The Back Alley Archives

Tumblr actually became huge because it is the anti-blog. What is the No. 1 reason that people quit blogging? Because they can’t find and develop an audience. This has been true of every blogging platform ever made. Conversely, blogs that do find an audience tend to keep adding that type of content. This simple philosophy boils down to the equation: Mo’ pageviews = mo’ pages.

But Tumblr does not conform to this calculus, and the reason is that a large percentage of Tumblr users actually don’t WANT an audience. They do not want to be found, except by a few close friends who they explicitly share one of their tumblogs with. Therefore Tumblr’s notoriously weak search functionality is A-OK with most of its user base.

Tumblr provides its users with the oldest privacy-control strategy on the Internet: security through obscurity and multiple pseudonymity. Its users prefer a coarse-grained scheme they can easily understand over a sophisticated fine-grained privacy control — such as Facebook provides — that requires a lot of time and patience. To quote Sweet Brown, Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Tumblr proves that the issue is less about public vs. private and more about whether you are findable and identifiable by people who actually know you in real life.

Most Tumblr content falls into three categories:
1.Photos of young people’s daily lives: studying, buying things, hanging out with friends. Many of these photos are from Instagram or the Tumblr mobile app, which is now quite good.
2.Entertaining memes and gifs they find on Tumblr and re-share with their friends. A teenage friend of mine told me recently that he tries to post something to his Tumblog on an hourly basis — which requires endless scouring of other Tumblogs for re-bloggable content. Fortunately, the Tumblr Dashboard is designed specifically with this goal in mind: consume lots of things and “reblog” easily. This is where the topic-based photobloggers add value to the ecosystem; it’s why we see Tumblr encouraging the seeding of “rebloggable” content — such as live-Tumbling The Grammys.
3.Porn and near-porn collections for personal use, usually under a different pseudonym. (Protip: searches on many keywords at 11 p.m. yield VERY different results than the same searches at 11 a.m. And there’s a NSFW setting if you truly don’t want to see any of it.)