Special:Badtitle/NS90:Tumblr/Reviews/If cancer was a website, it would be Tumblr./reply

Wow. That's a lot of vitriol.

I've got to admit, from a layout/organizational point of view, I've rarely seen a Tumblr blog that doesn't bug me with some functionality failure somewhere. But most of that can be laid at the feet of the various designers who peddle skins for the site. I particularly loathe the ones that remove all paging, just endlessly loading more content into the page you're on until your browser crashes from the overload.

Now, personally, I've never been interested enough to look at the API for Tumblr, but I am reminded of the old comment about UNIX: that it wasn't designed to keep you from doing stupid things because that would also keep you from doing clever things. I'm willing to give the the technology the benefit of the doubt, and allow as how it may be that the site's failures are mostly the result of people misusing its flexibility. But that said, I can easily understand disliking a site for its technical limitations. And personally, I don't think there's all that much value in a site that is deliberately designed to be to regular blogging what Twitter is to email.

However, the bile you spill forth because of the communities that have formed there? Completely baffles me. It's like saying television as a technology is fundamentally broken because you don't like what's on Channel 5 on Tuesday nights. It's complaining about blogs you don't like -- "how dare people who don't think like me congregate in a single spot and share their obviously incorrect beliefs!" Especially when you start trotting out all the political strawmen, not to mention a personal story that is somehow supposed to justify your right to an InterWeb that is Ideologically Pure. Give it a rest and go someplace else that doesn't give you apoplexy.