Investigating Tumblr's most popular post
This post has over 14 million notes. What did it originally say?
If you were on Tumblr in the early 2010s, you may remember a very popular post with millions of notes. Such a huge number of notes was rare at the time, and when Jason Oberholtzer — joberholtzer on tumblr — reblogged it in September 2012, he added the comment “I’ve never seen a post over 1 million. This is amazing.” Another Tumblr user1 replied, explaining “This is the ever-changing post that has millions of notes. People reblog it and edit what it says to whatever they want.”
Oberholtzer wrote about this post for Forbes, and his screenshot shows that the post, which said “Mitt Romney sucks pass it on” when he first came across it, had nearly eight million notes. Today, it has over fourteen million.
When Oberholtzer was done with it, the post read “Randy Newman for president”, and he helpfully screenshotted the post in the process of reblogging it, showing how editing a post worked in 2012.
All of the text seen in that screenshot, including the title, all of the existing comments, and even the usernames of the previous commenters could be changed or deleted by anyone who reblogged it, and this was true for every post on the site. Tumblr would eventually remove this feature in July 2015, a couple of months after an infamous reblog-editing incident where someone changed a post by young adult author John Green, one of Tumblr’s most active celebrity users at the time, so it looked like he’d posted that he loved the taste of cock and the smell of balls.
The 14 million note post had a number of popular permutations, some of which were generic sentiments that a lot of people could relate to, like “Reblog if you’re single” and “If you love TUMBLR, reblog this”, and others related to popular fandoms, like “Reblog if you are a wizard or a witch” for Harry Potter, “Let’s make Dean in gym shorts the most reblogged picture on Tumblr” for Supernatural, and “Reblog if you think Sherlock is sexy” for Sherlock. But what did it say before people started editing it?
Identifying the original post isn’t straightforward, because everything about the post, including the source — which for most posts would just link to the post on the original poster’s blog2 — has been changed a number of times. For example, if you scroll through youknowthatpost, a blog created in 2013 to catalogue different versions of the post,3 you’ll notice the source url is different for many of the reblogged versions. Several posts list Tumblr user charizzaaa as the source, and if you look through that user’s archive,4 you’ll see he got a lot of messages about the post in 2012 and 2013, which he mostly answered sarcastically. He told users who asked him about specific versions of the post that that’s not what it originally said, but he never revealed what it did say. As it turns out, he couldn’t have done that even if he wanted to, because it wasn’t his post. Upon further research, it became clear that he wasn’t the original poster, and that someone, probably charizzaaa himself, had changed the source to his blog after it went viral, and a number of popular versions of the post are edited from that version.
The thing is, there are two ways to view a Tumblr blog, via the blog itself and via the in-dashboard view. Using Tumblr’s official staff account as an example, the blog url is staff.tumblr.com, and the in-dashboard url is www.tumblr.com/staff. The in-dashboard view was introduced later on — I haven’t been able to pinpoint exactly when, but from memory, I’d say around 2014 or so. Whenever it was, it was after the most-reblogged post’s heyday — an ask sent to charizzaaa in May 2013 referred to the post having 14 million notes, which is around number of notes it has today, so its spread clearly slowed after that.5 The in-dashboard view shows the date the post was created,6 and viewing youknowthatpost this way, you’ll see that the most recent post on the blog is a version originally posted by a user named thvnhv in October 2010, and another version showing the same original poster and date appears elsewhere on the blog.
2010 is relatively early in Tumblr history — though the platform had been around for a few years already by then, it was nowhere near as popular as it would be during its peak years, from about 2012 to 2015.7 That’s by far the earliest date I’d seen attached to the post, and at this point I thought it was very plausible that thvnhv was the original poster. I searched her blog, and though she deleted the original post, there were enough other posts on her blog referencing it that I managed to piece together the story of the infamous 14 million note post.
On October 30, 2010, thvnhv — a 15-year-old girl whose real name was Thanh and whose url at the time was thanhbtv — posted “if you love your mom. Broadcast this to 20 people. one girl didn’t and her mom died 4days later.”8 This was a chain letter that she had seen somewhere else, not something she came up with herself. She posted this chain message as the post’s title, and in the post description9 she added “Sorry followers I can’t take a chance. As much as I say I hate my mom, we all know I love her.” She would later explain that she posted it to Tumblr because she “was too lazy to pass it on to 20 people” individually, and didn’t expect it to get a lot of notes.
The post took off immediately — I’ve managed to find reblogs from the same day it was created with several comments already — and by mid-November, it was already getting backlash. Thanh received several asks about the post throughout December, all of which refer to the mom chain letter, showing that at this point, nobody had edited it. The Wayback Machine shows that the post was already deleted the first time the post url was archived on December 31. In January 2011, Thanh received an ask which mentioned the post having 90,000 notes. By May 2011, it had over a million notes, and Thanh was receiving messages asking what her post originally said, so users had clearly been editing it.
In July 2011, an anonymous user accused Thanh of changing the post’s source to make it look like she originally posted it (something that charizzaaa and several others actually did), and she responded with proof that it really was her post, in the form of a link to an early reblog by nihaoitsjontsaai, which she says was the first reblog of the post. Unfortunately, the blog she linked to has since been deleted,10 but I think there’s enough other proof to say that it definitely was Thanh’s post. The early reblogs from the day it was posted all show her as the original poster, and for months she received asks that referred only to the mom chain letter, not to any other versions, so it clearly hadn’t been edited yet. It doesn’t make any sense for her to have edited the post to make it look like she was the original poster, because the post already has her name attached months before editing the post became a meme. So, despite her original post being deleted before it could be archived, I think we can conclusively say that Thanh is the original poster, and the 14 million note post started off as a “reblog or your mom might die” chain letter.
Today, that post is “broken”, and if you attempt to reblog it, you’ll just get an error message. I managed to find a couple of recent reblogs, one from last year and one from 2020, but I have no idea what the situation there is. Does it sometimes unbreak? Can only certain users reblog it? Is that why it stopped gaining notes after 2013? I can actually answer that last one: no, I found a lot of reblogged versions in the notes from 2013-2015, so whatever happened to it seems to have happened after 2015. But the other questions remain mysteries.
There is also another post that got passed around Tumblr in a bunch of different edited versions. That one currently has 11 million notes, and it’s still rebloggable. That was posted in 2011 and originally said “Reblog if you always follow back”,11 and edited versions of that post include “Reblog if you want anons” and “Reblog if your name isn’t Ashley”.12 This post has been mistakenly identified as the most edited post several times — here’s a reblog from last year claiming that “every single post you’ve ever seen with more than 3 million notes has been a different version of this one”13 and that the original post was from an anorexia blog in 2009.14 I can see why one would confuse them, especially since the “follow back/not Ashley/not Amanda” post is still rebloggable and has been posted to popular Tumblr history blogs like hellsite-hall-of-fame and worldheritagepostorganization — the latter with the mistaken attribution attached — while the “if you love your mom” post is unrebloggable and has been out of circulation for years now. It’s possible that the former will eventually surpass the latter’s note count, but if that does happen, it won’t be for a while,15 so Thanh’s chain letter remains Tumblr’s most reblogged post for now.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about a Tumblr meme with murky origins. Last year, I dug into the “What Makes You Haha” One Direction parody song, which went viral on Tumblr in 2012, and found that it was originally by an Australian band named Masketta Fall, who barely got any credit for their work.
That one stood out to me because it’s unusual for a song by a real band with a record deal and music on iTunes and Spotify to become an uncredited meme, but it’s less surprising for that to happen to a Tumblr post by a random person who deleted it before it went truly viral. Tumblr in particular has always been notoriously difficult to search, and a lot of users have changed their usernames or deleted their accounts over the years, making reblog chains hard to follow even if the post wasn’t edited to say something else.16 Trying to find a post that was only popular because it was edited to say a bunch of different things is Tumblr archeology on hard mode, but it was still worth a try, and I got to the bottom of it in the end.
There were a couple of details that I never would have been able to confirm if not for the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, and others that I would have been able to confirm far more easily if certain things had been archived. So my suggestion here is to archive things — if a post or blog or webpage seems like it could be interesting or notable, save it using the Wayback Machine or Archive Today. I don’t usually do this because I mostly write about pop music, and if I’m citing Pitchfork reviews or media coverage of Taylor Swift, I don’t have to worry about them disappearing from the internet, but since I cited a lot of obscure Tumblr posts as evidence here, I went through this entire essay and archived every single post I linked to, just in case.
My other advice is to be curious and fact check things. I could have taken charizzaaa at his word that he was the original poster, or I could have come across the post conflating the 14 million and 11 million note posts earlier in my search and taken that as true, but I kept going. I looked for evidence, and I found it. Obviously not everyone needs to spend hours digging into a minor piece of internet trivia and then write a 2,500 word Substack essay documenting it, but if you have some free time and something you’re curious about, it’s not the worst way to spend a day.
Whose username was occono in 2012 but has since changed to cocoonagram.
Some users who reposted images and other content from elsewhere would link to the site where they found said content in the source, but most Tumblr posts just had the post url as the source, even if it was reposted content.
Unfortunately, youknowthatpost reblogged only about a dozen versions before the blog’s owner stopped posting.
His blog theme is broken so you have to search the archive to find posts and click the eye button in the upper right to open them in the dashboard in order to view them.
That was interesting to learn, because I had assumed it probably stopped spreading when Tumblr removed the ability to edit reblogs, but it seems to have gone out of style two entire years before that.
Well, it does for some of them, on posts where the original blog has been deleted or changed its url, the original post shows with an anonymous icon and no date, like this:
Funnily, at one point charizzaaa, the other user who claimed to be the original poster, received an ask saying that this was the original post, and answered it saying that no, it wasn’t. But it was!
Most Tumblr text posts are written directly into the description field and don’t have titles.
I did some digging trying to find nihaoitsjontsaai’s blog in case he’d just changed his url, but no such luck, all I can find is someone else’s post mentioning him.
Proof that that’s the original: right now, the OP’s url shows as lilboreddev-blog, the -blog suffix is something Tumblr sometimes adds to inactive blogs to free up their urls, so the user’s url before that was just lilboreddev, and there’s an archived version of that blog from 2015 with a note in the sidebar reading “yes i’m the one that made that awkward ‘follow if you follow back’ post w 7,000,000+ notes... but guess if i follow back”.
There are a number of variations on the “reblog of your name isn’t ___” trend, including Amanda and Rick, but since all of them include the “this post is scandalous” comment, which was added to the Ashley version as a reference to the cartoon Recess, that one clearly came first.
This is doubly untrue because there are actually over a dozen posts with more than three million notes.
I have no where that supposed attribution came from! In all of my research I haven’t found any million-note post from an anorexia blog, and I’m not sure if there was one that I just haven’t come across or if the person who said that has their wires crossed or what, but regardless, neither of the two widely edited posts were that.
According to the archived description on the OP’s blog, the follow back post had seven million notes by 2015, and it took nine years to gain another four million notes and reach 11 million. Tumblr is nowhere near as popular today as it was in 2015, so gaining the more than three million notes necessary to overtake the other post would presumably take even longer.
One way in which Tumblr is actually very good for internet sleuthing is that even if the OP deletes a post, it still appears on all of the blogs that reblogged it, whereas if someone deletes a tweet on Twitter, it disappears from the retweets and quote tweets too. That’s probably good if you want to erase something dumb or embarrassing that you said, but it’s less good for internet historians trying to piece stuff like this together.