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

[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.