A year after banning "female-presenting nipples", Tumblr is much-diminished but still alive

The Atlantic reviews the state of Tumblr, where adult material was banned by new corporate owners, traffic collapsed, and the remains were sold for a pittance to Automattic, the company behind WordPress. It is down but far from out, Kaitlin Tiffany reports, with vibrant communities still thriving.

On one hand...

The biggest thing thats changed [this year] is an overall lack of content with diverse and mature themes, Cat Frazier, creator of the popular Tumblr Animated Text, writes to me in an email. I never followed porn accounts, but many of the people I followed were either deleted or left the platform out of frustration last year. That's left a noticeable gap. In fact a month ago I was scrolling through my followed accounts and about 100 of them hadn't uploaded since the ban.

... however ....

In late January, the Shaggys Power meme boomed. A transplant from Reddit, it featured screenshots of Matthew Lillard, the actor who played Shaggy in the 2002 live-action adaptation of Scooby-Doo, and captions portraying him as a god-like figure with a range of mysterious powers, swinging wildly between indiscriminate violence and pure benevolence. You are reading this now because I compel you to, the edited subtitle text on one still of Lillard reads. You are never free. (I have no idea what the heart of it is, Brennan says. I think its just absurdist.) It eventually expanded to include other actors from the movie, also praising Shaggys powers, and then to include Tumblr itself, in a discussion of the meta horror of a divine meme springing forth from seemingly nowhere.