I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021.
Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting the art of targeted ads. I am a wallet of flesh and blood which must be stripped bare and profiled and picked apart for the maximally efficient way to squeeze profit from my presence. Every other site will fold and morph itself to a shape of my liking - like a fairy tale trickster stealing memories and taking their mold - to lull me into compliance and loosen my coin purse.
Facebook sees me searching fitness equipment and injects my timeline with athletic wear ads. Reddit profiles the subreddits I follow and eagerly promotes a new coding bootcamp or cloud service at every turn. Google overhears me lamenting over my moving to-do list on voice call and fills in my “how much to tip movers” query before I’ve gotten the third word typed out.
Tumblr never even tried.
They could have. The information is there. The basic infrastructure, presumably, exists. Tumblr can recommend me tags based on tags I follow, blogs based on blogs I follow, even posts that for one reason or another may strike my fancy. Tumblr could be - SHOULD be - funneling this framework into advertising, as the only means that free-to-use social media platforms can turn a profit in our capitalistic hellscape.
They just don’t.
Today I saw an ad for treating Hyperhidrosis - a condition, I think, in which a person sweats too much - and I saw it twice, four posts apart, and it is so incredibly benignly impersonally ineptly untargeted toward me compared to all other pinpoint-aimed advertising that I’m endeared to it. Tumblr knows NOTHING about me. 8 years, 51,000 likes, and tumblr has not learned a THING about me.
Advertisements for a mattress? Shitty mobile game ads that don’t make even the slightest pretense at being anything other than a candy crush rip-off? Choose-your-own adventure games either about Royal Espionage or Choosing The Wrong Dress For Your Date with ZERO in-between.
And then this. This here. The culmination, the crown-jewel of tumblr’s nihilistic non-compliance with the state of social media advertising. Any pretense of capitalistic exchange is abandoned at the gas station by the side of the road. This is not a company. This is not a product. This is not anything that fulfills the contract of consumer and seller.
THIS. THIS IS WHAT TUMBLR HAS TO OFFER INSTEAD.
“Pour vinegar on your bread, fuck you.”
“Put it in the garbage, fuck you.”
“Your wife says you’re a fucking dumbass, fuck you.”
That’s it. That’s the advertisement. You vinegar-breadless cuck. You virgin extraordinaire bereft of bread and garbage can. I am fucking your wife right now in our vinegar-soaked motel bed. She puffs a cigarette which I pulled from the trashcan and we both laugh heartily at her recounts of your immasculine ineptitude. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you. Fuck you.
Amazing. Amazing. What a state of things to ring in 2021. What a great platform we all collectively choose to be on.
App Store Privacy Reports
Apple recently started forcing apps to report what information they collect and how they use it.
It’s really detailed and really easy to read.
And the difference between [tumblr] and the other platforms is… extraordinary.
TikTok Privacy Report for iOS
Facebook Privacy Report for iOS
Tumblr Privacy Report for iOS
Some take-aways
- Tumblr doesn’t even have a “Data Used to Track You” section
- Facebook doesn’t even have a “Data Not Linked to You” section
- Facebook’s “Data Used to Track You” section contains the unsettling “other” category
- TikTok links more types of data to you than Tumblr collects in total (almost none of which is connected to you)
And this is just the summary from each app. Apple actually breaks this stuff down in detail. Go to the App Store and see for yourself.
Apple’s surveys are typically self-interested (does anyone believe Apple cares about people’s privacy?) but this is certainly a valuable contrast to have. It’s indeed stark how unusual tumblr is in its continued resistance to identity data-mining, although it’s not surprising given tumblr’s history of resistance to advertising generally (tumblr didn’t even start advertising until 2012!). tumblr’s practices are all the more remarkable in 2121 given the extent to which datamining has become totally naturalized across platforms and internet services more generally. Alternative ways of generating income are rarely even acknowledged, as if they are somehow not possible.
#i cannot believe that i lived long enough to see tumblr become the best social media site #what the actual fuck #like to be fair it’s not much of a competition when the competition is trying to saw your legs off but #i remember when tumblr being a broken mess was a mark against it #now it’s a key selling feature #holy shit