luisasresearching

[luisasresearching]

ok so its getting HUGE i apparently am an yapper when it comes to tumblr...

ok, so in the next couple of days i'll be writing the section of my dissertation that talks about tumblr, its design and affordances! i'm sooo excited to do that!!! but also like. nervous.

[luisasresearching]

ok, so in the next couple of days i'll be writing the section of my dissertation that talks about tumblr, its design and affordances! i'm sooo excited to do that!!! but also like. nervous.

[luisasresearching]

looking for people to interview!

hi everyone. how are you doing? i'm Luisa, a PhD candidate in International Relations in Brazil. i'm studying k-pop fandoms and how fan identity can shape political subjectivities and action. i have started my interviews and i've been looking forward to interviewing k-pop fans that are active on tumblr and are not Brazilian. the interviews are anonymised, and they take between 60 and 90 minutes, on Google Meets. the interviews would be in English (or in Portuguese, if you're from a Portuguese-speaking country).

if any of you are interested in being interviewed, shoot me an ask with your e-mail so i can share the consent form for the participation! thanks a ton.

[luisasresearching]

looking for people to interview!

hi everyone. how are you doing? i'm Luisa, a PhD candidate in International Relations in Brazil. i'm studying k-pop fandoms and how fan identity can shape political subjectivities and action. i have started my interviews and i've been looking forward to interviewing k-pop fans that are active on tumblr and are not Brazilian. the interviews are anonymised, and they take between 60 and 90 minutes, on Google Meets. the interviews would be in English (or in Portuguese, if you're from a Portuguese-speaking country).

if any of you are interested in being interviewed, shoot me an ask with your e-mail so i can share the consent form for the participation! thanks a ton.

[luisasresearching]

looking for people to interview!

hi everyone. how are you doing? i'm Luisa, a PhD candidate in International Relations in Brazil. i'm studying k-pop fandoms and how fan identity can shape political subjectivities and action. i have started my interviews and i've been looking forward to interviewing k-pop fans that are active on tumblr and are not Brazilian. the interviews are anonymised, and they take between 60 and 90 minutes, on Google Meets. the interviews would be in English (or in Portuguese, if you're from a Portuguese-speaking country).

if any of you are interested in being interviewed, shoot me an ask with your e-mail so i can share the consent form for the participation! thanks a ton.

[luisasresearching]

it came to my realization that 99% of my fandom related headaches would be cured if everyone understood this

[luisasresearching]

Genuine question: where did the perception that fandom is for young people come from? When I first got into fandom it was mostly middle aged ladies. Fandom as we think of it today was invented by middle aged ladies; AO3 was invented by people who certainly weren't kids or teens.

Like I get there is both sexism and ageism involved--adult women aren't supposed to have hobbies etc etc, but presumably in, say, knitting fandom, the sexist and ageist comments aren't, "knitting is for young people and you're creepy to want to discuss knitting online." Presumably the vitriol is about wasting time or something, because as we all know the stereotype about knitting is that it's for little old ladies.

My question is how (and when) did the stereotype about fandom become that fandom is for young people?

[luisasresearching]

gotta admit I talk a big game about avoiding The TikTok Algorithm and all that garbage but probably another big reason is just. with every single one. This Could Have Been A Text Post. I'm sorry, you want me to take the worst part of social interaction (listening to other people talk very slowly) and just... do that? that's a deliberate part of the experience? you people do this... for fun? instead of reading text like God intended??

[luisasresearching]

Holy shit I think I just cracked the code of why people think you can’t sell things on Tumblr 😭

[luisasresearching]

Why do people keep recommending Dreamwidth as a Tumblr alternative, when Dreamwidth and Tumblr are so different?

To be flat-out honest, it's because Dreamwidth has so many things that Tumblr users say they want, even if it's also lacking a lot of features that Tumblr users have come to love:

Dreamwidth has incredibly lax content hosting rules. I'd say that it's slightly more restrictive than AO3, but only just slightly, and only because AO3's abuse team has been so overwhelmed and over-worked. Otherwise, the hosting policies are pretty similar. You want to go nuts, show nuts? You can do that on Dreamwidth.

In fact, Dreamwidth is so serious about "go nuts, show nuts", it gave up the ability to accept transactions through PayPal in 2009 to protect our ability to do that. (It's also one reason why Dreamwidth doesn't have an app: Dreamwidth will never be beholden to Apple's content rules this way.)

Dreamwidth cares about your privacy; it doesn't sell your data, and barely collects any to begin with. As far as I'm aware, it only collects what it needs to run the site. The owners have also spoken out on behalf of internet privacy many times, and are prepared to put their money where their mouth is.

No ads. Ever. Period. They mean it. Dreamwidth is entirely user funded.

Posts viewed in reverse chronological order; no algorithm, opt-in or otherwise. No algorithm at all. No "For You" or "Suggested" page. You still entirely create and curate your own experience.

The ability to make posts that only your "mutuals", or even only a specific subset of your "mutuals", can see. Want to make a post that's only open to Bonnie, Clyde, Butch, and Cassidy? You can do that! Want to make a post that's only open to Bonnie and Butch, but Clyde and Cassidy can't see shit? You can do that, too!

The owners have forsworn NFTs and the blockchain in general. Not as big a worry now as it was even a year ago, but still good to know!

We are explicitly the customers of Dreamwidth. Dreamwidth wants to make us happy, so any changes they make (and they do make changes) are made with us in mind, and after exploring as many possibilities as they can.

Dreamwidth is very transparent about their policies and changes. If you want to know why they're making a specific change, or keeping or getting rid of a feature, they will tell you. You don't have to find out ten months later that they're locked into a contract to keep it for a year (cough cough Tumblr Live cough cough).

So those are some things that Tumblr users would probably love about Dreamwidth.

Another reason Dreamwidth keeps being recommended is that a significant portion of the Age 30+ crowd spent a lot of earlier fandom years on a site known as LiveJournal. Dreamwidth may not be much like Tumblr, but it it started out as a code fork of LiveJournal, so it will be very familiar to anyone who spent any time there. Except better.

Finally, we're recommending Dreamwidth because some of the things that Tumblr users want are just... not going to happen on the web as it is now. Image hosting is the big one for this. Maybe in the future, the price of data will be much cheaper, and Dreamwidth will be able to host as much as we all want for a pittance that a fraction of the userbase will happily pay for everyone, but right now that's just not possible.

Everywhere you want to go that hosts a lot of images will either be running lots of ads, selling your data, or both.

Dreamwidth knows how much it costs to host your data, and has budgeted for that. They are hosting within their means, within our means.

Dreamwidth is the closest thing we may ever get to AO3 as a social media platform. One of the co-owners is from, and still in, fandom; she knows our values, because they are also her values. It may as well be the Blogsite Of Our Own.

[luisasresearching]

The forceful resistance to (UI) changes here reminds me a bit of Wikimedia/MediaWiki, where entrenched communities of power users can block public-facing design revamps that would benefit not-logged-in users and might help against declining editor numbers … even though logged-in Wikipedians are always free to keep using decades-old skins …

Anyways, here’s a bit of a question: Do you think Tumblr/Automattic could profit from a convo about this with Wikimedia?

I think the folks who work on any large platform like Reddit, Twitter, Discord, Midjourney, Wikimedia, AO3, etc have a lot to learn from each other and I'm happy to share a meal and a drink with anyone who has been in the crucible of building a social product. It's part of the mimetic and cultural evolution as we influence each other.

[luisasresearching]

Have you ever been to a fan convention (of any kind)?

Have you looked at the Survey Report yet??

We asked where y'all spend your fannish time, and how could any fannish conversation ignore the draw of The Conventions?

Q10: Have you ever been to a fan convention (of any kind)? ● 68,855 survey takers received this question. ● 68,807 answered it Yes 28,505 - 41.43% No 40,302 - 58.57%

What about you, tumblr?

If you have, shout out in the comments and maybe we can get more OTW tables at more conventions!

[luisasresearching]

Hey, genuine question, although I'm not honestly expecting a response: if tumblr users have been telling you what they want and what they don't want since you've taken over, and their feedback has more or less been ignored consistently whilst rolling out changes that nobody asked for or uses (tumblr live is coming to mind), and you're not getting the content use you want, might it be an idea to try those before abandoning the site? What is the worst that could happen, really? Listen to your userbase. You had a lot of good will from listening to people at the start of your ownership: blaze did well, as did ad-free, polls and so on, but there are some really popular things you've removed or made obsolete (prev tags, blog themes, avatars etc.) that a lot of people want back. Equally, there are some things I've never heard a single person want - this site isn't TikTok, and never will be. Instead of trying attract a crowd that is already catered for elsewhere, making the people who love tumblr still despite all the changes in ownership more comfortable under you can only be a benefit. Thank you for reading, if you did actually read this.

Thank you for the genuine question! First, I'll say that we've never launched anything with the expectation the community would hate it, but there sometimes is a big difference between what people say they want and how people respond or what information (and often misinformation) goes viral.

As an example, Post+, which is a feature where you can pay to subscribe to other users, had some misinformation go viral that if you used it you'd be sued by copyright holders if you did fan fiction, and there was a huge backlash that the site was going paid and a coordinated campaign to attack (including with death threats) everyone who signed up for the program.

I'll repeat, this was a program where the money all went to creators, Tumblr did not take a cut, and the creators were often already selling work on Patreon or Ko-fi, this just was an integrated way for it to work. Because of the hate and attacks, every launch creator canceled the program. It was sad, because this was a feature users and creators said they wanted, and we prioritized making users money over projects that would make us money.

Since then we've gotten better at managing attacks and threats, with new tools and a bigger Trust & Safety team, but Post+ never recovered.

You mention Blaze and Ad-free doing well, but their adoption is so small relative to the use of Tumblr their revenue couldn't support a fraction of the ~1,000 servers it takes to run Tumblr, much less any salaries.

To your broader point, though, one thing I'm hoping with a more focused approach in 2024 is that we can streamline some of the extra things that were launched (like Live) that haven't gotten the adoption we hoped, and focus in on the core functionality that people use a ton of on Tumblr. We will likely be shipping less new stuff and more focused on improving existing functionality and core flows.

[luisasresearching]

any advice about how to deal with posting a fic and getting radio silence? I know ppl aren’t owed engagement ofc, but I feel embarrassed at having spent so long on something no one cares about, and although I liked thinking about the characters and fandom before (and was considering writing more about them), now I can’t think about it without feeling that overpowering embarrassment 😭 part of me wants to delete the fic, but that would mean having to open ao3 and look at it again LMAO

sorry for the venting, I know this is probably a me problem, but has anyone else felt this, and if so, is there any way to make this pervasive shame go away??

*hugs* This is a very painful thing to experience and there isn't really any way to make it just go away, unfortunately. However, you can reflect on it a bit, when you're ready to.

Writing and posting are separate activities. If you've enjoyed writing the story but you haven't enjoyed posting it to the Archive, you can always continue writing just for yourself. This may or may not be something you'd enjoy - you know better than I do whether some of your enjoyment came from the anticipation of a reaction to your work.

Try to analyze where your embarrassment is coming from. Is it worrying that your story was poorly written? A lack of a reaction doesn't mean that the story is bad. Being unpopular doesn't mean it's bad, either. If your story is good to you, then it's a good story.

Is your embarrassment from feeling like you were "caught trying." Is it a cringe at the idea that you put effort into something that someone else doesn't (appear to) find valuable?

Is it actually embarrassment at all? Are you feeling a different kind of hurt instead? Did you hope that someone in particular would read your story and now you feel ignored? Did you hope to be embraced by your community and now you feel shunned?

These are difficult questions that I'm asking and you might not want to think about them right now. That's okay. You don't need to if you don't want to. You can definitely delete the fic and pretend it never happened. Or you can log out of that AO3 account and create a new one and never look back. Maybe you just need to take a week or a month off for a hiatus of sorts and when the ache isn't as bad, you'll be able to face it all again.

When I felt this way, it was because I felt like I'd put something into my community and that I'd been ignored. But since that time, I've found one person who gives me all of the community support I used to get from an entire fandom, and now when I post something on AO3 I don't actually need a response anymore. I get all of the fun and excitement and validation etc from my conversations and RP threads with my best friend.

Once you've got a little distance from the pain of this moment, try to figure out what it is that you were hoping to get and then figure out how you can get it. Maybe it's through posting fic to AO3, but maybe it's not.

Let's see what others can suggest. This is not something you're experiencing alone, anon. So very many of your fellow fan writers have experienced this too ❤️

[luisasresearching]

undergrad students unite

[luisasresearching]

We decided to publish this survey a second time because, by accident, the first version only lasted for a day.

Please reblog for a bigger sample size!

If you'd like to share your answer in the comments/tags, feel free to use 🫠/💀/🦉 and so on. And comment/tag your degree!

[luisasresearching]

When building a spear, what matters: you, building or the spear?

At the recent FSNNA conference (were you there? Did we meet? If you’ve been there, the panel recordings and the discussion space is still available for a week.), Katherine Crighton, Dr. Naomi Jacobs and Shivhan Szabo introduced an online game where you can create new fanworks for your blorbo for the newest fannish sensation: Blow the Man Down. The catch is, this fannish sensation is not a TV show. The story is reverse engineered through the fanworks created for it, but in a sense, it doesn’t exist. Your blorbo also doesn’t exist. My blorbo is real cool, though, their name is Bogdán.

When it comes to fannish creation, there are some key theories to reference. Participatory culture is one, we also talk about gift economy, affective labor; can they possibly explain why we are able to act fannishly when there isn’t even a canon to be fans of? Are we experiencing real feelings for a fake blorbo because we participated in their creation, committing to this silly man? Or is it because of the nature of the work, we used fannish practices to create them, which is inherently affective? Or is it, as the presentation already points out, due to the spear theory: we build our blorbo by piercing many blorbos through and that creates our type? I dare you; play the game and let us discuss our experiences. Or if you’ve ever gonched, what did you think of it?