excptional proff only

Tumblr.com: The Community for Communities

            Tumblr is a blogging website that is the home to 320 million different blogs (Tumblr). 320 million blogs that are all dedicated to different subjects. Each blog is unique to the person who is moderating it, they choose what they post about and how often they do it. Some of these blogs have millions of followers where as some have less than 10 people who follow them. The bloggers of Tumblr continue to use this website because of it’s sense of community, knowing that they aren't the only ones with an obscure range of interests and that there are thousands of other people who have the same interests as them keeps bloggers coming back. Tumblr.com is a place that creates multiple spaces daily, it is a community for people who have multiple interests, as well as a hub for communities to intertwine and to interact.

            Each individual’s experience with Tumblr is unique, down to the background image they first see when you log on. The first choice you make on the site is to select what topics you are interested in, the choices that you make will effect your entire experience on the website. Depending on what topics you had chosen, the site will display content that coincides with your interests. This effects who you will interact  with and overall what kind of experience you will have on Tumblr. If a wide selection of interests is chosen you will have a bigger spectrum of posts displayed on your blog. For example if you only chose sports, you would only see posts about sports and only meet people who talk about sports. But if you chose a wider variety like news, music, movies and television, you would have very diverse content and it would allow you to meet a bigger population of people. Users are more likely to come back if they are getting likes on their blogs and if they are earning more followers. When a blogger has a lot of followers other bloggers will leave them messages in hopes that they will become friends with them. The more people that you become friends with the more you are involved in the Tumblr community.

            Tumblr is home to many communities: music, movies, television, video games, anime, interior design, celebrities, etc.  Some people have an entire blog dedicated to One Direction and they only post about the boy band, their music and the members. Then other people have a blog in which they reblog whatever they want to, they reblog a picture that they find amusing, then a poem that inspired them. There are art blogs that only reblog pictures and then there is a more adult side of Tumblr where bloggers only post pornography and continue to log in only in hopes that someone will send them nude photos of themselves or that someone will have sexual conversations with them. Those type of bloggers generally don't really contribute to any other community because when people follow a porn blog they only want to view pornography, not funny images or a poem. A big reason why Tumblr has such a huge range of communities is because communities can mix together and form new ones while the original communities still exist.

             Say you really enjoy a certain bands music you can look them up and find all these different posts form people talking about their music and the band members. When a new album comes out the bloggers interact and start following each other based off of the posts that they are making. This gets the topic trending, there is always a hot and trending topic. It could be a newly released video game, the season finale of a tv show or even the most recent Presidential debate. When a large amount of users are all blogging about the same thing it becomes trending. Trending topics are displayed at the top of your search bar so you always see what is trending at the time. This draws in curious people who may become interested in this topic, then they start liking posts about that topic and following people who post about that topic, they quickly get integrated into that community on top of whatever they normally post about. Then their followers are exposed to the new content and the cycle continues, they look it up, start becoming interested in that topic, they begin posting about it and their followers see it. So if a blog that consistently only posted about comic books discovers anime all of their followers now are exposed to anime. It is likely that since they already followed someone with similar interests that they will be curious about anime and will start watching to see what all the fuss is about. The cycle then continues because then the follower will begin posting about anime and their followers will see it. Unless a user knows that they don't enjoy anime, they have the choice to unfollow the person. So now there is a hybrid community of people who enjoy comic books and anime. This is just one example of how communities mix and mingle, there are hundreds of different variations that can be created. With the wide variety of interests they all intertwine and from this even more unique communities form.

            Another thing that links many communities together are memes. Memes are jokes that become a form of language for social media users. It can be a saying, a picture, a video, or even a song. If it is a phrase each community will edit the phrase to relate to what they find humorous. So each sub group will see the joke and it is relevant to them because it was modified to what they find interesting. Whenever a meme is popular it makes social media users feel like they are all in on an inside joke that everyone knows about. This inclusiveness makes them want to be in on the elaborate joke for as long as they can because if you know about memes you can joke about it online and in real life with your friends. It is an endless cycle of people wanting to stay in on the inside joke, so they keep logging in to get a sense of familiarity. Then a new meme becomes popular and the older ones get abandoned. When people cannot keep up with the changing jokes and language they feel left out and are more likely to abandon their account. This is the downside of having a website that changes so rapidly, not every user has the time to log on to Tumblr every single day so they miss out on the community environment. This is a form of motivation to keep logging into their blog and stay active so their followers don’t unfollow them, so that they remain in the loop and remain relevant.

            Tumblr is very unique in the sense that it molds to it’s users. It is always changing and forming to what is popular at the time, which makes sure that the website stays relevant and that the bloggers who use it feel relevant as well. The massive amounts of things that people blog about gives bloggers variety so they never become bored, as you grow and your interests change so does your blog. You cannot out grow something that forms to you and grows with you which is why Tumblr has such a large community of communities because people of all ages use it. Some people were still blogging about The X-Files from when it originally aired and now new viewers are beginning to blog about it as they rebooted the television show. This is why Tumblr remains a place for multiple spaces to dwell, it hosts many separate communities and creates new unique sub communities so that every person who runs a blog feels unique and included.