The Internet Died on December 17th, 2018
The Internet Died on December 17th, 2018. This was when one of the last good platforms turned their backs on everyone and doomed the whole universe. I could've made a visual piece on this. I could've made an album on this. However, I think it's better for me to write my grief in its raw form because I find it easier for me to get it out of the way.
Back in the early 2010s, Tumblr was the hotspot for everything creative. Music blogs thrived there. Multiple fandoms thrived there. Sub-cultures thrived there. sub-cultures inside sub-cultures thrived there. A huge fraction of the internet thrived there. It was amazing to discover so many unique voices. Queer culture was able to be recognized more thanks to that website, because it allowed people to write informative blog posts with long paragraphs including nice headers and more. Adult artists and pro-kink people were able to bring communities because of the platform's advantages. Tumblr was great for having custom themes for people to use. So many of them looked so good taking advantage of the CSS format to create something fun akin to what people used to make on the site.
Many ignorant people who are mostly male see Tumblr as this "SJW" "cesspit" from looking at only one side of the platform. The false belief became more prominent in 2015/2016 when Orange Satan rose up to elect for the pedophile harbinger of death, and when gamergate exploded into horrific proportions. Edgelords and posers used to be common at that period, so dangerously common that I almost got trapped into that rabbit hole. Even though I said I liked edgy humor, that doesn't excuse people who harass others and go on witch-hunts for being different. Cringe culture tarnished the average person's general view of Tumblr, preventing them from discovering the bright side of things. As good as the site was, it wasn't exactly perfect. There came a lot of discourse and the puritans with TERFs being one of the worst kind of people who festered on the platform. However, that could've been ignored through tag/word filtering and following the blogs that avoids drama.
2015 and 2016 was when I learned that life isn't as good as one would believe. Having to learn the terrorist attacks, the many shootings and deaths, witness Vizzed getting amputated by DMCA on top of many more misfortunes was so heartbreaking that I tried to commit suicide in the most pathetic way. YouTube started going down the shitter when the monetization policies took place, Vine was shut down, and Twitter became nothing more than pessimism even before that piece of shit techbro bought it. The one place I had thought that would fit well for me would be Tumblr, the place that still had colorful communities. However, I had made the mistake of not going there more frequently than I thought, because I was either on some forum, on YouTube, or on Discord. When I started going on Tumblr more often, I had hoped that this place would go on to be one of the best creative spaces. But I was wrong. Dead wrong.
I ended up leaving the site immediately just so I could look away from the terror. As everyone was kicked out of their home, they had to migrate to another platform. A platform that was the antithesis to creativity: Twitter. Instead of moving to Pillowfort or even Dreamwidth, they've all chosen to use the site that made them more miserable and more hateful, the same site that got Orange Satan elected. There were no custom themes, no long blog posts, and no ability to upload audio. Instead, everyone was dealt with unfair DMCA takedowns, thousands of living breathing assholes intruding others lives, and brand accounts that fail to be funny. Twitter gradually worsened to the point of becoming an algorithmic box of misery. Creativity was replaced with trends and soullessly generated dysentery. Every other tweet was callout post after callout post. This was the worst Christmas gift of all time. This was the worst thing that has happened in all of space and time. The very last glimpse of optimism was dragged out in the back and shot. When I tried to get back into Tumblr years later, it didn't feel that same. All the joy was sucked out in favor of bots mindlessly following humans for no reason. The visual creativity and humor is now limited to only text posts. The freedom of sexuality is chastised to text posts. It's so sad to look at them. It's pure bullshit that these bots can post porn yet humans don't. Queerest place on the internet, my ass. The staff banned a trans staff member for no good reason. I had to close my account very shortly after.
The Internet Died on December 17th, 2018. Every time I think of Tumblr, I always default to that dreaded day of agony and destruction and nothing else. I always regret not being on that site more before The Dreaded Purge. I always wish I could go back in time and warn the CEO to not sell the platform to Yahoo and tell him and his staff that Tumblr needs its cultures, especially the queer and fandom cultures. In denial, I tried to search if it was possible to recover pre-purge blogs and posts via archived snapshots and such. However, it was too late. The flagged images are already removed from their server, and the worst thing I've learned was that during the dreaded exodus, the staff tried to ban archivers from preserving the blogs during that day. It was the most evilest and scummiest thing I've ever read, almost nothing could top that. My heart sank way deeper than before knowing that there is no way to bring back old Tumblr in its entirety.
The Internet Died on December 17th, 2018. I wish that there was a way to recover old Tumblr. As if people were to team up together to create an interactive archive of all the recovered blogs and posts before The Dreaded Purge. But I don't even know if that'll work, because the damage was already done. Almost every other social media platform is just a Twitter clone as if they forgotten how good they had with Tumblr. Even Pillowfort at is best doesn't really feel like the same old Tumblr I know. Until there's an exact or improved alternative to Tumblr, the Internet Died on December 17th, 2018.
The Internet Died on December 17th, 2018.