Tumblr is Trash (and this is why)

I have been on the internet for a while, have seen various trashy websites come, and either go or fall into obscurity but stick around, and I have seen tons of dumb “hip” technology fads that became forgotten about as quickly as they became big. MySpace, LiveJournal, Geocities (and nearly all the “free homepage” style sites), Xat, AIM, and many others can come to mind. Now imagine there is this hip website that over the span of a few years has managed to take every bad idea from every website and roll it into one. Congratulations, you now have Tumblr.

However, to explain everything wrong with this website would take a bit of breaking down what exactly is wrong with this website. I mean, there is so much wrong with it, it’s a surprise that it became so big….or maybe it isn’t, because it appeals to the lowest common denominator.

The Concept

By now everyone knows the concept of Twitter, with it’s 140 letters, and the ability to tweet/retweet/favorite posts, along with the fact you can post images and automatically shortened URLs, while searching/trending hashtags. Now, remove the word limit, similar to conventional blogs like WordPress or Blogger while pandering to the audience that uses sites such as LiveJournal, along with hipsters and random teenagers and you have Tumblr. Posts can be replied to, in message board quote fashion too, and GIFs can be posted. You can even create your own custom theme.  Sounds alright on paper right?  Of course, considering how it’s actually implemented, it’s a disaster, which leads us to our first point.

It’s everything wrong with web design in one site.

By now, everyone should have learned with MySpace, Geocities, and similar sites with 100% creative freedom that if you give users control, you will get shit. YouTube for example had backgrounds that made text unreadable on various channels created off low resolution, heavily compressed JPEG files. Tumblr, thanks to this audience I listed can be a nightmare to read. For every blog using a half decent default style, you’ll find 5000 blogs with unreadable styles. From the whole vaporwave trend and related blogs with styles trying to be ironic with 90s inspired website design (Keep in mind, as things such as the montage parody community showed, ironic usually means crap), to blogs with picture backgrounds, obnoxious mouse cursors that follow you like those old ads for spyware that said “FREE BLING CURSORS CLICK HERE” and autoplaying music (Usually either anime music, nu metal, video game music, or whatever Tumblr fad is big this week), your eyes and ears will take an assault. It’s Geocities/MySpace/Early YT all over again.

GIFs, GIFs, GIFs

At least I’ll say one good thing about Tumblr, it’s a great way to stress test your PC. Who needs Prime95, Crysis, and Intel Burn Test when you can just go to Tumblr and search up a tag of some TV show. You’ll see tons of huge, high resolution, 1-3 second loops of things even as mundane as a character talking, sometimes with a subtitle because you know, embedding is for losers. Oftentimes posts will have several gifs at once in them, along with the previously mentioned bad website themes with autoplaying music, sending Pentium 4s and similar into loud fans mode.  Don’t be surprised to see one of your CPUs stuck at max, or your CPU in general stuck at 100 due to the fact someone had to abuse GIFs.

Oh, and as a joke I tried to load up a Tumblr GIF page on my phone. It had to reboot (and it did it on it’s own). On my Atom Z3735 tablet, it ran slowish.

Pr0nz

Tumblr has it, and of course reposts from other sites too (mostly). Sometimes it’s original but it’s mediocre either way, and I can get it from 50000 better sites.

Fandoms

Remember when I mentioned Livejournal’s audience? Yup, Tumblr panders to them too. With gif support, reblogs, and hashtags, you can easily find CPU destroying gifs from your least favorite kids show, along with free drama about shit nobody cares about and mediocre fanart straight outta dA.  Hell, this site works just like dA. If it’s fandom related, it gets big. If it’s not, it doesn’t or remains in obscurity. That is, until you piss off a special snowflake.

Social Justice

The worst thing about this site? Social Justice Warriors. Take a bunch of entitled white people, usually nerds in college (or around college age), who have been raised with parents who hand everything to them on a silver platter, but then at the same time find out that reality isn’t so kind when they go into college/get a job. Now, throw them into an age of online activism, where online revolutions that happen in real life such as the Arab Spring fail to bring stable governments when they do overthrow governments (See: Egypt, or the whole Syrian Civil War feat. ISIS), when Kony 2012 and Occupy are flashes in the pan but show how easily these people are influenced, and where words such as “racism” and “homophobia” pop up all the time in the news, with some people getting special treatment on the news thanks to their skin color/origin/gender instead of being judged on the kind of person they are, and add a few buzzwords nobody but them and trolls will get. You end up with Tumblr’s special snowflakes.  Social Justice Warriors are professional victims, who spend tons of time bitching about stuff like content in a video game instead of women suffering and getting gang raped in India, or ISIS in general with all their war crimes and genocide, all while having a Pokemon avatar. Imagine if your favorite political commentator dressed in a Pokemon suit daily. If anything, they spend more time going on smear campaigns and talking about how oppressed they are for being crazy.

When you have a pansexual dragonkin with several genders/pronouns, 3 headmates, and self-diagnosed Autism (Yes, people do indeed self diagnose themselves with this) telling you how much you are a cis white hetero male (All for mocking them for being crazy) with 5000 Pokemon Anime gifs in between, it’s hard to take them seriously. They are mostly harmless….until they go on smear campaigns against people/companies. While some companies budge, realizing that they don’t want to alienate any potential customer, many don’t realize that these kinds of people are never happy. Even if you pander specifically to them, someone will still get alienated. Even if you put females in your game and add 5000 gender pronouns, you’re still going to offend someone out there who will accuse you of stereotyping them, while not acknowledging them is bad too because you’re only pandering to white cis males and not including diversity.

Social Justice Warriors in short….are only good as con artists and professional victims. Even as some have been exposed as being what they are against, they continue to play the victim card over problems nobody cares about and go on online hate mobs against people. They are just like “Pro-Life” abortion-activists, who will keep victimizing themselves but whenever they vote someone in, won’t do shit. Or they do minor things to make it harder and harder, but stop short of banning it because they know they won’t have a platform to use to make people vote for them.

Anyways, that’s what I think of Tumblr. It sucks, ‘nuff said.