tumblr is great. ive been on it since 2009. i met like most of the people i know through tumblr or second/thirdhand connections from people i met on tumblr. but like 60-80% of the stuff i see twitter wholly blamed for was invented on there first. tumblr (& some livejournal, but i really feel tumblr lead a lot of the charge) was like thee breeding ground for "having a different opinion on a piece of media is grounds for banishment & full debasement of your moral character". your-fav-is-problematic was a blog that maybe only could have been blown up specifically on tumblr & it changed EVERYTHING. ive never been active on mastodon so i can't speak to the development of CW/tagging culture there & i do gather that it's more intense than it was on tumblr but that was also totally a thing on there. twitter as a platform created its own very specific unhealthy behaviours for sure. but tumblr was genuinely awful abt so much of this stuff way earlier & i have no idea why it gets left out of the history of Bad Social Media Behaviour except that like. what i've learned through peoples' odd expectations of cohost is that a lot of people just weren't there??? but enough people were that it VERY MUCH had an effect on internet culture & it was largely not a good one. like i truly believe this. again i think tumblr is great & have been using it for 15 years but it is so odd to me
