you can take the girl out of tumblr, but not tumblr out of the girl

What did being on 2014 Tumblr do to its users? Why do we have a love-hate relationship with the platform?

Content warning: This story mentions disordered eating, sexual abuse, cyberbullying, and self-harm. Please refrain from reading this essay if you are distressed by these topics.

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“Tumblr becoming the cool, fun, healthy place on the internet is the funniest shit that ever happened online,” earlier this year author John Green shared on X (formerly Twitter). If you have been online for as long as I have, you must have come across the infamous John Green cock post at least once. Green was very active on Tumblr in the 2010s and was publicly bullied off the platform in 2015. So he has experienced Tumblr trauma as much as your friendly e-girl next door.

Note: Green did not write that post. For a while, there was a feature on Tumblr where anyone could edit others’ posts. Yes!!! Wild. I know.

In an interview given to The Miami Student a few days ago, Green confirmed that he is back on Tumblr, “It’s sort of a sane-ish place on the social internet, which is very, very funny to me because I definitely lived through some times when it wasn’t.”

In late 2022, there was much chatter about 2014 Tumblr aesthetics making a comeback and what that means for our body image issues. Many then-teenagers on 2014 Tumblr and now-adults, wrote letters laden with traumatic nostalgia appealing to the audience not to let 2014 Tumblr aesthetics make a comeback. “I hope 2014 Tumblr can be en vogue without the need for it to be followed by eight years of recovery. Praying that this time a character can just be a character rather than a devil on their shoulder, a skirt just a skirt rather than feeling like a personal attack, a song not a testament,” Lucy Harbon wrote in a Polyester article.

So what was so wrong about 2014 Tumblr that even people who are so nostalgic about their teenage Tumblr girl selves refuse to log back on? Well, the answer to that is complicated, but stick around to find out.

Disclaimer: The term 2014 Tumblr is more of an umbrella term that encompasses 2012, 2013, and 2014 Tumblr. In this essay, I have used 2014 Tumblr and 2010s Tumblr to refer to the period.

I was active in fan communities on Tumblr and Google Plus from 2012 onwards. I was a chubby child who was bullied in school and fandoms were how I found those who understood me. To them, I wasn’t a nerd. I was smart, witty, and creative. Until 2017 — when I was sent to boarding school — my virtual friends (and maybe my younger sister) were the only people I actually cared about.

The school I was going to had a no-personal-device policy. I remember sending long, sad personalised letters to my mutuals on how I wouldn’t be able to talk to them every day and promised to catch up when I came home for summer breaks. But by the time I graduated in 2019 and logged back in, all my friends had already logged out forever and that was the end of my Tumblr girl era.

While my exit from Tumblr was rather undramatic, it was not so for most ex-Tumblr girls. For them, saying goodbye to the platform was the culmination of years of bullying, harassment, and exposure to problematic content. The final straw for many was Tumblr’s policy against NSFW (Not Safe For Work) content enforced in December 2018, along with what The Verge called “a comically inaccurate takedown system.”

While the policy in itself was meant to make it a safer platform, and more importantly, please investors and advertisers, the problem was with how Tumblr enforced it. The site’s auto detectors inaccurately flagged innocent posts as NSFW and took them down. Unsurprisingly, this negatively affected LGBTQ+ users, the backbone of Tumblr.

Some of these rules were reversed in November 2022 after Tumblr and New York City’s Commission on Human Rights — who investigated Tumblr and found that their content moderation system was, in fact, biased against LGBTQ+ content — came to a settlement that stipulated that Tumblr revise its discriminatory policies around NSFW content and user appeals.

“So many of my favourite creators and friends left during the NSFW purge, so after 2018, there was no reason to be there,” Hannah, a 26-year-old from Scotland who was active on Tumblr from 2009 through 2018 tells me. “On top of that, there was an influx of bots. All the friendly creative people who used to share the space had been replaced by automated sexbots. Not very SFW, if you ask me.”

Now, let’s look at a few of the events that lead up to this exodus.

Even though, Tumblr wasn’t created to be a platform for fans and fandoms, over the years it had become a sort of haven for fans, especially for people who left LiveJournal (a long-form blogging platform that used to be pre-Tumble fandom, haven). Tumblr’s unique tagging system made it easier for fans to connect and hang out. This tag is also what led to the downfall of Tumblr, but more on that in a minute. Fandoms thrived on Tumblr sharing art, fiction, theories, and ships. Even today, fandoms are the few active communities on Tumblr.

Fandom critic and creator of Fandom Exile, Monia Ali defines 2014 as Tumblr’s banner year, “It marks a break between the utopian vision of Tumblr and fan culture and the clash with the reality that things were not that great,” she explains. Ali notes that the failure of Dashcon was a defining factor of the 2014 Tumblr culture.

For the uninitiated, Dashcon was an independent fan convention that happened in July 2014, catering to Tumblr’s fan communities. It was the first large gathering of Tumblr users. Dashcon was a massive failure, both in terms of mismanagement of attendance. “The failure of Dashcon is often used to mark the shift away from the fun idealism of the user base, and Dashcon happened in the middle of the year. Along with SuperWhoLock [Supernatural-Doctor Who-BBC Sherlock crossover] and Glee fandoms flaming out, these were soothsayers for the future of fandom on the site,” adds Ali.Post-Dashcon Tumblr was a feverdream. Fandoms got aggressive and creators were bullied and driven off the platform.

In a Kotaku article titled “In 2018, Tumblr Is A Joyless Black Hole,” a lot of this change in the site’s fandom etiquette is also ascribed to Yahoo’s 2013 acquisition of Tumblr, the platform’s lack of a meaningful Block feature, and the site’s content distribution structure. The article explains:

Though Tumblr has a messaging feature, the easiest way to talk to another Tumblr user is through reblogs. A user takes another person’s post and appends a note to the bottom to the original poster. The original post and the comment then appear on the reblogger’s Tumblr and in the feeds of anyone following the user who reblogged the post. The post gets longer and longer as it’s reblogged, making it hard to follow conversations that involve more than two people or that go on for a long time. Being unable to really talk to another person means that conflict on Tumblr escalates quickly, sometimes over things that seem inconsequential.

The Kotaku article also shares the story of a user :

“It actually happened to me once,” Elana, a Tumblr user who has been on the site for about five years, told Kotaku. “Nothing super bad, but I complained about [Dragon Age: Inquisition’s] Vivienne’s writing being kinda racist. The wording was bad and made it difficult to back up when a few people jumped on it to call me an SJW [social justice warrior] snowflake. At the time my follower count was pretty low and I ended up getting a few thousand notes, which was waaaaay more than anything I had posted before.” Elana deleted the blog in question, but because of how Tumblr works the reblogs of it still exist.

Tumblr’s content distribution structure, specifically tags is also what made it a breeding ground for posts that glorified eating disorders, self-harm, and other mental illnesses. For context, on Tumblr, posts are organised by tags which are added both manually by the users and automatically by the algorithm. If you want to participate in a community, you simply follow the tags and reblog the tagged posts with your thoughts. While this feature de-centralized the hierarchy of content distribution and made having a huge following less important, it also meant that you regularly came across stuff you didn’t sign up for.  

“One of the big differences between Tumblr and previous blogs and forums where this [harmful content] was common is that Tumblr is self-directed and was primarily a media feed rather than a social feed. You didn't join Tumblr to join a pro-ana [anorexia nervosa, a type of eating disorder] community, but you found pro-ana content, and because of the site's infrastructure, you perpetuated it,” explains Ali.

“I had no idea what depression or self-mutilation was before joining the platform. I will never forget the Tumblr trend at the time #cutsforbieber where girls my age [12 - 14 then] were cutting themselves for Justin Bieber,” shares Katelyn, a 24-year-old from the USA who joined Tumblr to be a part of K-pop and anime fandoms. “I couldn't tell you why, but I remember so many girls my age coming into school with cuts on their arms after this trend surfaced.”

Tumblr in the 2010s — not unlike any other social media platform — glorified thinness with its #thinspo and pro-ana communities. While some of us were more actively engaged in these communities than others, it has to be noted that the constant exposure to this content made us all dissect our teenage bodies and question our worth. Now, I am not saying this was a Tumblr-specific issue. The glorification of thinness is heavily ingrained in our culture. #edtwt (ED Twitter) and #edtok (ED TikTok) are very active even today.

What I am saying is that Tumblr was where my generation — zillennials — got their first exposure to people who glorified eating disorders and provided a community where you’d be accountable to each other if you eat, where slogans like “Hungry to bed, hungry to rise, makes a girl a smaller size” and “Keep calm and the hunger will pass” reminds you to that being thin is the most important thing to be alive for.

Top results of #thinspo on Tumblr at the time of writing this post

“I think the most problematic aspect of Tumblr was the lack of monitored content. You could get away with posting anything on Tumblr before it introduced a level of content monitoring after 2013-2015ish,” says Katelyn. “From eating disorder content to porn, to self-harm and the glorification of drug use, there were so many young minds on Tumblr who shouldn't have been exposed to harmful content, and that could have been prevented if there was some level of content monitoring from Tumblr.”

Katelyn’s opinion is also echoed by Ria who opened up to me about her experience of being groomed on Tumblr. A now 22-year-old from India, she was active in the SuperWhoLock fandom in the 2010s and ran a studyblr till 2021. “It took me a long time to realise or admit that I had been groomed, it was around that time I decided to step away from the fandom aspect of Tumblr. Dealing with the impact of all those things took several years and it still affects my sexual and romantic relationships,” Ria said adding that this is more of an issue on how fandom used to operate at the time than Tumblr itself. Even then, she is precarious about ever logging back in.

In the early 2010s, Tumblr was also very aesthetic-driven. You had to look a certain way, act a certain way, and dress a certain way — sad, thin, white, seemingly disinterested in life — to get popular. This aesthetics is also closely associated with the music genre indie sleaze and pays homage to the ‘90s grunge aesthetics, hipster fashion, and 80s electro-rock music.

2010s Tumblr aesthetics

Madison Huizinga elaborates on the 2010s Tumblr aesthetic in her newsletter Cafe Hysteria:

It was the dawn of edgy, self-described “aesthetics,” featuring blogs plastered with images of knee-high socks, Doc Martens boots, American Apparel skater skirts, and vinyl records from The 1975 and Arctic Monkeys. Fandom culture was flourishing, as fan blogs for John Green novels, One Direction, 5 Seconds of Summer, Doctor Who, and more abounded. Everyone was streaming “Boom Clap” by Charli XCX and memorizing the “It’s a Metaphor” monologue from The Fault in Our Stars. You just had to be there.

A popular meme from the time that would later go on to become the definition of Tumblr — a group of allegedly British sad-looking teenagers, standing along a cement wall, dressed in American Apparel clothing. These seemingly depressed faces were also perhaps a result of the rampant romanticisation of depression and mental illnesses prevalent on the platform.

Huizinga continues:

Discussions of depression, in particular, abounded, accompanied by photos that enhanced their gloomy tones. Among images of fishnets, chokers, and flannels tied around waists, were striking photos documenting evidence of self-destructive behavior. Pastel pills spilled out of canisters, cigarette burns, and images of self-harm were scattered across blogs alongside despondent screencaps from American Horror Story and Lana Del Rey music videos. All of which was cloaked in a black and white, grainy filter. In many ways, this moment of blatant, artistic expressions of sadness paralleled the young countercultural grunge era of the 1990s.

According to Dr Natalie Ann Hendry, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, and co-author of “Tumblr: Digital Media and Society,” another reason why Tumblr became a breeding ground for such problematic communities was the incoherence of the platform, unlike Instagram, which at that time had easily defined accounts, posts, hashtags, and so on. “This digital experience produces small boundaries or barriers for people to participate which makes the platform a little more obscure and this allows it to act as a place for subcultures or alternative ways of doing digital life,” she explains.

“The communal aspects developed over time in the form of identification and in-or-out-group dynamics taking off,” Monia Ali adds. “When you feel in control of the content you're consuming you let your guard down and it feels like a more ‘authentic’ experience. It feels more intimate and more honest. You can be more vulnerable, a space where your ‘true self’ is on display. But that’s the thing — being on display means it has to be maintained and constructed and perpetuated. This entrenches behaviours, feelings, and patterns as you consume and perform, you don't realise you're trying to conform as you’re doing it. You can get stuck in spirals that become part of your identity and develop attachments to a community depending on your obeisance to the established norms. You're not as in control as you think you are.”

What is interesting about Tumblr is that people had and have very strong connections to the platform. Just like this was the place so many of us learned about depression, porn, eating disorders, and self-harm; Tumblr was also the place we first learned about Queerness, feminism, self-acceptance, and safe spaces. And this is why you will find so many of us being nostalgic about it or even wishing we could be our teenage Tumblr girl selves again.

“Being interested in anime was not something I was open about when I was younger, but Tumblr gave me a safe, anonymous space to explore my interests and build relationships with people around the world with similar interests to me that I didn't have outside of Tumblr. It reassured me that I wasn't strange or weird for liking the shows and music that I enjoyed,” confesses Katelyn. “I also learned about feminism for the first time through Tumblr. While some topics I was too young to fully grasp, it did give me a sense of power and pride at that young age, being exposed to content that uplifted women.”

Hannah says, “Despite all its problematic aspects, Tumblr helped me grow a moral backbone and, as stuffy as it sounds, made me a better person. My views on the world and how it must be improved for the good of all people are built on what I learned on Tumblr. I learned about the fight for queer rights, the limits of women’s suffrage and the intersections of Queerness and race in feminist issues, and was introduced to powerhouse Black thinkers like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and so on. I learned about the struggles of indigenous peoples all over the world. I learned about disabled rights and the struggles of trans people. I watched the #MeToo movement unfold there. I grew up in a small Scottish town, where else would I learn all these things?”

Even though it took Ria several years to heal from the grooming she underwent on Tumblr she credits the platform for equipping her with the language to grapple with her Queer awakening. “I was a lonely teenager who otherwise felt misunderstood,” she confessed. “I was the only Queer person I knew in middle school.”

According to Dr Hendry, there is an additional reason behind the love-hate that Tumblr receives, especially in recent years. “The years of 2014 hatred line up with the things that people often recall in my interviews — that really strange time when you’re not a child, not an older young person or adult,” she explains. “There’s been enough time to reflect on those years now. Those 13-year-olds in 2014 are now 23, maybe finished university or moving on to other parts of their lives. They’re old enough to talk about their digital challenges without still being in it. Nostalgia works in waves – you need enough distance from something to then have space for intense feelings and memories to emerge.”

So then, is Tumblr making a comeback?

Firstly, Tumblr never actually went away completely. Fandoms still thrive there and there isn’t an alternative platform that caters to Tumblr’s active userbase. So it definitely isn’t going anywhere. In Monia Ali’s words: Twitter has declined, Instagram's algorithm is hurting everyone, TikTok is video-based, and Discord is entirely walled-off/private. 

Secondly, I don’t think it is making a comeback either. Tumblr is fundamentally different from other platforms — Reddit, Twitter, Instagram — that we are used to. Tumblr doesn’t necessarily function with a robust algorithm that pushes content to your explore page. For instance, if you like a post that doesn’t boost the post’s visibility. All it does is act like a save button. To amplify a post, you need to reblog it. It is a very user-interactive algorithm that we are too spoiled to appreciate.

For what it is worth, I believe both the hate and love Tumblr has received in the past few years is justified. Tumblr in the 2010s was very black and white. You either felt extremely seen or completely invalidated. You were showered with love and support one day and bullied the other. With constant arguments about what is in and what is out, we all wanted to be in, which means we strived to please strangers on the internet who at that were the only community we all had. As Dr Hendry says, a platform with such intensity is not a platform we can expect people to talk about with nuance ten years down the lane.