Thoughts on the new online life

[owlmoose]

Now that I'm not figuring out how the practicalities of DW/LJ/Tumblr cross-posting will work, I figure it's time to talk about the theory, and my thoughts on how this whole mess went down.

So, to catch anyone up who isn't familiar with the situation, Tumblr removed its reply feature yesterday. The reply button's functionality was already fairly limited, but it was still a tool many people used to communicate with each other. In the announcement of the change, made a few days in advance, Tumblr staff promised that a replacement feature was coming, but they provided no ETA, and no details of how the new commenting feature was going to work. (I've heard that the new version is in the process of rolling out, but I haven't seen it yet; I'm not particularly hopeful.) Also in yesterday's update, Tumblr took away tracked tags, apparently blending them into the search feature. Unlike the end of replies, the change to tag tracking was not announced in advance. To no one's surprise, response to both decisions has so far been overwhelmingly negative.

Removing replies I understand, even if I don't agree with or like it. Tumblr's initial design and the way it has evolved over the years makes it clear that promoting conversation among its users is not the company's priority. As I've said before, Tumblr is designed to be a broadcast medium. Every aspect of its DNA encourages you to reblog and share content. If you can respond to a post without reblogging it, then the content of that post isn't being shared more widely. Given that, I'm surprised that a change like this didn't come along earlier. And although a lack of a comment field makes interaction more difficult, it's not impossible -- we can still have conversations in reblogs, awkward as that is, or in the backchannels of asks and fanmail.

Removing tracked tags makes a lot less sense to me, and in the long run I think it will be more damaging to Tumblr, especially as a platform for fandom. Tracking tags was one of the easiest way to find new content, particularly content relating to smaller fandoms, less popular characters and 'ships. You can't count on the people who follow you to reblog everything that might possibly be of interest. Whenever I discovered a new show, book, or game that I wanted to talk about, the first thing I would do is check the tags. Tracked tags are also by far the best way to find content for an f-yeah blog.Tumblr's search feature has never been very good, and the results tend to be heavily weighted toward posts with more notes. In short, tracked tags have many uses, and abandoning them in favor of search has no logic to it that I can see. I would think that Tumblr has an interest in its users being able to find and share new content, so why make it more difficult? The real problem, though, is on the posting side. If it becomes too difficult to find new content, those posts will never be seen, and the users who post them will never receive the likes, reblogs, and other interactions that are so necessarily for fandom to thrive. Remove that incentive to post, and people will start leaving for greener pastures.

I don't expect the mass exodus to start anytime soon -- people have already devoted quite a bit of effort into fixing these problems. Enough folks are committed to making this platform work for fandom, even though it's proven itself a poor fit again and again. And it's not a poor fit in all ways. Tumblr remains the best platform for viewing and sharing fanart, videos, gifs, and other primarily visual media. It's also good for liveblogging, and for sharing random thoughts that are too long for Twitter but don't feel substantial enough to post on a journal. I have no intention of abandoning Tumblr entirely.

But as far as longer form posts go, including both meta and fic, I think the time has come for me to move primarily back to DW. I've wanted to do this for awhile, and this crosspost feature is the tool I needed to take the plunge.

Not everyone is going to want to migrate to DW. I totally get that. If DW was the platform that fandom wanted, they would have come here in the first place, rather than fleeing to Tumblr when LJ finally became unworkable. And if any of you want to continue to comment only on Tumblr, that's part of the reason I'm crossposting entire entries rather than just links. (I also always have Anon and OpenID commenting enabled, so there's no need to create an account to comment here.) But if you're at all willing to give DW a try, I hope you do.

Comments

[sarasa_cat]

It's pretty obvious that tumblr is becoming less useful as a fandom platform (although whether another fandom exodus occurs is yet to be seen).

What I'm curious about are tumblr's main content creators, who, actually, aren't fandom. (I know, strange to think it, but true).

I know quite a few professional bloggers who have set up tumblr with disqus in order to have comments under their posts in a more traditional blog sense. I assume that is still working?

The tracked tag thing makes it a little harder for someone to establish a new tag in the long tail of tags and forces everyone to stick with the five most popular tags that people are likely to search for. That is both good and bad for discoverability. (again, I'm thinking outside of fandom).

But back to fandom, I think we might start seeing the same split that was common throughout the 00's: art and visuals on certain fandom sites, fic, discussion, and meta on other fandom sites.

The crosspost tools you are using look useful for promoting communities that don't fit into tumblr's new schema but want exposure on tumblr's tagging system.

...

Edited to add: I also suspect that certain platforms naturally attract and repel certain kinds of fans because the platform's architecture only supports certain kinds of interactions or certain kinds of media. For instance, if you aren't an artist, you might never create a DevArt account, although you may silently lurk. If you aren't comfortable writing journal-style posts, you might avoid LJ/DW and, instead, create a twitter account. Etc. Tumblr works for certain kinds of fandom interactions and it caters to certain kinds of fannish desires. People who want tumblr to work for them will make it work whereas people who never found tumblr all that useful either avoided it completely (and do fandom activities elsewhere) or are rejoicing that they have a reason to move away from tumblr. Like other prior fandom exoduses from the past decade and a half, it will probably be more of a splintering than an exodus, just like how LJ's changes caused a splintering.

[owlmoose]

The crosspost tools you are using look useful for promoting communities that don't fit into tumblr's new schema but want exposure on tumblr's tagging system.

Yeah. I mentioned it to renay and she immediately jumped on how useful it could be for ladybusiness. Even if it turns out that it doesn't make sense to put all my posts on Tumblr, I will certainly use it to crosspost fic that's not Tumblr native.

I also suspect that certain platforms naturally attract and repel certain kinds of fans because the platform's architecture only supports certain kinds of interactions or certain kinds of media.

I don't know if it's quite that simple. Lots of people are on Tumblr mostly because it became the default platform for many fandoms across different kinds of content (myself included). Just like artists used LJ back when everyone was on LJ, even though LJ was not a great tool for posting and discovering art, fic and especially meta writers were forced onto Tumblr because that's where the largest potential audience was. When you're choosing a social media platform, for most people the social is more important than the media. So our inclination is to keep trying to make a platform work long after its clear that it's never going to be the tool we want, because we don't want to lose the community. I agree that some level of splintering is inevitable, though.

[sarasa_cat]

Well, I know quite a few ppl who find the media aspect just as important as the social aspect and when the media aspect fails to work for them, the social part isn't enough of a pull to keep them there, especially if the social aspect on that platform isn't really their cup of tea.

Also, I have seen broadcast style platforms (Twitter, tumblr) be embraced by ppl who dislike or denounce moderated comms / forums. Again, that is the media providing somethings that a subset of users want (or don't want).

In short, tumblr attracts different ppl than LJ, Reddit, and BSN although there is overlap. But definitely different subsets of fandom.

[owlmoose]

Fair enough. I would still contend that most people are more likely to put up with a media platform they don't like in order to remain connected to a community they appreciate and want to be a part of than the other way around.

[sarasa_cat]

I guess it depends on the person and the availability of other competing platforms.

I know quite a few people who have left fandom on tumblr but remain active elsewhere, or who have tumblr accounts that are marginally used for fandom (or not at all) because of tumblr's climate and, instead, they contribute to fandom elsewhere.

I've seen enough evidence leading me to suspect that tumblr attracts a different kind of fan than other platforms and that it also repels a certain class of fans too.

After all, if someone comes to a platform (any platform: LJ, DW, IJ, tumblr, reddit, BSN, some random forum,...) and they immediately feel "these are not my people" they just won't join.

So, you when you said "in order to remain connected to a community," that presupposes that the person wants to be connected to the specific community.

For instance, I don't know if it is still true because DAI's release changed the Cullen fandom community a lot, but before DAI, the Cullen Thread on BSN was a very distinct community that was, for the most part, very separate from tumblr. I am probably partially responsible for bringing some of those people over to tumblr (bc that was where I posted most of my meta) but, for the most part, they were on BSN+ff.net+DevArt. That community had a very different feel from much of the noise on BSN and was very different from tumblr regarding the kinds of content they produced and the emic perspective they held about Thedas.

[owlmoose]

you when you said "in order to remain connected to a community," that presupposes that the person wants to be connected to the specific community.

Yes. It does. That was exactly my point.

i have been on DW so seldom that it just locked me out of Aulu for pw failure this is parhetic

[circular_time]

I'm one of the few people who didn't use tracked tags, but I did search tags for this and that. And I preferred to add comments via reblog, although I find myself doing less and less of that and reluctantly going to tags for quick comments. I've never entirely understood Tumblr -- some posts allowed you to reply, and others didn't, and I never knew which.

I am a lazy ass and often find it easier to reblog and share than post anything thoughtful and long, and I keep meaning to come back to DW and then Not Getting Around to It, partly because of all the whiz bang things on my Tumblr dash that are shallow yet engrossing. I would really like to be active here again with the more thoughtful peeps. We'll see.

My other big problem is that I reconnected to a fandom with a lot of 20something fans who demand one tag critical discussions with "[topic/person]hate" and/or don't really do meta the way I'm used to. I've been trying to crosspost between Tumblr and DW sporadically, but the only responses I ever get are from one person who's an old LJ/DW exile. I am demotivated when a long meta post ans get crickets.

I hope I can lure a few more Whovians here.

Re: i have been on DW so seldom that it just locked me out of Aulu for pw failure this is parhetic

[owlmoose]

I've never entirely understood Tumblr -- some posts allowed you to reply, and others didn't, and I never knew which.

Replies were only enabled on original posts (so no replies to reblogs). Also, poster had to have the feature turned on, and they either had to be following you or you had to have been following them for some period of time (I think two weeks). The xkit extension added a reply feature today; I don't use the current incarnation of xkit because it's not developed for Safari, so I'm not sure how well it works.

I have very complex and probably unpopular opinions about the whole "don't tag your hate" thing, that I don't really want to get into right now; suffice it to say that we probably agree on the difficulties of writing critical meta on Tumblr, especially in certain fandoms.

Re: i have been on DW so seldom that it just locked me out of Aulu for pw failure this is parhetic

[circular_time]

Aaah, thank you for explaining the mysteries of the old reply feature.

I'm on my iPad about 2/3rds of the time when I'm browsing (whence the "parhetic" typos -- I may have to retain that gaffe as Darmok), so all the xkit fixes can't save me, much of the time.

...and yes, I have complicated opinions as well, but this ain't the place to threadjack. Perhaps a post is called for!

[alias_sqbr]

I think you can still manually check tags, you just can't track them. I guess people can make a separate bookmark of tags they like and check them periodically, though it's less convenient. I posted some fanart last night and still got a bunch of random non followers liking/reblogging it, but it's possible that's less than I would previously have gotten.

Otherwise, yeah.

[owlmoose]

Glad to hear that your art still got some attention. :) I would love to be wrong about the potential loss of audience that losing tracked tags might cause. I guess we'll see how it all shakes out.

[alias_sqbr]

Yeah :/

[jaininae]

Yeah, the support blog actually mentioned this when they reblogged the initial announcement, which I thought was a poor way at delivering the information b/c not everyone is going to reblog that post from support. But it's easy to find out for yourself if you just type it in the search engine.

In any case, x-kit has fixed tracked tags if anyone is interested: http://new-xkit-extension.tumblr.com/post/132192555454/tracked-tag-url

[owlmoose]

I think you meant that first link to go here? http://support.tumblr.com/post/132165437962/staff-now-you-can-follow-a-search-just-like-a

Anyway, I can see that as a potentially interesting feature, but as an extra feature, not a replacement for tracking.

[jaininae]

Yeah that's it, sorry about that.

Anyway, I can see that as a potentially interesting feature, but as an extra feature, not a replacement for tracking.

Tbh I think they kinda oversold it when they started explaining how they worked vry hard to collect the most popular posts for reblogging convenience, meanwhile it's the same search it was yesterday. I'm sure they worked hard on it but it's like they're selling me a feature I already knew along with a feature I'm never going to use lol.

[alias_sqbr]

I don't actually use tracked tags, but this seems even less appealing, ug.

[jaininae]

It seems to me that the replacement of the tracked tags with tracked searches was a serious oversight on their part. Unless they're now encouraging people to reblog only the most popular posts in any given tag, which depending on what you're interested in, could end up giving you the same results every day due to the slow traffic of the tag.

[owlmoose]

Unless they're now encouraging people to reblog only the most popular posts in any given tag, which depending on what you're interested in, could end up giving you the same results every day due to the slow traffic of the tag.

Yep. It really makes no sense to me at all. You would think that Tumblr would want to encourage content creation as well as reblogging, since without content there's nothing to reblog and no reason to visit the site.

[sarasa_cat]

The changes to how tags work and how we can search them seem to me, perhaps, as if tumblr wants content creators just to select up to five generic tags that best describe their content (e.g., latte-art, cthulhu, coffee, photography, food) such that casual users can just search for content that might interest them.

By removing tracked tags, hardcore users no longer see "I have 14 new posts in Very Specific Topic X that is of interest to me."

Obviously, none of this stops us from convincing a handful of people that we should use the tag "#SuranaSunday" for some weekly Surana prompt or "#30DaysOfHawkeMeme" for a month-long meme, allowing us to form an impromptu community around content we want to create and share, but now we are responsible for remembering, typing, or bookmarking the tag url such that we can see the posts in reverse chrono order as people create more stuff for that tag.

Basically, the feature is still there but the support for it is being sunsetted which makes it harder for casual users to discover.

[elainegrey]

Here's hoping you (re)introduce some folks to the joys of longer format journalling!