Tumblr: Social Media & Art

I’ve been using tumblr for over a decade, so I will always hold tumblr dear to my heart. And there is so much potential for a five star review, but at its current state I am only willing to give it a four. Here’s why - I have two reasons. First, the sterilization of content has taken away a significant reason for my use of tumblr. I can understand the reasoning behind it. But for many of us Tumblr used to be a place where we find a haven for self expression. Today, it is expression with an asterisk, a rejection of things that are taboo but not necessarily wrong, or actually harmful. Today’s tumblr is a reflection of the moral panic we live in. I still will use tumblr, out of nostalgia and habit, the fact that it’s still a great place to find beautiful content, and no other platform I know of has been quite able to serve the same function. My second point is more a functional one. We live in the era of endless scrolling, and our fingers are tired, but in our miserable lives we find solace in the endless feed of pretty pictures. We must have pretty pictures. If there could be a function where the scrolling can be somewhat automated, it would remedy the early-onset arthritis in our fingers. Perhaps a continuous scroll as i place and hold my finger on the screen, and perhaps the ability the adjust the scroll speed settings.

I’ve been writing here forever, but as a minor the changes tumblr has made has made it difficult to feel comfortable with the app. There’s no monitoring on spam tags for large posts, which is fine— except the posts often contain pornographic tags. For the last 3 months I have been dealing with some extremely disgusting fetish content and communities coming across my page— and the worst part about the communities? You CAN’T get rid of them; there is no option for being not interested. I’ve been faced with an extremely graphic example of bodily mutilation on my suggested communities tab. It was making me sick to open the search tab. I reported nearly 50 times, at least hoping it would stop being recommended to me. It was not. I had to unfollow every single tag and creator I had ever followed or followed back, spend time researching this fetish’s terms in order to block every single one on my filtered content, turn off dashboard preferences to randomized, and search an overload of other random things to FINALLY get it to go away. This was extremely disturbing on so many levels and I’m extremely, EXTREMELY upset that there is no way to get rid of these community suggestions if we don’t want to see them. As a long time user, I love tumblr. But the lack of ability to censor suggested communities is so disturbing and inappropriate. It’s just not ok.

I truly believe that Tumblr is one of the least toxic social platforms on the internet. Tumblr is just a fun place where you can destress after a long day at work or school, most of the communities are super wholesome and the platform is just an overall uplifting place where people can talk about fandom, Comics, Fanfics, The latest shows, Art, Etc. I’m finally at peace with myself after they removed “Tumblr live” because now that it’s gone I don’t have to worry about accidentally hitting the useless button on my feed. Another thing to mention is that there are so many fandoms to find and explore with so much creativity and love put into each one. It’s also a great place to post your own art and fanfics with genuine nontoxic feedback unlike Reddit or Twitter. The only thing to note is the NSFW (not safe for work) content but I do appreciate that the site doesn’t show you that kind of content unless you search for it, yes once in a while your dashboard will show you a NSFW pic but it’s genuinely minimized unlike Reddit which will show you a NSFW post every couple scrolls, another thing I will warn you about is that you will get scam messages asking you to join NSFW sites but these messages can be deleted and in my experience will go away after awhile. I genuinely rate the app a five out of five and highly recommend for anyone who’s new to the internet or is interested in a genuine, wholesome social media platform.