1. honestly like the biggest change was when they took tumblarity away, like it just changed the whole vibe of this site. tumblarity was kind of like the activity page except it gave you a tumblarity ”number” and also ranked your blog in your country and also across the whole site and like, if you got a popular post your tumblarity would increase etc (this was back when getting a thousand notes on a post would make you feel like king shit, too). and like people were fucking OB SESSED with this number. they would post about it, bitch about it, like ‘i logged in and my tumblarity went down by 40??? wtf?? i hate everything’ and it got to the point where people weren’t posting things they wanted to, they were just posting things that they knew would get a lot of notes and increase their tumblarity? it was like this weird insular popularity contest, it was definitely a meaner environment, very competitive. and then they took it away in one of the fifty bajillion updates (this was when they brought in the ask box too, before that we were using formspring lmao GOD) and people just started to chill and actually enjoy what they were posting and stuff, it was a complete about face. and staff said they were going to bring tumblarity back BUT THEY STILL HAVENT IT’S BEEN FIVE YEARS broken promises, full of lies
2. the great 36 hour catastrophe of 2011 where tumblr was down for a DAY AND A HALF and people were FREAKING THE FUCK OUT lmao remember the tumbeasts? the what to do when tumblr is down site? flocking to twitter just to bitch about tumblr? Like back before this, tumblr was SO glitchy like it would randomly go down all the time and you couldn’t access anything (most likely because it was still on shitty servers designed for a start up, you know) but after this it got a lot less glitchy/more professional. They also changed the layout (rip post icons that had ripped page edges that all fit together) and made all these dumb changes - no links in asks, no commas in tags, tag character limit blah blah blah - and we were all pretty bitter
3. back when tumblr was a lot smaller than it is now, it used to go through these weird phases that people called ‘tumblr’s boyfriend’. and like everyone would become obsessed with one movie and just post about it CONSTANTLY. first it was 2009 stark trek (jesus CHRIST this movie fucking saturated tumblr. it was EVERYWHERE), then it was inglorious basterds, then inception (the mad scramble to get urls like ‘theextractor’ or ‘arthureames’ never forget), then the social network (we dont fucking talk about this) and it was impossible to avoid and like 80% of your dash would just be about this one movie. it’s not really like that any more - again, tumblr is so much bigger than it used to be - but fucking hell it was A LOT
4. when they lifted the gif limit from 500kb lmao go back like, pre 2011 on anyone’s blog and all the gifs are so fucking pixelated and awful because you had to like make the gif black and white or get rid of all the saturation to actually be able to post anything jfc
5. THE DAY WE DISCOVERED MISSING E AND THEN XKIT can you imagine a tumblr where you couldn’t blacklist anything? where you just had to use this site in its basic form? IT WAS LIKE LIVING IN THE WILD, THANK YOU XKIT GUY FOR CIVILISING US poor missing e, the myspace of tumblr extensions

also shoutout to the fucking sharks vs cats CLUSTERFUCK, they tried to have this sitewide competition about which animal was more popular and you like chose a side and your icon got like a shark or a cat ~makeover it was so bizarre