In 2018, Tumblr Is a Joyless Black Hole
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
Ironically, the list isn't too different from issues that face other sites based around user-generated content, like Twitter, Youtube, and Facebook. Tumblr was the platform en vogue for many who coalesced around an interest or an identity, for entertainment and self-exploration alike, but the same ease of discovery that allowed Sherlock fans to find each other, or Questioning individuals to explore LGBTQ+ communities, make now-revoked or now-offensive posts easy to find, and make it easier for malicious actors to target, troll, and harrass.
The pendulum is swinging back towards more closely moderated, more closed communities, that even if they represent groups that are marginalized in the overworld, are more homogenous around a particular set of attributes. This migration is slowly leaving Tumblr feeling stale. Given enough time and enough people, another platform will grow to fulfill the same social purpose that Tumblr once did for a different generation of users, and some time later those unhappy with that platform will migrate to somewhere more public to benefit from greater exposure and a more diverse cavalcade of content.
This was what caught my attention at being remarkably non-unique:
> Another structural problem of Tumblr is that deleted blogs don’t really go away. Once a blog has been reblogged to someone else’s Tumblr, they are essentially posting it again as a copy of the original.
It's a well-aired controversy for the Web at large, including the EU's "right to be forgotten", hardly specific to Tumblr.
It made me wonder if the article isn't more a lament that Internet discussion forum platforms in general have failed to adapt to modern usage/expectations.
I hadn't considered the pendulum idea until you brought it up. I had merely assumed there isn't enough moderation labor available given the increasing number of users, but that wouldn't apply to a closed community.
Previously it had been forums and YouTube, but neither felt as personal. I ended up meeting a former partner and current one on Tumblr.
Tumblr however was hemorrhaging money. The way they commercialized it following Yahoo's purchase discouraged trans authors: content was marked as NSFW no matter how innocuous and no longer readily accessible to unregistered members, tags that were used to find trans content became inundated with prn spammers.
Nothing has really filled the gap left by Tumblr.
Why is this a bad thing? I've seen people mentioned this before in a negative way, but I don't understand why it hurts tumblr.
But if someone with more experience in this wants to correct/expand on this I'd be grateful for the opportunity to understand better.
What tumblr did was that suddenly all "NFSW" things to US standards (that are different from say... Japan standards), was hidden, not showing anymore on google searches, and when trying to click random hyperlinks ending on blocked content fairly often.
After this happened, I stopped reading tumblr, since I am not a poster, and have no intention of ever writing in tumblr, I don't feel like going through all the trouble of creating an account, and finding where they put the opt-in for NFSW posts, and keep logging on every time I click on a random link that tumblr moderation bot decided was NFSW.
I have a degree in digital animation, so I had for example tumblr block me from a blog that contained some references about character movements, because it featured "naked" characters (more like characters without texture genitals and clothes, but since women boobs you can't 'delete' from a model without changing how it works, they are always there, evne if without nipples, but in US culture that is frowned upon and get tagged NFSW).
Or some christian blogs talking about what is sinful or not, and so on. Tumblr differently than say... "Medium", is self styled less seriously, where people are more casual, not a place to find academic essays, so when the content is hidden, you can assume maybe is not worth your time going out of your way to register in the service that you have no intention of actually using.
What was honestly expected? Tumblr was an American company and they got bought by another American company. The brand had a reputation for hardcore pornography which was doubtlessly toxic to advertisers (most of whom are also American companies), so expecting Yahoo to turn a blind eye just wasn't realistic.
If you want a website moderated to the Japanese standard, you should probably find a website run by a Japanese company that supports itself with advertisements purchased by Japanese companies (a Japanese company in the business of selling advertisements to American companies would probably apply the American standard.)
It kills discoverability.
Sadly, the some of the larger trans subs have taken a turn for the toxic in the last couple of years or so, but 2013-2014 was a golden age, and even the current state of the trans subs is better than Tumblr ever was.
When I first started reading Tumblr blogs I was confused about the themes people used. Depending on the layout, the far side of quote pyramids often becomes so ridiculously narrow that all characters are stacked on top of each other. Conversations become unreadable.
Some other, modern themes use a different layout that doesn't have that problem.
I wondered why people put up with the old style until I found out that the usual way participants look at conversations is on their dashboard, which discards themes and uses the modern layout. People don't look at their own blogs. Blog themes aren't designed for reading. Only people without accounts have to deal with that, but they can't complain because they don't have accounts.
The whole reblogging system is a disaster. It's like a comment tree, but you can only look at one branch at a time.
https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Affective_death_spiral
Evaporative cooling of group beliefs: (Where heat == intelligence)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
We have a different obligation to software than we do to physical things; digital hangouts are after all just a computer program. What makes a thing popular seems to be a product of the number of people present crossed by the social weight of the people present. We might say that a party becomes uncool once a certain class of people has joined, or is uncool once a certain class of people have left.
The article says that the people on Tumblr are often horrible to each other and that it ruins Tumblr; we can burn that digital building down but it will just be rebuilt, with the same swelling of cool people coming and going, and undesirables lingering, in a cycle that cannot be broken.
I think that social media must necessarily follow the forest fire model, with lots of expected, regular burnings-down to allow for regrowth.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
Platforms that host communities that are editorially distinct -- like Discord, Reddit, even 4chan -- insulate some of the mayhem that radiates out of one channel from completely spoiling others. Tumblr (and Twitter) have no such mechanism, they don't have "Channels" or "Groups", all content is propagated through follows, reblogs, and un-namespaced public tags. Communities exist solely in the minds of their participants, but are not enforced or enabled by any platform feature, and thus are both trivially infiltrated, and offer no protection from the goings-on of the wider ecosystem. The only way to seek refuge from this to leave the platform altogether.
I think that social media must necessarily follow
the forest fire model,
Most social media sites can't do a good job about harassment because anyone banned or blocked can trivially open a new account. And the sites feel they _have_ to make it trivially easy to open an account, because user growth is king if you want funding.
A site where you could only create an account with a $5 donation and an original 300-word essay on how you'd contribute positively to the community would be much less likely to be raided by griefers.
[1] Source: 2011 What Is Responsible For Tumblr’s Recent Explosive Growth? => http://oobly.com/2011/01/30/are-the-p0rn-blogs-cloacked-as-n...
I'd argue that this is overblown. Way back in the '90s, most organized online fandom was on Usenet. Usenet had no formal rules. Sure, there was a ton of cultural norms, but there was no enforcement. If you were really tired of somebody, you could put their name into something called a "killfile" which would hide their posts from you (killfiles were entirely client-side). And ultimately despite the "Eternal September", Usenet worked well enough. Trolls came and went. Every once in a while a group would be dragged into the Meow Wars. But it was still less toxic than LiveJournal.
I mostly remember the LiveJournal age (and the UBB/vBulletin/phpBB age that existed alongside it) as something that was dominated by moderators who cared more about bikeshedding and wielding power than actually keeping awful people out. Rules enforcement was more like "You didn't format your post exactly the way I want it, this is your only warning, next time you're banned!". And in the meantime toxic people would just run rampant with concern trolling and/or attacking other fans for every little thing and the mods would just sit there and do nothing.
On UBB/vBulletin/phpBB boards, it wouldn't be uncommon for half the threads on the front page to be locked often with the threads ending with snarky moderator comments like "Use the search function next time dumbass". Or for all discussion on a particular subject to be shoved into a "megathread" with no threaded comments (god, I hated those forums; I miss WWWBoard).
Fandom has always been toxic.
Edit: Though I'll say that Tumblr's software and organization is godawful. The fact that until very recently the only way to comment on someone else's post was to reblog their post and add your comment at the bottom is just bizarre, nonsensical, and not conducive to any kind of productive discussion. And how reblogs and likes all got shoved under the "notes" category. You see a post gets 700 notes: you have no idea if it's a good post that got 700 likes or a shitty post that got 700 reblog-comments calling it out. And straight reblogs are treated the same way as reblog-comments too, so "soandso reblogged this post" is worthless. Are they sharing your post or replying to it? Gah.