Yall can be edgy and talk about how much you hate tumblr all you want but I will be real chief I value my undeserved clout on here and its also the only place that shoots all my niche interests directly into my brain at the speed of light
The idea behind Tumblr, namely the dashboard, how posts and reblogs work (kinda like mini-threads that stream endlessly onto your dash), and the tagging system, is actually superb and I have yet to find another social media site on par with this format. Hence why we all stay here.
But then there’s also the incompetent staff and the extreme cultural madness of the website, hence why we hate it despite staying.
Honestly, I don’t mind those last two things that much. I mind the deliberate greed and the casual bigotry behind a lot of what is supposedly their incompetence, but I can forgive most of the actual bugs and design choices. Remember when people complained about the activity buttons being moved to the bottom of a post and when they stopped indenting reblogged text and when they changed image dimensions and eventually people grew to accept and even like all that.
As for the culture, that’s the result of a lot of people learning fandom/pop culture and social justice in the same place and, well, it’s not their fault they didn’t learn that elsewhere. Most people are still learning how to apply the one to the other and yeah, some people are terrible and misuse it but where do people not? (For clarity’s sake, I’m not talking about the culture of allowing Nazis or whatever else because that’s not confined to here nor what people think about when they complain something’s too “tumblr”. They’re speaking of SJW then, we all know that.)
As someone who is gay, a woman, brown, and Muslim, there is no other place on the internet that has been as good for me or to me.
I know some people liked the smaller communities of LJ but I like being able to see things I hadn’t known about or even thought to look into. I get it’s not the same experience for everyone, I don’t go into tags often, I’ve been privileged enough to read posts I disagree with and usually not let them get to me. But if it’s a choice between the overzealousness of applied social justice and people at least trying to be better versus where there’s none at all, I have my preference.