Tumblr
Social
Tumblr's fandoms never left. Now the platform is building for them on purpose
A slimmed-down app focuses on reblogs, tags and the weird corners that made it famous.
Tumblr's obituary has been written many times. Each time, its fandoms ignored it. Fan art, long theory posts, inside jokes and endless reblog chains kept humming along while the rest of social media moved to video.
Now Tumblr is building for those users on purpose. A slimmer app puts tags, reblogs and community features front and center, and drops experiments that tried to make it look like everything else.
Small on purpose
Tumblr will not be the biggest network again, and it does not seem to want to be. Its value is depth: a place where a single show or book can sustain a community for years.
In an industry obsessed with scale, there is something refreshing about a platform that simply wants to be good for the people who already love it.