Like yeah its ideology was poorly articulated and delivered condescendingly and cringe and often cynical or opportunistic and just as often the work of teenagers, but it was also one of the first big online communities I can recall to take a consistent and uncompromising stance against at the time near-universally normalized forms of bigotry like ableism, fatphobia, and transphobia.
That’s not to trivialize the very real and foundational work of all those who came before, but for many people, myself included, it was my very first significant exposure to any of these ideas. I feel like all the best modern online leftist spaces take the same basic stance against those bigotries but from a much more mature, systemic, and materially grounded angle.
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They did nothing wrong and the people making fun of them had a significant overlap with the Anita Sarkeesian hater crowd that later morphed into G*merGate.
Many of them unironically expanded our understanding of gender on a theoretical and practical basis. If there is to be a 4th wave of feminism, its roots were probably in the SJW mines.
I always assumed the hate against Tumblr was misogyny/homophobia. A lot of complaints always boiled down to “OMG are you seeing this? Someone called a tumblrsexyman CUTE?! My favorite media franchise is RUINED!”
Meanwhile the same dudes would be posting bigbooba waifus on Reddit or whatever.
I think it was also just general hatred of The Youths. Tumblr skewed young, especially in the 2010s. Society hates to see kids care about things.
I can understand the reasoning, but I’ve always seen this place as being LF but with a twitter attention span and active word filter. I remember a thread during federation where someone tried to call us a “SomethingAwful ripoff” as an insult and people took that as a positive thing.
I’ve always seen this place as being LF
Not nearly ableist enough
Considering most of the tumblr sjw crowd was literal children and teens with some early 20s young adults they were way more politically literate and aware then some, if not most adults these days are. Most if not all of the criticism against them was either edgy teens or manchildren who wanted to protect their bigoted views. Hell, I even see some principled commies there now, it’s by far one of the least toxic social media and no celebs or rich fucks posting their shit too. It played a part in my own opening eyes to social issues which eventually lead to me researching marxism so I’m grateful to it.
I don’t think “SJW” tumblr was poorly articulated. I think poor articulation from it was emphasized. I suppose those are kinda the same thing, but I think it’s an important distinction.
