Platformed nostalgia: Techlash and the commercialisation of historical social media nostalgia on Tumblr

This article conceptualises platformed nostalgia as a social media platform branding strategy that commodifies historical social media nostalgia to (re)gain social acceptance and legitimacy in response to popular techlash towards contemporary social media platforms. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of 193 marketing and platform communication documents authored by and/or related to Tumblr under Automattic’s ownership (2019-), it argues that platformed nostalgia is cultivated through platform branding and communication strategies that instrumentalise users’ assumed nostalgic attachments to an imagined utopic past of early social media alongside normative platform values of transparency, democracy, and public good. The findings reveal that, in Tumblr’s case, the latter are invoked to position the platform as a nostalgic foil to real or imagined irresponsible or less responsible corporate social media platforms of the present, such as X (formerly Twitter). The analysis therefore explores how popular forms of historical social media nostalgia emerging from discontentment with and critique of the technocultural present are vulnerable to commercial co-optation by social media platforms.