Tumblr

Tumblr holds a specific kind of grief in my chest—the website of my adolescence, the place where I learned that other people felt things as intensely as I did, where I first encountered the word "aesthetic" used as a noun. Yahoo paid a billion dollars for it in 2013 and immediately had no idea what to do with it. Verizon bought it and somehow made things worse. Automattic picked it up for reportedly less than $3 million, which is less than what some people pay for NFT jpegs. And yet, through all this corporate fumbling, the site persists, its weird little community intact, still reblogging the same posts about fall leaves and fictional characters and the specific melancholy of existing in a body that doesn't quite fit right.

The thing about Tumblr is that it never tried to be professional. Twitter wanted to be the public square. Instagram wanted to be the highlight reel. LinkedIn wanted to be... whatever LinkedIn wants to be. Tumblr just wanted to be a place where you could post whatever you wanted—fan art and depression memes and aesthetic photography and long earnest posts about why that one ship is canon, actually—and find other people who cared about the same things. The reblog function created these beautiful chains of commentary, people building on each other's thoughts like a collaborative essay no one planned. It was chaotic and often unhinged and exactly what the internet should be.

I won't pretend Tumblr didn't make mistakes. The 2018 porn ban was a self-inflicted wound that drove away creators and users who had built communities around body positivity and queer sexuality. The site lost something irreplaceable when it decided that Apple's approval was worth more than its users' trust. But here's what's remarkable: Tumblr survived. The users who stayed developed an even stronger sense of identity, a defiant commitment to being the internet's weird art kid in the back of class. The humor got more absurdist. The communities got tighter. They've even brought some NSFW content back. The cockroach of social media learned to thrive in the nuclear winter of platform capitalism.

Technologically, Tumblr is a monument to "good enough." The dashboard loads fast enough. The mobile app works well enough. The themes let you customize your blog more than any other social platform, and some people have turned that customization into genuine art. But the platform's power isn't in its technology—it's in its refusal to optimize for engagement metrics the way other platforms do. There's no algorithmic feed pushing you toward outrage. You see posts in chronological order from people you chose to follow. If that sounds basic, it's only because we've forgotten what social media was like before every platform started treating our attention like a resource to be strip-mined.

In 2026, when I feel overwhelmed by the performative professionalism of LinkedIn, the discourse of Twitter, the careful curation of Instagram, I still find myself opening Tumblr. The site understands something essential about human creativity: it doesn't need to be monetizable to be meaningful. The fan artists and the shitposters and the people who just want to reblog pictures of cottages with vaguely threatening captions—they're not content creators, they're just people, expressing themselves in a space that still feels somehow free. Tumblr is proof that a social network can survive without growth at all costs, that community matters more than scale, that sometimes the weird kids make the best art.