#i've spent years curating my algorithm

[badgopher]

Friday

"Does table salt go bad" and "first amendment text" and "richmond virginia suburbs" and other things I've asked the Internet this week.

It was almost warm enough a couple days this week to make park days a thing. I tried. My toes got cold.

I think banning TikTok as it exists today is probably a good idea, but the law to effect that change seems to be in conflict with the first bullet point in the bill of rights. If we lived in a time where precedent mattered, I might be more bothered about how this all plays out. Will the government give TikTok assurances they wont enforce the law that the government enacted to oust them? Who knows. Does it matter? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ At the end of the day, I think I'm mostly just sad about my TikTok (maybe?) going away.

Booked a trip to (the suburbs of) Richmond, VA for the middle of February. A couple nights in Tuckahoe and a couple in Chester. Mostly just a vibe check. I'm hoping to settle on a plan by early March.

[work stuff.]

Rachel Platten is coming to town in March and it took me all of about 12 seconds to buy a ticket this morning, even though I haven't listened to her music in ages.

I have so many pictures to sort through and scan. And a bunch of laundry to fold.

Maybe this weekend.

It could happen.

[leveragehunters]

I have ditched Spotify. I know, I know, it's not an airport etc etc. But I had some thoughts.

A big part of making the decision was the 20+ years of MP3 files sitting disorganised and abandoned on various hard drives and old devices. I spent this past week or so organising them all onto one hard drive, updating file names and tags and folder structures so I could load them all into Plex.

I have a lot of music. Most of it ripped from CDs, some bought as MP3s, and some recorded from cassette tapes using an audio jack and a dream. There's bands I haven't thought about in years; ones that, once reminded, I missed terribly.

It made me realise in the 6 or so years I've had Spotify I've listened to less and less music overall and certainly to fewer once-beloved bands/albums. (I didn't even realise Linkin Park had a new album with a new co-lead singer, a woman, who is incredible.)

Now my music is all set up in Plex, I'm listening to it through PlexAmp, a fantastic music app I'm running on an old tablet, bluetoothed to some decent speakers instead of the crappy computer ones.

Result? I've maybe listened to more music this past week than in all of 2024.

Now there's obviously a novelty factor at play, having everything easily available for the first time in so long, but I think there's something else going on.

Algorithmically, Spotify fed me music. I had a few playlists, a few bands saved, but I didn't have a collection of my music. I'll be the first to admit I'm not a huge music buff, so without my music in front of me, without being able to flip through my personal musical history, the music I'd curated, it was just kind of lost. Listening to Spotify was more like walking through a record store or listening to the radio. I forgot about what I enjoyed and just listened to what was convenient.

Having all my music at my fingertips is making me happy. Happy listening and happy looking through my collection and happy remembering that yeah, that is an awesome album! It makes my brain feel good and I remember when I first heard it, who I was with, what was happening in my life!

It's awesome.

[hillbillyoracle]

I've been researching and experimenting around rehabilitating my relationship with technology for a few years now. What I've realized is there's a big gap between what the research shows and what gets bumped by algorithms like YouTube - which is probably not an accident given the aims of the algorithm.

Here are my biggest takeaways so far:

- Dumbphones, lockboxes, switching to physical media, most everything you see online about coping with tech overwhelm - these plus a very long drying out period are best in cases of genuine tech addiction. Otherwise it's overconsuming to solve and overconsumption problem. Our attempts to rehabilitate our relationships with tech are being hijacked and comodified which keeps us dissatisfied/on the hamster wheel.

- Not all screen time is created equal - research shows this. Some impacts people positively, some neutrally, some negatively. Targeting screen time as a metric tends to make people feel happier in the short term by minimizing the negative category but this often leads to a level of untenable friction toward the positive and neutral types in the long term that tends to lead to a relapse and "binging" the negative. Shame leads to a repeat of the cycle.

- Social media is consistently shown as one of the most negative impacts on psychological wellbeing. Your biggest bang for your buck will be in either leaving, modifying, or heavily structuring your use of social media.

- If you can't leave social media, taking it off of your phone and using a plug in to block the feed + ads on desktop can help. Still want to see what your friends and family are posting? Create a folder for bookmarks of direct links to their profile/main pages or use an RSS reader like Feedly. Curate it carefully; avoid outrage regardless of whether you share it's leanings.

- There are other targets that I personally think would make people happier with their tech usage overall: eliminating/minimizing subscriptions, avoiding ads, prioritizing privacy, and using human curation. While they each have benefits on their face, the shifts in usage they encourage are ones that people generally report more satisfaction with.

- Eliminating/minimizing subscriptions means more money each month but it also usually means cutting out things like streaming. The big non-financial con of streaming is that it can lead to overwhelm and perfectionism - thereby decreasing satisfaction. The upside of cutting it out is that it pushes people toward renting, owning, or ripping media they love which requires intentionality and curation.

- If really you want free streaming, check out whether your library has Kanopy, Hoopla, or Freegal. You can still get some of the benefits by embracing the reduced selection they offer. They also likely still have CDs and DVDs you can rip for your personal collection.

- Avoiding ads and prioritizing privacy go hand in hand. This usually means using an ad blocker and shifting away from Apple and Google and Meta where possible - deleting apps, switching services, blocking feeds, switching browsers. I can't deGoogle completely at the moment but when I shifted in the ways I was able, I started scoring my time online more positively and I took more breaks/spent less time on it.

- Seek out human curation: library newsletters, listen to local radio, ask your friends and family, check out round ups and newsletters from your favorite creators, share your own. Human curation is less likely to be driven by business interests and while there's no algorithm free media rec these days, they're not being given to trap you on a platform.

- Focusing on a quantitative metric (like screen time) is the gateway to consumerism. Stop looking for a cure and start discovering your personal philosophy. Talking about the algorithmic alienation from our actual feelings and desires is too much for this post but simply put there is no "pure" experience you're missing out on by using a screen. Notice how you're feeling, respond with kindness, and let the rest go. Shame is a weapon in the hands of corporations.

Hope this is helpful for someone out there.

[capesandshapes]

If Tumblr ever gets an algorithm I will actually leave

I've spent years personally curating my collection of freaks and weirdos on this website, and goddammit, I will see them.

[kazaa]

The Future of Kazaa

or: "The Inevitable, possible End(?)"

(please read this post in its entirety)

hey! hope youre all well

over the last 10 years, i enjoyed the time spent on tumblr. i've lost and gained friends, changed fandoms and blogs, even got a callout for some stupid shit (that was mostly not my fault tbh)!

however, while other social media have definitely gotten even worse, tumblr is not exempt. bad apples have always existed and algorithms have always been kind of shit, although it has definitely increasingly gone downhill. not only has tumblr's general atmosphere gotten worse, there is almost as much drama and bullshit like twitter was and still is.

no matter how good you curate your experience, no matter how much blocking/muting words and no matter how much you try to fight tumblr layout changes, there seems to not be positive (long-term) change.

as such, i have decided to shelf and put kazaa on a possible indefinite hiatus. [PT: shelf and put kazaa on a possible indefinite hiatus.]

please understand that this wasn't a light decision and i may return at some point, but currently i feel no need and interest. i will still continue to like posts and converse over IM (or other socials, hit me up!) from time to time, so i won't be away entirely.

[andromeda4004]

@staff

I arrived on Tumblr in 2021 because I wanted to engage with a few specific creators within a fandom. I cannot overstate how good this site is for that! I've spent years on other SM platforms trying to curate a feed full of things I care about, and it's actually possible here! I can scroll Tumblr happily for hours (and I do) knowing that I will be findings things I'm interested in and cool stuff that's tangential to that, because I found a group of mutuals that works. I can't do that anywhere else online; I've near-enough abandoned all my other SM because of the flood of irrelevant and uninteresting stuff pushed by the algorithm. Please don't screw up the bit of the Internet that's actually fun to hang out!

Also, please note - I pay for ad-free browsing (because I like my feed the way it is). I won't be doing that if my feed is screwed up anyway. I bought badges; I'd buy physical merch if international shipping wasn't excessive. I rave about how fun this site is when I'm offline. *I'm literally your perfect customer!* Please listen!

An open letter to @staff

I already submitted this to Support under "Feedback," but I'm sharing it here too as I don't expect it to get a response, and I feel like putting in out in public may be more effective than sending it off into the void.

The recent post on the Staff blog about changing tumblr to an algorithmic feed features a large amount of misinformation that I feel staff needs to address, openly and honestly, with information on where this data was sourced at the very least.

Claim 1: Algorithms help small creators.

This is false, as algorithms are designed to push content that gets engagement in order to get it more engagement, thereby assuring that the popular remain popular and the small remain small except in instances of extreme luck.

This can already be seen on the tumblr radar, which is a combination of staff picks (usually the same half-dozen fandoms or niche special interests like Lego photography) which already have a ton of engagement, or posts that are getting enough engagement to hit the radar organically. Tumblr has an algorithm that runs like every other socmed algorithm on the planet, and it will decimate the reach of small creators just like every other platform before it.

Claim 2: Only a small portion of users utilize the chronological feed.

You can find a poll by user @darkwood-sleddog here that at the time of writing this, sits at over 40 THOUSAND responses showing that over 96 percent of them use the chronological feed. Claiming otherwise isn't just a misstatement, it's a lie. You are lying to your core userbase and expecting them to accept it as fact. It's not just unethical, it's insulting to people who have been supporting your platform for over a decade.

Claim 3: Tumblr is not easy to use.

This is also 100% false and you ABSOLUTELY know it. Tumblr is EXTREMELY easy to use, the issue is that the documentation, the explanations of features, and often even the stability of the service is subpar. All of this would be very easy for staff to fix, if they would invest in the creation of walkthroughs and clear explanations of how various site features work, as well as finally fixing the search function. Your inability to explain how your service works should not result in completely ignoring the needs and wants of your core long-term userbase. The fact that you're more willing to invest in the very systems that have made every other form of social media so horrifically toxic than in trying to make it easier for people to use the service AS IT WORKS NOW and fixing the parts that don't work as well speaks volumes toward what tumblr staff actually cares about.

You will not get a paycheck if your platform becomes defunct, and the thing that makes it special right now is that it is the ONLY large-scale socmed platform on THE ENTIRE INTERNET with a true chronological feed and no aggressive algorithmic content serving. The recent post from staff indicates that you are going to kill that, and are insisting that it's what we want. It is not. I'd hazard to guess that most of the dev team knows it isn't what we want, but I assume the money people don't care. The user base isn't relevant, just how much money they can bring in.

The CEO stated he wanted this to remain as sort of the last bastion of the Old Internet, and yet here we are, watching you declare you intend to burn it to the ground.

You can do so much better than this.

[odd-cinema]

Media Audience #3 (CMNS201)

I am hyper aware of my media usage at all times. As previously explained in my first post, I am privy to thorough statistics of my film viewing habits through the Letterboxd app. For instance, I know that I've viewed around 2300 films in my lifetime, that I've only seen 166 Canadian films versus 1938 American films, and that this year I've spent 377 hours watching film. My phone tracks how much I spent active on it throughout the way and provides me updates when I have unusual habits (such as using my phone less). When I am speaking about needing a new product, or have googled something I might want, I am reminded through advertisements and recommendations on my devices. If I like horror movies, am politically aligned with the NDP, have a cat, and so on, the content I am an audience to reflects that. Netflix recommends horror films, my Twitter (or X) is left-leaning and my advertisements are for cat toys.

To expand on my previous blog post, this is where the concerns are with media becoming a perfectly curated echo-chamber for my lifestyle and beliefs. On one hand, this may be a positive for myself and my perceived intelligence, such as my ability to seek out what I believe is a bigger picture when I don't feel I'm seeing that. Whereas some people, people I know in my personal life, are berated with overwhelmingly negative, anxiety-inducing and very one-note content. For example, someone might be targeted by social media content exclusively about wars, tragedies, contentious debates and more. If they are to receive the same perspective over and over again, this can wear on their mental health and narrow their ability to see nuance in the content. I am very conscious of the fact that because this may not be the content I am receiving, this creates a disconnect between myself those people. I don't see their perspective, and how it has been formed, and they may not see mine either. We are both missing a piece of the puzzle and this boils down to algorithms.

I am admittedly less concerned with my role as an audience member as I exercise critical thinking and source checking. I am concerned about the disconnect between myself and those in my life, and how being different audiences to media perpetuates the broken link.

[nephrastar]

Honestly convinced that, barring maybe tumblr, bigwig social media has collapsed damn near all of my social circles.

All this shit about figuring out the algorithm, all this shit about analytics, SEO, about view time, about follower count... I just fucking hate it all now. Social media basically turned the internet from a wild west with pockets of peaceful and interesting communes to a monolithic walled city where the only thing that matters is numbers. And if you get big numbers, congrats you get to be famous!! But only if you can keep those numbers going.

And let me tell you from personal experience-- 9 times out of 10, when you post something to social media at "the right time of day" with the intent of getting some clout, your post just... Does not get clout, most of the time.

Any post that goes viral is a benefactor of circumstance. In my almost 20 years of being on the internet, the one and only thing I've ever posted that went viral was a shitpost on Twitter of me memeing on a restaurant because they had a tip limit on their app and they along with many other food and adjacent companies were being criticized for not paying their employees a living wage. This was in 2022. Last year. I learned nothing from having hundreds of thousands of likes and retweets, and have not had anything nearly as popular since. I promoted my art Twitter in the replies, but you wanna know what that did?

Absolutely FUCKING NOTHING. I didnt make any money as a result of piggybacking that viral tweet. I didn't have people clamoring for what i had to offer. And it was then when I realized that getting big numbers anywhere will ultimately amount to jack and shit. And Jack had long since left town.

That may sound like i was upset that i didnt become internet famous overnight. I honestly wasn't, but there's a point to be made here-- the chances of your platform becoming big and internet famous are about as good as your acting landing you a breakout role in a Hollywood film. You're competing with hundreds of hours worth of content per second on most platforms, and depending on the site, their algorithm, which may or may not be controlled by real life humans.

Nobody can know for certain what types of videos will be hits on YouTube anymore. not even YouTube staff know what will be hits anymore because their algorithm is a machine learning AI, and creating any content at all with the intent of beating the algorithm or making faceless computers happy will lead to burnout. And when that content doesn't make the big numbers, you're probably going to feel like it's your fault when it's really not. this goes for any social media site that uses similar methods to "curate" their user's site experience.

And I've seen far too many people i know fall into this trap, which may as well be gambling. Getting good numbers so you can get that nice dopamine hit. Then maybe you hit a jackpot. Then you're just outright delighted. So you do the same thing you did before. But it doesn't make big numbers this time. Was it something you did? Ah well. Post again. Nothing. You adjust how you post and when to post. Maybe what to post, even. But still... Your content isn't doing well. You may as well be playing slots at a casino, except instead of losing thousands of dollars you're losing time. Time that, honestly, would've been better spent doing something you legitimately like to do.

The way i see it, make content like the algorithm doesn't exist-- make videos infodumping about your special interest like view counts dont matter, draw art and post it with the same energy a 5 year old has when they show off their macaroni art to their parents. Make the music you want to hear played during a thunderstorm.

Make the content that you want because you like the idea of it existing. At the end of the day, that content is FOR YOU! It has value because you poured your passion and love into it, and no amount of Algorithms or influencer courses or viral content will ever change that. And if that does eventually lead to you being notable and successful, then congratulations! You have a large audience that's cheering you on and encouraging you to do what you love.

[one-chaotic-neautral]

Just somes notes on comparing my experiences with Twitter and Tumblr.

I've spent a couple months on twitter, compared to a few years being on Tumblr casually, and I can say with 100% certainty that Tumblr is a better app, for me at least.

Tumblr is very easy to curate my experience, I only follow a few people, who all reblog and post the content that I like seeing, and I never see anything I don't sign up to. When I post it's almost guaranteed that no one will see it, even on accident (hence why I'm writing this here rather than there). I always spend far less time at once on here, and generally leave quite happy.

Twitter on the other hand is far more predatory with it's algorithm. Even following very few people, I'll still get so many posts on my tl that I didn't sign up for. A majority of things on my home page are 'trending' posts or from specific tags, or even something a person who I'm following is following liked. It seems to have 80% of it's posts being controversies or intended to spark outrage, which appears to be the way that things gain popularity.

I originally got twitter for specific fandom content, and I'll be honest there is some great stuff there! but it's also shown me some of the worst kinds of fandom that I never saw before, or wanted to be involved in. It's hard to keep it on theme. And if it's not fandom controversies, it's irl tradgedies and other bigotry happening in the world that I've been trying to avoid thinking about because I'm unable to do anything about it.

Twitter seems to always leave me feeling worse than before. Angry, or sad, or frustrated etc. The only reason I haven't I downloaded it yet is my two (2) moots that I would die for despite only exchanging a total of roughly 12 sentences.

Basically my experience with Tumblr is far better because of the algorithm/system giving more user control, and the people I follow just being cool and fun.

[freefalasteen]

I have a slew of ads supporting palestine all over my socials, but that's because ive spent years curating it that way. For years, any pro-israel ad has been blocked/dismissed. Saying im not interested in it or it isn't for me. I've interacted with the ads I like. Most people ignore them or go past them and then wonder why their pages aren't to their liking during times like these. You have to be active in curating your own algorithm.

Not to say you arent right, people are getting silenced over this. But because ive customized my ad content at the very least im not seeing pro-israel sentiments.

Anybody speaking out about Palestine has been getting shadow-banned. It’s happening on every platform. I don’t see as many posts educating + showing support to Palestine unless it’s a huge celebrity or organization. But it’s not just celebs it’s happening to content creators all over the world and just everybody else who’s supporting Palestine. We are all purposefully being hidden. It’s extremely f’d up how people are literally being silenced for speaking the truth. Ridiculous. But I’m not shutting the hell up anytime soon so respectfully🖕🏿

But as of recently, Israel ordered an air strike on a hospital that killed hundreds of people. We are witnessing in real time the genocide of the people of Gaza and the media is trying to spin the narrative. Mind you, this is all being funded by our taxes. Yep, you heard that right. Our U.S. tax dollar is helping with the literal ethnic cleansing of Gaza. 😞

[violetsystems]

#personal

If anybody can trust anything about my time on earth, it's how many times I've stood up and called bullshit on things. This includes my own life often times and the last two years especially has been telling. I definitely had the vision for myself to move beyond things far before they ever collapsed. Back at the start of 2017 I flew to New York with intentions of restarting my music career sober. Five years later, nothing works including me. I think of music and blogging more as lily pads than anything. You assume people don't want to hire someone down the line that is a complete Borg. I've rewritten my resume eighteen times since I was let go from my job of twenty years. The entire time I've felt like I was selling myself to a brick wall. I come up with ideas to pass the time. The cybersecurity mixtape was a real attempt at bookending my careers so I could move on. To promote it, I took to Facebook of which I had been locked out of due to my old job hijacking my email address without warning. I've spent so much of my time proving I exist that I've renewed my passport with ten forms of identification. This was years ago but I have all the papers including a weird picture from a newspaper of me receiving confirmation at a church. But losing your Facebook without your consent is like being zeroed out completely. When it comes to proving you are still a live, a head shot on Facebook is the nail in the coffin. Everybody comes out of the woodwork. People who have been silent for years at this point. I read all these paragraph long job acceptance posts on LinkedIn often. "I was just like you. I was ghosted by the world and coworkers. I know how it feels when it happened to me. But after eight years I got the job with the arm and hammer company. Baking soda is your friend." And people ceremoniously congratulate you. I post a photo to my unlocked Facebook account with over a thousand friends and it's more a funeral than a parade. No one asks specifically what I've been doing. How I've been suffering. They want you to show the weakness so they can console and feel good about it. And the cast of people is the most telling. My old boss who left before they hired a CIO who fired everyone worth a shit is on there. He knows the pain more than anyone. That same boss and photo teacher that defended my ex girlfriend even after we broke up and she was fired from the job I helped her get. I helped a lot of people get jobs over the years. Some still work at the institution I got let go from. There's the very first girl I dated who was a recovering heroin addict who married the skinhead that excommunicated me back in college at the local denny's. Real top quality trash there. There's the people I met from Finland wandering South Korea alone who were probably spies. The day after I hung out with them in Seoul my room at the hostel was flooded with bed bugs. He had the nerve to ask how I was doing in spire of everything. I didn't answer. Why not ask your prime minister how it feels to be free enough to party?

America expects you to do all the heavy lifting when it comes to networking and pursuit of happiness. It says the key to your future is excavating the grave site of your past. And I often try to appear as if everything is normal and I am indeed alive. But the scientific method has proven to me more than once at my age that the past is an eyesore. You can always feel the vibe emanating from it like the stench in a graveyard from a zombie movie. You get ghosted and reconnect out of sanity. It's all waiting there with nothing relevant to say. People who have never clicked on anything you've ever shared are there because the algorithms curated your head shot. A highly contrasted and easy to parse avatar for whatever facial recognition keeps tabs on our identities across the globe. I keep up these pretentions because I don't want to be jobless forever. And yet the things I do are beyond the bare minimum other people contribute. You see, I know how much more talented I am next to everyone. Because I know how much I have risked in years compared to some dipshit edge lords on the internet half my age. I know how many times I've been followed around the world and swindled. I know how much of my information floats out there every day that people gape at. They talk constant shit behind my back because they have nothing better to do. And they have created largely a shadow like batman. A whisper of what I'm really capable of. And this scares the basic ass normal motherfuckers who thought they were better than me. I am myself. No one is like me. I have spent decades defending myself against the discourse cokeheads throw around idly in the club. And what do they actually have to show for it? Bullshit. Excuses. Mantras. Pre rehearsed arguments. Pranks. And I have to stand here for years and entertain a roast that never comes. I am never reconnecting to my past other than to have a super computer verify that I have nothing to do with anything but my own responsibilities for my own actions. I have no baggage from the past to take with me anywhere. I have nothing but horror and better judgement. People knew where I was all this time. And nobody in real life reached out. They set up a fake, cardboard town around me wondering if they could engineer a reconnection. Some reality show to profit off like disaster capitalism. Alec Baldwin presents the assistant director now streaming on peacock starring hologram Anne Heche. The big reveal in that show is to find out that those people are deathly afraid of something they don't understand. That they participated in my exit interview. Staged it for the cameras. And that my time as undercover boss putting up with any of this shit is ancient history.

I wouldn't ever say that about the people I've spent time with here on Tumblr. It's much different in a bizarre way. Although I've brought a lot of heat on myself in the real world for being open and honest. Everybody wants to test their mediocre beliefs about themselves on me. And if you know that this is just the same old cycle of jealousy, you know how bored I am with it. I hate it out here. I hate how people are so hyper fixated on the present that they don't realize it's worse than it was for me when you thought I was cool. Everything is fucking mediocre. Nobody tries. Everybody gets together and complains and does nothing about it. Nobody sees how confrontational and stupid things have become. You can't even enter your apartment without the garbage man trying to prove he's better than you because he has a job. I do have a job. I own a company. I never said it was profitable. I make a podcast about patches and then the next day every news media outlet is talking about patching your operating system like it's the end of the world. People know who I am. They make it a point to be seen like they're important enough to talk to whenever I take out my trash. They fucking steal ideas from me and never give me credit. Never throw me a bone. This has happened for decades and I have come to realize that this is America. A place that lies, cheats and acts nice about it so that you feel bad calling it out on it's punk ass bullshit. You need to get over feeling angry about knowing your worth. And people don't know how hard to hit back. There's a point when you no longer need to swing the bat. You are waiting for the umpire to call the walk. And here I am sitting at home plate every day spending my entire life savings waiting for somebody to acknowledge that I'm worth something. That's intentional. They want to break you down. They want me to believe that I'm nothing. And this is simply not fucking true. I'm about the only person on this website who wouldn't lie to you after what I've been through. Any one who talks shit about me who has never stared me in the eyes is a limp dick, flaccid pussy of an individual. And you need to start treating them as such. Because this doesn't get better for any of us if I go down like Jesus for a bunch of billionaires who dodge taxes in his name. Amen. <3 Tim

[dulcetines]

teh, kalo di twitter kan mainnya retweet, like, atau quote tweet gitu2 yah. nah kalo di tumblr gmn sie 🥲 i just keep reblogging things (and read them yes) but what else can i do here.. starting to love tumblr bc i find so many interesting things here lmao

oh boy. where do i even start

to be able to fully experience tumblr you'll have to get rid of anything the twt culture has taught you. like for example everything is deliberately much much slower here and i think that's probably why you're feeling underwhelmed? twitter is full of algorithms that incentivizes instant gratification and rewards you for staying on top of things. here in tumblr everything is chronologically more linear and it doesn't even have the kind of algorithm that boosts engagement and/or recommends you stuffs based on your likes/reblogs. so the answer to your question completely depends on why you created an account in the first place.

but mostly i want to introduce you to tumblr's tagging systems, which is functionally closer to AO3 tags more than it is to twitter hashtags. if you go to my homepage you'll notice how i have tags like #lovely people and #w: parent trap. people do this in tumblr to organize their content because once you tag a post it'll automatically appear on the tag page. for example, every ask related to the parent trap is always trackable here. or if i want to look at every single person who has said nice things to me or asked compelling questions about my works i can always go to the #lovely people tag.

this is pretty damn helpful especially if you're a creator and you're easily inspired by everything. tumblr for me is an inspiration well. in the old days i used to reblog every single thing that inspired me and tag it with a ship or character i associate it with. this could be a photoset, a gifset, a poem snippet, even a text post:

so basically pinterest but with a lot more context.

i also unironically use tags to elaborate my answers, which is one of the famous ways folks communicate here in tumblr. you've probably already noticed.

but like i've said, tumblr tags work like AO3 tags, so if you put a keyword into the search bar it will return with all content related to the keyword. for example, i check the #batlantern tag every day to see if there is any new fic and/or fanart lmao. but note that it doesn't have to be a fandom thing. go to the #writing advice tag in tumblr and you'll probably see a lot of helpful stuffs there, when filtered and sorted carefully. you can't really do this in twitter without finding an account originally created for that specific purpose.

anyway. tumblr for me is a form of escapism from other social media. it lets me curate things silently and thus helps me think a little bit better, without much noise in the background. i can even say that it feels meditative lol. like a social media vacation if you think about it. like my favorite AO3 authors and poets are here and every time they reblog something it's like seeing what's inside their heads, how they think about things and how that translates into something worth reading. i find all of their raw thoughts very interesting whereas in twitter it sometimes feels performative. things are also a lot funnier here in tumblr if you follow the right folks.

also if you know your way around HTML/CSS and you want to get nerdy, check out theme-hunter. i spent a lot of my teenage years making tumblr themes lmao

[omamervt]

And Thirdly, I think the source of a LOT of peoples' fears about the loss of a centralized kind of gathering place is that by and large, people have just... forgotten how to browse the web. Some of y'all may even be so young, you don't remember any other way. I know a guy who knows a guy who works at my state's community college, and they make it sound like people are just not being taught how to do even surface-level online research anymore. I learned that shit in middle school in a Republican small town with a graduating class of 60 who had a computer lab with 10-year-old PCs, most of which were dummy terminals, and probably 3 mbps that every station in the school had to share. Point is that while I'm certain that some people didn't get that training, I refuse to believe my school just so happened to be the only one that taught that. Anyway, I'm not as good at it now as I used to be, so I'm not gonna be the one to teach you, but I will say that if you're worried about not landing in the same place as your Twitter mutuals when the site inevitably gets stripped for parts in the foreclosure sale, LEARN HOW TO BROWSE THE WEB!!!

I've even seen people having anxiety about spreading their online presence too thin. Which is frankly an understandable position in the era of every social media having a unique algorithm with its own horrible and convoluted standards for what posts people see. But what if I told you that back in the day, the only social media you had to specifically design posts around was Twitter? And that was only due to the 140-character limit? People found shit by searching for it. You wanna find Pokemon content? you look up #Pokemon in the search bar, then you follow people who post about it. If your curation tools are good enough, you don't even have to worry about what kind of person the poster is upfront, because blocking them is easy enough if they do something hateful or annoying enough down the line. Honestly though that's one thing Twitter has going for it still. Tumblr still largely follows that model, and people have been ignoring that that it was designed as blogging software since the beginning of time. It's what y'all have loved about this site while Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc went different ways.

But be honest. If every site let you kinda just do whatever you wanted without having to worry about a post getting buried for not meeting some ridiculous arbitrary standard, you'd find it a lot easier to cross-post. Sure, your time may still be primarily spent on one site or another, but if everything was equal when it came to POSTING, why wouldn't you just schedule to 5 different platforms with Buffer or some shit?

And if we all combine attempts at cross-posting with using RSS correctly, worry more about SEO than discovery on-platform (and frankly, be wary of any site that doesn't let people find posts from a Google search or see them without logging in, including Discord), stop equating pure numbers with genuine engagement, and re-learning The Old Ways of Existing On The Internet, I think people will survive the loss of One Central Place better than they're expecting too.

Something I've been thinking about ever since the first sign that Twitter was gonna be run into the ground is that a lot of people are (reasonably) concerned that the loss of Twitter is gonna mean the loss of a centralized platform that would allow for virtually anyone to grow a massive following of people who like what they do, and leverage that to make money doing the things they love.

Again, this isn't unreasonable, but I think maybe there are some things to consider before going all doom and gloom about it.

First, and most importantly, while we're all used to relying on centralized social media sites for discovering new things now, I think we need to remember that MANY of the independent media organizations you know of today, namely Dropout (made of former members of College Humor, a popular media production group from the 2010s), RocketJump, or RoosterTeeth? All of them and more got started way before Twitter was the prevalent social media. Basically anyone who's been making primarily web-based content since ~2014 or earlier has been around since before Twitter was the prevalent social media. Some of them got a boost from Facebook, but Pre-Timeline Facebook wasn't some shitty walled garden either, and Facebook's enshittification wasn't really complete until around 2015, with the Pivot to Video scam. The web was still a pretty open and explorable place up to that point in time. People were still discovered all the time, even with small followings, because they knew of a WAY easier game to play than the algorithm game: Search Engine Optimization, the idea that if your webpage contains all the right keywords, it's likely to end up in the first two pages of someone's Google search. Or, if you go back to a pre-2010 world, their Bing search, or their Yahoo search, or their Ask.com question. The point is, if social media as many of you know it ceased to exist tomorrow, the world wide web has a vast series of tools that many have forgotten in the last 8 years, but haven't actually gone anywhere. In fact, some have improved while nobody was looking. (like RSS. You know, the thing podcasts use? Yeah, it lets you push and pull basically any kind of web-friendly data you can imagine to any source that takes the format, including a basic-ass free Wordpress or Neocities webpage. You can even pull your Tumblr! And there are way more resources to help you maximize your use of them, now!)

I had more but I'll have to come back to it later because I had way more to say about the first point alone than I anticipated.