I hate to say I told you so, but... I told you so.
Too short for you? Let me explain a bit more, so you can understand exactly why this whole nasty scenario happened, and for anyone else in the audience who might be living under a rock and is unaware of what happened around July 4th this year.
On June 9th, 2014, an image was posted to Tumblr condemining 4Chan as "racist, misogynistic, and just plain evil", urging Tumblr users to #ShutDown4Chan. It has been rumored that the blog that posted it, shutdown4chan, may have been created by 4Chan's /pol/ board itself as a way to poke the hornet's nest. Tactics like these are typical of 4Chan; the attempt is to incite rage in its target... that is, it's a trolling tactic, and unfortunately, it worked.
On July 4th, 2014, Tumblr users posted several Social Justice related posts on 4Chan, accusing the members there of intolerance and bigotry, as is typical of SJWs who are on a mission (which is every single one of them. That mission? To implement their own warped idea of what social justice is, regardless of who they step on to do it). The blog, fictional or not, had worked. 4Chan retaliated by flooding several Social Justice and Fandom-related tags (such as #SuperWhoLock) with gore and shock imagery to purposefully mock and trigger users. Tumblr users attempted to bury and block the content, warning others to stay away from the affected tags until further notice... effectively bringing fandom and social justice discussion on the site to a screeching halt.
Tumblr, not one to take anything lightly ever, decided the best course of action (rather than ignoring the obvious trolls) was to make a petition to label 4Chan as a hate group, or as they put it, "internet criminals". 4Chan retaliated by making a mock-petition to label Tumblr users as "mentally handicapped landwhales", further mocking the whole thing as per is their usual style of sarcastic humor.
The problem is this - the instigator seems obvious from this info, right? It's 4Chan, no question, book 'em Lando. But the problem is this - according to KYM (KnowYourMeme), where I've been getting all this info from as an outsider, Tumblr may have actually started it first, and the 4Chan-Tumblr hateboner thing is absolutely nothing new. 4Chan picked a fight with Tumblr back in 2010, when Tumblr was literally just people posting about fandoms, and actually brought the entire site down. There's reason to believe some Social Justice Crusaders have been going onto 4Chan before the raids even happened and posting SJW rants in /pol/ and /b/, notoriously nasty boards on the site that quite often hold some pretty genuinely vile stuff. The consensus seems to be that some of Tumblr's SJWs may have started it by posting to 4Chan first, then the /pol/ board retaliated by making a satirical blog mocking the entire thing. Unfortunately, the Poe's Law is strong with Tumblr, and Tumblr's SJWs took it seriously. Way. Too. Fucking. Seriously.
So it all boils down to this, and be aware this is only my opinion on the whole thing - Tumblr's SJWs decided to fuck with something too damn big for them to pick on. They can belittle and bully users on Tumblr all they want, but outside of Tumblr they have no power, and I hope to god that they realize that now. You see, 4Chan is basically a democracy - anyone can say anything they want, however vile or sweet, but nobody's going to listen to it unless the majority agrees. So in other words, it's exactly like the United States is right now. You got your assholes, bigots, and morons, sure... but you also have your helpers, sweethearts, and saints. And in the middle, the majority of people that is, you have everyone else. People just looking for help, or to have a good time, or to discuss things they enjoy or create cat macros.
This whole social construct is lost on Tumblr's SJW crowd, however, who cannot see the forest for the rotten trees and who have consistently demonstrated they can't do so even in real life. We're talking about people who think tattooing "I <3 Misandry" on their body and calling people "cis-scum" while drinking from a Zazzle mug labeled "Male tears" is a good idea. These people, These people, these are the ones who are attacking a group of people that really gives no shit about the overly vocal minority and is much more concerned with free speech and having a good time than anything else.
Now I want to reiterate that this is not, I repeat, not all Tumblr users, or even the majority of Tumblr users. It's just one particularly vocal, particularly virulent, and particularly nasty group of people who don't think anyone else matters but them, and who use the important fabric of Social Justice as a whole to share their internalized bigotry in a socially acceptable way. These people are literally Stormfront, but in a different guise and fighting for a different form of bigotry to become dominant. They are sad, lifeless, pointless, relentlessly angry individuals who cannot accept the fact that most people don't think all men are rapists, all whites are racist, and all straight cissexual people are monsters. They want it their way, dammit, and they feel entitled to have it their way because after all, they've been so damn oppressed for years - isn't it time they got to be on top and rule everyone else with an iron fist? After all, it's only fair, right?
Nasty, right? So you can see, then, why I believe what I do when I say this - I believe the SJWs instigated first, and moreover, I believe they are long overdue for it and deserve what happened to them.
Now on first glance, this may seem pretty heartless of me to say - "Sugary, these people are fighting for social justice! They're oppressed and they want to change that!" Okay, but answer me this - how does purposefully attacking someone who is expressing their opinion openly on an entirely different site, who isn't even bothering you, who is just as varied and may be just as oppressed in real life as you are... how is that any different than picking on the weird kid across the hall who just so happened to say the wrong thing to you that day? How is that any different than intentionally triggering someone that you know is easily triggered by a specific thing? You and I both know, reader, that Tumblr loves its trigger warnings, so how come they couldn't respect 4Chan's triggers this time and purposefully incited them to attack?
"But Sugary!" I hear you say, "Two wrongs don't make a right!" You're absolutely right, but the problem is, Tumblr was in the wrong to begin with by trying to "help" someone that didn't want, need, or even deserve their brand of "help" to start with. Ever hear that old story about the farmer and the rattlesnake? The farmer saw a cold, freezing snake one winter, and out of kindness he picked it up and put it in his coat to warm the poor thing up. When the snake warmed up, it bit the famer, fatally poisoning him. As the farmer died, he cried out asking why the snake had done that after being treated so kindly. The snake replied with "You knew what I was when you picked me up", and so both beings died. In this case, Tumblr SJWs are the farmer, and 4Chan is the snake. 4Chan is full of nastiness and venom in certain areas, yes, but just like a snake, if you pick it up, you cannot blame it for biting you. You were the one that picked it up. The snake did not go over to you and bite you on purpose, the snake was doing its own snakey thing, trying to live its own snakey life and do things its own snakey way. When you picked it up, you knew you would get bit eventually - it was just a matter of when. No matter how good your intentions are, if you pick up something dangerous, you put yourself in danger. tl; dr - the road to hell is paved with golden bricks of good intentions, and as any Tumblr SJW could tell you, intent doesn't matter if your intent leads to the harm of yourself or others.
"But Sugary!" I hear you feebly say, standing on your argument's last legs, "Tumblr is picked on often! They're already a source of ridicule, and nobody believes SJWs are doing any good, anyway! We all know they're hypocrites, but that doesn't mean they're not the victim here! How dare you victim-blame?" That's nice that you're defending a victim and saying that victim-blaming is wrong (which it is), but there's just one problem here. That problem is that you're wrong - Tumblr, by definition, is not a victim. How so? Well, when you purposefully attack something, that kind of means you cease to be the victim and start to be the perpetrator. What Tumblr's SJW crowd did here was purposefully try to bully another site the way they bully Tumblr's own users every day, and then tried to play victim when they got knocked on their asses for it. If one hornet stings you, you cannot then go throw rocks at that hornet's nest and then cry victim over being stung by even more hornets, because you are the one who threw rocks over a small slight to start with, attacking a bunch of internet users who would have been no threat to you at all unless you attacked them first. Not only did you throw rocks at a hornet's nest, you threw rocks at the biggest hornet's nest in the neighborhood. You did this to yourselves. You instigated over a slight, a slight. That makes you the perpetrator, not the victim.
If that's not getting through, let's try this analogy. You tried to rape 4Chan as the rapist, Tumblr SJWs, and 4Chan responded by roundhouse-kicking you in the nuts and then punching you in the face a few times for good measure when you tried to blame it for its own near-rape. You are not the victims here, SJWs, no matter how much you try to say otherwise, and you're not an oppressed group online, either - you're a vocal group with a powerful presence on Tumblr, and that makes you the exact opposite of "oppressed". 4Chan saw through that and stung you by mocking it, as is their way, and you responded by throwing rocks at them. Tell me how any of this makes you morons the victim, and I'll agree with you, but until then, you're the rapist in my eyes, and 4Chan is the sexual assault survivor that was savvy enough to defend themselves. You cannot play the victim card here and expect anyone to take you seriously, because nobody will. 4Chan is not going to change, and attacking it is, as one Reddit observer posted, "Like urinating in an ocean full of piss".
This is undeniably a mess and will continue to be a mess, either right now or in the future. I don't foresee Tumblr and 4Chan getting along any time soon, no matter how many cutesy Chumblr shipping photos come along (seriously, 4Chan/Tumblr is my new hatelove OTP, they're just soooo damn cute! ^_^). So then, the question remains - Who's really to blame, who should care, and what do we do to fix it? The answers there are who cares because this is hilarious, nobody, and stop fucking instigating them, you morons.
Sincerely,
Sugary Snicket
P.S. - To quote a certain famous female pop star, Tumblr, we are never, ever, ever, ever, getting back together. :3