Tumblr, fandom, and setting expectations
So remember the old days, when we used to write about other people's posts in our own spaces rather than just reblogging everything, maybe with commentary, maybe with a few thoughts hidden in the tags? I miss those days, so here I am, being the change I want to see.
This post about Tumblr and people's issues* with it was making the rounds a little while ago, and it struck a nerve with me. I don't disagree with the original poster's complaint, exactly -- there often is something dysfunctional about the way people interact on Tumblr, and that detracts from my enjoyment of both the site and of fandom as a whole. But it seems to me that the OP has cause and effect exactly backwards. Tumblr isn't a personal journaling site that people are treating like a public forum. Tumblr is a public forum that people are treating like a personal journaling site. Tumblr is a broadcast medium, specifically designed to promote the sharing of content as quickly as possible to as many people as possible. It is not meant for private conversation or personal journaling, so folks shouldn't be surprised when trying to use it that way is a disappointing experience.
I feel like I've been beating this drum a lot, especially since the end of Tumblr comments (and was there ever a more clear sign that Tumblr doesn't want to be a conversation platform than their decision to take away commenting?), and you might fairly ask why I care. It's purely selfish in the end -- I think fandom would be a better place if we would accept Tumblr's limitations and use it for the type of content and interaction that does work well there -- sharing multimedia, links, memes, and other short-form content. As far as I'm concerned, Tumblr works best when you treat it like Twitter writ large. No one expects Twitter to host personal conversations. No one expects an unlocked Tweet to be private. No one expects to avoid spoilers or negative commentary about characters they like. No one expects Twitter to serve as a long-form archive. And yet these are all complains that I hear about Tumblr on a regular basis. The secret to happiness is setting proper expectations, and the way to do that as a Tumblr user is to embrace the site for what it is, rather than fighting the interface to make it into something that it isn't, and was never meant to be.
I get the desire to have your entire community living on a single site. But the days of One Platform to Rule Them All are long behind us, if that particular beast ever even existed. Is it more trouble to go to Twitter for news and links, Tumblr for images and memes, Dreamwidth for meta and discussion, AO3 for fic? Maybe so, but I find that playing to the strengths of each site is making me happier overall. If that means I drift away from some elements of my fandom community, so be it -- I miss some people who I don't see nearly as much as I used to, but I hope to enjoy the time I do spend interacting with them all the more.
*Linking to a reblog because the OP deleted the post. The respondent here words things more strongly than I would have, but as you might guess I largely agree. The fact that the OP can delete but the reblogs live on forever is a whole other can of worms with Tumblr's design, but getting into that would be a different post.
This post about Tumblr and people's issues* with it was making the rounds a little while ago, and it struck a nerve with me. I don't disagree with the original poster's complaint, exactly -- there often is something dysfunctional about the way people interact on Tumblr, and that detracts from my enjoyment of both the site and of fandom as a whole. But it seems to me that the OP has cause and effect exactly backwards. Tumblr isn't a personal journaling site that people are treating like a public forum. Tumblr is a public forum that people are treating like a personal journaling site. Tumblr is a broadcast medium, specifically designed to promote the sharing of content as quickly as possible to as many people as possible. It is not meant for private conversation or personal journaling, so folks shouldn't be surprised when trying to use it that way is a disappointing experience.
I feel like I've been beating this drum a lot, especially since the end of Tumblr comments (and was there ever a more clear sign that Tumblr doesn't want to be a conversation platform than their decision to take away commenting?), and you might fairly ask why I care. It's purely selfish in the end -- I think fandom would be a better place if we would accept Tumblr's limitations and use it for the type of content and interaction that does work well there -- sharing multimedia, links, memes, and other short-form content. As far as I'm concerned, Tumblr works best when you treat it like Twitter writ large. No one expects Twitter to host personal conversations. No one expects an unlocked Tweet to be private. No one expects to avoid spoilers or negative commentary about characters they like. No one expects Twitter to serve as a long-form archive. And yet these are all complains that I hear about Tumblr on a regular basis. The secret to happiness is setting proper expectations, and the way to do that as a Tumblr user is to embrace the site for what it is, rather than fighting the interface to make it into something that it isn't, and was never meant to be.
I get the desire to have your entire community living on a single site. But the days of One Platform to Rule Them All are long behind us, if that particular beast ever even existed. Is it more trouble to go to Twitter for news and links, Tumblr for images and memes, Dreamwidth for meta and discussion, AO3 for fic? Maybe so, but I find that playing to the strengths of each site is making me happier overall. If that means I drift away from some elements of my fandom community, so be it -- I miss some people who I don't see nearly as much as I used to, but I hope to enjoy the time I do spend interacting with them all the more.
*Linking to a reblog because the OP deleted the post. The respondent here words things more strongly than I would have, but as you might guess I largely agree. The fact that the OP can delete but the reblogs live on forever is a whole other can of worms with Tumblr's design, but getting into that would be a different post.
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Sadly, I don't have time to retype it. The short version is that I've seen a lot of people on twitter and tumblr fail to understand that both of these services are public broadcast platforms. A number of "fail to understand what twitter is" cases have been covered by journalists.
I agree with you 9000% regarding the above but I also think that tumblr is a very deceptive platform because it advertises itself as a blogging system but it is actually twitter on steroids.
The other thing is:
I find that playing to the strengths of each site is making me happier overall
me too. Although Tumblr has a very low barrier to entry compared to LJ, DW, AO3, FF.net, DevArt, the Wikias, etc. Each of those platforms are geared towards content creators. Tumblr is all about setting up your blog and reblogging to your hearts content. Some people think of tumblr as a place where they create and curate an image of themselves that is personal albeit internet searchable. So, I can see how people form misconceptions about the platform...
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When I started using Tumblr, it was with the intention of being like Twitter, but for the stuff Twitter couldn't handle -- slightly longer comments, media, adding commentary to links. I never expected it to become my primary fandom platform, and yet here we are. I feel like I've made a little progress sneaking back here via crossposting, but only a little.
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I remember having accounts on LJ and DeviantArt and ff.net and a few other sites, and using mostly the same names for each, and 90% of my online (and plenty of offline) friends also having the same, and all of us interacting across all platforms as needed, and though the exact platforms might be different now, but it was really effective, both for fandom participation and for social interaction, and I miss having all those options.
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Yeah, I've never been a single-account person either. I wonder if it wasn't the fact that Tumblr, as a multimedia platform, seemed like it might be the ideal place to try it?
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I have wondered that, too, and I have a really strong feeling that what'd happen is I'd just never see most of my friends again. :/ I'm happy that the crossposting feature exists, but for me, I guess the ideal sort of thing I'd post to tumblr would be those short, punctuation-less/tumblr dialect commentary posts, you know? whereas what I'd post to Dreamwidth would be... the kind of more personal/meaty things I already do, but more frequently.
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I wonder how the rise of popularity of Tumblr and the decline of communities on journalling platforms is related. A few years ago to find new people in the same fandom and to talk with them I searched for that fandom's comm. Today there are fewer/less active comms (in my perception; not sure if there really are more anon/kinkmemes or if I just didn't know them before) and to find people to talk about a new fandom more often I have to go to their personal journals, which feels like a higher entry barrier.
It may also have something to do with the rise of AO3's popularity: fic announcement comms are less necessary than they were when most fic was on LJ.
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ETA: Clearly people who felt a bit overloaded by the idea that LJ or DW was for Long Well Thought Out Blog Posts or Not At All are much happier using Twitter for sharing their transient ideas, as well. I was very sad when I saw that misconception take hold. Because I think it reduced people's desire to post here.
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I hadn't thought of that, but yes, there is a perception that LJ or DW are for "proper" blog posts, not just a few lines here or there. That probably also creates a higher entry barrier for new people.
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I agree, it is too bad. It's hard not to have that thought, though -- even I am less likely to put short, throwaway posts on DW, although now that I crosspost most of my entries to Tumblr it makes more sense to me. But once I got out of the habit of making posts like that here, it's been challenging to start doing it again.
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But I do see that many people have a different feeling about what's appropriate for each platform.
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Why fandom chose Tumblr as its new home rather than Dreamwidth (which is basically just LJ, designed with fandom in mind, without the evil corporate overlords) has always baffled me a little bit, but that's where they went, and that's where they stay.
To my mind, the end of fic announcement comms was caused by death of Delicious. Most of the newsletter comms I'm familiar with depended on Delicious to aggregate their links, and when Delicious changed format drastically, it became much harder to use as a back end.
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Makes you wonder what will happen with tumblr.
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But still.
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But it's my impression that some people did leave LJ over that, but many other fannish people made their peace and stayed. Then as Tumblr and Twitter gained momentum, more people didn't really leave LJ as neglect it for other platforms.
And with AO3 for fic posting, the decline of comms on both LJ and DW accelerated too.
My point, which I didn't really clarify very well, was that after the founding of DW and AO3 all the existing trends kept accelerating.
I wasn't aware of the impact of Delicious -- I'd forgotten about that! Thanks.
Platforms have a huge impact on us, for sure.
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It was the progression of things, I think -- Strikethrough, Boldthrough, the end of subject lines. It's more in retrospect, to me, that Strikethrough was the beginning of the end of fandom on LJ (just as, in retrospect, we may see the loss of commenting features as the beginning of the end of fandom on Tumblr, although of course it's too soon to say). I agree that, in the end, it's been more benign neglect than dramatic departures. I still crosspost to LJ, although I don't check my friends list there nearly as regularly as I do here.
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I've repeatedly toyed with the idea of starting a Tumblr, but for me there's a much higher bar to entry, to wit I am completely unfamiliar with how it works, so it's a big investment of learning and trial-and-error. (And, ultimately, would require a shift in How I Fandom that I so far have been unwilling to make; I *want* discussion, and I *especially* want that discussion and its attached content to have stable URLs and be findable through a search!)
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I've also seen recently where some people get mad when people respond to them on Twitter - not in harassing ways, which are always unacceptable, but just asking questions and making comments, having a conversation like the Twitter platform is meant for. And it IS what it's meant for. You can either ignore the comments or engage with them, but telling people not to make them is futile.
The current generation of social media is not meant for safe personal spaces. I'm hoping someone, someday soon, creates a hybrid space where we can be more in control of our own spaces. But until then, I'm not sure why people refuse to understand the limits of the sites they choose to use.
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The idea that Tumblr can or should be a safe space is particularly baffling to me. Every single aspect of the interface fights against that notion.
Sounds like I've mostly been lucky not to run into this attitude on Twitter. I wonder if it's less prevalent because you can have a locked Twitter account, and also the blocking tools are fairly robust. Tumblr has rudimentary blocking tools, but they aren't nearly as good, and although it's possible to password-protect your Tumblr, I think hardly anyone ever does.
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Prompted by your post I just scrolled through it for a bit and realized that the only thing I miss on it is the fabulous clothing Tumblrs I follow that post amazing period costume. In fact, I used it more as a way to collect reference for art than anything else.
Rather than finding the entry level to starting up a Tumblr blog easy, I have found it baffling the whole time. I never understood either the etiquette or how people managed to feel themselves connected to fandom in such a sea of stuff - but maybe that's just a product of the types of blogs I ended up following, as I stated above.
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I've always felt like it's relatively easy to find people to follow, but very difficult to actually strike up a conversation with someone, even before replies went away.
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What's curious to me is that classic Who fandom on Tumblr thrives and prospers in meta-land. Lots of Meta. Challenges, questionnaires, prompts, photosets with commentary, audio clips with commentary, fanart with commentary — it's hard not to engage in those discussions, despite Tumblr driving us batty. I think it's partly the nature of that fandom: it's a 50+ span of material, much of it from the 60s through the 80s, and people have to give at least a little meta/context for everything they share, because nobody in fandom is familiar with all of it.
I've seen meta-posts for Steven Universe like that. Interestingly, Harry Potter tends to drive a lot of long meta-posts, which makes me think this could be more true of older fandoms where the initial "oo shiny" has worn off, and the people sticking with the fandom are going deeper.
Obviously that would be easier on DW, except (a) Tumblr's where the action is and (b) being able to embed audio clips, video clips, or incorporate images into meta can be handy. I find myself missing it now when I don't have a quick-and-easy mechanism for doing so.
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It does make me wonder what the DW experience would be like if there were some good free third-party hosting sites for images, gifs and vids that were easily integrated with posting on DW — part of the appeal of tumblr is the ease of multimedia sharing and the free hosting of the multimedia in question. The hosting comes with downsides - you can't delete what you've uploaded if someone else reblogs it (and I wonder if it still gets permanently grabbed even if you delete your post before someone else reblogs it - who knows?), but 'free' and 'convenient' are so very seductive, as is the sense of any post *could* be the post that takes off spectacularly and makes one internet famous!!! or at least temporarily tumblr famous.
I guess for me, sites like tumblr and twitter combine the possibility that something I write could reach what feels like anyone, with the risk that it will be heard by no one - like there's quantum flickering between an audience beyond my mental grasp to fathom and a void of existential anxiety. I find Dreamwidth being smaller scale and more intimate a feature - it's still internet mom & pop, and that's something I hold very dear.
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This might be the killer app for DW, especially if some limited form of reblogging were implemented. I do like that I can reblog a post and essentially just say "this", without having to make a whole new post of my own, when I think my circle would be interested in something but I don't really have anything to add.
I agree that DW's homegrown feel is a feature, but I do still wish my fandoms had a more robust community here.
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Would you all be interested in an xkit.com, essentially? A public partner to go with the private nature of DW, that is designed *to work with* A03 and DW, to create a threefold fandom experience?
DW brings the posts with strong lockdown protocols, and threaded comments section.
Ao3 is a brilliantly executed archive.
xkit.com could be the twitter/tumblr equivilent that has limited commenting (replies, for the love of all that is holy we need replies) and is art, music/video, and sharing focused.
Making a meta post? post to DW and share via xkit ... post your fic to Ao3, share via xkit. Use "Ao3-feed" accounts that are paired with DW comms for fic updates via xkit and then talk in the comm ...
What do you think?
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Something I don't think has been mentioned yet: the change in technology over the last eight years. I think one of the things that shifted fandom towards tumblr, once strikethrough made LJ less attractive, was the arrival of smart phones and tablets. Before 2007, we were mostly internetting from desktops and laptops -- with keyboards. LJ/DW are still not ideal for smaller screened devices, and participating in wordy conversations is laborious compared to reblogging or kudosing. Maybe it just became easier for people to default to tumblr and twitter, and as you and others have said, with the rise of AO3 there was less need to follow journals or comms to get a fic/fanwork fix.
(Um, I say this never having tumbled or twittered from my phone, so I don't really know what I'm talking about, disclaim, disclaim, disclaim. These days I do most of my fannishness in email. :-/)
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I think I'm kind of an outlier in that I actually use a different platform (Plurk) for livewatch commentary/personal griping - it's sort of like Twitter, except replies to a post are gathered under that post. This is what the interface looks like. You can also mute plurks so you don't get notified of new replies to them, which solves my main problem with Twitter (hard to control the input volume). The platform is not the most stable, but it's fairly easy to lock down and I think more importantly, it's really easy to post - with DW, you still have to click through a lot of pages, which is fine for a longer one-off, but I think would get kind of tedious for a pile of short posts. Though now I'm wondering if we could make a 'quick post' module or something, much like we have 'quick reply' (and when DW added the ability to do that from your reading list, without having to go to a new page? WONDERFUL).