Why Tumblr is a secret

Though the popular blogging site has been up and running since its foundation in 2007, Tumblr has never failed to remain under the social radar.

Self-defined less as a blog-hosting site and more as a large “sharing” network, the site enables users to take on a customary URL to post pictures, text, videos and projects for personal, professional, social or private reasons.

The malleability of the site is what empowers bloggers beyond any other blogging site.

With little pressure to produce original content, Tumblrers can post anything from their Instagram photos of cats and/or girlfriends, to web articles and features from large corporations like Newsweek, the Huffington Post and Vogue.

And what’s more is that with the coming of the new Facebook format, there are, no-doubt, a few Tumblr-drawn influences.

The predominantly larger population of users are those using it for personal reasons. Though many Tumblr users have a greater tendency to post pictures, gifs and other visuals to their website, the site can also be used to put up the most personal of personal items: private phone pictures, tangents about their bosses, letters to unrequited loves or angry responses to requited loves you’re too scared to confront.

For a long time now, Tumblr has been an emotional landfill. The site is a sanctuary of sorts, in the sense that if your URL is something you don’t give out, you can post ideas as tasteless, profane or inappropriate as you want.

You can put up pictures you’re too embarrassed to admit you like, paintings you wish you made or uninhibited tributes to that celebrity everyone hates. It is a miniature Id.

Tumblr is for an endless supply of shirtless hipsters with cats, girls with bloody knees and pretty dresses or generic photos of unknown persons smoking cigarettes, sitting at typewriters or softly stroking white horses.

Tumblr is another world, a world that exists divorced of your real world, in which you can create an ulterior fake-life for things you might only pretend to be interested in. It is a void to throw your infatuations into, under the veil of a profile that rarely gives a first and last name.

It’s a cathartic, self-documenting collage for as many portraits of Emma Watson as you want, as many Kafka quotes you don’t completely understand and as many self-indulgent pieces of poetry that you care to write with the comfort that someone, anyone, will see it from the surplus of anonymous followers you’ve accumulated.

Tumblr is a secret because what you put up is something you don’t care to put on Twitter or Facebook.

Tumblr is a secret because you know your profile isn’t necessarily you — a version of you, perhaps — but not you.

It is a confidence that is neither profound, authentic nor deeply-dangerous, but here, you don’t have to worry about preemptive disapproval.

Tumblr is knowing that someone out there underneath the same guise as you has decided to glance and possibly care about your blog roll.