There’s nothing bad about forming a community, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting users to form relationships with one another. The problem is that social design sometimes takes away from the intent of a web site.
Tumblr has this problem… When it first launched, one of the larger appeals it held was that it was so ultrasimple… While Tumblr developed a community, it was one that you could effectively opt out of if you didn’t care.
Recently, however, Tumblr has canonized this community. New users are given popular blogs to follow by default. The emphasis on notes and liking and reblogging posts has been stressed: the number of users reading your blog is displayed directly on the Dashboard, whereas before it was out-of-sight. The problem with that is that it has changed the attitude of its users. Before, there was a certain unrestrained freedom to how tumblelogs were kept. Now, more than ever, there’s a feeling of restraint, of this canon community existing, and more and more blogs that I come across are trying to cater to this central niche of the site. Whereas before nearly every blog I read had its own radically different set of sources - it was several months into using the site that I even heard the name Topherchris - now, being a part of Tumblr means knowing the people who hang together and the various inside jokes and the site-specific memes and movements.
While that’s helped Tumblr grow, it killed a part of the site that was really valuable: the freedom of the isolation Tumblr started you off with, of not knowing anything about the site other than the basic functionality. It let you form your own community rather than subscribing to a site-wide one.
The problem with social is that it works. Add in elements to your site that let users group together with other people and there’ll be a surge in activity. The more malicious elements - the closed circle on Digg, the feeling of the central group on Tumblr - make certain types of users far more rabidly active at the same time as it constructs an unhealthy hierarchy… This self-focus on reblogging and being part of this inward community means that a lot of blogs here - most, even - are incomprehensible unless you’re a part of the Tumblr community…
To state the concept more generally: social becomes harmful when it becomes unavoidable. As soon as users feel actively penalized for not interacting with other people, something is lost in the site’s functionality.
God, so on-point and prescient. I put off reblogging this a while back but now with the introduction of this ridiculous “Tumblarity” b.s. it’s even more relevant.
I sometimes wonder if the integrity of my blog has wavered as I’ve gained more followers and occasional exposure on the Radar. For months, I had only about ~15 followers and no idea who soupsoup was, and I couldn’t have cared less. It was possible to avoid the community if I had no desire to try to “get in.” My blog was probably purer back then… it was really just for ME, and Tumblr was an elegantly simple platform for it, the anti-myspace/blogger/facebook. I did feel a pang whenever I found something cool and wanted to share it far and wide yet no one noticed, but - whatever. When you have barely 2 dozen followers you don’t nurture those kinds of aspirations.
But over time, my purposes got warped and I kind of lost sight of why I started my blog in the first place. It’s irresistible to feel a little brightened by every blue bar that pops up on my dashboard, and just as hard not to take notice of which of my posts get more reblogs and which languish. I would get pissed whenever someone stripped reblog credit from something I had posted. Just a few days ago, when checking out “Popular Stuff,” I was bewildered to see the posts that had made it to “Most Popular” — posts that were to me, completely inane and boring.
Seriously though, who gives a shit?? NOBODY outside of Tumblrs incestuous little bubble world. The popularity of those posts have no relevance to the outside world whatsoever — in no small part because few Tumblrs have that much of an outside readership, period. Reblogs and likes are just part of an enormous circle-jerk that actually ensures the metrics are meaningless and non-applicable outside of Tumblr itself. A year ago, Fred Wilson suggested that the reblog button is powerful enough to spur a “revolution.” But he got it wrong. Reblogging not only creates an echo chamber of easy consumption (that doesn’t require you to interact with what you’re consuming or who you’re reblogging), but it means that pretty much everything that happens on Tumblr stays within Tumblr.
I decided not to be discouraged and to only focus on what I think is interesting. That I would purposely sequester myself away from the stupid blogs with thousands of followers, which have nothing to do with me. That I would ignore my # of followers or reblogs. I turned off dashboard notifications and installed langer’s greasemonkey script to hide my follower count. But now it’s like, wait - Tumblr wants me to care? Tumblr wants to encourage posts that are driven by pointless statistics and feed juvenile “popularity” comparisons?? And Tumblr won’t allow me to opt out?
Gross. And a step in the wrong direction, imo. Meanwhile, Tumblr doesn’t seem to be ramping up efforts to improve the way its blogs are indexed by search engines and receive outside hits (unless it’s saving this to eventually be a paid feature). So basically - imo, Tumblarity will just further cut off Tumblr from the wider blogosphere while driving down the overall quality of what gets posted. Yeah, nice job, guys.
I try to focus on my personality, my interests, my beliefs consistently. I feel like even if you don’t like an individual post, if I withhold myself, I have my followers missing out on the greater, holistic picture that I’ve developed of the world. So ultimately, the unpopular posts are just as important as the popular ones to me.
I try not to let Tumblr’s metrics hold me back too much either. A lot of my super-popular posts with non-Tumblrs have had the fewest likes and reblogs. But because I don’t hold myself back on that, I feel like it’s allowed me to diversify and get followers from more places. Let’s be clear that, you’ll get better at what you measure. I wish Tumblr would let non-users “like” posts too, just so one could get an idea about the broader internet beyond these walls, because the like feature is powerful in that respect.
I don’t know what I’m saying. This isn’t a very cohesive argument.
