As a white middle-aged male, Tumblr is the only place I've experienced what it is like to be on the receiving end of racism. It's quite fascinating to see just how vile some of it gets. Of course it is only fascinating to me because I can trivially withdraw from it and not be particularly affected.
It's not always fun and games: I'm Assyrian (a middle eastern, ethnically Christian ethnicity). When the first news reports of ISIS ethnically cleansing Assyrians in areas under their control came out, prominent members of social justice tumblr started joking about it being 'karma' because white-passing Christian-ish people were on the receiving end of genocide.
My point about Tumblr is that it's a huge site containing a lot of blogs. Seems like half (or over half) is porn. Most of the other half seems dedicated to rabid fanbases of various bits of pop culture. There's some politics like everywhere else on the net, but I have no idea why so many people here, including my downvoters, think it's this despicable bastion of frothy far leftism when that's only a small part of it. Hell, there's a dedicated base of white power blogging on Tumblr but no one ever mentions that.
It's like saying Reddit is nothing but Red Pill / MRA / gamergate types, or HN is nothing more than clueless Valley types. Or that Twitter is nothing but people sending each other 140 character descriptions of lunch. I really hate lazy stereotypes of complex interactions, especially on a place like HN where people should be "native" enough to digital culture to know better.
It's the social "flows" of the sites that differentiate them. On Reddit, you subscribe to a number of communities, and then you only see content that a bunch of people agree fits those communities' standards. On Tumblr, you subscribe to a bunch of individuals' blogs, where those bloggers all have 1. a very simple/encouraged inbuilt mechanism for sharing things they see from their own subscriptions onto their own blog, and 2. a culture of "signal-boosting"—a term loosely meaning "passing along chain letters", or more generally, sharing something they wouldn't have posted for its own sake, with an audience that didn't sign up for such content, because "it's important that this spread until it reaches the people who are affected by it." As if it were a local weather emergency or an amber alert or something.
The combined result is that, on Tumblr, you'll subscribe to people for one thing, and then inevitably they'll "signal-boost" other things into your feed that you didn't sign up for. The most often "signal-boosted" thing is Social Justice discourse. This is why people get the impression Tumblr is a Social Justice website: if you subscribe to blogs about porn, cats, and tech, you'll end up with a dashboard containing porn, cats, tech, and "signal-boosted" Social Justice.
Personally, my problem isn't with Social Justice, but with "signal-boosting" itself. I (very carefully) use Tumblr, and enjoy doing so, but only by strictly following a policy of unsubscribing from any blog that "signal-boosts" anything. I think this means that I end up following only blogs that are completely disconnected from Tumblr's social graph, though, so I don't know how precisely I can be said to be "using Tumblr" at this point, rather than just being subscribed to some blogs that happen to be hosted there.
> I have no idea why so many people here, including my downvoters, think it's this despicable bastion of frothy far leftism when that's only a small part of it.
I have no idea how you know what your downvoters think about Tumblr.
> It's like saying Reddit is nothing but Red Pill / MRA / gamergate types [...] I really hate lazy stereotypes
Who is the "they" in your post then, below, if not a generalised "Reddit" of nothing but Red Pill / MRA / gamergate types?
"Reddit is leaking. Tumblr: the scapegoat for everything they don't like."
>I have no idea how you know what your downvoters think about Tumblr.
Because Tumblr is brought up here and on Reddit frequently as this hellhole of idiotic far leftist thought. All I can think is: "have you actually looked at Tumblr beyond following some link at /r/tumblrinaction?" because there's so, so much more than that.
>Reddit is leaking...
Well, one thing you can count on from Reddit (or at least the vocal people in the defaults and conservative subs) is a fear and loathing of Tumblr, as well as considering SRS to be the root of all evil. Any time someone wants to panic about the threat of "SJWs", Tumblr is not far behind in the fear factor.
Hence, "reddit is leaking.." which was a joking way of referring to "tumblr is leaking".
But I still defend Reddit to my friends who are dismissive of it. Reddit contains a lot more than the awful stuff it's well known for. The defaults might be a hive of scum and villainy but there's a ton of great stuff in the smaller subs.
