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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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.