https://amgreatness.com/2021/06/04/from-what-lab-did-cancel-culture-leak/
First, Tumblr became known as a site that was most enthusiastically embraced by teenage girls. In fact, equal percentages of men and women use Tumblr in the United States as of last year, but the site’s culture arguably privileges traditionally feminine traits over male ones.
The “teenage” part, by contrast, was inarguable in the site’s early years. The site’s users skew disproportionately toward young Millennials, with a full 69 percent of its users coming from the Millennial generation, most of whom were in high school or college at the time when Tumblr’s popularity started to explode (around May 2011, the site had 5 billion posts, which ballooned to 166 billion by 2018). This teenage and feminine culture was prone, as teenage girls are generally, to huge amounts of relational aggression—i.e., attacking people through their friends and communities, rather than directly.
Second, as established above, Tumblr was a haven for budding artists in fan communities. While you’d think this would be a welcoming environment due to its non-monetizable interests, the reality of jockeying for status within fan communities can reach levels of brutality and absurdity commensurate with the professional art world. This was true even before Tumblr, as one can easily discover by looking at adult Harry Potter fanfiction communities from the early 2000s, or more specifically, the infamous case of a user called MsScribe.