13 ms·

Let’s all go back to Tumblr

99 points by raleighm 8y ago

therealmarv 8y ago
Have you seen the last mobile app? You are forced to see 3-4 ads without seeing the post in question. Actually tumblr is dying because of this.
newswriter99 8y ago
-self-harm glorification -bad porn -signal boosting for political rants -faux moral intellectualism by social justice warriors -cyber bullying Let's not?
- phyzome 8y ago
  Those are all content issues, not format/platform issues. Don't like those? Don't make your social circle out of the people who do them.
  - eahman02 8y ago
    There's nothing inherently wrong with the Twitter platform.
    - Scoping_dindus 8y ago
      Depends on what the goal is. 300 characters incentivizes driveby remarks rather than articulate conversations. Twitter also has really bad content enforcement. Not inherent to the format, but it's worth consideration in the interest of practicality.
      - eahman02 8y ago
        Who has time and energy for articulate conversations over the internet? What do we want, a social network for the few?
        IGI-111 8y ago
        Usenet was fun while it lasted. But september will probably never end.
        eahman02 8y ago
        In fact, it's about to start.
    - lmm 8y ago
      There was a great article I've never been able to find again about how the UI of Twitter naturally guides users into de facto bullying, and most of the advice given by experienced Twitter users (e.g. check existing replies to a tweet before adding your own) is working around UI choices made by the system itself.
      - pferde 8y ago
        I wonder how many of those bully-inducing UI features are also present in software like Mastodon or Diaspora, and are therefore disasters-in-waiting, to be triggered once critical mass of users is reached.
      - Pete_D 8y ago
        Was it this one? https://web.archive.org/web/20180801143131/http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=41853 https://web.archive.org/web/20180801143131/http://www.shamus... (archive link because the site seems to be down at the moment)
        lmm 8y ago
        It wasn't, but that's a good article on the same topic. The one I was thinking of was focused more on low-level details of the twitter UI.
  - 1ris 8y ago
    I think the "notes" and the "reblog" function contribute to the problem. It drives engagement ^w^w makes trolling way too easy and creates a need for attention that leads to attention whoring/virtue signalling/radicalisation. I think they are pretty much platform problems.
  - philwelch 8y ago
    The medium is the message. Twitter is designed like a platform for harassment, so a lot of the content on Twitter is harassing. Tumblr is designed like a platform for radicalization, so a lot of the content on Tumblr is radicalized. It turns out that your very advice ("don't make your social circle out of the people who [create weird and distateful fringe content]") is the exact same echo-chamber-and-radicalization-mechanism that filled Tumblr with this kind of crap in the first place.
    - phyzome 8y ago
      But Twitter makes it so that's all up in your face. I haven't used Tumblr hardly at all, but it seems like it's optional to participate in that, since things are a little more partitioned. Anyway, I'm interested in hearing more about the radicalization thing, which I haven't actually observed first-hand, but several people in the comments here have mentioned. What interaction elements do you think lead to it?
      - b5 8y ago
        I used Tumblr for years. From probably 2008 until 2017. It's not entirely optional to interact with radicalised elements on Tumblr. The tagging system lets them find you, and then they can brigade you if you fall foul of whatever pet cause they have. This happened to me when I'd posted a photo of my dog. She's my pride and joy, and it was a harmless and cute photo of her jumping to catch a ball in the air. My mistake was using the caption "Good girl!" and tag #goodgirl. (I also tagged #dog, #fetch, #springerspaniel, #spaniel.) I was flooded with follows from people, mostly men but also some young-ish girls, in the "daddy dom" community (their main tag seems to be #ddlg, but #goodgirl was enough for them to find me). That was a pretty disturbing subculture with definitely uncomfortable elements of abuse built right into the foundation of it. I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. They mercilessly harrassed me. They flooded my inbox with abusive message: "dirty cis scum, kill yourself", things like that. They reblogged my photo saying some pretty vile things about me and my poor dog. In their reblogs they utterly misrepresented what I'd said, reposted it endlessly, called me transphobic, a bigot, threatened to dox me. In the end I abandoned my entire blog there and deleted it. As far as I know, there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful reblogs taken down. I reported them all for abuse and harassment, but Tumblr did nothing. Tumblr's staff don't care. They would never respond on Twitter or by email or to my reports through the form on the site. Just radio silence. This is purely anecdotal, I know. I know someone else who also accidentally drew the ire of Tumblr and ended up having to delete their blog and leave the platform to escape a sustained campaign of harassment and threats from a similar group of people. Again, Tumblr-the-company did nothing to stop it.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  You can add one more thing: inane bullshit. In my field of academia, I know several people who maintain a Wordpress or similar blog for serious matters, but a parallel Tumblr blog for silly memes etc. So, there seems to be a feeling among some that Tumblr is not a credible venue.
- sp332 8y ago
  I don't trust Yahoo to moderate things well either. They seem to be a little too reactionary. For example they first cracked down on NSFW blogs for no particular reason and then mostly rolled back changes after protests. https://www.zdnet.com/article/after-backlash-yahoos-tumblr-quietly-restores-adult-nsfw-blogs/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/after-backlash-yahoos-tumblr-q... How do you think they're going to handle organized campaigns to remove users, or not to remove users? My guess is it will be a mess.
  - mjevans 8y ago
    I can't actually recall any form of organized moderation that has been successful for WIDE audiences. It seems to work 'OK' if there's a smaller community with a group of core dedicated users (which the moderation staff has a large overlap with); however even then it works only if there is a clear and unambiguous mission statement and laser focused guidelines of 'on topic' contributions. I'm not familiar with Craigslist, and have only very limited observations of Reddit; but I think these sites are generally the closest to a sustainable model. In my experience they let 'local' moderation do it's thing, sub-communities individually have their own flavor and groups; with active and positive ones seeing the most success. Moderate ones tend to languish until they trail off. The really bad ones get globally flagged and killed. I think a logical next step might be 'supersets' where different user areas subscribe to a kind of moderation guild.
  - Grue3 8y ago
    Tumblr is currently owned by Oath, not Yahoo.
- lainga 8y ago
  You can get all of those except the first one out of Twitter...
  - foolfoolz 8y ago
    it’s there if you look for it
tomjen3 8y ago
A radical idea, lets all go back to blogs, hosted and owned by ourselves, on our own sites, which will enrich only us, and where you can write as long and as short as you want, and link to whatever you want.
- phyzome 8y ago
  I have such nostalgia for the blogosphere. The one thing it's missing is post privacy; I want to be able to journal privately (like on Dreamwidth) but also use my own hosting and not rely on someone else's platform. I've been toying around with writing my own social media software along those lines, using servers. Some noodling about on that topic: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/ https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/
  - bena 8y ago
    That doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle.
  - drharby 8y ago
    I figure any cms could offer that via privileges
    - phyzome 8y ago
      Sure! And that's what Dreamwidth offers... except I can't run my own DW. (Well, it's open source so I could, but it's kind of huge, and I would be the only user!) I'm basically thinking of federated DW.
      - stevenicr 8y ago
        self hosted wordpress does all this out of the box I think. I have one site where I have public posts and pages and some pages are "password protected" - so they are viewable by a select few associates, and a few pages are either saved as draft or pulished privately in the admin backedn / dashboard - which makes it easy to retrieve and edit and such. There are free plugins like buddypress wihch can make more complex systems, private, public, semi-private groups for friends and content, stuff like that. Many others like s2member and such. only trickery is if you have a widget displaying a list of published "pages" on your site, you may need to get into that widget and tell it to not display page 10398 if that is one you are trying to keep under wraps and yet be available for your secret friends, published, but not listed as another comment mentions with docuwiki, and I think youtube has a similar option. there are many auto backup options with basic free plugins too, so I think WP would cover what you are describing. Definitely need added security plugins as these are auto targetted for breaking into regularly, good ones are free and available. You could always put it in a sub folder and add in an htaccess extra htpasswd to lock it down further and such of course as well.
phyzome 8y ago
Main takeaways, in my view: - Longer form allows for less heated conversation - Allowing randos to emplace their screeds immediately below your post encourages fighting That second point I think bears more exploration. Maybe we shouldn't allow trolls to inject themselves into every conversation, eh? My favorite format for post/discussion is still the blog format, where comments are moderated by the author of the post. You want to post something the author wouldn't allow on their post? Do it on your own blog. (Dreamwidth, main successor to Livejournal, has this property as well.)
- ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
  I run a few blogs for a couple of pretty big Authors (not GRRM big, but still top 5 in Amazon for their categories). For years now, I've been suggesting to not have comments on the blog, and just have a link to their email saying something like "Want to discuss this? Send me an Email, I'd love to chat!". Every single one of them prefers this method, and has said it creates a much more valuable conversation 1-on-1 with the person, rather than the exposed public sharing of an open comment section. One of the authors actually came up with the idea, and I now love it too. A few others ask for comments as normal, but want people to sign up, and be approved. WP has a nice feature for this where people can sign up + comment in a single go, then the admin can approve that comment, which also approves them to post in the future. Settings > Discussion > "Comment author must have a previously approved comment."
  - saurik 8y ago
    I find it really interesting (and even exciting) that Instagram stories (which have rapidly taken over Instagram) work like this: you respond by sending a private message to the poster, not by leaving a public comment.
  - jseliger 8y ago
    A long time ago, James Fallows of The Atlantic made the decision to turn off comments on his blog: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/lets-talk-reader-comments-one-more-time/280058 https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/lets-ta...
douglaswlance 8y ago
Tumblr is guaranteed one-upmanship. The reblogging feature causes escalation. We need to look at the brain, and figure out how neurons work together in networks to produce truth. Then use that model for our social networks.
- majewsky 8y ago
  What makes you think that neurons produce truth? Neurons mostly produce actionable thoughts.
  - hydrox24 8y ago
    > Neurons mostly produce actionable thoughts. I suppose you think this is true.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      Well, no. I thought about editing this after the fact, but couldn't come up with a succinct summary of what neurons do on a high level. So I let this first impulse stand.
      - pjc50 8y ago
        I think you missed a joke, but I'm not sure.
  - api_or_ipa 8y ago
    Collectively neurons moderate their individual binary responses and together respond with more nuance to outside stimuli. Maybe that's the parallel she/he is trying to present?
  - douglaswlance 8y ago
    Neurons produced the modern world. I'd say they're doing a bit better at producing truth than all other matter in the known universe...
- 8y ago
lrg 8y ago
Some of the longer posts about social justice that I would read on Tumblr when I was regularly using the app offered some insight into the minds and feelings of marginalized groups that were able to voice their opinions vehemently due to the anonymity that Tumblr provided. It was a safe space and an echo chamber, in that widely unaccepted opinions were harshly criticized as bigotry and removed from the discourse. I think it gave a lot of people the opportunity to vent to a group of generally caring, considerate, sometimes single-minded, and occasionally misguided teenagers and young adults when these people felt that they had no other outlet. It might not have produced the most inspired arguments or conversations, but at the very least Tumblr provided a cohesive community.
randomsearch 8y ago
Here's the deal with replacing Twitter: first realise it is (under a sane interpretation) a really badly designed product, because it doesn't know what it is. Let's say that roughly it comprises: 1. A way to hear about news from people or organisations you like (Elon, Yankees, WTO, Lady Gaga, whatever) 2. A way to microblog and share with your friends or (more usefully) with colleagues or interest communities. 3. A discussion medium where there is no hierarchy of competence, and everyone's opinion is given the same weight. (1) and (2) are generally positive and useful things. In (2) you might get a flamewar in a gardening community or whatever, so you need moderators to prevent outbursts over how best to deal with greenfly, but generally these kinda things are pretty peaceful. See HN. It is not at all clear that (3) is a good idea at all. Most people know nothing about most topics, so giving equal weight to their voice is a bad idea. The reasons that (3) has come about, persisted, become central to Twitter, is that it's a very good way to engage people. Enragement is engagement. It sells advertising, but it doesn't do much for humanity or its user base. I'd say using Twitter for (1), leaving (2) to better platforms, and realising we don't need (3) is a sensible solution. The only reason we don't have that is Jack knows full well that (3) makes money, and to hell with the terrible problems that causes. tl;dr - before looking for alternatives, ask yourself if you need anything at all.
- phyzome 8y ago
  It's good for short-form humor. Does that fall under (2)?
  - wastedhours 8y ago
    (1) and (2) I guess - depending on the status of the person sharing the joke.
  - randomsearch 8y ago
    If you want a serious answer - probably outside those categories.
- summerdown2 8y ago
  There's also (4) - a discussion medium with an increasing number of partisan bad actors both at state and corporate level, whose interest is to gum up communication, switch the overton window or foster division by trolling. In my opinion, an increasing problem with twitter and other discussion media is astroturfing and bot re-signalling, so I feel this needs an additional category different from (3), in that (3) is people who are incompetent. (4) would be people who are agenda-driven and/or malicious. Or, to put it differently, (3) is about problems caused by people who can hide their incompetence. (4) would be about problems caused by people who can hide their identity. I'm extremely pessimistic about this section of users, because in my opinion, an identity-based internet would just as radically screw up the internet in a different direction. I do feel, however, that that's the way governments are heading if things carry on the way they are.
bena 8y ago
Yes, let's go to tumblr because text-wrapping is awesome. Seriously, tumblr has a problem with basic text layout. Responses get indented, heavily on an already narrow column. And next thing you know, any text is basically wrapped to single characters on the right side of the page. Edit: It's so bad, trying to intentionally reproduce it is more trouble than it is worth.
- Quanttek 8y ago
  Didn't they change that quite a while back?
  - bena 8y ago
    Possibly it's been changed since then. I've some friends on tumblr but after a while I've just given up on going to any tumblr link because reading it became annoying.
bopbop 8y ago
This walled garden isn't working! Quick, let's get back to the last one! Seriously though, blogs and RSS - communication on the internet has been solved. It just doesn't seem to be easily monetizable, so a big commercial entity isn't pushing it. This is quite interesting though: "Everyone I knew aged out of it, lost interest in chronicling their personal lives <b> or got jobs writing the kinds of blogs they used to write for free." </b> So does this mean there is money out there for the kind of tumblr/blog weirdness people like to read?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- adventured 8y ago
  > So does this mean there is money out there for the kind of tumblr/blog weirdness people like to read? Sort of, if you've got the rare personality that can turn a blog into a form of entertainment. Along with the unrelenting dedication to do it in a rote fashion week after week for years. Once the audience latches on, you're not allowed to take a long hiatus or change what you do. Dooce (dooce.com) comes to mind, her blog had very primitive beginnings prior to growing into a serious monetized traffic destination for a time. I like to call them Howard Stern personalities, people that are gifted entertainers. You may not like their brand of content or personality (I don't care for people like Stern and Glenn Beck for example), but they've got the magic sauce for some audience base. I spent a lot of time in the early blogosphere, circa 1998-2004 or so. Something that was amazing to observe, was how many very talented personalities were unable to break through to that ultimate next level of popularity. They seemingly had everything it required (whether wit, charm, skilled story telling, et al.) and still couldn't get there. The world has a lot of brilliant people that never break through for any number of countless reasons.
- codingdave 8y ago
  > It just doesn't seem to be easily monetizable, so a big commercial entity isn't pushing it. The existence of Wordpress would argue otherwise.
  - 8y ago
woolvalley 8y ago
Any public social platform that wants to be the new thing needs to add a discoverability component for new users. I signed up for mastodon.social a while back, and had no idea who to follow. So I stopped using it. I notice all the commercial ones have a discoverability component when you join to solve this problem.
- pferde 8y ago
  You can usually search for hashtags that interest you, and take it from there, engaging people talking about them.
intertextuality 8y ago
Politics aside, tumblr is impossible to have long-form conversation on. Sure, it has longer posts than say, twitter, but replying to a chain makes makes things almost impossible to read. [0] Furthermore, instead of following content per se, you follow blogs that are likely going to be insular. Tumblr is just as much of an echo-chamber as Twitter is, if not even moreso. This is quite different from reddit or hn where you see a plethora of topics and submissions from different people related to a topic, and which are upvoted/downvoted. Both reddit and hn's UX allow for long replies and discussion, at least until the thread becomes too nested. You can see the difference in any reddit sub that is geared towards text content instead of link submissions, but especially in /r/AskHistorians and similar. Not that reddit and its ilk don't have any issues, but at least its possible to have longer discussion there. Mastodon is a semi-decent alternative to twitter, but 500 characters is still a tad too short. I suspect they'll make this configurable in future updates. Pleroma [1] has a 5,000 character limit by default, which is configurable. However both of these still suffer from subscribing to people, not content aggregates where anyone can post. So for social networks, Mastodon looks promising if you don't care about the popular culture of pathologically blocking other instances. If you aren't on an instance that doesn't block other ones, you can end up being in an echo chamber easily too. For actual discussion though, I don't know what's better than reddit or hn, even with the problems that they do have. Centralization isn't always bad, although reddit is slowly making itself unappealing, especially once they finally kill off the old design. [0]: http://i.imgur.com/PvO3Hcu.jpg http://i.imgur.com/PvO3Hcu.jpg [1]: Pleroma is another decentralized, federated network that interfaces with Mastodon, GNU Social, and other Fediverse networks.
- indrora 8y ago
  For what it's worth, the Mastodon instance I'm on (and several others) bump the 5kchar limit to 65kchar and even 1Mchar. I have legitimately seen 2MChar toots. They were automated, but gigantic Megachar toots.
- Grue3 8y ago
  It's been literally years since reply chains stopped to be indented like in your screenshot.
volkisch 8y ago
Only if tumblr promises to close down account/blogs promoting pedophilia/zoofilia/similar degenerate stuff. The moderation after the Yahoo buyout got quite stale, they don't even block nazi, or anti-zionist stuff which is a red flag in liberal media.
- lagadu 8y ago
  And who decides what is "degenerate stuff"? You? No, thank you.
- jrs95 8y ago
  Um...why should criticizing Israel be lumped in with Nazism and pedophilia?
AndrewKemendo 8y ago
I'm still shocked nobody has figured out how to turnkey self hosting. I mean I understand how complicated it is, given the range of options, but it seems like it's tractable. Maybe if AWS/Azure etc... had some kind of sign up API that would make it possible.
- dangoor 8y ago
  My DreamHost shared hosting WordPress is pretty turnkey. It's not the most user-friendly UI, but it really is as simple as "register domain" on one page, "install WordPress" on another, and then setup my admin account. After that, they keep the software up to date and email me to let me know when I need to click the link to upgrade the database (very infrequent). I'd imagine there are hosts that are more turnkey than that (wordpress.com, likely). I wonder if it's really the case that people just don't want to pay.
  - AndrewKemendo 8y ago
    It's true, there aren't any that I've seen that are more turnkey, but that's not self hosting. I'm thinking something like Medium, where you enter your name/contact info etc... on one page and a CC and that's it. A back end process registers the URL/whois, sets up a cloud host account, pushes a default package to the host (maybe even WP), then sends your email the key/login for the front end and the cloud host login. So it's a one page setup for something that you can either use as a default Medium like site or SSH into and do whatever you want. You pay the monthly EC2 account, a yearly maintenance with a DNS Registry etc... like you would had you set everything up individually. The only thing you can't currently automate is setting up people's accounts on cloud providers. I don't see that changing but would be interesting if you could.
    - dangoor 8y ago
      Dreamhost is pretty close to self-hosting. I can SSH in. I can download all of the files in my Wordpress installation, copy them elsewhere, dump my MySQL db, copy that elsewhere and have it running on another machine. The only way it differs from a VM is that I don't have root. Dreamhost actually does, iirc, allow me to get the same experience with a VM. Really, I'd argue that anyone offering Wordpress in such a way that you can easily download all of your data and put it somewhere else is fine on the self hosting axis. And lots of people do pay for hosting, but there are millions more who won't pay even $1/month.
b5 8y ago
This article utterly misrepresents Tumblr as some kind of paradise. It's definitely not. It's as good and bad as Twitter or Facebook or whatever else. I used Tumblr for years, from probably 2008 until 2017. The real problem as I see it is there's a large, vocal, vicious echo-chamber effect at play. A lot of its userbase are quite radical and aggressive in their beliefs, and the reblogging system makes it easy to use the platform for bully. It's not entirely optional to interact with radicalised elements on Tumblr. The tagging system lets them find you, and then they can brigade you if you fall foul of whatever pet cause they have. This happened to me when I'd posted a photo of my dog. She's my pride and joy, and it was a harmless and cute photo of her jumping to catch a ball in the air. My mistake was using the caption "Good girl!" and tag #goodgirl. (I also tagged #dog, #fetch, #springerspaniel, #spaniel.) I was flooded with follows from people, mostly men but also some young-ish girls, in the "daddy dom" community (their main tag seems to be #ddlg, but #goodgirl was enough for them to find me). That was a pretty disturbing subculture with definitely uncomfortable elements of abuse built right into the foundation of it. I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. They mercilessly harrassed me. They flooded my inbox with abusive message: "dirty cis scum, kill yourself", things like that. They reblogged my photo saying some pretty vile things about me and my poor dog. In their reblogs they utterly misrepresented what I'd said, reposted it endlessly, called me transphobic, a bigot, threatened to dox me. In the end I abandoned my entire blog there and deleted it. As far as I know, there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful reblogs taken down. I reported them all for abuse and harassment, but Tumblr did nothing. Tumblr's staff don't care. They would never respond on Twitter or by email or to my reports through the form on the site. Just radio silence. This is purely anecdotal of course. I know someone else who also accidentally drew the ire of Tumblr and ended up having to delete their blog and leave the platform to escape a sustained campaign of harassment and threats from a similar group of people. Again, Tumblr-the-company did nothing to stop it.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
  Indeed. I wondered whether the author was talking about a different Tumblr to the one I was familiar with. Even from the early days it seems to have been a community for militant transsexuals, furries, SJWs, and people with niche sexual fetishes.
teddyh 8y ago
> But a great many serious things cannot be articulated in 140 or 280 characters, and so [on Twitter] you get the most easily reducible — and therefore least accurate — version of the feeling or idea. Either that, or you get lengthy Twitter threads, which are ponderous and boring. This is quite similar to Noam Chomsky’s idea of the media requiring “concision”¹, and therefore the media can only express mainstream ideas, since non-mainstream ideas require a little bit of explanation and so cannot be expressed concisely. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_(media_studies) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_(media_studies)
- uRreading2slow 8y ago
  https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#attr-input-maxlength https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#attr-input... > The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse. <label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label>
whywhywhywhy 8y ago
Really miss the early image-blog days of Tumblr, the reblog functionality causing work to be attributed and sort of collective consciousness made it a fascinating internet art site to browse and contribute to. Pretty much all been replaced by Instagram now which although has most of the same functionality the fact it's a locked in system with only the most basic form of linking and attribution makes it a completely different place for artists. People stealing work and claiming it's their own is a lot more common on IG, on Tumblr the ease of re-blogging and focus on curating allows users to flourish as either curators or creators without any bad blood between the two. (Purely talking about the art side of Tumblr here, I wasn't involved in the other areas)
jrs95 8y ago
> Maybe you’re familiar with the many reasons why people hate Twitter. It’s a time sink, it enables the spread of fake news and bigotry, Yup. Tumblr totally doesn’t do any of that. I guess we are supposed to pretend it doesn’t because it’s a platform for the right kind of lies and hate?
wyoh 8y ago
I use to like Tumblr but a significant part of the content creators I was following (photographers) moved to either Instagram or Patron. It's not the same as it used to be and the platform is quickly losing ground.
androidgirl 8y ago
I don't think that there is a solution as easy as moving to $SOCIAL_NETWORK or $ACTIVITY_PUB_SITE. I feel currently that the issue with social media is it's hyper stimulating. Speaking from a recovering social media addict point of view, the modern web latches onto human tendencies too well. We can be outraged, surrounded by people like us, 24/7. That's immensely fulfilling to most people, including me. I don't use social media anymore because it's awful for me. And I don't think the echo chamber issue can be solved, at all. It's not a technology issue, it's an issue with how humans respond to these networks and the Internet in general.
- Spivak 8y ago
  I think this view ignores differences in systems that do actively shape the way we communicate and how communities grow. I don't think that social media fits your description, just that sites like Twitter do. Examples of less-toxic social media: - Messaging: SMS, Email, GroupMe, Messenger, Skype, Snapchat - Micro Communities: Discord - Small purpose-driven communities, small subreddits, Discord - Collaborative: DeviantArt, GitHub - Long form discussion: Blog circles, Blogger, Tumblr sometimes - Non-discussion: Pinterest, Flickr, Instagram, StumbleUpon
  - androidgirl 8y ago
    Admittedly this is a more relaxed definition of social media than I have accepted, but I see your point! I still use Discord and Github, and the social interaction there doesn't cause the same feeling that Facebook or Twitter do. However, I might argue a select few of these sites or technologies can still be polarizing or unhealthy, particularly Instagram and Pinterest.
stevenicr 8y ago
Tumblr was one of my favorite places on the web for a time. A real anti-fbook, but then they were taken over by yahoo. It didn't change a lot at first, but the wall street ad and censor machine started to creep in and it became obvious what once was a haven for sharing things you would never do on fbook, well it got a new moderation staff and more changes. I stayed with it even after the change to hide the porn by default and such. Then one day one of my tumblrs got banned. I understood, it very much looked like many of the rampant spammer's tumblr sites, I had thought thay by using a custom modded theme and other things a tumblr employee would see it was not a cut of mill spam blog but highly custom and completely unique. I was wrong, the moderator that made the site disappear did not see it. When I emailed the next level staff asking why and suggesting that it was unique and not spam, they replied it was flagged as spam and is gone. I wrote back one time begging for access to download a copy of my tumblr, it was all original content, all the text, all the photos. They did not care to even reply. I tried to write the CEO, I reached out for an explanation on twitter even. Nothing. I know, not a customer, the product, and your rights to speech are not rights when publishing on a sharecropper lords platform, but I expected more of tumblr. I was mistaken. I later read about how some of these companies were employing a lot of people from places outside the USA and did some research on the majority of religions and morals of those areas and scratched my head wondering how the main people of tumblr could even consider such a move given the wide range of widely shared content likely being disturbing to so many in some of those places. Then I realized, it was not just about the cheap labor, it was about have an excuse for why so much was mopped up without a second thought. IT wasn't the tumblr crew doing it right - this was the plan from yahoo and the future advertiser's and wall street and all that. I'm so mad I did not backup my tumblrs when I had the chance, so mad that I gave them so much. Promoted it as a place to have fun without the stress of fbook, linked in and such. Never again. At least with other portals you know there is a chance at loss ( I routinely save my comments before submitting to any wordpress based site, assuming that akismet will likely flag my comment and make it disappear into the ether box not seen by blog admins.. and of course blog admins make them hidden as well. Can't believe I'm about to say this, but I have more faith in G plus providing customer service and fair rules than tumblr. Boy that did not taste right coming out of my virtual mouth. That's how pitiful tumblr is now, unless it goes back to being self owned / private or whatever, it is dead to me, And there is not backup for them to get of my past trust and love.

99 points by raleighm 8y ago

Have you seen the last mobile app? You are forced to see 3-4 ads without seeing the post in question. Actually tumblr is dying because of this.

newswriter99 8y ago

-self-harm glorification -bad porn -signal boosting for political rants -faux moral intellectualism by social justice warriors -cyber bullying Let's not?

phyzome 8y ago
Those are all content issues, not format/platform issues. Don't like those? Don't make your social circle out of the people who do them.
- eahman02 8y ago
  There's nothing inherently wrong with the Twitter platform.
  - Scoping_dindus 8y ago
    Depends on what the goal is. 300 characters incentivizes driveby remarks rather than articulate conversations. Twitter also has really bad content enforcement. Not inherent to the format, but it's worth consideration in the interest of practicality.
    - eahman02 8y ago
      Who has time and energy for articulate conversations over the internet? What do we want, a social network for the few?
      - IGI-111 8y ago
        Usenet was fun while it lasted. But september will probably never end.
        eahman02 8y ago
        In fact, it's about to start.
  - lmm 8y ago
    There was a great article I've never been able to find again about how the UI of Twitter naturally guides users into de facto bullying, and most of the advice given by experienced Twitter users (e.g. check existing replies to a tweet before adding your own) is working around UI choices made by the system itself.
    - pferde 8y ago
      I wonder how many of those bully-inducing UI features are also present in software like Mastodon or Diaspora, and are therefore disasters-in-waiting, to be triggered once critical mass of users is reached.
    - Pete_D 8y ago
      Was it this one? https://web.archive.org/web/20180801143131/http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=41853 https://web.archive.org/web/20180801143131/http://www.shamus... (archive link because the site seems to be down at the moment)
      - lmm 8y ago
        It wasn't, but that's a good article on the same topic. The one I was thinking of was focused more on low-level details of the twitter UI.
- 1ris 8y ago
  I think the "notes" and the "reblog" function contribute to the problem. It drives engagement ^w^w makes trolling way too easy and creates a need for attention that leads to attention whoring/virtue signalling/radicalisation. I think they are pretty much platform problems.
- philwelch 8y ago
  The medium is the message. Twitter is designed like a platform for harassment, so a lot of the content on Twitter is harassing. Tumblr is designed like a platform for radicalization, so a lot of the content on Tumblr is radicalized. It turns out that your very advice ("don't make your social circle out of the people who [create weird and distateful fringe content]") is the exact same echo-chamber-and-radicalization-mechanism that filled Tumblr with this kind of crap in the first place.
  - phyzome 8y ago
    But Twitter makes it so that's all up in your face. I haven't used Tumblr hardly at all, but it seems like it's optional to participate in that, since things are a little more partitioned. Anyway, I'm interested in hearing more about the radicalization thing, which I haven't actually observed first-hand, but several people in the comments here have mentioned. What interaction elements do you think lead to it?
    - b5 8y ago
      I used Tumblr for years. From probably 2008 until 2017. It's not entirely optional to interact with radicalised elements on Tumblr. The tagging system lets them find you, and then they can brigade you if you fall foul of whatever pet cause they have. This happened to me when I'd posted a photo of my dog. She's my pride and joy, and it was a harmless and cute photo of her jumping to catch a ball in the air. My mistake was using the caption "Good girl!" and tag #goodgirl. (I also tagged #dog, #fetch, #springerspaniel, #spaniel.) I was flooded with follows from people, mostly men but also some young-ish girls, in the "daddy dom" community (their main tag seems to be #ddlg, but #goodgirl was enough for them to find me). That was a pretty disturbing subculture with definitely uncomfortable elements of abuse built right into the foundation of it. I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. They mercilessly harrassed me. They flooded my inbox with abusive message: "dirty cis scum, kill yourself", things like that. They reblogged my photo saying some pretty vile things about me and my poor dog. In their reblogs they utterly misrepresented what I'd said, reposted it endlessly, called me transphobic, a bigot, threatened to dox me. In the end I abandoned my entire blog there and deleted it. As far as I know, there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful reblogs taken down. I reported them all for abuse and harassment, but Tumblr did nothing. Tumblr's staff don't care. They would never respond on Twitter or by email or to my reports through the form on the site. Just radio silence. This is purely anecdotal, I know. I know someone else who also accidentally drew the ire of Tumblr and ended up having to delete their blog and leave the platform to escape a sustained campaign of harassment and threats from a similar group of people. Again, Tumblr-the-company did nothing to stop it.
Mediterraneo10 8y ago
You can add one more thing: inane bullshit. In my field of academia, I know several people who maintain a Wordpress or similar blog for serious matters, but a parallel Tumblr blog for silly memes etc. So, there seems to be a feeling among some that Tumblr is not a credible venue.
sp332 8y ago
I don't trust Yahoo to moderate things well either. They seem to be a little too reactionary. For example they first cracked down on NSFW blogs for no particular reason and then mostly rolled back changes after protests. https://www.zdnet.com/article/after-backlash-yahoos-tumblr-quietly-restores-adult-nsfw-blogs/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/after-backlash-yahoos-tumblr-q... How do you think they're going to handle organized campaigns to remove users, or not to remove users? My guess is it will be a mess.
- mjevans 8y ago
  I can't actually recall any form of organized moderation that has been successful for WIDE audiences. It seems to work 'OK' if there's a smaller community with a group of core dedicated users (which the moderation staff has a large overlap with); however even then it works only if there is a clear and unambiguous mission statement and laser focused guidelines of 'on topic' contributions. I'm not familiar with Craigslist, and have only very limited observations of Reddit; but I think these sites are generally the closest to a sustainable model. In my experience they let 'local' moderation do it's thing, sub-communities individually have their own flavor and groups; with active and positive ones seeing the most success. Moderate ones tend to languish until they trail off. The really bad ones get globally flagged and killed. I think a logical next step might be 'supersets' where different user areas subscribe to a kind of moderation guild.
- Grue3 8y ago
  Tumblr is currently owned by Oath, not Yahoo.
lainga 8y ago
You can get all of those except the first one out of Twitter...
- foolfoolz 8y ago
  it’s there if you look for it

tomjen3 8y ago

A radical idea, lets all go back to blogs, hosted and owned by ourselves, on our own sites, which will enrich only us, and where you can write as long and as short as you want, and link to whatever you want.

phyzome 8y ago
I have such nostalgia for the blogosphere. The one thing it's missing is post privacy; I want to be able to journal privately (like on Dreamwidth) but also use my own hosting and not rely on someone else's platform. I've been toying around with writing my own social media software along those lines, using servers. Some noodling about on that topic: https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/ https://www.brainonfire.net/blog/tag/social-media/
- bena 8y ago
  That doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle.
- drharby 8y ago
  I figure any cms could offer that via privileges
  - phyzome 8y ago
    Sure! And that's what Dreamwidth offers... except I can't run my own DW. (Well, it's open source so I could, but it's kind of huge, and I would be the only user!) I'm basically thinking of federated DW.
    - stevenicr 8y ago
      self hosted wordpress does all this out of the box I think. I have one site where I have public posts and pages and some pages are "password protected" - so they are viewable by a select few associates, and a few pages are either saved as draft or pulished privately in the admin backedn / dashboard - which makes it easy to retrieve and edit and such. There are free plugins like buddypress wihch can make more complex systems, private, public, semi-private groups for friends and content, stuff like that. Many others like s2member and such. only trickery is if you have a widget displaying a list of published "pages" on your site, you may need to get into that widget and tell it to not display page 10398 if that is one you are trying to keep under wraps and yet be available for your secret friends, published, but not listed as another comment mentions with docuwiki, and I think youtube has a similar option. there are many auto backup options with basic free plugins too, so I think WP would cover what you are describing. Definitely need added security plugins as these are auto targetted for breaking into regularly, good ones are free and available. You could always put it in a sub folder and add in an htaccess extra htpasswd to lock it down further and such of course as well.

phyzome 8y ago

Main takeaways, in my view: - Longer form allows for less heated conversation - Allowing randos to emplace their screeds immediately below your post encourages fighting That second point I think bears more exploration. Maybe we shouldn't allow trolls to inject themselves into every conversation, eh? My favorite format for post/discussion is still the blog format, where comments are moderated by the author of the post. You want to post something the author wouldn't allow on their post? Do it on your own blog. (Dreamwidth, main successor to Livejournal, has this property as well.)

ObsoleteNerd 8y ago
I run a few blogs for a couple of pretty big Authors (not GRRM big, but still top 5 in Amazon for their categories). For years now, I've been suggesting to not have comments on the blog, and just have a link to their email saying something like "Want to discuss this? Send me an Email, I'd love to chat!". Every single one of them prefers this method, and has said it creates a much more valuable conversation 1-on-1 with the person, rather than the exposed public sharing of an open comment section. One of the authors actually came up with the idea, and I now love it too. A few others ask for comments as normal, but want people to sign up, and be approved. WP has a nice feature for this where people can sign up + comment in a single go, then the admin can approve that comment, which also approves them to post in the future. Settings > Discussion > "Comment author must have a previously approved comment."
- saurik 8y ago
  I find it really interesting (and even exciting) that Instagram stories (which have rapidly taken over Instagram) work like this: you respond by sending a private message to the poster, not by leaving a public comment.
- jseliger 8y ago
  A long time ago, James Fallows of The Atlantic made the decision to turn off comments on his blog: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/lets-talk-reader-comments-one-more-time/280058 https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/09/lets-ta...

douglaswlance 8y ago

Tumblr is guaranteed one-upmanship. The reblogging feature causes escalation. We need to look at the brain, and figure out how neurons work together in networks to produce truth. Then use that model for our social networks.

majewsky 8y ago
What makes you think that neurons produce truth? Neurons mostly produce actionable thoughts.
- hydrox24 8y ago
  > Neurons mostly produce actionable thoughts. I suppose you think this is true.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    Well, no. I thought about editing this after the fact, but couldn't come up with a succinct summary of what neurons do on a high level. So I let this first impulse stand.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      I think you missed a joke, but I'm not sure.
- api_or_ipa 8y ago
  Collectively neurons moderate their individual binary responses and together respond with more nuance to outside stimuli. Maybe that's the parallel she/he is trying to present?
- douglaswlance 8y ago
  Neurons produced the modern world. I'd say they're doing a bit better at producing truth than all other matter in the known universe...
8y ago

lrg 8y ago

Some of the longer posts about social justice that I would read on Tumblr when I was regularly using the app offered some insight into the minds and feelings of marginalized groups that were able to voice their opinions vehemently due to the anonymity that Tumblr provided. It was a safe space and an echo chamber, in that widely unaccepted opinions were harshly criticized as bigotry and removed from the discourse. I think it gave a lot of people the opportunity to vent to a group of generally caring, considerate, sometimes single-minded, and occasionally misguided teenagers and young adults when these people felt that they had no other outlet. It might not have produced the most inspired arguments or conversations, but at the very least Tumblr provided a cohesive community.

randomsearch 8y ago

Here's the deal with replacing Twitter: first realise it is (under a sane interpretation) a really badly designed product, because it doesn't know what it is. Let's say that roughly it comprises: 1. A way to hear about news from people or organisations you like (Elon, Yankees, WTO, Lady Gaga, whatever) 2. A way to microblog and share with your friends or (more usefully) with colleagues or interest communities. 3. A discussion medium where there is no hierarchy of competence, and everyone's opinion is given the same weight. (1) and (2) are generally positive and useful things. In (2) you might get a flamewar in a gardening community or whatever, so you need moderators to prevent outbursts over how best to deal with greenfly, but generally these kinda things are pretty peaceful. See HN. It is not at all clear that (3) is a good idea at all. Most people know nothing about most topics, so giving equal weight to their voice is a bad idea. The reasons that (3) has come about, persisted, become central to Twitter, is that it's a very good way to engage people. Enragement is engagement. It sells advertising, but it doesn't do much for humanity or its user base. I'd say using Twitter for (1), leaving (2) to better platforms, and realising we don't need (3) is a sensible solution. The only reason we don't have that is Jack knows full well that (3) makes money, and to hell with the terrible problems that causes. tl;dr - before looking for alternatives, ask yourself if you need anything at all.

phyzome 8y ago
It's good for short-form humor. Does that fall under (2)?
- wastedhours 8y ago
  (1) and (2) I guess - depending on the status of the person sharing the joke.
- randomsearch 8y ago
  If you want a serious answer - probably outside those categories.
summerdown2 8y ago
There's also (4) - a discussion medium with an increasing number of partisan bad actors both at state and corporate level, whose interest is to gum up communication, switch the overton window or foster division by trolling. In my opinion, an increasing problem with twitter and other discussion media is astroturfing and bot re-signalling, so I feel this needs an additional category different from (3), in that (3) is people who are incompetent. (4) would be people who are agenda-driven and/or malicious. Or, to put it differently, (3) is about problems caused by people who can hide their incompetence. (4) would be about problems caused by people who can hide their identity. I'm extremely pessimistic about this section of users, because in my opinion, an identity-based internet would just as radically screw up the internet in a different direction. I do feel, however, that that's the way governments are heading if things carry on the way they are.

bena 8y ago

Yes, let's go to tumblr because text-wrapping is awesome. Seriously, tumblr has a problem with basic text layout. Responses get indented, heavily on an already narrow column. And next thing you know, any text is basically wrapped to single characters on the right side of the page. Edit: It's so bad, trying to intentionally reproduce it is more trouble than it is worth.

Quanttek 8y ago
Didn't they change that quite a while back?
- bena 8y ago
  Possibly it's been changed since then. I've some friends on tumblr but after a while I've just given up on going to any tumblr link because reading it became annoying.

bopbop 8y ago

This walled garden isn't working! Quick, let's get back to the last one! Seriously though, blogs and RSS - communication on the internet has been solved. It just doesn't seem to be easily monetizable, so a big commercial entity isn't pushing it. This is quite interesting though: "Everyone I knew aged out of it, lost interest in chronicling their personal lives <b> or got jobs writing the kinds of blogs they used to write for free." </b> So does this mean there is money out there for the kind of tumblr/blog weirdness people like to read?

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
adventured 8y ago
> So does this mean there is money out there for the kind of tumblr/blog weirdness people like to read? Sort of, if you've got the rare personality that can turn a blog into a form of entertainment. Along with the unrelenting dedication to do it in a rote fashion week after week for years. Once the audience latches on, you're not allowed to take a long hiatus or change what you do. Dooce (dooce.com) comes to mind, her blog had very primitive beginnings prior to growing into a serious monetized traffic destination for a time. I like to call them Howard Stern personalities, people that are gifted entertainers. You may not like their brand of content or personality (I don't care for people like Stern and Glenn Beck for example), but they've got the magic sauce for some audience base. I spent a lot of time in the early blogosphere, circa 1998-2004 or so. Something that was amazing to observe, was how many very talented personalities were unable to break through to that ultimate next level of popularity. They seemingly had everything it required (whether wit, charm, skilled story telling, et al.) and still couldn't get there. The world has a lot of brilliant people that never break through for any number of countless reasons.
codingdave 8y ago
> It just doesn't seem to be easily monetizable, so a big commercial entity isn't pushing it. The existence of Wordpress would argue otherwise.
- 8y ago

woolvalley 8y ago

Any public social platform that wants to be the new thing needs to add a discoverability component for new users. I signed up for mastodon.social a while back, and had no idea who to follow. So I stopped using it. I notice all the commercial ones have a discoverability component when you join to solve this problem.

pferde 8y ago
You can usually search for hashtags that interest you, and take it from there, engaging people talking about them.

intertextuality 8y ago

Politics aside, tumblr is impossible to have long-form conversation on. Sure, it has longer posts than say, twitter, but replying to a chain makes makes things almost impossible to read. [0] Furthermore, instead of following content per se, you follow blogs that are likely going to be insular. Tumblr is just as much of an echo-chamber as Twitter is, if not even moreso. This is quite different from reddit or hn where you see a plethora of topics and submissions from different people related to a topic, and which are upvoted/downvoted. Both reddit and hn's UX allow for long replies and discussion, at least until the thread becomes too nested. You can see the difference in any reddit sub that is geared towards text content instead of link submissions, but especially in /r/AskHistorians and similar. Not that reddit and its ilk don't have any issues, but at least its possible to have longer discussion there. Mastodon is a semi-decent alternative to twitter, but 500 characters is still a tad too short. I suspect they'll make this configurable in future updates. Pleroma [1] has a 5,000 character limit by default, which is configurable. However both of these still suffer from subscribing to people, not content aggregates where anyone can post. So for social networks, Mastodon looks promising if you don't care about the popular culture of pathologically blocking other instances. If you aren't on an instance that doesn't block other ones, you can end up being in an echo chamber easily too. For actual discussion though, I don't know what's better than reddit or hn, even with the problems that they do have. Centralization isn't always bad, although reddit is slowly making itself unappealing, especially once they finally kill off the old design. [0]: http://i.imgur.com/PvO3Hcu.jpg http://i.imgur.com/PvO3Hcu.jpg [1]: Pleroma is another decentralized, federated network that interfaces with Mastodon, GNU Social, and other Fediverse networks.

indrora 8y ago
For what it's worth, the Mastodon instance I'm on (and several others) bump the 5kchar limit to 65kchar and even 1Mchar. I have legitimately seen 2MChar toots. They were automated, but gigantic Megachar toots.
Grue3 8y ago
It's been literally years since reply chains stopped to be indented like in your screenshot.

volkisch 8y ago

Only if tumblr promises to close down account/blogs promoting pedophilia/zoofilia/similar degenerate stuff. The moderation after the Yahoo buyout got quite stale, they don't even block nazi, or anti-zionist stuff which is a red flag in liberal media.

lagadu 8y ago
And who decides what is "degenerate stuff"? You? No, thank you.
jrs95 8y ago
Um...why should criticizing Israel be lumped in with Nazism and pedophilia?

AndrewKemendo 8y ago

I'm still shocked nobody has figured out how to turnkey self hosting. I mean I understand how complicated it is, given the range of options, but it seems like it's tractable. Maybe if AWS/Azure etc... had some kind of sign up API that would make it possible.

dangoor 8y ago
My DreamHost shared hosting WordPress is pretty turnkey. It's not the most user-friendly UI, but it really is as simple as "register domain" on one page, "install WordPress" on another, and then setup my admin account. After that, they keep the software up to date and email me to let me know when I need to click the link to upgrade the database (very infrequent). I'd imagine there are hosts that are more turnkey than that (wordpress.com, likely). I wonder if it's really the case that people just don't want to pay.
- AndrewKemendo 8y ago
  It's true, there aren't any that I've seen that are more turnkey, but that's not self hosting. I'm thinking something like Medium, where you enter your name/contact info etc... on one page and a CC and that's it. A back end process registers the URL/whois, sets up a cloud host account, pushes a default package to the host (maybe even WP), then sends your email the key/login for the front end and the cloud host login. So it's a one page setup for something that you can either use as a default Medium like site or SSH into and do whatever you want. You pay the monthly EC2 account, a yearly maintenance with a DNS Registry etc... like you would had you set everything up individually. The only thing you can't currently automate is setting up people's accounts on cloud providers. I don't see that changing but would be interesting if you could.
  - dangoor 8y ago
    Dreamhost is pretty close to self-hosting. I can SSH in. I can download all of the files in my Wordpress installation, copy them elsewhere, dump my MySQL db, copy that elsewhere and have it running on another machine. The only way it differs from a VM is that I don't have root. Dreamhost actually does, iirc, allow me to get the same experience with a VM. Really, I'd argue that anyone offering Wordpress in such a way that you can easily download all of your data and put it somewhere else is fine on the self hosting axis. And lots of people do pay for hosting, but there are millions more who won't pay even $1/month.

b5 8y ago

This article utterly misrepresents Tumblr as some kind of paradise. It's definitely not. It's as good and bad as Twitter or Facebook or whatever else. I used Tumblr for years, from probably 2008 until 2017. The real problem as I see it is there's a large, vocal, vicious echo-chamber effect at play. A lot of its userbase are quite radical and aggressive in their beliefs, and the reblogging system makes it easy to use the platform for bully. It's not entirely optional to interact with radicalised elements on Tumblr. The tagging system lets them find you, and then they can brigade you if you fall foul of whatever pet cause they have. This happened to me when I'd posted a photo of my dog. She's my pride and joy, and it was a harmless and cute photo of her jumping to catch a ball in the air. My mistake was using the caption "Good girl!" and tag #goodgirl. (I also tagged #dog, #fetch, #springerspaniel, #spaniel.) I was flooded with follows from people, mostly men but also some young-ish girls, in the "daddy dom" community (their main tag seems to be #ddlg, but #goodgirl was enough for them to find me). That was a pretty disturbing subculture with definitely uncomfortable elements of abuse built right into the foundation of it. I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot. They mercilessly harrassed me. They flooded my inbox with abusive message: "dirty cis scum, kill yourself", things like that. They reblogged my photo saying some pretty vile things about me and my poor dog. In their reblogs they utterly misrepresented what I'd said, reposted it endlessly, called me transphobic, a bigot, threatened to dox me. In the end I abandoned my entire blog there and deleted it. As far as I know, there's no way to get my dog's photo removed from Tumblr or get the hateful reblogs taken down. I reported them all for abuse and harassment, but Tumblr did nothing. Tumblr's staff don't care. They would never respond on Twitter or by email or to my reports through the form on the site. Just radio silence. This is purely anecdotal of course. I know someone else who also accidentally drew the ire of Tumblr and ended up having to delete their blog and leave the platform to escape a sustained campaign of harassment and threats from a similar group of people. Again, Tumblr-the-company did nothing to stop it.

SmellyGeekBoy 8y ago
Indeed. I wondered whether the author was talking about a different Tumblr to the one I was familiar with. Even from the early days it seems to have been a community for militant transsexuals, furries, SJWs, and people with niche sexual fetishes.

teddyh 8y ago

> But a great many serious things cannot be articulated in 140 or 280 characters, and so [on Twitter] you get the most easily reducible — and therefore least accurate — version of the feeling or idea. Either that, or you get lengthy Twitter threads, which are ponderous and boring. This is quite similar to Noam Chomsky’s idea of the media requiring “concision”¹, and therefore the media can only express mainstream ideas, since non-mainstream ideas require a little bit of explanation and so cannot be expressed concisely. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_(media_studies) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concision_(media_studies)

uRreading2slow 8y ago
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#attr-input-maxlength https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/input.html#attr-input... > The following extract shows how a messaging client's text entry could be arbitrarily restricted to a fixed number of characters, thus forcing any conversation through this medium to be terse and discouraging intelligent discourse. <label>What are you doing? <input name=status maxlength=140></label>

whywhywhywhy 8y ago

Really miss the early image-blog days of Tumblr, the reblog functionality causing work to be attributed and sort of collective consciousness made it a fascinating internet art site to browse and contribute to. Pretty much all been replaced by Instagram now which although has most of the same functionality the fact it's a locked in system with only the most basic form of linking and attribution makes it a completely different place for artists. People stealing work and claiming it's their own is a lot more common on IG, on Tumblr the ease of re-blogging and focus on curating allows users to flourish as either curators or creators without any bad blood between the two. (Purely talking about the art side of Tumblr here, I wasn't involved in the other areas)

jrs95 8y ago

> Maybe you’re familiar with the many reasons why people hate Twitter. It’s a time sink, it enables the spread of fake news and bigotry, Yup. Tumblr totally doesn’t do any of that. I guess we are supposed to pretend it doesn’t because it’s a platform for the right kind of lies and hate?

wyoh 8y ago

I use to like Tumblr but a significant part of the content creators I was following (photographers) moved to either Instagram or Patron. It's not the same as it used to be and the platform is quickly losing ground.

androidgirl 8y ago

I don't think that there is a solution as easy as moving to $SOCIAL_NETWORK or $ACTIVITY_PUB_SITE. I feel currently that the issue with social media is it's hyper stimulating. Speaking from a recovering social media addict point of view, the modern web latches onto human tendencies too well. We can be outraged, surrounded by people like us, 24/7. That's immensely fulfilling to most people, including me. I don't use social media anymore because it's awful for me. And I don't think the echo chamber issue can be solved, at all. It's not a technology issue, it's an issue with how humans respond to these networks and the Internet in general.

Spivak 8y ago
I think this view ignores differences in systems that do actively shape the way we communicate and how communities grow. I don't think that social media fits your description, just that sites like Twitter do. Examples of less-toxic social media: - Messaging: SMS, Email, GroupMe, Messenger, Skype, Snapchat - Micro Communities: Discord - Small purpose-driven communities, small subreddits, Discord - Collaborative: DeviantArt, GitHub - Long form discussion: Blog circles, Blogger, Tumblr sometimes - Non-discussion: Pinterest, Flickr, Instagram, StumbleUpon
- androidgirl 8y ago
  Admittedly this is a more relaxed definition of social media than I have accepted, but I see your point! I still use Discord and Github, and the social interaction there doesn't cause the same feeling that Facebook or Twitter do. However, I might argue a select few of these sites or technologies can still be polarizing or unhealthy, particularly Instagram and Pinterest.

stevenicr 8y ago

Tumblr was one of my favorite places on the web for a time. A real anti-fbook, but then they were taken over by yahoo. It didn't change a lot at first, but the wall street ad and censor machine started to creep in and it became obvious what once was a haven for sharing things you would never do on fbook, well it got a new moderation staff and more changes. I stayed with it even after the change to hide the porn by default and such. Then one day one of my tumblrs got banned. I understood, it very much looked like many of the rampant spammer's tumblr sites, I had thought thay by using a custom modded theme and other things a tumblr employee would see it was not a cut of mill spam blog but highly custom and completely unique. I was wrong, the moderator that made the site disappear did not see it. When I emailed the next level staff asking why and suggesting that it was unique and not spam, they replied it was flagged as spam and is gone. I wrote back one time begging for access to download a copy of my tumblr, it was all original content, all the text, all the photos. They did not care to even reply. I tried to write the CEO, I reached out for an explanation on twitter even. Nothing. I know, not a customer, the product, and your rights to speech are not rights when publishing on a sharecropper lords platform, but I expected more of tumblr. I was mistaken. I later read about how some of these companies were employing a lot of people from places outside the USA and did some research on the majority of religions and morals of those areas and scratched my head wondering how the main people of tumblr could even consider such a move given the wide range of widely shared content likely being disturbing to so many in some of those places. Then I realized, it was not just about the cheap labor, it was about have an excuse for why so much was mopped up without a second thought. IT wasn't the tumblr crew doing it right - this was the plan from yahoo and the future advertiser's and wall street and all that. I'm so mad I did not backup my tumblrs when I had the chance, so mad that I gave them so much. Promoted it as a place to have fun without the stress of fbook, linked in and such. Never again. At least with other portals you know there is a chance at loss ( I routinely save my comments before submitting to any wordpress based site, assuming that akismet will likely flag my comment and make it disappear into the ether box not seen by blog admins.. and of course blog admins make them hidden as well. Can't believe I'm about to say this, but I have more faith in G plus providing customer service and fair rules than tumblr. Boy that did not taste right coming out of my virtual mouth. That's how pitiful tumblr is now, unless it goes back to being self owned / private or whatever, it is dead to me, And there is not backup for them to get of my past trust and love.