On Tumblr

[mark_asphodel]

I'm kind of not seeing the point of it, at least for me.

I have no intention of forwarding SO COOL stuff, however cute, funny, or instructional. That's exactly what I meant when I posted on tumblr comparing social media to chain email forwards. So there's this awesome cat gif or neat recipe or cosplay thing that 17,000 other people have already liked? That's cool, but I'm pretty sure those 17,000 likes and 5,000 reblogs don't need me adding to the noise.

And really, it's mostly just a noise machine.  Tumblr is not designed for dialogue.

So the real point of it, as far as I saw tumblr, was showcasing fan art. Well, the ethics of posting fanart basically leads me to this-- I'm not going to do it myself, and you basically have to "vet" every single piece that someone else posts to determine it's been sources and THEN whether or not the artist approves of reposting before you reblog no matter how much you like something, so I may as well just post a fanart roundup (links and all) of what I like every now and again on my DW like I've been doing these past few years. They'll get about as much traffic either way.

I'm not deleting my account there because there are some interesting things that take place on tumblr, but it's not fulfilling my needs for either fanart adoration or discussion.  I can use it as a dumping ground for ideas too frivolous for this journal, but eh.

ETA: Raphi pointed out that tumblr is at least all public-access so friends-locking and such is not an issue.  As someone who dislikes information being siloed I have to admit that's a huge point in its favor.

Comments

[raphiael]

For me, I think of the reblogging "cool" stuff as more self-reference, I guess. I have tags on my own blog that I go to when I want to look at cute stuff to cheer myself up, or awesome art to inspire myself. That kind of thing. I think the goal of tumblr for me is less sharing, more curating -- with a side of the "too frivolous for my serious journal" stuff. But it's definitely not for everyone, and I think if I didn't have a lot of friends who used tumblr exclusively, I wouldn't still be there.

[mark_asphodel]

I think the goal of tumblr for me is less sharing, more curating

That makes sense-- and for tumblr, you do have pretty excellent taste. But for me, it kind of crosses the line between watching some awesome cat video on YouTube and MAYBE sending it to my husband via IM or spamming that same video to my entire address book. I have my little picture hoards and bookmark hoards and such and I guess it'd be nice to have them all in one place with tags, so I can see the appeal there.

But in terms of interaction with other people/entities? Deeply dissatisfying experience.

[queenlua]

Amusingly enough, I had a tumblr many moons ago (2010ish?) that I used exclusively as a place to dump links/art/etc that amused me. Using it at a social platform didn't even occur to me at the time; I didn't know anyone else who used Tumblr and the only blogs I followed were topic-specific ones.

I ended up moving away that time when I discovered a platform I found more suited for curation: Pinboard, which is less visually sexy but just as functional for the purposes of "save this link and tag it for me." As an added bonus, it gives you privacy controls (which was important for me, since I didn't want to link, say, too many articles related to my university or hometown on a public platform, bla bla personally identifying info).

I still use the service and am very pleased with it, in the event you ever want to move off Tumblr or would like the option to curate with privacy locks.

[lyndis]

Yeah, I think tumblr fandom sucks ass. the setup is not conducive to actual discussion and people started crying the instant tumblr changed-- wahhh back to lj/dw/whatever. really? stfu and stop being so finnicky. these people just pick up the cool new site until it's not cool anymore anyway. fuck that shit.

the whole fanart thing is getting annoying. i just gave up caring. if it's sourced i reblog but i generally only reblog art i really like and then i generally check out the source site also.

[raphiael]

Disagree on the crying over layout changes. The layout change has legitimately made the site unusable for a lot of people and purposes, and Tumblr staff tends to roll out new, buggy changes very frequently, despite the protests of its community, as well as going out of its way to break add-ons instead of working with the add-on makers or incorporating the features into its platform. We cried the exact same way when LJ changed and moved en masse to DW (after a lot of bitching still on LJ), didn't we? Because the site runners didn't listen to us or care about our concerns or utilization of their platform. It's no different.

[mark_asphodel]

The layout change has legitimately made the site unusable for a lot of people and purposes, and Tumblr staff tends to roll out new, buggy changes very frequently, despite the protests of its community

Yeah. Whether Facebook, Meetup, LJ, or tumbr, when staff make changes that break functionality and appear not to give a toss about the end users, that's a legit complaint. In the case of LJ, we had a viable alternative that actually met our needs in DW. In the case of Meetup, which we use for our astronomy club, we haven't got a viable alternative that won't inconvenience our 250-odd users, so we're stuck.

[lyndis]

yeah but most people were on tumblr all of maybe a year while most of us on LJ were there for 5-10 years and some of us were paying to use the site. afaik nobody is paying to use tumblr.

[raphiael]

That's not true in the least - Tumblr has paid layouts and traffic-generators, as well as ads that they get money for you to look at, incorporated through means that, unlike LJ, you can't adblock out. And Tumblr's been around since 2007, and many of the people complaining have been there -- that's longer than I've been on LJ. The newness and hipness of a site does not suddenly negate its customers' right to complain or leave. And on the internet, users = customers. Traffic generates income. "Let's bring our traffic to a site that actually cares about us" is 100% valid, regardless of how many years you've been giving that traffic.

[queenlua]

ads that they get money for you to look at

"If you're not paying for it, you are the product."

This isn't me saying that folks don't have a right to complain, because they absolutely do. But any service that relies on advertising dollars is, by its nature, going to be more interested in pleasing those advertisers than its users. In Tumblr's case, AFAIK it's still existing off VC dollars, but the same principle applies—if they think they can grow the site more by pissing off a quarter of its userbase, it's going to piss off a quarter of its userbase every time, and thus the complaints may fall on deaf ears.

(And it's possible that the users complaining on Tumblr are a small minority. I remember a chat I had with an Etsy engineer—people took to the fourms on that website in droves whenever they had a complaint about a site change/feature/whatever, and they'd get all "clearly the Etsy staff is just IGNORING us," "why haven't they responded to this critical issue?!" etc. But the engineer had approx. a billion statistics on site use/bugs/etc, and as he read the forums he was just thinking, "We're not ignoring you! Just, we have the numbers here! Only 0.0002% of site users have a problem with this feature and we can't make both you and the 99.9998 happy!")

It's unfortunate, since due to the nature of How Social Interaction Works on the Web, there's simply not many alternative models for interacting where You Own Your Own User Experience and It Will Not Change Unless You Want it To. It's legitimately difficult/impossible for website operators to maintain "legacy" versions of their code for people who want to keep old versions of the site, but when they do want to refresh things or add features or whatnot, it affects everyone.

For this reason, sites like DW and Pinboard that deliberately buck the "free account but ads for all!" trend are pretty interesting to me. Not a guaranteed-perfect model, mind, since you still have to trust the people running those services—but at least they're directly accountable to their users, rather than a VC or advertisers, and at least in those two cases I've been quite satisfied with the result.

[kyusil]

I'm not sure I get the public access thing. One of the turn-offs of Tumblr (as a personal blog) for me was the lack of having that option. And considering how many private or small-scale spats end up going viral there, with everybody on the site needing to throw their two cents in having at least the option of privacy control might not be a bad idea. Granted, given the nature of the platform one could argue that it's the users' fault for posting sensitive info in the first place, but by and large here we're talking about teenagers. Dumb kids who are going to regret all this later in life and are entirely unable to do damage control. At least make privacy control an option.

Re: fanart, this is one reason I'm one of the dinosaurs who didn't jump ship from deviantART to Tumblr. Because I can keep track of my own art and the art I like. People suddenly started posting exclusively to Tumblr, which makes negative sense to me. You already had a perfectly good artists' platform! Ah well. It should only be a matter of time until they come back? '~'

[queenlua]

Having all posts public is a design choice—and while that makes Tumblr unsuited for certain use cases, offering a privacy option would probably stifle the openness/quickness of discussions, which may well be a drawback to the majority of its users.

Example: while I love the DW/LJ paradigm to bits, I do think that if you're new to a fandom on those sites, it's pretty common to encounter a bunch of "friends only" locks and very little discussion that you, the confused newcomer, can access, which is a bit discouraging and off-putting from the outset.

But on Tumblr, it's less intimidating and easier to participate in discussion, insomuch as that exists—just jump in the Fire Emblem tag or onto a random blog and respond to something there. Then if you like anyone participating in the discussion, you don't have to wonder if you're "friends" or not if or if it'd be creepy to ask for access; you just follow them, no fuss.

It's possible that the LJ communities functioned like this back when they were active, but I wasn't around then, so I can't comment on that experience. But it's worth noting that while I much prefer DW/LJ as a social platform, there's a huge chunk of my flist that I didn't add here until I interacted with them some on Tumblr first, because it just "feels" easier to meet new folks there, and that's probably a direct result of everything being public.

[mark_asphodel]

I do think that if you're new to a fandom on those sites, it's pretty common to encounter a bunch of "friends only" locks and very little discussion that you, the confused newcomer, can access, which is a bit discouraging and off-putting from the outset.

This is my single biggest beef with the move from website-based fandom to journal-based fandom. I hate it. Hatehatehatehate.

It's possible that the LJ communities functioned like this back when they were active

The comms I lurked on (in other fandoms-- HP, for example) were pretty intimidating in the same way major message boards and Usenet groups were intimidating. They had regulars and cultures and mods... the official sort and the self-appointed sort. Good place to browse and shitty to post.

[kyusil]

I feel like that is true of any established fandom though, wherever it is. I'm similarly intimidated-- if that's the word we're going to use-- by Tumblr fandom as I know it gets into the sort of routine drama and fights that are just indicative of public fandom space. And which I'm just done with, personally. IMO you're going to have to pay a price no matter where you go.

Thankfully with emblemology those barriers seem to be coming down in places. I know it's served as a reminder to me to unlock my fandom-related entries!

[samuraiter]

the ethics of posting fanart

This is one of my major reservations about the place, as well.

[amielleon]

Personally I like it precisely because it's the new generation of chainmail -- except unlike the old model of chainmail, where shit fell into my inbox and I couldn't do much to keep it from doing so other than sending snide emails back to the people sending it -- I can to some extent select what kind of mass-circulated content I am interested in.

Also it helps me keep in touch with some friends who don't hang on any other mutual sites. When you IM or email someone there's a certain sense of etiquette that you won't do so frivolously if you don't have a standing norm of regular contact. On the other hand, passive contact through a social media site such as tumblr is both non-awkward and effective at keeping up some level of being in each others' lives.

I did certainly have the thought, however, that being ethical about fanart essentially meant barring the use of Tumblr for what its format is best at doing.