“… for most of Tumblr’s history, the Dashboard was (and still largely remains) organized by reverse chronology, rather than…
“… for most of Tumblr’s history, the Dashboard was (and still largely remains) organized by reverse chronology, rather than algorithmic hierarchy. 11 This has a democratizing function: posts with ten thousand notes (even “promoted” posts) appear equally weighted to posts that only have five notes. Tumblr’s feed structure, in combination with its pseudonymity, means that individual users’ voices are not automatically marginalized or dismissed for being less popular or more radical. 12 Others cannot see the identity or number of a user’s followers nor who they follow. As a result, although “star” posters do develop on Tumblr (since the number of “notes” is visible on a post), they rarely reflect cultural hierarchies or power brokers in real life.Tumblr’s structure thus emphasizes ever-shifting collective authorship and diverse creative communities over individual originality and idea ownership. Tumblr’s reblogging convention decenters singular authorship of any one piece of content; a creative work, once posted, can circulate through multiple clusters of users and communities via reblogging, conveying a sense of expansive yet elusive community. This sense of an ever-present imagined collectivity also manifests in Tumblr users’ performative authorship through hashtags. Tags were particularly vital as early collective tools because, before 2015, there was no private direct messaging function between users. Rather than using tags as more traditional indexing tools, users add tags to posts as a form of performative signaling on many collective Tumblr networks. 13 Over time, hashtags also became ways to block content and curate community engagement, as widely employed user modifications allowed users to block content by tag.Taken together, this mix of design features affords an experience and environment that both maximizes user creative agency…”— a tumblr book, Chapter 1