#how to Tumblr

[porcupine-girl]

Hey Tumblr newbies! This is your periodic reminder to not look like a bot!

Recently I've had an uptick in bot followers after a long lull, but I have ALSO had an uptick in followers who, once I click on their blogs, appear to be real, but have the default userpic, no bio, and/or "Untitled" for the blog title, and so look like bots at first glance.

Please don't forget to change your userpic - it doesn't matter what you change it to, you can turn the default one upside-down, just so it's clear a human has interacted with it! While you're at it, change the title of the blog to be literally anything other than "Untitled" and for good measure toss up a few words in your bio; naming a couple fandoms you're in is a good one that immediately marks you as real.

But if you only do one of these, change your userpic for sure. Many people will just see a default userpic and block on sight without doing any further investigation. If you have a default userpic you have probably already been blocked by a few people you followed! Is it fair that Tumblr makes you follow people when you sign up before it lets you change your userpic, and doesn't warn you that the default userpic will make people think you're a bot? No. But that's life on the hellsite.

[ltleflrt]

Apparently it's time to start posting and reblogging How to Tumblr stuff again. Lots of people are hopping from Twitter to Bluesky. A big thing to emphasize is that "repost" is the term bsky uses for "retweet", and we need to educate on the difference between "repost" and "reblog" here on Tumblr. We have so many things saying "don't repost things!" and that might cause confusion now that bsky has entered the game. I'd hate to see people avoiding Tumblr because they got yelled at for something they didn't do, because lingo is different.

I'll start: on Tumblr, "reblog" is sharing the original post on your blog for your followers to see. "Repost" is creating a new post with something you saved or downloaded or screenshoted from someone else's blog, and that's highly discouraged here. Please reblog to share the original so the creator can get the interactions too.

[wowbright]

Friendly reminder that you're not required to publicly take sides in any geopolitical conflict you don't understand.

[anexperimentallife]

You can tell who is new to Tumblr (especially refugees from other social media), because they're very concerned about the age of posts, worried about "spam liking/reblogging," use words like "unalive" unironically, and censor trigger words with asterisks. Some will also put irrelevant tags on their posts "for reach."

Dude, you are your own algorithm on this site. Stuff from 2012 occasionally gets a burst of 100K more notes. "Spam liking/reblogging" old posts will get you kissed on the mouth. With tongue. The only thing censoring letters in trigger words and using euphemisms will accomplish is to make blocking those terms useless for those trying to avoid that subject matter. Putting every irrelevant popular tag you can think of on your post "for reach" is just going to get you blocked for spam tagging.

Just relax. Follow people, reblog stuff that interests you, and make your own posts. You will find your people, and they will find you.

[princesoleil29]

❤️

[vaspider]

Since I just turned off reblogs on another post that quickly went from "let's have fun" to "this is fucking awful, I'm taking away this toy," please read this BlueSky thread from rahaeli, who I don't think is on here.

Most of it I've c/p for ease of readability bc BSky's threading sucks.

Okay, it's time again to talk about what the experience of having a social media account with a bunch of followers (*) is like. (* "a bunch" of followers is platform dependent. I'm getting irritating shit at 2k on Bluesky I didn't get until 10k on Twitter.)

(Ugh, wait, nevermind, I hit 3k while I wasn't looking. Anyway.) Someone who has never had more than 100 followers literally cannot comprehend the sheer volume of the responses you get. Even if individual posts don't get a ton of replies, if you post with any frequency, it accumulates.

Once you hit the first degradation threshold, your experience gets a little bit shittier. It's overwhelming volume, but the people who are following you are mostly ideologically, socially, and culturally aligned to you. You have the same concept of social media manners.

You'll get a few duplicate comments, because nobody reads the comments before they reply, but they're mostly from cool people, so you just roll your eyes a little at the same joke five times. You still make friends. You still have fun and can wind up finding neat new people.

And then those neat new people retweet your stuff, and it starts reaching out to an audience of people who are less aligned with what you think of as social media manners. You start getting some replies you find obnoxious: they're in good faith, you can tell, but they just grate on you sometimes.

And then *those* people start reposting your more viral threads, and you get people following you who are three degrees of separation from the people you are most likely to vibe with. And three degrees of separation is the second degradation threshold.

The second degradation threshold is where you start getting the constant, low-grade sand-in-a-pearl annoyances. The person who wants to argue with everything. The 15 people making the identical shitty "joke" that's actually just doing the exact thing you're complaining about, "ironically".

The people who look at a post that contains no question marks and think "there is an implied question here and I will answer it!" and leap to offer the most basic advice that you already thought of because you have existed for more than three seconds and can, in fact, think of the obvious answers.

The people who are spoiling for a fight no matter what, because you used one word in the post that is their particular berserk button and they're going to scream at you for hating waffles because you said you like pancakes even though you never mentioned waffles.

It is constant. It is never-ending. You cannot escape it. Every time you post anything at all, opening the app means wading through twenty garbage replies for every reply from someone who is actually cool and you'd vibe with just fine if you chatted with them.

You want to bitch about a minor annoyance? There will be 40 people all giving you the same useless advice. You want to squee about something you're enjoying that's making you happy? There will be 40 people coming to scold you because that thing isn't morally pure enough.

Every post. Every day. About 75% of the time you compose a post, you will get halfway through writing it and think "I can't deal with the replies this will get today" and delete it. You stop talking about things you enjoy, because you're tired of people shitting on them.

You stop complaining about the tiny annoyances in your life that you want to bitch about, because weirdly enough you already HAVE tried the first fifteen obvious suggestions you're going to get, and you don't want to spend an hour explaining why they won't work to everyone who's "helping".

(But you can't just ignore the "helpful" posts and not engage with them, because then you start getting accusations of being "elitist" and "standoffish" and jesus, lady, we're just trying to help here, why do you have to be so fucking rude and stuck-up, you full of yourself bitch.)

If you are any less gracious to the 40th person than that person thinks they deserve, there is a very good chance they're going to call you a cunt and drag allot their friends in to dogpile you and make the site unusable for at least three days.

The third degradation threshold is when you start needing to regularly call your local police department and politely remind them there are people who get very mad at you online and will try very hard to have you murdered by armed agents of the state and you'd appreciate it if they didn't do that.

I first had that conversation with my local police department in 2003. It's gotten faster now, at least? You usually don't have to start by explaining what social media even is.

Bluesky has tighter thresholds than Twitter did. On Twitter it was nicely exponential: the breakpoints were around 1k, 10k, 100k. Bluesky is running faster. I'm getting Twitter 10k annoyances at a Bluesky 3k. I am trying very, very hard not to switch over into Twitter 10k defensive posting.

I want to leave the defensive posting back on Twitter. I really do. I want to be able to bitch about a thing without having to wade through 20 "go try [extremely obvious thing]". I want to post about a thing I enjoy without 20 people yelling at me I'm bad for enjoyjng it.

There's a difference between arguing about an idea (which I love) and the onslaught of constantly infuriating replies plucking at your last goddamn nerve. And the more "last goddamn nerve" replies you get, the crankier you are, and then people lose their shit at you because you snapped at them.

So maybe let's all start keeping a few principles in mind: 1) if there's more than one reply, check to see if your point has already been covered. If it has, you don't need to repeat it.

2) Even the funniest joke gets old after the 20th time you hear it in 3 hours.

3) "I'm going to jokingly do the exact thing you just were complaining about because ha ha the real joke is I would never do that asshole thing" is never funny, and it is indistinguishable from you actually doing the asshole thing.

4) If there is no question mark in the tweet, think twice about offering "helpful" advice unless you and the poster know each other *mutually*, not just parasocially, you know it's likely to be new info for them, and you ask "do you want to hear how I handle this?" first and get an affirmative.

5) If you are going to ignore 4, ask yourself "is this a suggestion that someone with a reasonable level of generalized adult knowledge would think of trying within the first 15 minutes of approaching the problem?" If so, do not suggest it.

6) Do you really need to nitpick that grammar, spelling, or word choice? Did you understand what they were trying to say before autocorrect mangled it or they blanked on the exact word they wanted and found a close one? If you understood the meaning, don't be their volunteer copyeditor.

7) Is someone excited about a thing you hate? Are they having fun with the thing? Is the thing a front for white supremacist recruiting or organizing the overthrow of the US government? If the answers are yes, yes, and no, respectively, shut the fuck up and let people enjoy things.

8) We are all occasionally That Commenter. If someone you have a pre-existing relationship with replies to you and lets you know you're being That Commenter, it's because they have a positive enough impression of you they don't want to go straight to block. Treat this like the warning sign it is.

9) It deserves repeating: remember the Law of Large Numbers. Even if you only commented once, you may be the hundredth irritating comment that person got that day. Bluesky's terrible threading makes this worse: people don't keep a single thread of mounting crankiness the way they did on Twitter.

9a) If someone's top tweet sounds really annoyed at something, maybe check their timeline or follow back their nested self-QTs to see what level of irritable they're at and over what so you don't step straight on the same rakes they've been dodging all day.

10) However, remember that BSky also doesn't show replies made by people the OP has blocked in a thread. If they post about a pattern that's making them cranky and you look and don't see anything, they probably already blocked the worst of it. They still saw it in their mentions in order to block.

I really cannot overstate how absolutely exhausting and soul-destroying the experience of having a large account can be. It's also somehow still rewarding, or we wouldn't do it. But especially if you're a woman or a person of color or a female POC, that balance is really, really close most days.

And of course, the ones who stay are the ones who do find it still rewarding enough to keep doing it despite the constant irritations.

From here, the thread moves into a conversation about stuff specific to BlueSky, but the majority of the thread is truly applicable to Tumblr as well.

You may be the first person to comment "op lives on a planet without music," or "op has never heard of [thing OP didn't mention for whatever reason]," but you're probably not, and at a certain point, it becomes like someone tapping a sunburn.

So yeah.

[jmtorres]

so a post wandered across my dash where someone had gotten a transphobic butthole commenting on their fic, and they were asking their followers go tell this person to kill themselves

and i said, have you considered telling people to kill themselves is an abusive tactic and maybe the proportionate response would be to delete the idiotic comment [alas blocking was not available as the coward hadn't logged in]

to their credit, this person blocked me rather than sending me abuse (though if they replied, I can't see it because they blocked, oh well)

but like. it kinda bothers me that someone i follow thought this was cool to reblog. i thought me and my mutuals were on the same page here. we don't tell people to kill themselves. we especially do not incite others to send someone a slew of such messages. we tell bigoted idiots off, block them when possible, report them if we can nail what they said to a hate speech or threat policy.

we do not tell people to kill themselves.

if you think it's acceptable to send someone a "kys" message for literally any reason please go ahead and block me, I don't want to know you.

[freesia-writes]

Educational Saturday 😉❤️

I come to you today with a very important and very loving blurb about requests, courtesy, and how this site works.

This was a recent interaction I got, and I know others will be able to elaborate on it much better, so I'll keep it simple:

The single most important way to support writers is to REBLOG.

This site operates on REBLOGS.

Reading or requesting without doing anything to share the writer's work is very one-sided and not how we do things here.

SO, my beloved readers...

If you enjoy it, reblog it.

Don't bother with likes.

Comments can be put in the reblog.

.

sincerely, one of many authors putting their hearts and souls into creating awesome stuff for you to enjoy (and appreciate). ;)

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

Hello! I'm so sorry because this is a bit random and you definitely don't have to answer. But I'm a writer too and is it just me or has Tumblr been seeing much less interactions with fanworks these days? People aren't reblogging the way they used to and it's bugging me. Someone reblogged one of my fics this morning with "I don't usually repost fics but this one stole my heart" and I'm pleased with the compliment obviously but it did rub me the wrong way... Tumblr has no algorithm that'll push fanworks to you, and if you like something you're a lil bit responsible for it being shared. And while I do thankfully receive compliments and encouragement on that blog, on another it's just... It feels a bit like they don't care for the author, they just want the fics.

I know this was a bit random, apologies again! I just didn't know who else to take this too. Hope you're having a wonderful week!

I mean, I do agree with you on the “people unfortunately no longer engage with or reblog stuff like they used to in the past” though, as a fellow writer, I don’t believe anybody is “responsible” for reblogging things they enjoy, be it fanfiction or anything. like… yes, reblog means a whole lot to us artists. Like as a function — for Tumblr — doesn’t actually help that much (Like still helps, we still appreciate Like, but it’s not as effective as Reblog), because unlike other social media platforms, Tumblr Like isn’t going to get the content spread to wider audiences. but still, I don’t want to guilt trip anybody into thinking that “reblogging stuff you enjoy is a Must on Tumblr” because then it kind of becomes a “responsibility”, and I don’t think “responsibility on anybody’s end (be it artists’ or audiences’)” is why we create art to begin with, be it fanfiction or fan art or any other form of art.

instead I’d like to encourage people to please reblog the stuff they like. we do appreciate you if you like our posts, but we will appreciate you even more if you reblog and help our content reach wider audience.

please please please please don’t be shy to reblog what you like. reblogging is also a great motivation for your favorite artists to create more art you can enjoy.

reblog is like giving your friend a cup of hot chocolate as a way of thanking them for giving you a gift (fanfic or fanart), in the sense that it’s not your ‘responsibility’ to give your friend a cup of hot chocolate because when your friend gifts you the gift (fanfic or fanart), they do it out of love, not because they demand something in return from you, but your friend will still greatly appreciate the cup of hot chocolate nonetheless, and there will more likely be more gifts (fanfic or fanart) from them this way.

[musashi]

it has come to my attention that people who are new to the platform in any regard are unaware that you can answer asks privately and don't know what tumblr oldies mean when we say "answer privately"

i ask for a lot of art permission as a youtuber and like to keep that correspondence private, and i am noticing an increasingly confused amount of people who try to then send me a DM on TOP of the ask, thinking thats what i mean. the confusion comes because i have DMs closed.

so! here is how you answer asks privately.

this only applies to non-anonymous asks, obviously.

hit 'answer,' like you normally would. type your response.

click this little arrow next to 'post now'

4. select 'answer privately'

click it. there you go!

when you do this, your response to the ask will be sent directly to the other person's askbox, and will show up as an ask notification for them. no one will see it besides you two.

this is common courtesy with non-anonymous asks. you generally want to assume that any logged in ask should be answered privately, unless it's something you or the asker intend to share with your followers like an ask game or a confessional or something the asker is trying to communicate to multiple people/boost.

a lot of tumblr users do not like DMs and have them turned off for a reason! for me, it is because the current culture surrounding instant messaging makes me uncomfortable and i do not want to feel "constantly available" to people. asks are nice because i can answer them when i have the time.

i didn't realize this had fallen out of favour or that people didn't know it was a thing, so here you go.

[savebylou]

Being in the fandom.

Lately I have struggle a bit with being in the fandom, sometimes when things happened in the fandom that cause a lot of reactions it can be a bit overwhelming seeing so many opinions, especially the negative ones. Before it was easy for me to just ignore opinions I disagree with, but lately that has been hard for me to do.

I have take breaks from the dash and that has help but I think this will keep happening and I need to find ways to dealing with this besides the breaks.

I saw this tweet and it make me realise that regardless of the fandom drama that happens at any time in the future, the worst thing already happened, my worst fear of the fandom became a reality, we lost Liam. A member of the band is not with us anymore and we will have to deal with this reality for the rest of our lives. Nothing in the fandom for me will be as painful as losing one of the boys.

So I will try to remind myself that to not let fandom discourse affect me. Sharing this in case it helps somone that is struggling with the same.

I will keep trying to be kind, I will keep supporting the boys and wish them the best and when I need breaks from the fandom I will take them.

Fandom is to enjoy it, do whatever is best for you, curate your experience, follow the people that you want, filter tags to not see the content you don't want, take care, wish you all the best.

[wowgrim]

actual thread of an argument someone tried to start in the notes of one of my posts:

troll: You're implying that Israel has a right to exist? Your Jewish-Zionist upbringing brainwashed you. Get over it.

me: I'm not Jewish. As for Zionism, I didn't even know Israel existed as a modern country until I was 8 years old, and I don't think I heard the term "Zionism" until I was in late high school or college.

troll: You're not Jewish and you don't think Israel should be immediately destroyed? That's the definition of antisemitism! The existence of Israel is super antisemitic because reasons! You are antisemitic!

...

Why are these people so predictable? Attack attack attack, never engage with facts or principles. I know these comments are designed to enrage OPs, but they are just so repetitive and detached from anything anyone actually says in their original posts that they're more boring than anything. Say something thought provoking!

[auroraboringaliceinwonderland]

Idk if a lot of Cinderella boy fans are new on tumblr because Punko made posts about there being a fandom here and y’all came, but I’ve seen a ton of of stuff that makes me think there’s a lot of new users. And I’m telling y’all you gotta change your profile pics to something. If I see one of the default tumblr pfp pics I’m gonna think you’re a bot - same with the rest of tumblr.

Also go to your blog, click the gear, then go down to visibility, and turn on the thing at the bottom that excludes you from third party stuff; including training generative AI which is really freaking bad for the planet and artists and generally people everywhere.

Another thing you can do is go to pages and choose if people can see the stuff you’ve liked/who you’re following. You can also choose if people can ask you questions, if they have the option to be anonymous, and if they’re allowed to send pictures/videos via asks.

You are the curator of your blogging experience, so explore the settings; reblog the posts that you want others to see; decorate your blog how you like; and block the users whom you don’t.

[sukurio]

Some older works bc I don’t really have anything recent rn. And I need to get this account jump started.

whirlwings belong to @lordmarble (check em out 🔫🥰)

[ivomagus]

Me getting this notification after zoning out in Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines for the past 5 days straight.