Building Tools for Creativity with David Karp

I really wanted to go to this interview specifically to see Tumblr creator David Karp. I am a self-affirmed Tumblr addict and think it's personally one of the most fantastic forms of social networking on the internet. Although the weird humored, anti-social, bad pun-telling blogs I run around with there may not be it's intended purpose, I think Tumblr creates a very nice open space for anyone to say whatever they want without judgement.



I only stayed at this event for about a half hour because I wanted to go to another movie that was happening immediately afterwards. I learned that David Karp is a very strange individual, which is exactly the kind of person that should've invented a platform like Tumblr.

"I wanted to make an identity I was proud of," Karp said on why he invented Tumblr. "I wanted people to be able to create and post things on different mediums."

These kinds of answers always make me a bit weary because it seems like generic technical speak for very social networking platform we currently had. Tumblr's two core difference from other networks is that it supports virtually any medium of content you would want to blog, and the reblog feature that presents other users' commentary on the content while simultaneously linking to the source of the content (this is a double-edged sword, especially for Tumblr mobile, as more than about 5-6 comments from users on one piece of content can get lengthy and cause for skipping past it.

Karp said that he did not initialize a community comment system on Tumblr because of witnessing the structure on sites such as YouTube and Facebook and how comments can eventually devolve and detract from the original content. He said he believes in "an equal platform for people to comment their thoughts on other people's original content", meaning that he didn't think it was fair for one person to go through the trouble of making a video or recording audio and all the semantics behind it while someone else who didn't do any work gets to express their opinions. This is a sort of see-saw logic that has both pros and cons I guess, but I ultimately agree with Karp, especially after seeing so many YouTube comment arguments on videos that have nothing to do with that.

I would've really liked to ask Karp why Tumblr refuses to adapt to Missing E, a Tumblr add-on that many users install to make their Tumblr experience more enjoyable and most customized to their own liking. Tumblr engineers have been coding around this free add-on's features, but has yet to replace them with anything similar. I also wanted to ask Karp about a more consistent and usable messaging system between users since so many friendships have been forged between the interwebs on this site and also because it's a feature that nearly every other platform has had for quite some time.

Despite my brief attendance at this event, it was very interesting and I learned a lot. David Karp looked exactly as I thought he would in real life, hoodie and all.

David Karp @ Building Tools for Creativity SXSW 2013
©Cheyenne Matthews-Hoffman