There is a quote I like, "Great people talk about ideas. Average people talk about things. Small people talk about other people."
Tumblr wins because it turns ideas into things and makes them easier to talk about. Not only this, but it also makes it really easy for your writing to get traction with others, assuming it's reasonably interesting. It's like training wheels for future intellectuals, a perfect match for intellectually curious kids in their late teens and early twenties. (In fact, it almost invents a new category of online interaction that I'd call 'intellectual sociability'.)
I love Tumblr, been using it for nearly 4 years! While I agree that self expression matters, at least for me, there has to be more than that. MySpace also allowed users to change up and remix their profile page with custom CSS/JavaScript code but they still lost users to Facebook's clean design. MySpace became a digital ghetto, made evident by the glitter graffiti-like images posted user's comments. What I like about Tumblr is not only that it allows me to customize my tumblog but that it helps me with a set of great looking templates!
What myspace did was a horrible implementation of customization and community features. It was an eyesore. They might have cleaned up some of their act now, but its too little too late.
Tumblr is more like blog+facebook+twitter, made ridiculously easy; minus the clutter and noise.
I run a site with fairly high traction with teenagers specifically teenages from california and tumblr is very popular with that demographic. From the outside looking in, they seem as excited about it as I was about friendster circa 2003, like this blogging thing was just invented. My take on the success of tumbler, for this demo at least is that it successfully implements standard blog tools that were once too nerdy for the masses (rss subscriptions, auto posting to twitter / fb, making it easy to post any type of media, making it easy to theme their blogs). In fact most of them use it like a twitter on steroids, posting pics and videos and viewing them without having to click on a like to a seperate service.
[+] [-] Alex3917|15 years ago|reply
Tumblr wins because it turns ideas into things and makes them easier to talk about. Not only this, but it also makes it really easy for your writing to get traction with others, assuming it's reasonably interesting. It's like training wheels for future intellectuals, a perfect match for intellectually curious kids in their late teens and early twenties. (In fact, it almost invents a new category of online interaction that I'd call 'intellectual sociability'.)
This was my analysis of Tumblr a year ago, and I think it still holds perfectly today: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=961523
[+] [-] xelipe|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pavs|15 years ago|reply
Tumblr is more like blog+facebook+twitter, made ridiculously easy; minus the clutter and noise.
[+] [-] uurayan|15 years ago|reply