#whereas asks only the userblog can see and are devoid of context to the original post unless that context is included

[quillreplies]

part of me wonders if making asks rebloggable had something to do with this. you see it used to be if you wanted to reblog a ask post you had to screenshot it, ‘could you make a rebloggable version of this post’ used to be a popular request of popular blogs. this private nature meant that if you wanted to do say, an askblog you’d pre-empt this by screenshotting the ask directly (you’d then reply privately to the ask to notify the asker that you’d used their ask if you were a real one).

this process removed a layer of access to the asker, who could tie their name and face to a popular post and not receive any backlash since people could not click on anything to get to their blog.

I think that might be a contributing factor to the fact that if you do get an ask nowadays, you’re probably getting an anon.

You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?