Gripping article about Tumblr, teens and the rise and fall of bloggers

Read Elspeth Reeve's fabulous article about Pizza, one of the most popular Tumblogs, the "secret lives" of Tumblr Teens, and mistakes made.

It has everything. The wonderful creativity of the users; its incomprehensible architecture; the emergent support mechanisms; the toxic call-out culture; and everything ultimately, inevitably being ruined after Yahoo buys it.

Then it happened. On August 19, just days before his twentieth birthday, Lilley tried to log in to So-Relatable but couldnt. Greenfield checked the site, which redirected to an error page: Theres nothing here. Whatever you were looking for doesnt currently exist at this address. Theyd been terminated, their blogs revoked by Tumblr for violating its terms of service.

Tumblr had just dissolved the sites of some of its most popular teenage users, an estimated 30 million follows gone. Including Pizza. Blogs that had brought relief from unremitting high school agony and then miraculously made their teen creators more money than they could have ever imagined, were erased from the internet, except for fragments reblogged on other sites. The day before, if theyd had a funny thought, they could share it with half a million people. And now, nothing.

The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens [New Republic]

P.S. Who did the article's wonderful pixel art (above) and why the hell did New Republic post it as a JPEG?