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This is one of my biggest problems on Tumblr as well, as a rule. I’ve been lucky enough to meet some lovely people that I consider friends, but by and large it’s very difficult to do because at least for me, the primary way I made friends in previous incarnations of fandom were through comment threads and discussions that went on over long periods of time, sometimes spreading over different formats. I have a group of friends I met on message boards during my X File days, for instance, that I’d consider the equivalent of what most people would call their high school or college “squad:” roughly half of us are no longer anywhere near fandom, but I’ve known them for over half my life now and while our level of interaction may rise and fall with what’s going on in our lives, I don’t see myself ever fully losing track of/connection with this group of people – they’re that significant a part of my life, even when I go long periods without taking to them. And I have a few more friends, whom I met in various other LJ-based fandoms, who I would also place in that category. But the thing about both message board and LJ-fandom culture is that it allowed for long, in-depth conversations over extended periods of time. It wasn’t unusual in either format to have discussions that lasted days or even weeks, with participants sometimes unable to log in daily (due to access or real-life time constraints), and as a result I think while the speed of the discussions were often slower, the content tended to be more in-depth, as once you had the time available, you were responding to multiple points, and engaging with a greater awareness that there was a person on the other end of the line (so to speak). And of course, once a discussion slowed or went down to two people, it was much easier to transfer to email or a messaging service, since both message boards and LJ messaging tended to be a little less akin to tying a message to a chicken and throwing it in the direction of your intended target, hoping for the best.
I’ve seen discussion about how Tumblr is a superior platform because it’s better for lurkers – and I can see on some level how that is true. Tumblr is in many ways a great leveler: anyone can create a blog that’s “worth watching” in that the majority of any Tumblr blog consists of reblogs and rapid-fire images to be consumed quickly and pushed down on a dash just as fast. But the downside to this, I think, is the anonymity of it. We are actively discouraged from adding discourse: don’t add commentary, it clogs the images and ruins aesthetic. Don’t leave your opinion, no one wants that! Anything you want to say should be in the tags, where they disappear upon reblogs. Just reblog, baby, reblog; don’t speak, don’t think, don’t talk. I also believe this contributes to the often-antagonistic slant to much of Tumblr’s discourse: there’s so little in the way of “voice” on most blogs that it’s far easier to forget that blogs are comprised of individuals, with personalities, emotions and complex relationships to the texts they engage with. It’s far easier to reduce people to extremes.
The thing I wish Tumblr had more than anything else was a comments system worth using. I hate the extent to which any kind of discussion is reliant on opening new posts, or reblogging the same post repeatedly in a kind of unwieldy threading system, until it’s gotten big enough that there’s just no way to keep going. I’d love to see Tumblr embrace Dreamwidth as a simultaneous-use platform, i.e., someone writes meta and the “read more” sends you to Dreamwidth where openaccess posting allows for commentary and threading using your Tumblr name (or even anonymous posting, if it makes the commenter more comfortable). I’d also love to see this used as a way of keeping attention on fanfiction longer: perhaps Tumblr blogs devoted to reading and discussing lesser-recommended fic, with discussion taking place on Dreamwidth, but Tumblr used to tag the author, alerting them that – yes, people are reading your stories!, but without the immediate anxiety that comes with writing comments Directly On AO3. Similarly, it would be lovely to see more people, who feel that Tumblr has been better for them in terms of allowing for visibility they didn’t get on DW/LJ, be able to use Tumblr to introduce themselves to DW: perhaps use Tumblr as a primary location, but still comment on DW. Openaccess linking would draw hits to their Tumblrs, but regular commenting on DW would allow a space for their personalities to shine through in a way that (as you mention) isn’t really allowed for on Tumblr, where the best we can often hope for is that someone, somewhere will read our tags.
I do believe there’s a place for a platform like Tumblr in fandom. But it is absolutely not as our primary platform. At the end of the day, like it or not (unpopular? opinion forthcoming): fandom is a text-based culture. It needs to be generative. If it becomes primarily consumer-based it will die. And right now, the Tumblr-based model is not sustainable for the very reason that it is alienating so many of those who create the material that keeps fandom going. Gifsets are lovely, but they won’t sustain a fandom. Eventually we will all be discussing the maybe 5% of fanfiction written by authors who can survive in this climate, and reblogging moving images of the texts we watch on screen. That isn’t transformative fandom, and honestly it holds no appeal to me.
This is one of my biggest problems on Tumblr as well, as a rule. I’ve been lucky enough to meet some lovely people that I consider friends, but by and large it’s very difficult to do because at least for me, the primary way I made friends in previous incarnations of fandom were through comment threads and discussions that went on over long periods of time, sometimes spreading over different formats. I have a group of friends I met on message boards during my X File days, for instance, that I’d consider the equivalent of what most people would call their high school or college “squad:” roughly half of us are no longer anywhere near fandom, but I’ve known them for over half my life now and while our level of interaction may rise and fall with what’s going on in our lives, I don’t see myself ever fully losing track of/connection with this group of people – they’re that significant a part of my life, even when I go long periods without taking to them. And I have a few more friends, whom I met in various other LJ-based fandoms, who I would also place in that category. But the thing about both message board and LJ-fandom culture is that it allowed for long, in-depth conversations over extended periods of time. It wasn’t unusual in either format to have discussions that lasted days or even weeks, with participants sometimes unable to log in daily (due to access or real-life time constraints), and as a result I think while the speed of the discussions were often slower, the content tended to be more in-depth, as once you had the time available, you were responding to multiple points, and engaging with a greater awareness that there was a person on the other end of the line (so to speak). And of course, once a discussion slowed or went down to two people, it was much easier to transfer to email or a messaging service, since both message boards and LJ messaging tended to be a little less akin to tying a message to a chicken and throwing it in the direction of your intended target, hoping for the best.
I’ve seen discussion about how Tumblr is a superior platform because it’s better for lurkers – and I can see on some level how that is true. Tumblr is in many ways a great leveler: anyone can create a blog that’s “worth watching” in that the majority of any Tumblr blog consists of reblogs and rapid-fire images to be consumed quickly and pushed down on a dash just as fast. But the downside to this, I think, is the anonymity of it. We are actively discouraged from adding discourse: don’t add commentary, it clogs the images and ruins aesthetic. Don’t leave your opinion, no one wants that! Anything you want to say should be in the tags, where they disappear upon reblogs. Just reblog, baby, reblog; don’t speak, don’t think, don’t talk. I also believe this contributes to the often-antagonistic slant to much of Tumblr’s discourse: there’s so little in the way of “voice” on most blogs that it’s far easier to forget that blogs are comprised of individuals, with personalities, emotions and complex relationships to the texts they engage with. It’s far easier to reduce people to extremes.
The thing I wish Tumblr had more than anything else was a comments system worth using. I hate the extent to which any kind of discussion is reliant on opening new posts, or reblogging the same post repeatedly in a kind of unwieldy threading system, until it’s gotten big enough that there’s just no way to keep going. I’d love to see Tumblr embrace Dreamwidth as a simultaneous-use platform, i.e., someone writes meta and the “read more” sends you to Dreamwidth where openaccess posting allows for commentary and threading using your Tumblr name (or even anonymous posting, if it makes the commenter more comfortable). I’d also love to see this used as a way of keeping attention on fanfiction longer: perhaps Tumblr blogs devoted to reading and discussing lesser-recommended fic, with discussion taking place on Dreamwidth, but Tumblr used to tag the author, alerting them that – yes, people are reading your stories!, but without the immediate anxiety that comes with writing comments Directly On AO3. Similarly, it would be lovely to see more people, who feel that Tumblr has been better for them in terms of allowing for visibility they didn’t get on DW/LJ, be able to use Tumblr to introduce themselves to DW: perhaps use Tumblr as a primary location, but still comment on DW. Openaccess linking would draw hits to their Tumblrs, but regular commenting on DW would allow a space for their personalities to shine through in a way that (as you mention) isn’t really allowed for on Tumblr, where the best we can often hope for is that someone, somewhere will read our tags.
I do believe there’s a place for a platform like Tumblr in fandom. But it is absolutely not as our primary platform. At the end of the day, like it or not (unpopular? opinion forthcoming): fandom is a text-based culture. It needs to be generative. If it becomes primarily consumer-based it will die. And right now, the Tumblr-based model is not sustainable for the very reason that it is alienating so many of those who create the material that keeps fandom going. Gifsets are lovely, but they won’t sustain a fandom. Eventually we will all be discussing the maybe 5% of fanfiction written by authors who can survive in this climate, and reblogging moving images of the texts we watch on screen. That isn’t transformative fandom, and honestly it holds no appeal to me.
