I like to imagine tumblr is mostly populated by ages 12-20 to spare myself a lot of headache. Because honestly that's what a lot of it feels like to me: cliquey high school posturing, and oddly disconnected from the real world. And sure, there was a lot of this happening on LJ too (and elsewhere), but never on such a wide yet centralized scale. Eh centralized is probably not the right word I guess. Maybe the better way to describe it is unapologetically public? (though Tumblr actually feels a lot like an exploded version of ontd to me)
But yeah my one biggest turnoff re: the social justice scene on Tumblr has consistently been that aggressive focus on easy targets/surface symptoms (which I do think has a place in the conversation but is ultimately kinda unproductive, especially when it starts to dominate the conversation). Plus the way Tumblr works is that it's more or less established this bizarre universe of "this is bad" vs "this good" with not much room for gray area in between (even when individual posts are nuanced, that kind of thing tends to get buried in the overall hive mind). At best it's offputting, and at worst it's kind of a dangerous mentality...
Every time I get tempted to use tumblr properly instead of as a lurker, I'm reminded of how much I hate fannish culture there and would rather just not deal. I don't even know how to articulate it -- like you said, at some point it just kind of stopped making sense. On one hand, I sometimes suspect this is just the natural evolution of stuff like anon memes/ontd/fandom_wank... but that doesn't make it any less weird.
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But yeah my one biggest turnoff re: the social justice scene on Tumblr has consistently been that aggressive focus on easy targets/surface symptoms (which I do think has a place in the conversation but is ultimately kinda unproductive, especially when it starts to dominate the conversation). Plus the way Tumblr works is that it's more or less established this bizarre universe of "this is bad" vs "this good" with not much room for gray area in between (even when individual posts are nuanced, that kind of thing tends to get buried in the overall hive mind). At best it's offputting, and at worst it's kind of a dangerous mentality...
Every time I get tempted to use tumblr properly instead of as a lurker, I'm reminded of how much I hate fannish culture there and would rather just not deal. I don't even know how to articulate it -- like you said, at some point it just kind of stopped making sense. On one hand, I sometimes suspect this is just the natural evolution of stuff like anon memes/ontd/fandom_wank... but that doesn't make it any less weird.