Cascading Behavior and the Fall of Tumblr
Being born right before the start of the 2000s meant that you lived in one of the prime times of the Internet. My first Facebook account was made when I was ten years old, and I had my first smartphone when I was in the sixth grade. As you can see, I was extremely young when I started using social media. A platform that played a pivotal role in my teenage years was Tumblr. This network helped me establish many of the interests I still have today. However, I remember that I slowly stopped using it as I grew older. Recently, I was able to log in into my old account for the first time in a few years. As I reminisced and was filled with nostalgia of my middle and highschool years, I could not help but ask myself what had actually happened to Tumblr, and why, from being a top platform, it began losing its popularity. In general, I asked myself how is it that as a group, we migrate from one social media to another.
I had to do some research as to why Tumblr began to lose its massive following. Back in the 2010’s there was a surge of users who began to use Tumblr as a means of self expression. There were thousands of different communities: from the users who used the platform to display their art, to the massive fandoms for music groups and tv shows. According to Forbes, a major part of the appeal for Tumblr was that it allowed the existence of sensitive or NSFW (not safe for work) content (Forbes, 2018). However, this allowed for other types of content to be posted that were extremely unethical and illegal. With such risks, Tumblr decided to put an entire ban of any type of NSFW content in 2018. With this ban, they made an algorithm that was able to detect content that contained any type of sensitive topics. However, such algorithms started taking down many posts and Tumblr users that posted “nudity found in art, and gender-confirmation surgery”, which were all said to be exceptions from this ban (Forbes, 2018). With such a ban, many of its content creators began switching to other social media where this type of content is still allowed, like Twitter. Many artists also started moving to these platforms, and other types of communities followed as well. As a result, Tumblr began to slowly fade away into the same destiny as sites like Myspace.
Knowing the history of Tumblr, its loss of popularity can be explained through Networks theory. More specifically, the transition from Tumblr to other social media like Twitter can be understood with the topic of cascading behavior. According to Easley, with cascading behavior it is possible to model decisions within networks regarding the implementation of technologies and /or the switching from one technology to another (Easley, 2010). In this case, we can analyze how Tumblr went from being one of the most popular social platforms of the 2010’s to losing its popularity to other major social networks like Twitter. According to theory presented by Easley, we can model it in the following way. We can have a network that represents Tumblr (T for the purpose of the example) users at the start of its downfall. Each T user represents a node, and they use T as their main social media network. However, there are some nodes, called the initial adapters, that suddenly move to Twitter (or I). Now, we can make the assumption that the reason for this particular adoption is due to the new restrictions Tumblr has made on sensitive content (Easley, 2010). Observe the following coordination game:
Here, X and Y represent two different Tumblr users who are the initial adopters. The payoff for staying with technology T is t = 5, while the payoff for adopting technology I is i = 10 (This payoff is determined in the context of the users ability to interact with friends and observe the content that they are interested in). With the threshold formula, users will switch from T to I if q >= 5 / (5 + 10) = 1 / 3 of its neighbors are utilizing Twitter. The adoption from Tumblr to Twitter meant that more than 1 / 3 of the user’s neighbors (or mutuals) had to have moved to Twitter in order for them to have moved as well (Easley, 2010). Since more people started moving to other social media websites, it meant that other users will do as well, making such a possibility as to why Tumblr lost its influence in social media culture.
The theory of cascading effect can greatly explain why so many people began to switch to other forms of social media. In fact, now it is possible to observe why I began to use my blog less and less. Most of my mutual friends (or neighbors) began to adopt other technologies, meaning that they had a better payoff by switching. As a user (and node), I also observed that my payoff was better if I began to explore other types of social media and I followed as well. It is obviously difficult to be able to explain why each single user switches from one platform to another. However, it is possible to have certain explanations as to why this modern phenomena occurred with the topics learned in the Networks course.
Sources:
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/networks-book-ch19.pdf