People have been a bit nostalgic for the tumblr of old, when there were no askholes, no replies, only reblogs. Because then the focus was on the content and not the people. In a way that’s true but in another it’s not. Tumblr without the ways of means in communication is very much like a scapbook. Have you read scrapbooks made by other than yourself? They’re very boring. At best they’re memory aid, at worst it’s vanity exercise.

And a tumblr without commentary, without an anchor and then there’s no context for why it’s there. I’ve stopped following a few very well curated image/art tumblrs because in the end all those images floating around with a link and a title as only context provider, it’s just noise.

Furthermore, you just know that in most cases the link is to another aggregator and not to the creator. This means that the image and only the image is what matters, the one who made it in the first place is forgotten and not explored. It’s not a favourite artist of the poster.

Not everyone will agree, but to me Internet is about communication. It’s about things that hopefully stays after the few seconds you look at something. There needs to be a feedback loop, be it a string with cans or a mailbox. There needs to be a context. Why should I sit and read a blog about literature if the poster thinks that the greatest book of all time is the Da Vinci Code or Atlas Shrugged? Who is just as important as what.