I’ve been reading some articles about the fandom exodus from Livejournal (for some reason), and thinking about Tumblr. I mean, obviously, it’s fun to be apocalyptic and try to guess when our current abode will bite it.
But, the only thing I found is that one website is way to small sample to draw any conclusions from. I was thinking about MySpace, but I realized that it’s just too different - you could match MySpace with Facebook, but not with Tumblr.
That said, if you wanted to believe that Tumbr is essentially following the same trajectory as Livejournal, this is what I would say:
There are basically four big strikes in Livejournal history that could be mapped to Tumblr incidents:
- Strikethrough and Boldthrough (May 2007)
- Livejournal being sold to SUP (December 2007)
- DDOS attacks (March-October 2011)
- removal of subject lines in comments (November 2011)
Number 1 is unlikely to happen on Tumblr. Usually it is framed as a conflict of misunderstanding - fan creators being labeled as child pornography and their blogs shut down. Nowadays, fandom is widely recognized as a money-making machine (and thus much more tolerated). And since tumblr culture is pretty strongly against lolicon/shotacon and its western equivalents, this wouldn’t cause such a stir. (Also of note: most of the “steamier” fandom activities (like kinkmemes) still happen on livejournal or dreamwidth. #notthatdead
Number 2, on the other hand, is obvious. *waves to Yahoo* (That was on May 2013, for the record.)
Number 3 might be key difference. In the few months when Livejournal was unreliable, fans were “weaned” from it. IMHO, it would have taken much longer for fandom to move without this.
Number 4 might be, arguably, mapped to bluespace (November 2014) and the recent removal of replies (November 2015). Neither of these changes hit fandom activities specifically. At one point there was a panic around alleged removal of tag pages, but as of today, /tagged/ still works, so that was either a hoax, or A/B testing (or furious backpedalling).
More relevant bits of info:
- Dreamwidth, one of several Livejournal clones at that time, went to beta in April 2009.
- Tumblr was created in April 2007.
- Twitter was created in July 2006.
What that means is, throughout the demise of Livejournal, one of its successors was created soon after the first hit, and the two others already existed.
Tl;dr - nobody knows shit. Tumblr might be on the downward slope. It might not. If it is, it will take at least a year, but might as long as four. And the next fandom haven might already exist (and it probably isn’t a Tumblr clone).