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Chico State's independent student newspaper

The Orion

Tumblr — the scourge of online blogging

tumlr.jpg
Photo credit: Miles Huffman

Tumblr is the worst social media platform in the world.

More blatantly bigoted or hate-spreading websites might top this list, but Tumblr’s connection with a younger audience and increasing popularity make it far more dangerous.

A good 70 percent of the blogs are interchangeable, both in terms of style and content, with the homogenous user base of 16 to 24-year-olds. I peruse friends’ and nearly all fit into the hipster mold.

Tumblr was created with the intention of providing a platform for short-form blogging. Now, it’s almost all reblogging and people just regurgitating someone else’s work out onto their own profiles. It’s become a website where an opinion column on its failures is the only possible catharsis.

A website where users believe everything they see without investigating and their only reaction is to reblog.

A website where hate manifests in a more widespread and ignorant way than bigot-based forums because of Tumblr’s tolerance for defamation. Misinformation is conceived and spread on a whim of the most vocal idiots.

A website that celebrates unoriginality, stalenes, and the perpetration of conventionality.

A website that calls for a lack of creative profundity and exalts thoughtlessness as modern art.

A website that takes counterculture to a pretentious, hipster extreme that abandons practicality for the grandiose and doesn’t recognize its own conformity, mindlessly defending anything.

A website that is the epitome of the millennial generation’s self-entitlement stereotype. Although a large chunk of the user base is not college educated, everyone is free to act like a professional and speak smooth butter out of their ass.

A website where comedic posts are staged and based upon a subterranean humor level, where users are desperate to provoke the next burst of social reaction at any cost.

A website sustaining vices like cowardice and being antisocial. Tumblr is a place where anorexia and depression are often romanticized and instead of seeking help, people wallow or reblog with their chronic, potentially serious conditions.

The idea of “beautiful sadness” is promoted steadfastly, and lost love is glorified like it’s the artsiest thing ever.

No website should exist where posts like “I’m sad, but that’s OK, I always am” get a hundred thousand favorites. It’s not OK, and it’s disgusting to try and get attention by slathering posts with sadness or self-pity like it’s honey BBQ sauce.

Not everyone can identify as weird. Not everyone is different, and no, not everyone is unique. Tumblr is like an elitist anthill, with a hive mind and incessant groupthink that squanders any hope of ingenuity or free expression.

The expression side of Tumblr — Netflix celebration, small-draw artists, band portfolios, harmless Vine sharing — is the extent of its social network usefulness. It serves little practical function aside from artist updates, and even then, the microblogger’s Twitter is more applicable.

Every time I go on Tumblr, I feel like I tumbled down a rabbit hole into hell.

William Rein can be reached at [email protected] or @toeshd on Twitter

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