What Tumblr Was

I spent hours on Tumblr looking for images I couldn’t name. Not Instagram’s algorithm, not Pinterest’s wellness aesthetic—just collections made by people with taste and nothing to do but archive it. Scrolling through tags, landing on blogs with names like Fuck Yeah Skinny Bitch, just clicking, collecting. These weren’t casual reblogs. They were shrines.

You could see the whole person in what they kept. The way they arranged things, what patterns they returned to, what images they chose to save. Someone’s visual consciousness made visible. And if their taste matched yours, if you’d been looking for the same things, it felt like finding someone who actually saw the world.

A lot of them were about beauty—skin, bodies, specific kinds of light. Some thematic, architectural, about surfaces. Some frankly sexual, which was the only point. The internet back then let you look at whatever without someone measuring it, quantifying it, selling it back to you. You found things by stumbling through someone else’s collection. No algorithm, no personalization. Just someone else’s eye, and whether it matched yours.

The web used to work like that. You’d disappear into a stranger’s taste and feel less strange. Feel like someone else was looking for the same things you were looking for.

Tumblr got bought. They sanitized it, killed it. But for a while it was the place you went when you wanted to see things without explanation, and you’d find other people who wanted exactly the same things. That was the whole point.