A cartoon depiction of the author, wearing a hoodie and smiling motd.co

when Tumblr was pursuing some particular stage of growth it built a “Directory”, something fairly basic that at first glance was an opt-in collection of categories that you could submit your blog to. somewhat weirdly, though, you could submit other tumblogs to different categories. In addition, the submission process was structured around a system by which the blog that received the most submissions for a given category could be “featured” with a special treatment at the top of the page. A group of people I hung out with at the time noticed fairly quickly that engagement was not particularly high in most categories and we could pretty easily elevate whatever we wanted with just a bit of coordination.

The categories were largely interest-based (“music”, “tech”, etc) but there was one for “non-profit” blogs, I suppose with some idealistic vision of highlighting all the good that was being done in the world and the organizations that were using Tumblr to talk about their work, etc.

This combination of details is how we managed to get Tumblr founder and then-CEO David Karp’s personal blog voted all the way to the featured spot of the “non-profit” category