Yes, But No

About

Yes But No is a single topic blog featuring a series of declarative statements that are intended to disprove various assumptions or preconceived notions surrounding particular ethnic or socio-cultural stereotypes. Since the launch of the original blog in early 2011, it has spawned a number of derivative blogs focusing on specific fandoms or other group identities.

Origin

The original “Yes But No” blog^[1] was created by Tumblr blogger Christine Chen as a personal project on April 19th, 2011. According to the site description, Chen created the blog to “break assumptions and stereotypes that everyone makes about various cultures, genders [and] sexualities.” One of the earliest instances to draw widespread attention was a commentary on the Asians in the Library viral video controversy that erupted a month earlier in March, which went on to gain more than 11,000 likes and reblogs.

In its beginning, Chen focused on addressing various misconceptions that are based on ethnicity and geographic locations, but the scope of the blog was eventually broadened to include gender stereotypes, niche hobbies and social interests. The blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Spread

Chen eventually opened up the blog’s submission feature and began curating custom-generated messages submitted by the readers, which continued to perform well on Tumblr by gaining anywhere from hundreds to tens of thousands of notes. In May 2011, Chen set up a Facebook fan page^[2] and a Twitter account^[9] for the site, allowing the Tumblr feed to be channeled through additional outlets in the social media. The popularity of the blog reached its first peak between June and September 2011, when a handful of spin-off “Yes But No” blogs were launched for various fandoms including Harry Potter, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Sherlock, Glee and One Direction.

In early November, Chen’s blog was covered by the Spanish-language news publication Univision^[7] in a blog post titled “Yes But No goes viral breaking stereotypes.” By December 2011, the first Portugese-language “Yes But No” blog had been created for the fantasy fiction series Percy Jackson & the Olympians. The trend of “Yes But No” blogs continued to persist throughout the first half of 2012, giving way to a large number of other fandom or hobby-specific sites on Tumblr (shown below). In addition to its large-scale presence on the microblogging service^[3], similar examples can be found on image-sharing communities like Pinterest^[4] and Favim^[8] under the tag “yes but no.”