How would you explain Tumblr to someone who has never used it?
That’s hard to explain!
My best effort is: “a collection of blogs talking to each other, reblogging the same stuff to each other.”
How would you describe the ✨atmosphere✨?
- There is an overarching structure of content, but it doesn’t necessarily correspond to what people outside Tumblr think of as “media,” e.g. in the broad scheme of things it’s more like “tumblr fandom drama” than anything to do with actual characters or characters in a story. There’s a bunch of different kinds of stuff that get talked about, but not everything is about the same characters, plot or media.
- Tumblr’s specific culture is very particular and strange. There’s some stuff like the culture of 4chan and the culture of YouTube comments that is quite alien, but there’s also things like “tumblr fandom drama,” which seems much more familiar and intuitive to most people who are familiar with fandom drama in other places, which I guess means it’s not so much an “alien” thing as just “a thing that’s different from my default expectations.”
- “Tumblr” doesn’t necessarily mean “tumblr,” and is more of a general term than it is a specific thing, in the same way that the culture of 4chan is not “4chan,” and the culture of YouTube comments is not “Youtube comments.”
- There’s a lot of “vagueblogging” and “reblogging,” but there’s no “meta,” which seems to be a big deal on twitter and other places. Also, the “conversation” tends to be very casual, more so than elsewhere. Twitter-style “conversation threads” are pretty much absent.
- “Tumblr” is often about making a “post,” and then waiting for others to “comment” on it
- Comments aren’t “on,” there’s an expectation that everyone will respond, so there aren’t any “discourse” threads, except for exactly the kind of thing that tends to happen on twitter and elsewhere.
- Everyone on Tumblr is trying to be as “hip” as possible







