They did nothing wrong and the people making fun of them had a significant overlap with the Anita Sarkeesian hater crowd that later morphed into G*merGate.

I always assumed the hate against Tumblr was misogyny/homophobia. A lot of complaints always boiled down to "OMG are you seeing this? Someone called a tumblrsexyman CUTE?! My favorite media franchise is RUINED!"

Meanwhile the same dudes would be posting bigbooba waifus on Reddit or whatever.

Considering most of the tumblr sjw crowd was literal children and teens with some early 20s young adults they were way more politically literate and aware then some, if not most adults these days are. Most if not all of the criticism against them was either edgy teens or manchildren who wanted to protect their bigoted views. Hell, I even see some principled commies there now, it's by far one of the least toxic social media and no celebs or rich fucks posting their shit too. It played a part in my own opening eyes to social issues which eventually lead to me researching marxism so I'm grateful to it.

I can understand the reasoning, but I've always seen this place as being LF but with a twitter attention span and active word filter. I remember a thread during federation where someone tried to call us a "SomethingAwful ripoff" as an insult and people took that as a positive thing.

I don't think "SJW" tumblr was poorly articulated. I think poor articulation from it was emphasized. I suppose those are kinda the same thing, but I think it's an important distinction.