Who, and Sherlock) was created and stayed active for a shockingly long time on Tumblr. Superwholock was created in late 2011, peaked in 2013–2014, and is still mildly active today on Tumblr. This is just one example of an extremely niche topic that you would only really find on Tumblr.
Tumblr offers a sense of community to people with extremely specific and non-mainstream interests, something that keeps people avid users of Tumblr. There isn’t really any other social media where you can find the kinds of things you can on Tumblr.
Other things I like:
‘Below the Cut’: Tumblr has a function called ‘keep reading’, often referred to by users as ‘below the cut’. This is a line that you can insert anywhere into your post, essentially ‘cutting’ everything below it. When your post shows up on someone’s dash, they will only see up to that line, which has a ‘Keep Reading’ button.
Upon clicking that button, the user will then be able to see the rest of the post. For writers especially, this function is extremely useful. Stories that are very very long won’t clog up user dash’s thanks to the majority of it being ‘below the cut’, meaning users who don’t want to see the content don’t have to spend ages scrolling. This is also useful for users who write content that might potentially be triggering for readers (Mature content/sensitive topics/depression/eating disorders etc), as they can still write about it but readers won’t see it unless they click the Read More button.
Tags: like many other social media, Tumblr uses hashtags to help spread posts to more viewers. Tumblr tags, however, have become a sort of joke space among Tumblr users. Many content creators hide jokes or funny comments in the tags, making them extremely fun to read. This is less a Tumblr thing and more of a ‘the community on Tumblr’ thing, but I don’t see it on any other social media so I thought I’d make a note of it.
As a popular writing site, one of my favorite Tumblr tags is “no proofreading we die like men”, a tag with over a thousand works under it.
Anon asks/asks in general: Tumblr has the ‘ask’ function, where users can submit ‘asks’ to blogs, a fun, and extremely entertaining feature. Asks can be anonymous or from your account, meaning you can interact with content creators in a much friendlier way you can’t on other social media.
Summary
So why is Tumblr a platform that I never forget to check at least once a day? Why is it a social media I truly believe I’ll still be using years into the future?
- Personalization. Tumblr is fun and extremely aesthetic to use. The ability to customize your personal page makes it feel like a good representation of you online.
- The likes and reblogs system. Using both likes and reblogs allows you to show your appreciation for content and get other people to look at something you really liked.
- Close communities. Lots of people on Tumblr are constantly talking with their mutual, and Tumblr communities are fun and very close due to the niche interests they are usually built upon.
- The little things! The ‘Keep Reading’ function being useful to both censor possibly triggering content and stop long posts from clogging up someone’s dash. Fun tags that hide little jokes about the writing or art as well as allowing people to find specific content easier, and asks, something that lets you chat with writers or content creators in a way that builds community.
