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the_deep_magicUgh. I have only caught the barest whiff of wank (that doesn't sound right, but you know what I mean) on Tumblr because I follow only a few people, but I have to say, I think the shift to Tumblr is seriously undermining fandom, any fandom, as a community. Just about every fandom I follow is involved, and I know wank is nothing new, but even a few years ago when people were still mostly on LJ, the wank happened on Tumblr but was discussed elsewhere.
I understand why some people left LJ; I don't understand the mass exodus and why they went to Tumblr instead of Dreamwidth or something similar. Maybe that kind of platform has run its course? Or with the rapid growth of AO3, fandom has split into one platform for fics and one for, well, fannishness?
When I started back in the Dark Ages, it was listservs and archives (remember geocities and angelfire? I try not to). I wasn't hugely active back then -- it took LJ to make me an real participant, and maybe that's why I'm clinging to it so hard. But it really does seem ideal: fics, comments, communities, and discussion threads all in one place. Now you've got Tumblr, which is like a bunch of people standing around in a circle shouting at each other -- in order to participate at all, you have to listen to everything everyone else says (often over and over) and in order to join in, you've got to repeat everything everyone else before you said first. Also, everyone's blindfolded and has access to a stack of bricks to throw at will with no sense of responsibility for who the brick hits.
Yikes, maybe if I'd actually gotten my rhetoric degree, I could've come up with a better metaphor to explain the sense of disconnection, but Tumblr really, really frustrates me. The reblogging of the same things over and over is an annoyance that I suppose I can live with, but the inability to respond to someone's post without a) reposting it and everything before it; and b) cutting off the tags, which are a significant means of communication for some reason, make it impossible to have a conversation. And without that, there's no community. Yeah, you can get your rant or your meta or your angry screed out to more people at once, but it doesn't matter how many people click that little heart; it's just you up on that soapbox.
I'm not holding out hope that people will move back to LJ. Technology changes, and I can live with that. But the move to Tumblr has had an overall isolating effect -- slightly compensated for, I think, by Twitter -- and I just want to know what comes next. I hope the generation moving into fandom now knows that it's more than just reblogging gifsets and adding "SO MANY FEELS" at the bottom.
By the way, I know I'm being a hater here, but "feels" is a fucking verb. Tumblr!speak may actually annoy me more than IM!speak.
I understand why some people left LJ; I don't understand the mass exodus and why they went to Tumblr instead of Dreamwidth or something similar. Maybe that kind of platform has run its course? Or with the rapid growth of AO3, fandom has split into one platform for fics and one for, well, fannishness?
When I started back in the Dark Ages, it was listservs and archives (remember geocities and angelfire? I try not to). I wasn't hugely active back then -- it took LJ to make me an real participant, and maybe that's why I'm clinging to it so hard. But it really does seem ideal: fics, comments, communities, and discussion threads all in one place. Now you've got Tumblr, which is like a bunch of people standing around in a circle shouting at each other -- in order to participate at all, you have to listen to everything everyone else says (often over and over) and in order to join in, you've got to repeat everything everyone else before you said first. Also, everyone's blindfolded and has access to a stack of bricks to throw at will with no sense of responsibility for who the brick hits.
Yikes, maybe if I'd actually gotten my rhetoric degree, I could've come up with a better metaphor to explain the sense of disconnection, but Tumblr really, really frustrates me. The reblogging of the same things over and over is an annoyance that I suppose I can live with, but the inability to respond to someone's post without a) reposting it and everything before it; and b) cutting off the tags, which are a significant means of communication for some reason, make it impossible to have a conversation. And without that, there's no community. Yeah, you can get your rant or your meta or your angry screed out to more people at once, but it doesn't matter how many people click that little heart; it's just you up on that soapbox.
I'm not holding out hope that people will move back to LJ. Technology changes, and I can live with that. But the move to Tumblr has had an overall isolating effect -- slightly compensated for, I think, by Twitter -- and I just want to know what comes next. I hope the generation moving into fandom now knows that it's more than just reblogging gifsets and adding "SO MANY FEELS" at the bottom.
By the way, I know I'm being a hater here, but "feels" is a fucking verb. Tumblr!speak may actually annoy me more than IM!speak.
