I lived through it. You know what else I did? I stubbornly ground my heels in and stayed on Livejournal for several years.
When we’re talking about it, I think everyone thinks the big scary words up there meant that like… swat teams showed up and made us delete our accounts at gunpoint or something and that’s not the case.
First of all: Let me confess: Strikethrough and boldthrough? Didn’t even effect me, or any of my communities. I was mostly into RP back then, where we had these neat little single-universe ‘’’jamjar’’’ groups of crossover hell (it was a blast! Tumblr RP can never compare.) At the time of Strikethrough and boldthrough I was one of the people who didn’t care because it didn’t concern me– though I was at the time a prolific writer of darkfic and those themes through my RP as well
But I did notice when entire tags and a few communities went under, and or stopped allowing certain kinds of content all together out of fear of being next. Sex positivity was still a burgeoning thing even then, and you were likely to get laughed out of town if you liked or focused on sex and or romantic relationships in your writing or even just– shipping in general. There was a grind to a hault of everything but the most canon, vanilia romance crap in almost all fandom circles from day one (when shipping had already been a ‘persecuted’ part of fandom)….
People who had been cool with you and your content before changed over night. Suddenly their squicks and or intellectual superiority complexes were ‘proven correct’ by staff’s actions and reports of people getting harassed, bullied, and told that they should never write another fic if all they could write about was gross gays– SKYrocketed
After a while, content became SO sterilized that interest dropped off. I wondered where everyone had went, and ended up in fandom limbo for a few years before making my first tumblr in like 2009 or 2010 or so.
Tl;dr: the death of live journal that all us old codgers are talking about did not happen overnight. It was a slow, painful, awful death of malady where your loved one forgot who you were and called you slurs before they finally died and the pain was over. Btw, you can still go make an LJ account today. Goahead if you want!
When we talk about tumblr dying it’s not about the site blipping out of existence, it’s about the fact that it’s going the exact same route as LJ. If you don’t believe me, you should look into the tags that have been completely purged (the yaoi tag for one, which I know or a FACT was mostly used by gay nsfw content artists).
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