"I thought tumblr was dead"

For the past five or so years, after I "returned" to tumblr, whenever I told a fandom story I'd inevitably deal with a minute one interruption of a person replying with "oh god, I thought tumblr was dead" or "that's still around?" The biggest shocker was when it happened to me at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies at a panel about Classic Hollywood and younger generations. I brought up the Hot Vintage poll as an example of fans campaigning for their favorite old actors and spreading knowledge/movie recs, and I got a surprised "that's still around?" from one of the other academics. But, it's a social media site populated mostly be young (or younger) people, shouldn't that be a prime source? The popularity of the site peaked in the early 2010s, with 2012 probably being considered the golden heyday of multiple large fandoms occupying the site. There were also plenty of people who hopped on tumblr as a secular site, keeping aesthetic blogs or curating sources of weird internet, who left when it was declared dead the first time.

The thing is, tumblr is always being declared dead but it has never actually died. Tumblr staff and developers would revamp the site without warning, breaking third party apps, or cracking down on explicit photos (it was repealed), or try to make the site profitable through constant ads or video content and each time a wave of users would understandably flee out of fear from other fandom purges and because it was clear that tumblr did not care about being a space for fandom. I reduced my obsessive checking for a few years because I was led to believe that there was good fandom to be found on twitter or instagram or some place that I just didn't have access to yet because I was old and no longer at the forefront of the fandom frontier. I returned because I missed all the small enclaves of Doctor Who fandom (was not a fan of the huge, trolly reddit discord), and I was desperate to find someone making gifs or meta for Man From UNCLE or Blake's 7. There are very few places on the internet to have conversations about fandom history and fandom politics and tumblr is still the number outlet for that. It's just not popular anymore, in the sense that fandom is now a "popular" hobby. (Popular here means easy-to-access and legible. Modern fandom is very popular but historic fandom and tumblr fandom is not.)

It's beneficial for tumblr to be dead in the public consciousness because tumblr remains unprofitable. It's not a forum where there creators and producers of film & TV can hold court and control narratives while mining the fans for free labor. The term 'fandom' has been watered down to the extent that the term is almost no longer useful. Lots of people are fans of television shows - they are active and engaged viewers who talk and play with other active and engaged viewers. I do think that's a form of fandom but I also think there's a form of fandom that lives in the gutter, that's all dirt and sweat because the show is destroying your life and rewiring your brain. Tumblr is a haven for the second type of fandom, where it's not just pure obsession but also a deep part of your mental health. It goes beyond personally identifying with an affective object so much that there's a need to be "correct" about it like much of the fandom we see portrayed in media. I mean, those arguments are fun, but they are not what defines fandom for me and it's too often what people assume when I speak about fandom.

Tumblr is undoubtedly broken, and we've driven away xkit guy, and when my computer was wiped I lost all my third-party settings so my dashboard was unusable again for a while. But it's still my best bet for broadcast interaction, and where it looks like Starsky & Hutch fandom is slowly growing, and it moves and updates at a pace that is active but pleasant and comfortable. Tumblr is where the rats and cockroaches of fandom live, and will live for the foreseeable future. It's far from dead, you can take it from my rotting hands.

Housekeeping: I discovered an issue where I was not receiving any email replies to posts. If you've sent me responses using that method in the past I have not seen them and I apologize. The issue should be fixed going forward.

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