I saw people on LiveJournal, but—I have a friend who last year brought up the metaphor of LiveJournal being a dinner party, and Tumblr being a coffee shop. And, obviously, I love throwing a dinner party, but that’s not very open. That being said, you’re having much more engaged conversations at your dinner party than you are in your coffee shop. So, Tumblr can feel a little surface-y. I do think that specific user experience choices and design choices of the platform cause a specific kind of conflict within fandom that we did not see previously. It has to do with context collapse: the way that a post can be written and reblogged, and suddenly it is an utterly different post. That’s something we do not see on any other social network. That being said, it means that ideas can spread much farther than they could elsewhere, and you see posts that have, really, 100,000 notes. You don’t get that on Twitter. You don’t get that on Facebook in that way. But it also means the conversation branches in ways that can cause strife.
Elizabeth Minkel in Morimoto, Lori. 2018. “Roundtable: Tumblr and Fandom.” In “Tumblr and Fandom,“edited by Lori Morimoto and Louisa Ellen Stein, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 27.