Another one bites the dust

[flemmings]

I never got the hang of tumblr, never figured out how people had actual conversations on it, and am not crying because it's going belly up. FFLs are full of 'welcome tumblrites this is how DW works!' posts. Nice if tumblr had ever done the same for us old codgers. "What this post is actually about is, with people from Tumblr joining in droves: How does one get a Dreamwidth reading page that's full of interesting people writing interesting things?"

Simplest thing in the world to me- find a user, look at their friends page, pick anyone interesting to friend, look at *their* friends page, and so on. Whereas tumblr always seemed to be happening somewhere else, with any single entry followed by a useless list of people who reblogged that entry without any sign of further comments at all.

Which said, I did find some good tumblr RoL commenters whose posts were interesting, even if there seemed no way to join in the discussion. Hope they come over here.

Comments

[kore]

THANK
YOU

b/c the only fucking reply I ever got to "I find it really hard next to impossible to find conversations/hold conversations/search for topics on Tumblr" was UR DOIN IT WRONG, and there were no fucking user guides, and it was ten thousand times more cliquey than I have ever found LJ/DW to be. And I was on LJ back when there were invite codes and people squawked about that.

(Srsly, if you wanted to see, like, posts about Captain Marvel, the tag was something like "captain marvel thoughts," or "cap marv movie," or "carol movie." Anything fucking other than "captain marvel," which was fucking full of garbage. And how were you supposed to know which subtags went with what topic? Just click around I guess. Or hope someone in the know told you. And also people who didn't want to be in the global tagging system, I WONDER WHY, would come up with their own blog-only cutesy tags for captain marvel, like "princess sparklepunch fists," so good luck looking for anything on their Tumblr if they didn't have a tag index. And most people didn't, or if they did, it didn't work.)

(AND, what did the fucking global tagging system wind up doing anyway? Making it INSANELY EASY for Tumblr Corp to block and censor all kinds of stuff, a lot of it queer-friendly and also SFW. Yes, what a fantastic tool! Let's just institute it here immédiatement!)

Anyway, pillowfort's back up! So now that some Tumblr people have probably made a bunch of free accounts here and demanded "reblogging and global tagging and unlimited photo hosting" in the news welcome post comments, they'll probably all go over there to get hundreds of $5-a-pop accounts. XD

[flemmings]

I'm envious that you got to interact enough to discover that people were cliquey on Tumblr. I couldn't even figure out how you talked to people there. But I also had the impression that much of Tumblr was Very Young by anyone's definition, not just those of us on Old Age Security, and I wonder if the cabalistic aspect had something to do with that?

Reblogging? Doesn't one just link? (Though maybe they don't know the etiquette of that either.) And how does global tagging differ from ordinary tagging?

[kore]

Regular (on blogs) tagging is, I tag my post "Captain Marvel," and you can search my blog for that tag, and see all the entries with it. But that only works for my blog. Global tagging is when you look for every single post on Tumblr tagged "Captain Marvel," which, absolutely unsurprisingly, led to huge wankstorms. Basically like hashtags on Twitter (also a terrible fucking idea, also highly prone to both abuse and manipulating by corporations).

I've honestly seen people confused and maybe even somewhat upset going "But how do I indicate I like something and help circulate it without reblogging?" and I'm just like....LINKS! LINKS ARE THE VERTEBRAE OF THE INTERNET. The whole early internet was like basically linkspam! I was there for some of it! FFS, Google's original wildly successful PageRank algorithm, before it got messed with, was based on how often people linked to a site! WTF.

I dunno. It appears, not to go totally In the beginning was the command line, a lot of people are accessing Twitter, Tumblr, Facebook and similar sites via walled garden type apps on their ipads or iphones, and not realizing how censored and curated the whole experience is. To support something, you either upvote it or basically copy it, with very little additional commentary. Altho people do seem to use Twitter to pass on links, but they more often just retweet stuff. Linking has been replaced by "share buttons." A corporate invention.

//is older than BALLS, as they say