Feed: Slashdot
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Title: The Tumblr Revival is Real - and Gen Z is Leading the Charge

Link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/04/07/0350...

"Gen Z is rediscovering Tumblr - a chaotic, cozy corner of the internet
untouched by algorithmic gloss and influencer overload..." writes Fast
Company, "embracing the platform as a refuge from an internet saturated with
influencers and algorithm fatigue." Thanks to Gen Z, the site has found new
life. As of 2025, Gen Z makes up 50% of Tumblr's active monthly users and
accounts for 60% of new sign-ups, according to data shared with Business
Insider's Amanda Hoover, who recently reported on the platform's resurgence.
User numbers spiked in January during the near-ban of TikTok and jumped again
last year when Brazil temporarily banned X. In response, Tumblr users
launched dedicated communities to archive and share their favorite TikToks...
To keep up with the momentum, Tumblr introduced Reddit-style Communities in
December, letting users connect over shared interests like photography and
video games. In January, it debuted Tumblr TV - a TikTok-like feature that
serves as both a GIF search engine and a short-form video platform. But
perhaps Tumblr's greatest strength is that it isn't TikTok or Facebook.
Currently the 10th most popular social platform in the U.S., according to
analytics firm Similarweb, Tumblr is dwarfed by giants like Instagram and X.
For its users, though, that's part of the appeal. First launched in 2007,
Tumblr peaked at over 100 million users in 2014, according to the article.
Trends like Occupy Wall Street had been born on Tumblr, notes Business
Insider, calling the blogging platform "Gen Z's safe space... as the rest of
the social internet has become increasingly commodified, polarized, and
dominated by lifestyle influencers." Tumblr was also "one of the most hyped
startups in the world before fading into obsolescence - bought by Yahoo for
$1.1 billion in 2013... then acquired by Verizon, and later offloaded for
fractions of pennies on the dollar in a distressed sale. "That same Tumblr, a
relic of many millennials' formative years, has been having a moment among
Gen Z..." "Gen Z has this romanticism of the early-2000s internet," says
Amanda Brennan, an internet librarian who worked at Tumblr for seven years,
leaving her role as head of content in 2021... Part of the reason young
people are hanging out on old social platforms is that there's nowhere new to
go. The tech industry is evolving at a slower pace than it was in the 2000s,
and there's less room for disruption. Big Tech has a stranglehold on how we
socialize. That leaves Gen Z to pick up the scraps left by the early online
millennials and attempt to craft them into something relevant. They love
Pinterest (founded in 2010) and Snapchat (2011), and they're trying out
digital point-and-shoot cameras and flip phones for an early-2000s aesthetic -
 and learning the valuable lesson that sometimes we look better when
blurrier. More Gen Zers and millennials are signing up for Yahoo. Napster,
surprising many people with its continued existence, just sold for $207
million. The trend is fueled by nostalgia for Y2K aesthetics and a longing
for a time when people could make mistakes on the internet and move past
them. The pandemic also brought more Gen Z users to Tumblr... And Tumblr
still works much like an older internet, where people have more control over
what they see and rely less on algorithms. "You curate your own stuff; it
takes a little bit of work to put everything in place, but when it's working,
you see the content you want to see," Fjodor Everaerts, a 26-year-old in
Belgium who has made some 250,000 posts since he joined Tumblr when he was
14... Under Automattic, Tumblr is finally in the home that serves it, [says
Ari Levine, the head of brand partnerships at Tumblr]. "We've had ups and
downs along the way, but we're in the most interesting position and place
that we've been in 18 years," he says... And following media companies
(including Business Insider) and social platforms like Reddit, Automattic in
2024 was making a deal with OpenAI and Midjourney to allow the systems to
train on Tumblr posts. "The social internet is fractured," the article
argues. ("Millennials are running Reddit. Gen Xers and Baby Boomers have a
home on Facebook. Bluesky, one of the new X alternatives, has a tangible
elder-millennial/Gen X vibe. Gen Zers have created social apps like BeReal
and the Myspace-inspired Noplace, but they've so far generated more hype than
influence...." But in a world where megaplatforms "flatten our online
experiences and reward content that fits a mold," the article suggests,
"smaller communities can enrich them."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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