Social media platform review: Tumblr trouble
The second post in my series reviewing my experience and usage of social media platforms focuses on Tumblr, which was Fandom Central for a decade and arguably left indelible marks on fandom and online culture. A full rundown of Tumblr's history, fandom significance, and recent developments is beyond the scope of this post, which is about my personal experiences of the platform. Tumblr is well known enough that I won't be explaining some of its basics as I did with Mastodon, so if you need more information please refer to the links in this paragraph.
Current and future posts in this series are:
Summary of platform: Multi-format blogging site with nearly limitless image hosting and unique--and problematic--reblog functions.
Platform usage: Image-heavy fan posts and meta, "collecting" content I like, discussions and discourse
I am certain I would never have gone to Tumblr if Dreamwidth weren't so dead. I had been on LiveJournal and then on DW for years during the peak of my Avatar: The Last Airbender fandom involvement. I was comfortable with the platforms, particularly DW that I was getting settled into, and had made friends there. I had a Tumblr since 2011, but used it extremely intermittently through 2011-2013 and not at all in 2014.1 I found the platform confusing and had heard horror stories about it.
Most of my DW friends were on Tumblr, though. That was where fandom was. I might be getting one update every three days on my DW feed, and I didn't know how to find new people. Tumblr looked intimidating but also increasingly tempting with its neverending rush of content, including incredibly image-heavy content that I couldn't imagine doing on DW. I saw fairly ordinary fannish Tumblr posts getting hundreds and thousands of notes and I wanted that interaction, that validation. In early 2015 logged into my inactive Tumblr account, took a breath, and dove in.
As expected, I hated it. I had no idea how to find people, how reblogs worked, how tags worked. I still had the same people-finding problem for a while; I found a lot of stuff relevant to my interests through site-wide search, but the search function was crap for more detailed terms. At the same time, the moment I started following more people I was drowning in content. The site was disorganized and confusing, with more content than I knew what to do with and too little of the stuff I wanted. I almost ragequit more than once, believing I was too old or this and perpetually out of place.
Dreamwidth was still dead, though, and I was out of ideas. I kept on with Tumblr, if intermittently.
I got used to the platform gradually, then in spurts. I found more people to follow by ogling posts and the threads they spawned, and quickly learned the best stuff was not in the tags but on my dash--if I curated it well enough. I figured out how reblog worked and learned to reblog "clean" while adding tag commentary. I even started to queue posts after a while. The firehose of content, which I found so alienating and unmanageable, became increasingly alluring. Arguing on reblogs felt cathartic if ultimately unfulfilling. I was starting to get hooked.
What finally got me hardcore into Tumblr was finding the big and active fandom for the new Star Wars movies. I didn't really get into the fandom until Rogue One, but once I did I was totally sucked in. There was so much fanwork to consume, so many interesting ideas and theories to discuss, so many raging arguments to be had.
I also reblogged avidly because it was often impossible to find stuff on Tumblr once it had passed by my dash. Sitewide search was pretty much hopeless for detailed searches. Even if you remembered what blog you saw a piece of art or a text post on, the search might still fail or that particular blog's tag system might be impenetrable--or, a personal horror of mine (shared by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rose_griffes), the blog might not use tags at all. URL changing is free and forwarding is not provided by default,2 meaning some links were irreversibly broken even if the user was active and keeping the original post online and accessible.3 Just about the only way I could be sure to find content in the future was to reblog it and lock it down to my own tagging system. It was like I was playing Pokémon with Tumblr posts, "gotta catch 'em all!" Looking back I was very much showing my traditional blogging background, seeing my blog as a fixed archive rather than something fleeting and ephemeral.
On the creator side I again found myself producing long and involved analytical essays which have always been my default mode of engagement with fandom. I know Tumblr is not really the right format for long essays, or for content organization in general, but my posts were getting read and generating discussion which was really all I wanted.
I also branched out into the kind of content that Tumblr's image hosting and gallery format made possible, such as edits of animated gifs and visual parallels. This edit set illustrating the concepts of cultural appropriation and cultural sharing through Avatar: The Last Airbender was arguably a meta post in itself that would have been a lot wordier and, frankly, more boring in pure text.4 The emergence of such edit and gif posts was a case of the medium defining and creating content, and as far as I can tell fandom is still searching for an alternative to Tumblr for these kinds of posts.5
I had come around from disliking Tumblr outright to enjoying myself and spending a great deal of time on it, but all was not well. The very things that made Tumblr so engaging, the constant flow of content, the drama and discourse, were also starting to wear on my nerves. Looking back at my DW entries, I was making noise as early as December 2017 about spending time away from Tumblr.
I would still go on with Tumblr for another year until, eventually, Tumblr discourse caught up to me on a personal level and Tumblr's business model caught up to it on a sitewide level. Exactly one year after my 2017 post about taking a break/leaving, I made another post announcing I was spending less time on Tumblr and spreading out to other platforms.
For two years of intensive use, Tumblr was my go-to place for all sorts of fannish content whether it was suitable for that content or not: Long meta essays, liveblog threads composed of short impressions, image-heavy posts of animated gifs and edits, and reblogs of other people's content. The first category, essays, are being ported over here to DW. I have Mastodon now for liveblogs and it works much better for the purpose than Tumblr did.6 The third category of animated gif/edits posts have no easy alternative, and I will continue to use Tumblr for that purpose in the near future alongside Pillowfort.
As for the fourth category, reblogs, I don't feel as much of a need to collect content now that I've leaned back from Tumblr. When I do go on Tumblr I still queue things I like on my dash and that's about it. Reblogging is such a distinctive function of Tumblr, a very fraught one at that which takes away or at least limits creators' control over their content. It has also been an avenue for conflict and harassment along with sitewide search/tagging. It's no wonder there was horror at the suggestion of bringing reblogs to Dreamwidth. As much enjoyment and creativity as the reblog channeled for me and millions of other users, it should be left at Tumblr's doorstep.
I'm glad for the time I spent time on Tumblr. I was able to stretch myself as a fan and as a writer there. It's where I made--and broke--relationships with other fans. I'm just as glad to get away from Tumblr, and to make more use of other platforms. Tumblr will remain a tool for me in fandom communication and content hosting; it just won't be my only outlet anymore, and it never should have been.
Notes:
1. Source: My Tumblr archive. You can look through your archive, too, by appending /archive after your URL. I think you'll find it interesting.
2. Users could code a redirect into their blog themes, but as with all client-side replacements for what are properly server-side functions it was imperfect at best. The linked example would not work for clients who had disabled Javascript.
3. This wouldn't be a problem if it were a case of the creator not wanting the post to be accessible anymore, e.g. they deleted the post or deactivated. But you frequently had these situation where creators wanted their content found and users wanted to find it, but couldn't because the site functioned so poorly. And of course, reblogs that persisted despite edits and deletes to the original meant that creators who didn't want their content found and circulated anymore were out of luck if it had already been reblogged too widely.
4. In fact, I started that post as a text post before I realized it would be better in visual form.
5. Pillowfort has reblogs but no reblog with commentary, and currently next to no image hosting.
6. For example I did a thread on S1E12 of Star Wars: Resistance while watching, and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy starting with Book 1: Dawn.
Current and future posts in this series are:
Summary of platform: Multi-format blogging site with nearly limitless image hosting and unique--and problematic--reblog functions.
Platform usage: Image-heavy fan posts and meta, "collecting" content I like, discussions and discourse
I am certain I would never have gone to Tumblr if Dreamwidth weren't so dead. I had been on LiveJournal and then on DW for years during the peak of my Avatar: The Last Airbender fandom involvement. I was comfortable with the platforms, particularly DW that I was getting settled into, and had made friends there. I had a Tumblr since 2011, but used it extremely intermittently through 2011-2013 and not at all in 2014.1 I found the platform confusing and had heard horror stories about it.
Most of my DW friends were on Tumblr, though. That was where fandom was. I might be getting one update every three days on my DW feed, and I didn't know how to find new people. Tumblr looked intimidating but also increasingly tempting with its neverending rush of content, including incredibly image-heavy content that I couldn't imagine doing on DW. I saw fairly ordinary fannish Tumblr posts getting hundreds and thousands of notes and I wanted that interaction, that validation. In early 2015 logged into my inactive Tumblr account, took a breath, and dove in.
As expected, I hated it. I had no idea how to find people, how reblogs worked, how tags worked. I still had the same people-finding problem for a while; I found a lot of stuff relevant to my interests through site-wide search, but the search function was crap for more detailed terms. At the same time, the moment I started following more people I was drowning in content. The site was disorganized and confusing, with more content than I knew what to do with and too little of the stuff I wanted. I almost ragequit more than once, believing I was too old or this and perpetually out of place.
Dreamwidth was still dead, though, and I was out of ideas. I kept on with Tumblr, if intermittently.
I got used to the platform gradually, then in spurts. I found more people to follow by ogling posts and the threads they spawned, and quickly learned the best stuff was not in the tags but on my dash--if I curated it well enough. I figured out how reblog worked and learned to reblog "clean" while adding tag commentary. I even started to queue posts after a while. The firehose of content, which I found so alienating and unmanageable, became increasingly alluring. Arguing on reblogs felt cathartic if ultimately unfulfilling. I was starting to get hooked.
What finally got me hardcore into Tumblr was finding the big and active fandom for the new Star Wars movies. I didn't really get into the fandom until Rogue One, but once I did I was totally sucked in. There was so much fanwork to consume, so many interesting ideas and theories to discuss, so many raging arguments to be had.
I also reblogged avidly because it was often impossible to find stuff on Tumblr once it had passed by my dash. Sitewide search was pretty much hopeless for detailed searches. Even if you remembered what blog you saw a piece of art or a text post on, the search might still fail or that particular blog's tag system might be impenetrable--or, a personal horror of mine (shared by
rose_griffes), the blog might not use tags at all. URL changing is free and forwarding is not provided by default,2 meaning some links were irreversibly broken even if the user was active and keeping the original post online and accessible.3 Just about the only way I could be sure to find content in the future was to reblog it and lock it down to my own tagging system. It was like I was playing Pokémon with Tumblr posts, "gotta catch 'em all!" Looking back I was very much showing my traditional blogging background, seeing my blog as a fixed archive rather than something fleeting and ephemeral.On the creator side I again found myself producing long and involved analytical essays which have always been my default mode of engagement with fandom. I know Tumblr is not really the right format for long essays, or for content organization in general, but my posts were getting read and generating discussion which was really all I wanted.
I also branched out into the kind of content that Tumblr's image hosting and gallery format made possible, such as edits of animated gifs and visual parallels. This edit set illustrating the concepts of cultural appropriation and cultural sharing through Avatar: The Last Airbender was arguably a meta post in itself that would have been a lot wordier and, frankly, more boring in pure text.4 The emergence of such edit and gif posts was a case of the medium defining and creating content, and as far as I can tell fandom is still searching for an alternative to Tumblr for these kinds of posts.5
I had come around from disliking Tumblr outright to enjoying myself and spending a great deal of time on it, but all was not well. The very things that made Tumblr so engaging, the constant flow of content, the drama and discourse, were also starting to wear on my nerves. Looking back at my DW entries, I was making noise as early as December 2017 about spending time away from Tumblr.
I would still go on with Tumblr for another year until, eventually, Tumblr discourse caught up to me on a personal level and Tumblr's business model caught up to it on a sitewide level. Exactly one year after my 2017 post about taking a break/leaving, I made another post announcing I was spending less time on Tumblr and spreading out to other platforms.
For two years of intensive use, Tumblr was my go-to place for all sorts of fannish content whether it was suitable for that content or not: Long meta essays, liveblog threads composed of short impressions, image-heavy posts of animated gifs and edits, and reblogs of other people's content. The first category, essays, are being ported over here to DW. I have Mastodon now for liveblogs and it works much better for the purpose than Tumblr did.6 The third category of animated gif/edits posts have no easy alternative, and I will continue to use Tumblr for that purpose in the near future alongside Pillowfort.
As for the fourth category, reblogs, I don't feel as much of a need to collect content now that I've leaned back from Tumblr. When I do go on Tumblr I still queue things I like on my dash and that's about it. Reblogging is such a distinctive function of Tumblr, a very fraught one at that which takes away or at least limits creators' control over their content. It has also been an avenue for conflict and harassment along with sitewide search/tagging. It's no wonder there was horror at the suggestion of bringing reblogs to Dreamwidth. As much enjoyment and creativity as the reblog channeled for me and millions of other users, it should be left at Tumblr's doorstep.
I'm glad for the time I spent time on Tumblr. I was able to stretch myself as a fan and as a writer there. It's where I made--and broke--relationships with other fans. I'm just as glad to get away from Tumblr, and to make more use of other platforms. Tumblr will remain a tool for me in fandom communication and content hosting; it just won't be my only outlet anymore, and it never should have been.
Notes:
1. Source: My Tumblr archive. You can look through your archive, too, by appending /archive after your URL. I think you'll find it interesting.
2. Users could code a redirect into their blog themes, but as with all client-side replacements for what are properly server-side functions it was imperfect at best. The linked example would not work for clients who had disabled Javascript.
3. This wouldn't be a problem if it were a case of the creator not wanting the post to be accessible anymore, e.g. they deleted the post or deactivated. But you frequently had these situation where creators wanted their content found and users wanted to find it, but couldn't because the site functioned so poorly. And of course, reblogs that persisted despite edits and deletes to the original meant that creators who didn't want their content found and circulated anymore were out of luck if it had already been reblogged too widely.
4. In fact, I started that post as a text post before I realized it would be better in visual form.
5. Pillowfort has reblogs but no reblog with commentary, and currently next to no image hosting.
6. For example I did a thread on S1E12 of Star Wars: Resistance while watching, and Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis trilogy starting with Book 1: Dawn.