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tumblr makes me want to have drinks with people I have never met and Facebook makes me want to throw drinks at people I already know.

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This is a meme that made rounds on tumblr, gathering affirmations from people across different user groups and communities. Fans, queers, “snowflakes,” sex workers, “horny people,” teenage girls with flawless aesthetics, writers, artists: they all seemed to agree, that tumblr is very different from Facebook – and much, much better. The vernacular positioning of tumblr within the social media ecology did not stop at comparisons with Facebook. Another popular meme that has circulated on tumblr at various points in time is a still from the 1985 movie The Breakfast Club, where the five main characters – described in the film as: “a brain … and an athlete … and a basket case … a princess … and a criminal” – were labeled as LinkedIn, Facebook, tumblr, Instagram, and Twitter respectively. tumblr, unsurprisingly for anyone who has ever spent time on the platform, was cast as the basket case of the group.

These comparisons were not merely vernacular. In an early interview with the New York Sun (Martin 2007), tumblr’s then 21-year-old “boy wonder,” founder David Karp, rejected the comparison between both himself and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and the two social media platforms (David’s Log 2008). Karp was cited as saying that it is “lame” when your online experience ends with Facebook, which “really falls short [as a] space on the Web to identify you.” In the same breath, he also called YouTube “a miserable social experience” (Martin 2007). These little glimpses into popular and corporate imaginaries of tumblr open up our discussion of what tumblr is, how it works, and why so many people consider(ed) it special. We start with a journey through tumblr’s history and ownership.