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(“ If You Love David Karp So Much Why Don’t You Marry Him?”) In 2008, shortly after Tumblr’s launch, he derided Silicon Valley as “hypercompetitive” and “incestuous.” His company would try to represent a wilder and more inclusive vision of the internet. Karp was so charming that early Gawker went after him on principle. If you didn’t like what you’d put out there, or you weren’t sure of the connections you’d built, you could start over, try something else, no explanation needed. It had no public follower or friend counts, no comment sections, and no requirements that users provide real names. The platform was optimized for secrets and for pseudonyms, which meant it was for art and confession and porn. Whereas Facebook aimed to bring everyone and their mother online, Tumblr was the opposite: an online underground, a place where your mother, in particular, would never see you. Three thousand miles away, a floppy-haired 20-year-old named David Karp-Zuckerberg’s non-evil twin-was building something different. Facebook’s “wall” would be a site of public presentation-a chronology of schools and jobs and outfits and relationships, all cemented to a legal name-and “likes” would be a public measure of approval.

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Our social networks would be visible and searchable, with friendships cataloged in photo albums full of hyperlinked tags. Out in California, Mark Zuckerberg was working on a website that could connect everybody on the planet.

In the beginning-in the aughts-Facebook was Palo Alto and Tumblr was New York. Now even the once-devoted talk about it as if it’s already gone. It laid the very foundation for life online as we know it-and, at times, suggested a much better way forward. “I’ll be working with the Tumblr teams directly to fill in the gaps in the meantime, and launch an internal and external search for new leaders including a new CEO for Tumblr.” Yet this latest upheaval lends some urgency to a provocative question: If Tumblr disappeared from the internet tomorrow, how would it be eulogized? The site was once the anti-Facebook-a thriving, less exploitative avenue for social media-as well as a bulwark in the culture wars, fending off the irony-addled lunatics of 4chan and offering a different, weirder route for the “extremely online” mind. “We’re redoubling our efforts to make Tumblr awesome,” Mullenweg assured me via email last week.

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(Also: It has seemingly never figured out how to make money.) The site has been sold and sold again, shedding clout through both the natural aging process for social-media platforms and an unnatural run of tragic corporate mismanagement. Tumblr no longer has its place on the list of internet spaces-Instagram, TikTok, Discord-that seem most responsible for driving internet culture and shaping the sensibilities of the up-and-coming generation. Today, it’s an archaism.Īccording to data provided by the analytics company Similarweb, visits to Tumblr’s website and mobile apps declined more than 40 percent from October 2018 to October 2021, while the number of unique visitors dropped 17.5 percent. At various points during the platform’s reign of online influence-from roughly 2010 to 2015-the phrase Tumblr user served as a proud identity marker, or something like a slur. Tumblr, launched 15 years ago this month, once had a reputation that was as big and confusing as that of Texas or Taylor Swift: It wasn’t just a blogging platform, but a staging ground for an array of political movements, the birthplace of all manner of digital aesthetics, and the site of freaky in-groups, niche conspiracy theories, community meltdowns, and one very famous grave-robbing scandal. The news (and the refusal to present it as news) is sort of sad, sort of odd, and maybe ominous.

Five days after that, Matt Mullenweg, whose company, Automattic, now owns Tumblr, emailed me to say that he wasn’t planning to “make a big deal out of it” in deference to D’Onofrio’s “privacy and safety.” He did not elaborate. The company has not explained Jeff D’Onofrio’s departure, nor even referenced it publicly I learned about it incidentally, several weeks after speaking with him, in a “wanted to let you know” email from a company spokesperson. The CEO of Tumblr-a social platform that was once worth more than $1 billion, and in its time was among the internet’s most popular and talked-about cultural spaces-quietly worked his last day on January 21.