Tumblr/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.



  • Crack Ship:
    • Tumblr/Missing e. To the point that more than just a few fanfics were written after the tumblr staff sent emails encouraging users to uninstall missing e... which didn't work in the slightest.
    • One meme suggested that since Tumblr was full of virgin females and 4chan full of virgin males, they should get together and pair up. Tumblr/Anonymous promptly ensued.
    • Tumblr and MapCrunch. The after one day the whole MapCrunch serve system crashed from tumblr users overuse. The MapCrunch staff replied with lovely messages to the tumblr community.
  • Fandom Rivalry: With several SN websites, Facebook in particular. There seems to be some sort of unwritten rule against posting your Tumblr blog on Facebook and vice versa.
  • Fan Dumb: By the truckload. It hit a new low with Tumblr's 250-post-per-day limit, with people vehemently objecting to it and refusing to acknowledge any points in favor of the new limit.
    • Though the fact that the post limit didn't do what it was suppose to do (stabilize the servers, therefore making users deal with both undependable servers and limits) makes the objections considerably less dumb.
  • Flanderization: A common accusation of critics of Tumblr is that it has become a breeding ground for sex and gender fetishism and well as applying the same to even mental illness, where such things are regarded as fashion accessories as opposed to topics discussed with anything resembling maturity or even rationality among some of the more bizarre sections of Tumblr. That said, it could be argued to be harmless internet LARPing by the same token by its defenders who believe the former are buzzkills on their creativity and open expression.
  • Harsher in Hindsight: Back when Yahoo bought Tumblr in May 2013, one of the community's biggest fears was that Yahoo was going to get rid of all the porn on the site, a fear so prevalent that the higher-ups at Yahoo actually issued a statement promising they weren't going to get rid of it. Come December 2018, a little over a year after Verizon acquired Yahoo, new guidelines prohibiting NSFW content ultimately proved those fears correct.
    • Although to be fair, it wasn't Yahoo's management which handed down the porn ban, but Verizon.
  • Memetic Mutation: Numerous memes have spread through the site, some original and others finding their way from... that one site.
    • Everything is x and nothing hurts
    • For Sherlock fans a variation of this "Everything is Sherlock and everything hurts" is now very popular after The Reichenbach Fall.
    • MY CREYS (in reference to pictures/gifs of Tear Jerker scenes)
    • The so-called "memefaces".
    • One of the more popular posts is a gif from the show The Walking Dead, where one of the characters undergoes a brain scan as they became infected. Someone incorrectly stated that the gif was an MRI scan of a person's brain releasing endorphins as they die, calling it "tragically beautiful".
    • MapCrunch. Users would use it to be "teleported" anywhere in the world and would then chronicle their adventures in finding the nearest airport.
    • "Listen here, cum-slut", after a user posted an extremely angry reaction to a set of .gifs from the movie Jack And Jill, showing a CGI cockatoo getting drenched in a chocolate fountain. The user had no idea this was fake, and got hysterical about animal abuse and how the bird 'probably died, and was opening its mouth to scream', ect.
    • Once upon a time, someone coined the term YOLO[1]. Not long afterwards, Tumblr grabbed the ball and never stopped running.
    • Ridiculously Photogenic Guy.
    • Saying the same thing over and over again, but one will be in bold or one will be in italics or bulleted Etc.
    • An extremely popular post will usually get the response "Bless this post, bless you, bless your cow" or something along those lines.
    • A series of 2chan posts about an... overly-optimistic Stalker with a Crush has started to gain a ridiculous amount of steam. (´・ω・`)
    • This song about Shia LaBeouf.
    • The normal girl and other girl. This resulted in users shipping them and there are loads of fanarts and fanfics about them (blog is here), and now it has its own page.
    • LOKI'D
    • Every snarky commentary on "female presenting nipples", both visual and otherwise, and every innocent image flagged by the braindead moderation software as obscene and reposted with the warning after the "doom post" by Tumblr's CEO on December 3, 2018
  • Never Live It Down: You will quickly find one for each character of everything ever.
  • Nightmare Fuel / Adult Fear:
    • On November 16, 2011, as part of Tumblr's promotion to raise awareness about two major Internet censorship bills, accessing your dashboard would result in every entry being completely censored out, preventing you from seeing any entries. Fortunately, it goes away after a refresh, but imagine if this sort of thing became permanent.
      • Flashforward to December 2018, when Tumblr became one of the censors...
    • And on January 18, 2012, they did a similar thing by having users an option to blackout their posts for 24 hours to protest these bills.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Replying to blogs is woefully limited, at least compared to other blog services. The most lenient settings you'll see on a blog are "let people I'm following reply to my posts" + "let people following me for >2 weeks reply to me", and even then you're bound to a 250-character limit. You also cannot reply to your own posts, or delete your comments, short of making another comment to replace it (that's right, you cannot post more than 1 comment per entry). Also, you can't reply to rebloged posts. Some users take up using Disqus for comments, but it hasn't really caught on and since the "n comments" thing that Disqus adds to posts does not appear on the dashboard, many users can spend years following your blog without ever noticing the Disqus comment boxes.
    • The servers are infamous for being down for a good plurality of the time. Also, that awkward moment when servers go down right when you make a post.
    • Trying to view a tag that is used by more than one thing.
      • For example, viewing the Chair tag, which is the Portmanteau Couple Name for the Chuck/Blair pairing on Gossip Girl results in a page full of furniture. This fact is not ignored by people who ship opposing couples who have taken to calling it "furniture shipping".
      • A similar example is the Carly/Sam Les Yay pairing on iCarly. It's couple name is Cam. Millions of pictures. None of Carly and/or Sam. Unlike the Chuck/Blair pairing, Cam shippers have invented an alternate name, Shaykett which is mildly popular.
      • There are two results for searching pbj; a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, or a popular Homestuck slash pairing.
      • Also The Bear tag isn't just pictures of the animals.
      • Try searching for Kratos. You'll probably get mostly Kratos. Any characters that share a name have the same problem. Of course, if you like multiple characters with the same name.. say Haruhi and Haruhi, then you get double the awesome in one tag!
      • Fans of BBC's Sherlock ended up clashing with SHINee fans, of all things, after the band started releasing teasers of a mini-album called Sherlock. The interaction in the tags was... interesting.
  • Ship-to-Ship Combat:
    • Any work with a large fan following on Tumblr has this to varying degrees. Ship wars can get pretty bloody on this site as there is pretty much zero moderation, that any single person can cause havoc in a tag, and any one single person can retaliate on a massive scale. Worst in the small to medium size fandoms because they don't have the numbers to 'outflood' a ship war with positive posts, but are big enough that a ship war can be sustained a long time by retaliation and counter-retaliation before it fizzles out.
    • Watch out especially for the "tagging" function. This allows users to categorize their posts by placing tags on them, and for others to find those posts when they search for or "track" that tag. If you try to categorize a post bashing a ship with that ship's Portmanteau Couple Name, God help you against the shippers who find that post in their tracked tag.
  • Snark Bait: Circulating pictures of "girl gamers", which are basically just models holding video game controllers, sometimes incorrectly. Often parodied in posts like this. [dead link]
    • This also applies to the Self-Deprecation that users like to mock, claiming that somebody on Tumblr is bound to get offended by anything.

A Poem About Tumblr (Original)
Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Um, what the hell are you talking about, you fucking asshole? Roses and violets can be any fucking color they want, and who are you to judge them? Maybe they don’t even identify as roses and violets and you’re just making this decision based on their appearance. Wow, go fuck yourself, you bigoted asshole.

  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks:
    • The new dashboard. Almost immediately after the change took place, many users demanded the staff to change back to the old dashboard.
    • Also the new rules for asks (limiting the characters to 200, waiting for an hour to post new messages, no linebreaks, not putting links in the ask box, etc.) It should be noted, however, that while the Facebook-esque dashboard change prompted a Facebook-esque reaction of anger that fizzled out quickly, the ask box changes are still widely hated, and prompted a "blackout" in September. And now the ask limit has been downgraded from ten to five, fueling this trope more, especially from roleplayers.
    • The new 250-post-per-day limit. So people were complaining about server instability, now they're complaining about post caps.
      • It would help if the servers were any more stable after the change was implemented.
    • Not related but has elements of this trope: Fan Mail, although not because it changes anything but because it's a completely useless "feature" instead of the things people have asked for (and missing e delivered).
    • Tumblr getting rid of the old customizing page for themes, which resulted in this for many.
    • Every time when changes from the website take place, it can provoke into this.
    • The purge of all content that was not "advertiser-friendly" in December 2018, as a deliberate shift from supporting users and communities to monetizing them for profit.
  • True Art Is Angsty
  1. you only live once