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yvannairieOne thing I didn't realise about The Youth That Grew Up With Social Fandom is that reading through another person's backlog isn't, like, normal to them?
Like, somewhere like on Twitter that's understandable b/c Twitter is all about New Content, All The Time, but on Tumblr people get weirdly apologetic about reading back through other people's blogs and reblogging stuff from two-three years ago -- something I also started doing because I'm usually also dropping people a notice that I'm informally "following" them (neener neener my dashboard is clean and my RSS feed finally works as intended, thank you DW), which means that Your New Content is the only way people really find out about what you're into and what you're passionate about.
And, well, in the attention economy new content is how you make it and please the almighty algorithms/get eyes on your stuff, so it makes sense The New Stuff is the only thing people pay attention to.
... and that's. IDK. That makes me inexplicably sad.
I have a massive backlog for anyone who cares to go through it. I used to have a tag I used exclusively for reblogs if people wanted to know who I interacted with and how, or to browse around for what I used to talk about in my tags, I used to have a tag for comments I added on reblogs, I had three different personal tags (a tradition I'm continuing on this journal -- some of y'all are not here for my life, you're here for the Spicy Takes About Fiction), and I tag for fandom and topic pretty heavily.
I have a tags page. I even had a tag cloud once upon a time so people could find out what was "big" on my blog, although that no longer works for reasons unknown to me. And that's how I had it set up while I still had search turned off. Now I don't care -- if someone wants to hate-search my blog for content to complain about that's no skin off my back because I'm done posting original content on Tumblr anyway. Finding out what I am "about", what I like, what I think about and how I go about thinking about it is easier than ever, but... it's no longer the norm.
The majority of my content up until I quit using Tumblr for anything but self-promotion was original content. I was always posting in a way that would make my tags fun to read backwards through -- or if not fun, at least informative or expressive. One of my big joys was finding people who had interesting things to say, and reading through their personal or fandom tags and getting to know their opinions. That's why getting the hell off Tumblr and back into a more sensible journal-based site did so much good for me, because while I was never embarrassed to be a primarily self-post blog, at least I know that the people who are subbed to me here are here exclusively for my thoughts and not just using me as a tertiary filter on their experience of the internet.
Oh well. It's not like I need any more reasons to hate the attention economy.
Maybe reposting and backdating my stuff finally gives them the attention they deserve, too.
Like, somewhere like on Twitter that's understandable b/c Twitter is all about New Content, All The Time, but on Tumblr people get weirdly apologetic about reading back through other people's blogs and reblogging stuff from two-three years ago -- something I also started doing because I'm usually also dropping people a notice that I'm informally "following" them (neener neener my dashboard is clean and my RSS feed finally works as intended, thank you DW), which means that Your New Content is the only way people really find out about what you're into and what you're passionate about.
And, well, in the attention economy new content is how you make it and please the almighty algorithms/get eyes on your stuff, so it makes sense The New Stuff is the only thing people pay attention to.
... and that's. IDK. That makes me inexplicably sad.
I have a massive backlog for anyone who cares to go through it. I used to have a tag I used exclusively for reblogs if people wanted to know who I interacted with and how, or to browse around for what I used to talk about in my tags, I used to have a tag for comments I added on reblogs, I had three different personal tags (a tradition I'm continuing on this journal -- some of y'all are not here for my life, you're here for the Spicy Takes About Fiction), and I tag for fandom and topic pretty heavily.
I have a tags page. I even had a tag cloud once upon a time so people could find out what was "big" on my blog, although that no longer works for reasons unknown to me. And that's how I had it set up while I still had search turned off. Now I don't care -- if someone wants to hate-search my blog for content to complain about that's no skin off my back because I'm done posting original content on Tumblr anyway. Finding out what I am "about", what I like, what I think about and how I go about thinking about it is easier than ever, but... it's no longer the norm.
The majority of my content up until I quit using Tumblr for anything but self-promotion was original content. I was always posting in a way that would make my tags fun to read backwards through -- or if not fun, at least informative or expressive. One of my big joys was finding people who had interesting things to say, and reading through their personal or fandom tags and getting to know their opinions. That's why getting the hell off Tumblr and back into a more sensible journal-based site did so much good for me, because while I was never embarrassed to be a primarily self-post blog, at least I know that the people who are subbed to me here are here exclusively for my thoughts and not just using me as a tertiary filter on their experience of the internet.
Oh well. It's not like I need any more reasons to hate the attention economy.
Maybe reposting and backdating my stuff finally gives them the attention they deserve, too.
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Date: 13/8/19 20:10 (UTC)[i still feel apologetic about reading through backlogs (even only a week of it) on tumblr because that's a learned social behaviour from that arena - to be oh sorry i'm not being creepy i just like your blog / hyperfixate. but it was always comforting for me, it reminded me of browsing on lj and it could keep me occupied for days, reading an entire archive, and i'd feel like i gained some perspective on changing things and learned a lot. but i'd feel 'guilty' because it was a thing to say on tumblr ]
[and of course, with 'callout culture' i do feel a little wary about going through archives, i might like to say, please don't block me, i'm not combing for receipts, i just really am enjoying the material' ]
[i was reading some of my own oc tumblr archive just this week, looking at how i've changed and how much 'stuff' i did put out there, because i wanted people to find value in my thoughts and my Take on The Shit. i told myself last time i did that that people on dw do follow you for your stuff, not your 'curation', and that i should back up my old original stuff even if it's totally 'off-topic'. like i ever cared about consistency more than superficially ]
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Date: 14/8/19 12:01 (UTC)And that was before search became functionally unusable >_>)
Anyway the attention economy is bad for the self-esteem of writers and also bad for the breadth of the discussion. I don't give a fuck anymore, although I'm annoyed that I now have to repost fucking. Errything when it's still there, perfectly discoverable on my Tumblr.
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Date: 14/8/19 03:35 (UTC)This is an interesting point about websites that encourage reblogging over posting original content. I was mostly using tumblr many years ago for curating fandom artwork and have found that pinterest is much more productive for that, even though a lot of content on pinterest ultimately comes from tumblr. At least pinterest is not pretending to even foster the illusion of interaction, I suppose.
A lot could be and has been written about the nature of how unpaid social media platforms have developed. A lot that is... not good.
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Date: 14/8/19 11:54 (UTC)no subject
Date: 14/8/19 13:52 (UTC)It is depressing for me as an artist that the free model seems to be failing but if a subscription model filters out Nazis then it’s probably necessary.
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Date: 14/8/19 16:32 (UTC)And... yeah, tbh, the biggest thing about the algorithm is that it directly contributes to mainstreaming (excellent video by Innuendo Studios here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gq0ZHgKT2tc) because the algorithm wasn't there to determine value, it was there to find what was popular and then make it more popular, because even a backlash is a form of attention.
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Date: 14/8/19 17:05 (UTC)But yeah. Algorithms are specifically created to encourage outrage right now and there’s no push to stop this because it’s profitable and probably too heady for the average user to understand.
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Date: 14/8/19 19:51 (UTC)Also it seems like people tend to disavow their old Tumblr stuff a lot, so they wouldn't *want* others reading their old posts and thinking that's what they're "about". The people saying they disavow anything more than one day old (or even two seconds old) are joking, yes, but there's a grain of truth to it. I've known at least one person who disavowed anything older than six months, and I think she was being entirely serious.
(I probably shouldn't have been as surprised as I was that, four years later, she is a very different person, and one I like rather less.)
(I think I have to go back about five *years* to start seeing significant amounts of stuff I don't currently endorse, and even then I both see a lot of my present self in past!me and tend to respect her even when I disagree.)
Personally, I link to my relevant old posts a lot, because I love making contextual posts but know I can't reasonably expect others to have memorised large chunks of my blog like I have. I'm very four-dimensional, and I too tend to find ephemeral post-streams sad.
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I do like the curation aspect of Tumblr, though. I don't think I could--no, I *empirically* could not jump straight into journal-style blogging. Curation gave me a chance to build my confidence, gradually ease into posting, and make connections so that I wasn't alone when I first started posting on Dreamwidth.
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Date: 14/8/19 20:35 (UTC)I don't think I've ever deleted shit off Tumblr, tbh. All my bad arguments, all my public spats, all my catastrophising breakdowns, they're all there, and I kind of just assume that people are going to be able to tell that Van From Five Years Ago is not Van From Right Now, Who Is On Meds And Also In Therapy, let alone the Baby Radfem Van From Eight Years Ago. But then again... the way I've been running my blog (i.e. focusing more on internal cohesion rather than reach through search and the like) based on the assumption that someone who likes me for my content will look back through my content to find more of it has ensured that I'm so obscure that I'm prolly never gonna end up in the middle of the kind of firestorm having your old dumb shit out there might cause.
And I can relate to "I can respect that even if I don't agree with it" -- the benefit to having the context of absolutely all of my bullshit right there is that I understand where my flirtation with anti-shipping came from, I understand where my TERFy and SWERFy baggage come from, and I can look at what I was going through to better understand why I would ever think that, god. That's the other benefit of just trying to maintain cohesion/continuity in my own work over... whatever it is that curation provides for people, I guess.
IDK. From this comment alone I think I might be missing something about why Tumblr is so popular b/c I've pretty much always followed people for the stuff they make, (and when people stop making original work I stop being interested in them) and if they have a reblog tag I can block, I often do that. The only curatory feeds I care about are my friends, b/c I need to know how to cater to them, pretty much.
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Date: 14/8/19 23:27 (UTC)It's interesting that you parse that as "anti-growth", when I've been parsing it as "over-the-top *pro*-growth". (Maybe you're referring to the muckraking and I'm referring to a backlash *against* muckraking?) I feel like people often...they don't *directly* accuse me of being anti-growth because they aren't talking with me in mind, but they say things like...hang on, I know a place from which I can pull a direct quote (formatting slightly adapted):
"In retrospect, I look back on that project and see a large number of things I did completely wrong. I’m fine with that. Looking back and *not* seeing a huge number of things I did wrong would mean that neither my writing nor my understanding had improved since 2009. "Oops" is the sound we make when we improve our beliefs and strategies; so to look back at a time and not see anything you did wrong means that you haven’t learned anything or changed your mind since then."
Stuff a lot like that, only in a more Tumblr-y register.
And this bothers me because I almost never look back at something and go "damn, I fucked up". Occasionally I'll look back at something and go "it was the best move under the circumstances, but I'd do it differently knowing what I know now", but even this seems a lot less common for me than a lot of people (though they could very well be exaggerating both the frequency and severity of the regret they feel).
I used "respect" mostly because I couldn't think of a better word: "why I would ever think that, god" is not really covered by the concept I had in mind. More "yeah, tbh, if I were operating under the constraints you were I'd probably do exactly the same thing".
(All this makes me *not* very good at telling that X From Five Years Ago is not the same as X From Right Now, since I tend to assume that Five-Years-Ago is still endorsed unless stated otherwise *and* that even if not *currently* endorsed, it's a pattern they're likely willing to go back to if necessary (though they might try harder now to avoid ever having it become necessary, having learned there are options they like better†). Since I know that this doesn't actually hold true for many people, I do worry about this sometimes when I'm archive-binging: trying to figure out which things I can integrate into my model of them as things-they-think and which are merely things-they-*used*-to-think, and probably failing.)
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A lot of people just seem to casually live with the belief that their future selves will think they're terrible, and I would find that crushing.
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>>if they have a reblog tag I can block, I often do that.<<
I can understand not wanting the hey-here's-a-neat-thing type of reblog, but "the comments you make on other posts are an integral part of your own blog" is perhaps the single thing I love most about Tumblr. On Dreamwidth I've been making do with posting links every fortnight or so to the places I've commented, but I think I'm the only one I've met who does that. Many--at first, all--of the things I write publicly are in response to others, and if people miss out on those they're only getting a small piece of the picture.
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†*If* indeed they like the current option better: there's the possibility that they are more constrained now than they were before, or coping with different-but-equally-bad constraints.
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Date: 15/8/19 13:12 (UTC)That lack of grounding is what puts me off from talking about anything to any great depth on Tumblr, and I'm also not interested in self-flagellating in every post where I discuss the impact and breadth of my previous opinions that I now disagree with, because that shit is terrible for my self-esteem. For me, "I understand where you're coming from" and "that's the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard" aren't contradictory, I can simultaneously call past me a fucking doofus with bad takes on everything while recognising that that genuinely was as good as I was capable of back then. I need to know what foundation I'm building on so my current opinions don't get corrupted by the same flaws in logic that led to my original bad opinions, and the way Tumblr encouraged understanding everything in a present tense just isn't useful for me and supportive of my personal growth.
Also, yeah, commentary is definitely a defining aspect of Tumblr, and I shouldn't have implied I ignore reblog additions. I consider those original content, and was mostly talking about eliminating reblogs without commentary from my feed. I had separate tags for shit I added thoughts to and shit I didn't.
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Date: 18/8/19 04:05 (UTC)If I didn't want to read what you write, why would I add you to the fire-hydrant.
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Date: 18/8/19 11:53 (UTC)no subject
Date: 18/8/19 23:44 (UTC)(I'm not using Tumblr as a social media though, moreso a aggregator for art and cool ideas and jokes)
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Date: 19/8/19 06:29 (UTC)