fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3486 ]

[ SECRET POST #3486 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3486 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Maya Rudolph & Martin Short]

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[Hamilton/South Park]

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[John Spencer]

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[Sliders]

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[Daniel Radcliffe]

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[Star Trek: Deep Space Nine]

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[Dune]

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[Assassin's Creed Syndicate]

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[Mulberry]

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13. [tb]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 28 secrets from Secret Submission Post #498.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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There's been a little bit of discussion about Tumblr over the last couple days, and some people have been very critical about it, so I wanted to make a thread to ask people who are really down on Tumblr where they're coming from. To be clear here, I'm not particularly committed to Tumblr and I don't really use it myself, I'm just curious where people are coming from.

In particular I have two questions:

1) what are your major issues with Tumblr as a platform? Not quality of life things, not annoyances with fandom people, but really major issues you have with the service.

2) why do you think fandom adopted Tumblr so widely and totally, if Tumblr is so bad?

I think 1 and 2 are related. Tumblr makes it very easy to create an echo chamber, leading people to have a pretty warped view of "how everyone is," and very hard to fact check or get truth out there once a fake meme has circulated widely.

To more clearly answer 2, the above makes people feel comfortable and "safe." Unfortunately it comes with the big downsides listed.

This is not only about fandom btw. Neo nazis are there. MRAs are there. Pro-ana groups are there. The reblogging structure itself without a proper commenting system lends to these groups happening and facts often never being corrected on a much larger scale than blog sites like LJ or DW ever did.

Re: Question about Tumblr

diet_poison - 2016-07-21 01:07 (UTC) - Expand

So on your view, its issues as a communication platform are part of its appeal as a social platform, basically?

Yup.

Re: Question about Tumblr

(Anonymous) - 2016-07-21 00:23 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Question about Tumblr

(Anonymous) - 2016-07-21 00:44 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Question about Tumblr

diet_poison - 2016-07-21 01:11 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Question about Tumblr

(Anonymous) - 2016-07-21 01:31 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Question about Tumblr

(Anonymous) - 2016-07-21 02:48 (UTC) - Expand

1) It seems almost broken. Just recently, there will be 15 minute snippets of audio randomly playing on the dash - and sometimes it isn't even from ads, I've gotten clips from the middle of shows. Sometimes, i'll reply to the post and it will jump me back three or four days on my dashboard. Why?

It took how long to get a reasonable block service? There's still how many spam bots in the fandom tags? Having a conversation is even stranger than twitter - it doesn't quite encourage open discussion like here or LJ simply by design, but I suppose it wasn't built for that.

New Xkit has an extension to prevent the ads from auto-playing! It's called Anti Capitalism!

Re: Question about Tumblr

morieris - 2016-07-21 01:38 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Question about Tumblr

mrs_don_draper - 2016-07-21 01:55 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Question about Tumblr

morieris - 2016-07-21 02:11 (UTC) - Expand

I have no major issues because I have Xkit. So when shit goes wrong, I don't notice. I guess it would be cool if some of the Xkit stuff was integrated.

As to why it is so popular, I guess because it is easy to share information.

I've seen around Tumblr that Yahoo is doing something bad that will mean the end of Tumblr. If so, I hope someone creates a good competitor soon. How else will I see hot gifs of guys from TV shows I have not discovered???

I think that's a little overblown, but I'm not really surprised that tumblr turned out to be a bust for yahoo.

Re: Question about Tumblr

kaijinscendre - 2016-07-20 23:15 (UTC) - Expand

Isn't Yahoo trying to be sold to somebody?

Re: Question about Tumblr

(Anonymous) - 2016-07-21 01:33 (UTC) - Expand

The way we're all talking to each other right now on this website - you can't really do that on tumblr. I can't understand how or why fandom adopted a platform whose design seems to discourage in-depth discussion.

So then isn't the answer that there are probably ways Tumblr doesn't suck, and that there's some aspect of fandom behavior that Tumblr fulfills and that you don't understand?

The only rational conclusion from this data is that fandom as a whole isn't that interested in the kind of conversation we're having right now. In which case it seems to me your beef is less with Tumblr as a platform and more with the actual people in fandom.

Re: Question about Tumblr

(Anonymous) - 2016-07-20 23:24 (UTC) - Expand

It's because fandom shifted from being mostly text to mostly art, at least from my observations, and tumblr is great for artists.

1. I hate the user interface. I hate that it's not community-based or text-based. I hate that there are no functional comment threads and I HATE that you have to reblog something just to comment on it, that is the dumbest thing.

2. The younger segments of fandom adopted to it even more than those who originally were on journal-based platforms and I think that momentum moved things along in that direction. Also, Eljay kicked the bucket with their terrible management at the same time. Tumblr is also pretty good for fanart and gifs which a lot of people (myself included) really enjoy. There are things that are good about it. My bones with it are personal preference.

I guess my question is: what made the younger segments of the fandom adopt it, rather than some other alternative to LJ or some other site? Was it just random chance? Was it just the image-sharing capabilities that you mention?

Re: Question about Tumblr

diet_poison - 2016-07-21 01:56 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Question about Tumblr

(Anonymous) - 2016-07-21 18:08 (UTC) - Expand

1. They make updates with no warning whatsoever. Just one minute, same old. The next minute, BOOM! The updates often conflict with settings people have set for their themes and dashboards. This has resulted in missing/deleted themes, GIGANTIC TEXT FOR NO REASON, buttons randomly moved around (i.e. switching "post" and "delete"), and the like. Often, tumblr users will ask for features from the staff, and then the staff will make changes to things people liked instead. For example, there is/was a long-standing desire to fix the video player, but they instead made everyone's icon slide as you scrolled down the dash instead. They also randomly changed the number of pixels the standard picture post could be, rendering all gifs and pics useless unless you use outside coding like Xkit and/or Stylish. Those two extensions are pretty much the only thing holding tumblr together right now.

2. It's really easy to meet other people in your fandom. The forum setting means everyone can see everything you post, but tumblr is much more selective. You can pick and choose who you fangirl with. Also, you can search by tag rather than have to search through forums for what you're looking for. It's not the fans (necessarily) that are terrible, though there are some terrible ones. I think the fans do a lot with what they're given to work with.

1. Tags are not communities. So it's difficult to find the set of people who are into something without wading through a bunch of people who hate something.

2. There's no control of visibility other than "everyone not on my block list." Similarly, there's no way to do moderation beyond spending entire afternoons playing blocklist whack a mole. All of which go on your personal dash.

3. Hate blogs, which go beyond not liking something to "calling out" anyone who disagrees, usually with something like "bad post." Usually gaming the system to get around block lists.

4. The reblogging system amplifies crankery and rewards adolescent egocentrism.

5. Not so good markdown support.

--

Why did fandom adopt tumblr? Livejournal imploded due to mismanagement. Dreamwidth still lacks usable image support. And Tumblr is a relatively easy microblogging platform.

1): I like to read long conversations, without necessarily replying to any of the parties in the conversation. That's very difficult to do on Tumblr.

2): Tumblr makes it easy to follow a single person and read their posts, and to directly respond to those posts if you want. If you don't want to engage with the other people who're talking to that person, or you don't want to respond to anyone's posts at all, Tumblr may be fine for your needs.

Edited 2016-07-21 02:13 (UTC)

My biggest gripe is how difficult it is to have coherent conversations between multiple people. Honestly I like Tumblr a lot, though, almost as much as I liked the forums of yore.

As for why fandom adopted it... LJ and DW have serious problems as fandom platforms as well. Tumblr allows literally anyone to jump in the sandbox and play, without gatekeeping from established mods/comms/cliques. It also allows non-content creators a lot more options for participation. There's always been moderating, aggregating, etc but Tumblr rolls all these into one and let's you make a spiffy blog showcasing all the fan things you like.

It also divorces fandom from personal life in a way that journal sites didn't. Sure, you could have a mostly empty journal, but ime it was very difficult to interact in LJ-based fan communities with the same distance you can interact on Tumblr with. On Tumblr I don't need to have an about me, I don't need to post about my day to prove to some mod that I'm a "real person" and not a troll, I don't need to join a moderated community just to talk about a fandom I like. I can just queue up a bunch of stuff and have fun with it.

Between Tumblrs obvious advantages for things like art and content sharing, and things like Strikethrough, it was inevitable that fandom would make the jump.

I'm just curious to see where it'll head next.

Leaving current fandom aside...

what are your major issues with Tumblr as a platform? Not quality of life things, not annoyances with fandom people, but really major issues you have with the service.

Honestly, I think it's a good site for sharing pictures (which was its intended purpose) but just a terrible fandom platform. Misinformation gets spread like wild fire (like the Will Smith's Dad post which was later corrected). Also some of the interface changes like fixing the video, which sometimes works and if it does it loads incredibly slowly, but they also screwed up everything else.

Another particular beef of mine is the lack of being able to keep sorted out your favorites. Think of lj/dw and their use of "memories" where you can save posts and keep them saved in neat tags. Tumblr doesn't have that and, again, it wasn't designed for that I think.

why do you think fandom adopted Tumblr so widely and totally, if Tumblr is so bad?

I'll go with the fact that, after the infamous strikethrough on livejournal, a lot of people already had a tumblr account and where posting there. Then a new generation of peeps came whose first experience in fandom was on tumblr. Now people (artists included) are moving onto twitter and sometimes crosspost their art on tumblr. Why? Because tumblr is becoming less and less functional.

Also taking into account that Tumblr is currently in a lingo with how yahoo fucked the site and themselves over, and fandom is currently migrating onto other platforms, mostly twitter since everyone and their moms have already an account over there.

Also tumblr on phone sucks but I think that's true for many phone apps.

1) It. Does. Not. Work.
Conversation is impossible.

2) LJ died and created a vacuum. Fuck LJ's bad admins.

Fuck Six Apart and the fucking Russians. LJ would have been fine if it hadn't been sold to the DDoS magnet of Russian opposition. It was those constant DDoS attacks that killed it. and the DW snobs who leaped on every opportunity like Starscream whenever Megatron sneezed to try and drive people away from it.

Why was it Tumblr, in particular, that ended up being the thing to fill that vacuum?

1. It is buggy and broken as fuck. Auto-playing ads, auto-playing videos, having to opt-OUT of certain things rather than opt-in, functionality degrading while updates produce only minor aesthetic tweaks... also, it is RIDICULOUSLY resource-heavy for what it is. I am seriously trying to find another place on the Internet to hang, but it seems to be where a lot of my community hangs out now. *sigh*

2. It's extremely easy to disseminate something uber-fast and far, especially visual media. This can play to its detriment (misinformation and crackpottery gets spread too), but if you're pumping out a steady stream of artistic content, it'll get spread around way more than, say, on LJ, which can only be spread if someone links to it in their own post. I can totally understand why fandom loved it; with a couple clicks, you can share and spread something, rather than the longer process something like LJ or DA would require.

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