Tumblr Is Tumbling (medium.com) 157
Alex Barredo, a technology writer, shares his observation on Tumblr's popularity over the past few years: Tumblr is the home of some of the most creative online personas, and now it is dying. Or so it seems. Founded on early 2007 by David Karp with a new formula for really simplified blogging, it quickly took off. With each passing quarter, most of their stats were crushing it. It was the new star of the New York tech scene. The East Coast had a good social platform after years of Californian monopoly (MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, Twitter, etc), at last. In May of 2013, Yahoo snatched it for a cool $1.1 billion: $990 million plus liabilities. Less than a year after the deal was closed, Tumblr peaked in activity. By February of 2014, there were more than 106 million new posts each day on the platform. Today that figure has been slashed by two thirds to around 35 million. David Karp, the founder of Tumblr, said today he was leaving the company. Karp founded Tumblr close to 11 years ago with Marco Arment. He wrote: I beg you to understand that my decision comes after months of reflection on my personal ambitions, and at no cost to my hopefulness for Tumblr's future or the impact I know it can have. The internet is at a crossroads of which this team can play a fundamental role in shaping. You are in the driver seat, and I am so excited to see where you go!
It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying" (Score:2)
Stop using the words "killer" or "dying" when talking about companies or objects.
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Yo bro, companies are people too! [wikipedia.org]
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No they're not. People are idiots, lawyers even more so.
You can pass a law that oxygen is pink with green dots, that won't make it real.
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Yo bro, companies are people too! [wikipedia.org]
As idiotic as it is...this is the world we live in.
Re:It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying" (Score:5, Informative)
That's not what CU is about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Justice Kennedy's majority opinion found that the BCRA section 203 prohibition of all independent expenditures by corporations and unions violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech.[28] The majority wrote, "If the First Amendment has any force, it prohibits Congress from fining or jailing citizens, or associations of citizens, for simply engaging in political speech."[29]
Justice Kennedy's opinion also noted that because the First Amendment does not distinguish between media and other corporations, the BCRA restrictions improperly allowed Congress to suppress political speech in newspapers, books, television, and blogs.[7] The Court overruled Austin, which had held that a state law that prohibited corporations from using treasury money to support or oppose candidates in elections did not violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments. The Court also overruled that portion of McConnell that upheld BCRA's restriction of corporate spending on "electioneering communications". The Court's ruling effectively freed corporations and unions to spend money both on "electioneering communications" and to directly advocate for the election or defeat of candidates (although not to contribute directly to candidates or political parties).
The majority ruled that the Freedom of the Press clause of the First Amendment protects associations of individuals in addition to individual speakers, and further that the First Amendment does not allow prohibitions of speech based on the identity of the speaker. Corporations, as associations of individuals therefore, have free speech rights under the First Amendment. Because spending money is essential to disseminating speech, as established in Buckley v. Valeo, limiting a corporation's ability to spend money is unconstitutional because it limits the ability of its members to associate effectively and to speak on political issues.
I.e. the First Amendment gives individuals a right to speech. It also gives them a right to speak when organized into a corporation.
If you look at the background SCOTUS decision you find
Section 203 of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (known as BCRA or McCain-Feingold Act) modified the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971, 2 U.S.C. section 441b to prohibited corporations and unions from using their general treasury to fund "electioneering communications" (broadcast advertisements mentioning a candidate in any context) within 30 days before a primary or 60 days before a general election. During the 2004 presidential campaign, a conservative nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization, Citizens United, filed a complaint before the Federal Election Commission (FEC) charging that advertisements for Michael Moore's film Fahrenheit 9/11, a docudrama critical of the Bush administration's response to the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 and produced and marketed by a variety of corporate entities, constituted political advertising and thus could not be aired within the 30 days before a primary election or 60 days before a general election. The FEC dismissed the complaint after finding no evidence that broadcast advertisements featuring a candidate within the proscribed time limits had actually been made.[11] The FEC later dismissed a second complaint which argued that the movie itself constituted illegal corporate spending advocating the election or defeat of a candidate, which was illegal under the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 and the Federal Election Campaign Act Amendments of 1974. In dismissing that complaint, the FEC found that:
The complainant alleged that the release and distribution of FAHRENHEIT 9/11 constituted an independent expenditure because the film expressly advocated the defeat of President Bush and that by being fully or partially responsible for the film's release, Michael Moore a
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Hello there. I see you posted a big wall of text above.
I'm not going to read it.
kthxbye
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Don't be a moron, DontBeAMoran.
Re: It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying" (Score:2)
Nice wallotext! Shills be shillin' =)
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Or you can just accuse someone who simply cited Wikipedia on the case and ruling of being a shill for simply stating the facts.
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But muh "facts"!!!!1!1!!!
How's that corporate bootleather taste?
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A documentary is clearly speech, even if it cost money to produce.
And before the CU decision you had the bizarre situation that a documentary produced by Michael Moore's Dog Eat Dog films, a corporation was speech but one by CU, another corporation was money.
That makes no sense. And the SCOTUS ended up ruling that the government had no power to prevent either under campaign finance laws.
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Especially don't claim anything is dying before Netcraft has confirmed it.
Re: It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying" (Score:3)
Re: It's always "X killer" or "Y is dying" (Score:2)
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In the title, yes. But it's dying in the summary.
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Unless they're video game companies. Then they go to EA.
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If one day I read "EA buy rights to Amiga brand" I won't even be surprised.
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Sounds like the hentai websites I vi... heard about.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Informative)
There isn't webservice that Yahoo can't destroy it.
Re:Maybe... (Score:5, Funny)
There isn't webservice that Yahoo can't destroy it.
Can we get Yahoo to buy Facebook?
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There isn't webservice that Yahoo can't destroy it.
Can we get Yahoo to buy Facebook?
Facebook is doing a pretty good job of destroying itself.
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I bet we'll only learn once it's too late, but maybe Yahoo is a Highlander.
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The opposite of that.
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Easiest access to information in human history, and people remain willfully ignorant.
new term for the 21st century to replace the 19th century meme, "you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink."
I think I can explain the crash in popularity... (Score:3, Insightful)
When did Tumblr ban porn?
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IMHO infinite scrolling is the worst idea ever coded. We don't have infinite memory on our computers.
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What makes even less sense is that infinite scrolling is more design around phone hardware than desktops, despite the fact that phones only have about half the memory of desktops (though thanks to Razer we'll probably see next year's flagships shipping with 8GB).
Also fuck whoever decided that clicking an image on an infinite scroll page shouldn't open said image in a new tab by default.
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Uh, what makes you think you need to keep infinite memory to support infinite scroll? Items that are in the direction of scroll are preloaded, objects that are beyond the view window in the other direction are purged. Pretty basic UI stuff, we've been doing this for years.
In my mind, it's one of the more useful UX improvements rather than the idiotic "next page" BS that came before it.
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You can't bookmark your infinite scroll position nor can you jump to the bottom and read everything in the order it was written. The primary drawback of 'next page' was that almost every site had their pages numbered backwards. Page 1 should be the oldest content, not the newest content. You can't ever keep your place when the content of the pages keep changing while their address stay the same.
Basic UI stuff was abandoned long ago.
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Ban porn? I thought that was all Tumblr was.
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Tumblr didn't ban porn .. it's a major porn site. What they did do recently was encourage their many porn posters to mark their accounts 'adult' so a visitor has to log into Tumblr for to view the porn.
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Shortly after Yahoo took over, since then it has been increasingly user hostile. I run a NSFW art side blog and as of last week it's no longer visible unless you are logged into tumblr. By default search results remove NSFW blogs and advertising is disabled on NSFW blogs.
Recently they instituted a change to the dashboard which has always been a chronological view to a "best stuff first" further burying creator content in favor for whatever is popular, this has seen several content creating blogs suffer.
Many
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All of what you said is exactly what I said further down. I just couldn't remember the name of what they changed to their Facebook-like app.
https://slashdot.org/comments.... [slashdot.org]
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When did Tumblr ban porn?
Requiring a login and removing pages from search results is one step shy of shadowbanning.
More recently, Tumblr has been abruptly terminating NSFW accounts, no notice, no explanation.
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Can Buzzfeed go to? (Score:3)
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Go to where?
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As an aside. Despite my current ID, I have been on this site since 1997. I remember it being announced on Chip n' Dips. Looking at the comments and scoring, I am rather disgusted by the amount of SJWs that are hiding out here.
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No shit, it's a social networking site. (Score:5, Interesting)
Like any social networking site, its popularity is very fragile and dependent on who its userbase it.
Just like Friendster, and MySpace, at some point it will fall out of favor. It's kinda like nightclubs. If it becomes too easy to get into it and starts being populated by blue-hairs and corporate shills, all the cool kids will move on and it will cease being the cool place to hang out.
Tumblr being bought by Yahoo was the first major step to that status.
All these social networking sites want to reach a place in the online landscape where they are not a fad, and become an institution of the online world (like Wikipedia or Rotten Tomatoes). That has not happened yet.
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Yes, you're right. Absolutely. Up until the last sentence, though. The now-exemplary social network is Facebook, and, like it or not, it is an institution. Don't believe me? It has a global Alexa rank of 3.
Not 300, not 3000.
3.
That's about as institution-like as you can get. (2 and 1 are Youtube and Google, respectively). Wikipedia is 5. RT is a paltry 397.
Tumblr, for comparison is 54 globally, 23 in the US. Those are also institution-level numbers. While yes, there is expected to be ebb-and-flow i
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Yes, you're right. Absolutely. Up until the last sentence, though. The now-exemplary social network is Facebook, and, like it or not, it is an institution. Don't believe me? It has a global Alexa rank of 3....That's about as institution-like as you can get. (2 and 1 are Youtube and Google, respectively). Wikipedia is 5. RT is a paltry 397.
Tumblr, for comparison is 54 globally, 23 in the US. Those are also institution-level numbers. While yes, there is expected to be ebb-and-flow in usage and popularity of a site,
Alexa popularity ranks are only snapshots of that specific time they are run. They will fluctuate or drop completely. What was MySpace's peak rating?
Also, unlike a social networking site, reference sites have lasting value in their databases and archived articles. Social networking is created to be a communication platform and a way of keeping up-to-date with people. Like a news site that never gets new articles published, it soon becomes irrelevant except to historians (and since social networking is not a
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Like any social networking site, its popularity is very fragile and dependent on who its userbase it.
Just like Friendster, and MySpace, at some point it will fall out of favor.
And what about Facebook? What's their "secret sauce"? I think it's the huge staff of psychologists who have turned it into a platform for manipulating people's minds...
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And what about Facebook? What's their "secret sauce"? I think it's the huge staff of psychologists who have turned it into a platform for manipulating people's minds...
There is no "secret sauce". Facebook just got much, much, much bigger than the other networking sites. The higher it gets, the longer it will take to fall to Earth. We have already passed "Peak Facebook" in the U.S., its continued growth in user numbers is driven by emerging markets getting online. With the recent revelations about Russia and other governments using it to manipulate public opinion and influence politics, you will see fewer people use it as a news source, which will further weaken the reason
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You can see this is cars, aircraft, and lots of other stuff.. Social media, and the tech industry in general is inexorably falling into this pattern...
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FB was the probably the first site with a large audience that micro-target ads easy to buy even for very small buyers. It is relentless in pursuing advertising dollars rather than waiting for 1. Idea 2. ??? 3. Profit!
FB even pays outside firms for info on its users in order to strengthen its ability to sell targeted advertising, according to the author of "World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech," a book by a well-known journalists published by Penguin, not some claptrap. It's not just sellin
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(edit) ...made...
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Just like Friendster, and MySpace, at some point it will fall out of favor. It's kinda like nightclubs. If it becomes too easy to get into it and starts being populated by blue-hairs and corporate shills, all the cool kids will move on and it will cease being the cool place to hang out. (...) All these social networking sites want to reach a place in the online landscape where they are not a fad, and become an institution of the online world (...). That has not happened yet.
Except the by far largest and still quickly growing social network is everything but cool. It's now the social network where you talk to your grandma and all the other not-so-hip people that you can't have hanging out at your cool place. I don't think you've understood how deeply entrenched Facebook has become as the least common denominator. And everything is being sucked down that gravity well, more and more doesn't have a web page or forum anymore - they have a Facebook group. If anything I think it's em
Translation (Score:4, Insightful)
Footage (Score:2)
Here's actual footage of Mr. Karp saying goodbye.
http://reactiongifs.me/wp-cont... [reactiongifs.me]
Porn (Score:1)
Netcraft confirms! (Score:1)
Tumblr is dying!
Easy to understand why (Score:5, Informative)
First they don't bother to get rid of the rape videos or pictures, and there is no way direct way to notify them of such.
Second, in an effort to make Tumblr more exclusive, they're forcing people to sign up to see most of the tumbles, specifically the ones where men and women are naked (gasp!).
Third, they recently implemented a Facebook-like process for their app which works on trending or some such, and is killing traffic to people's blogs. According to posted shots of traffic logs, folks are seeing a huge drop in site visits as a direct result.
So yeah, not surprising at all.
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Second, in an effort to make Tumblr more exclusive, they're forcing people to sign up to see most of the ** tumbles**
Third, they make up nonsensical names for forum posts....
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To expand on your second point:
"Fuck it" can happen between 2 and 3. I didn't do 2 for the longest time because I didn't want to install the app. When I finally did to verify my claims in this post, I needed to login or sign-up. I then uninstalled the app.
Aha! (Score:2)
Found the problem right here:
"In May of 2013, Yahoo snatched it for a cool $1.1 billion"
Porn haven (Score:3)
Broken Website & Broken Base - (Score:1)
There are two major problems with Tumblr that have gone unaddressed for years now. Being a longtime user who sought out the website for its art community, I used to be an avid proponent of the site, but now I can barely be bothered to even check my activity page between uploads. The website and its community are a hot mess right now, and only one of those problems can actually be solved by the operators of Tumblr itself.
The first of those problems, the solvable one, is that as a website it runs like dog shi
David Karp? (Score:2)
I always thought there was something fishy about Tumblr.
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The actual amount was eleventy million million.
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The actual amount was eleventy million million.
I talked to Chef's father, and said it was more like tree fiddy.
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Because having to count digits when reading a number like 461073354 (quick: what order of magnitude is that?) adds so much to the flow of a document.
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AFAIK you need to write numbers this way when programming.
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We generally don't let the limited syntax of computer languages dictate our representation of human languages.
Humans can perfectly well understand: "Oh the chainsaws? He bought 2, 3 days ago" because we have context-aware parsing and realize that, in this sentence, the comma symbol makes more sense as a punctuation operator than a numerical divider.
Re:2 words - liberal shithole (Score:5, Insightful)
One of the problems with the Internet is also one of its great strengths - it allows people who are not geographically adjacent to form communities.
Normally these edge cases would be socially isolated and unable to cause trouble, but when they find each other online they can form a mob, and a motivated mob (whether rational or not) is a force. It's a case of the organised and passionate minority overpowering the disorganised and ambivalent majority.
Thankfully... eventually there's pushback. You just have to hope it doesn't go too far in the other direction.
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Double-edge sword.
We are seeing the same break away from the right. Hopefully some decent, moderate group will meet in the middle.
Re:2 words - liberal shithole (Score:4, Insightful)
"We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win." — Douglas Adams
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Sometimes....... At least until their obsession bleeds into mainstream totally unchecked and gradually turned up to the 11, then the ambivalent majority has to care.
The gender bathroom spectacle apparently has annoyed quite a large amount of people - just not annoyed enough to initiate backlash. 20 more SJW spectacles of the same intensity each pushing more and more ridiculous policies, then perhaps finally some parent of their boys (specially snowflake ones) found to their horror that their grade school
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>microaggression
A microaggression is anything you say that hurts the feelings of someone (often a third party) who is irrationally willing to get pissy about it because they feel empowered by what they read about SJW crap in the news and on the Internet.
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Normally these edge cases would be socially isolated and unable to cause trouble, but when they find each other online they can form a mob, and a motivated mob (whether rational or not) is a force. It's a case of the organised and passionate minority overpowering the disorganised and ambivalent majority.
https://phys.org/news/2011-07-... [phys.org]
Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.
"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame."
As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. "In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks."
The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E in an article titled "Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities."
An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.
You can imagine this being the mechanism that totalitarian movements - Communists, Nazis, Islamists etc - take over once they hit 10% of the population. Well that, and violence or threats of violence against their critics.
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If there's a company that really needs nut jobs, it's Planters Peanuts.
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Hardly a fascist rant.
Tumblr has a large number of extremely toxic communities including ones for shoplifters and hard drugs. Their SJW community is absolutely insane with most of the members claiming a large number of mental disorders and dysphorias that are used to justify their bad behavior. You'll run into people who think it's ableist to ask them not to be a dick because they have multiple personalities and most of the personalities have cluster b personality disorders of their own. All self diagn
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Take none.
Take SJW over alt-right.
Take alt-right over SJW.
Take both.
The first one would be the most prudent choice for any mentally sane person.
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There is the core issue between Liberals and Conservatives.
Liberals strive for change, while Conservatives keep things as they are.
Both ideas have good and bad points. While Change is necessary to fix problems, not all changes are good and you should put stock in the method that has been slowly fine tuned over the long run.
That said. For News media, Interesting stuff is usually what is new (hence News) so Liberal ideas will normally get the head lines, because the Conservative ideas are not new. Now this h
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Yes it is. However it is a freaking slashdot post, done to rest my brain from working for a few minutes
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As a liberal I'd appreciate it if you didn't claim tumblr. It's representative of the lunatic fringe. Claiming tumblr for the left is as stupid as if John Mccain got on television and claimed that the daily stormer was the mouthpiece of the mainstream right.
Tumblr SJWs aren't really liberals. (Score:3)
Tumblr is mostly porn and that's the best thing you can say about it. Every other community on tumblr is a toxic cesspool.
Communities for shoplifters,
Communities for meth users,
Then there are the so-called SJWs but I don't even think it's fair to associate tumblr's particular brand with the rest of the fringe left. Their version of this community is almost exclusively crybullies competing for who is the most disabled and disadvantaged. There is little actual political discourse involved so I don't even k
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Congratulations, you are the only person on the Internet today who used the term "SJW" correctly.
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"The sonic echo chambering is what is what made people stop using it"
And SJWs are the masters of echo chambers.
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