From my memories of the meme wars and the last time I checked in on tumblr, tumblr had a lot of niche communities. A lot of those revolved around sexuality.
There were some nazis, but there was also a lot of bad poetry and art. Also porn. Porn was everywhere. When porn got banned, enough people left and enough communities were exiled that the nazi communities (without growing at all) passed some arbitrary percentage of users that declaring the entire site racist became in vogue.
That's why I refuse to consider big platforms "a community": At best, they're platforms on which many communities can form, but anyone trying to tell you a million people can be in one community is either an incompetent marketer, extraordinarily naïve, or, perhaps, attempting to tar a huge number of different communities with the bad actions of a single community, or even a subset of a single community. Ask yourself: If someone told you that Manhattan was Neo-Nazi because someone once saw a swastika flag flying from an apartment window, would you take the claim at face value?
The problem is that people do see a subset of a whole site, or a subset of a whole city, or a subset of a whole country or ethnicity or culture, and come away thinking they've Seen The Thing. Take that far enough, and you get nationalism, or racism, both of which spring from the underlying notion that broad groups of humans can be classified minutely as if they were species of insect, as opposed to being large numbers of endlessly complex individuals, each with a distinct life and set of experiences.
It's like saying the average Hacker News user doesn't know what a computer is. You're picking an extremist, extremely small amount of users as an "average," despite them being nothing close to it.
https://worldheritagepostorganization.tumblr.com/post/674066...
But most of them have left now. I don't think you remember the spirit of the site properly if you think people on there are doing, like, normal stuff that makes sense.
(Remember in 2017 when a user turned out to be faking having HIV so they wouldn't be cancelled for writing real people fanfic about Lin Manuel Miranda? And they were called out by someone else who wrote real people fanfic about him where he was a cannibal?)
The period you're describing was several years after Marco left. And besides, David was technically the sole "founder" (see e.g. [1]). In any case, David was ultimately responsible for the product direction.
I don't mean to minimize Marco's contributions in any way, as his efforts were absolutely massive and utterly essential to Tumblr's success. But with respect to the community and culture, product direction matters a lot more than the backend implementation in this context. (And I say this despite being one of Tumblr's first backend engineers myself!)
We're lost in this cruel place your voice above
Young soul from out my heart be still in love
Worth this cruel place your voice from the deep snow
That this is the night of the world so slow
Will leave me as my hopes have flown before
Which answered not with a love that was more
I'm sitting in this kingdom by the grave
Your clothes by your voice at the stillness gave
She's gone to the floor floating on our side
She speaks in the earth and the truth inside
Have naught but the pain you feel the bright eyes
Beyond the waves wipe out my heart denies
Your voice from the laugh of the desolate
You're looking for the moon is full of hate
Forgive if I could change the time has come
We're lost in this world is not like a drum
They also had more young subcultures that liked spending money, so native advertising like Instagram should've worked. The only young people who like consumerism on Twitter are the kpop fans, everyone else is a communist.