While porn creators belonged to tightly connected subgroups, they were linked to the rest of Tumblr’s network “with a very high number of ties,” and their productions “spread widely across the whole social graph.” In other words, they weren’t quarantined in some illicit corner of the site—they were woven into its basic fabric: The average Tumblr user in the sample followed 51 blogs, two or three of which tended to be specifically pornographic, and another two of which tended to be “bridge” blogs, run by users who were particularly likely to reblog porn.
Read: What Tumblr’s porn ban really means
“My personal opinion about this whole story is that the numbers were very clear,” Luca Aiello, one of the researchers, told me recently. “People were very engaged with that type of content, and banning it would determine the fall of the community.”
The second story about Tumblr’s 2019 was published yesterday on Tumblr’s Fandometrics blog, which releases weekly rankings of the site’s “ships” and subcultures, as well as a yearly data haul about its top communities, memes, and modes of thought. Without porn, Tumblr still has plenty: photography, studying, The Sims, cats, dogs, reptiles, “fitness” (the main category in which some nudity still hides, alongside the devastating anorexia blogs that haunt the platform no matter what tags it prohibits).
The recap paints Tumblr as a vibrant tangle of memes and mini-communities. There, as everywhere else, the biggest meme of the year was Area 51. “Tumblr loves aliens,” its data-insights manager and “meme librarian,” Amanda Brennan, says. Users were particularly into the “Naruto run” sub-meme of the meme, which was drawn from a popular anime series. Tumblr also saw a Minecraft “renaissance,” another big year for Keanu Reeves, and a resurgence of “incorrect quotes,” the Facebook feed’s favorite joke circa 2009.
In late January, the “Shaggy’s Power” meme boomed. A transplant from Reddit, it featured screenshots of Matthew Lillard, the actor who played Shaggy in the 2002 live-action adaptation of Scooby-Doo, and captions portraying him as a godlike figure with a range of mysterious powers, swinging wildly between indiscriminate violence and pure benevolence. “You are reading this now because I compel you to,” the edited subtitle text on one still of Lillard reads. “You are never free.” (“I have no idea what the heart of it is,” Brennan says. “I think it’s just absurdist.”) It eventually expanded to include other actors from the movie, also praising Shaggy’s powers, and then to Tumblr itself, in a discussion of the meta horror of a divine meme springing forth from seemingly nowhere.
“the scooby doo memes are making me lose my shit. i have no idea where they came from, i doubt i ever will,” one user posted earlier this year. “this is the kind of content i signed up for when i made my tumblr.”