for the lurkers/likers
Dec. 5th, 2018 03:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2RArf3L
I was talking to @walburgablack this morning on Instagram of all places (we are all desperate not to lose one another, and some of us jaded veterans long ago started exchanging our other handles, because we have never believed any one site would stay), and while both of us are the sort of inveterate essayists who have no real problem fitting in to a largely text-and-OP-based platform like Dreamwidth, we were mourning a little about what we’ll lose by leaving Tumblr.
She pointed out that it’s not that you can’t lurk on DW; it’s dead easy to just read and not post. But she admitted, it’s a big barrier to actually follow someone instead of reading silently on their page, and an even bigger barrier to actually leave a comment– you have to be coherent, you know?– and like her, I admitted I was using the current kerfuffle as a good reason to actually follow people I’ve definitely read for a while but never actually engaged with in any way. (I am absolutely feeling weird about the social-order inversion of following handles to other sites when they are relative to me very BNF and I’ve never actually spoken to them before but here I am with them suddenly following me back when we were never mutuals on Tumblr? It’s weird. I feel like I’m presuming.)
I was on Livejournal for about a decade before it imploded (I never left, I just also never accepted the latest TOS that wasn’t translated into English, so my crossposter broke and it kicks me back an error a day)– and in that time, I know I had a substantial following of anons who never commented, never reached out to me, never contacted me, but once in a great while someone would leave an anon comment or, later, on another platform, would confess that they’d been reading me for years. Now, I was not a big f-locker on LJ, so there was a ton of stuff I wrote publicly about. (Towards the end, I started having some hostile RL anons– I never did find out who, but someone who knew me was reading my blog and copy-pasting it for non-readers. Even f-locked posts sometimes, so I had to lock down a lot of things. This is preserved in my privacy groups on DW, even though I don’t really remember the details otherwise– some of those groups are explicitly me trying to exclude the person whose account i thought was being used to read locked posts and copy-paste them to stir shit. I never did figure it out, and anyway– LJ imploded, and the RL drama changed, and nobody cared anymore, but. This involved MySpace too, for the record, so there’s some ancient shit for you.)
And what I’ll miss about Tumblr is that it lowered the bar for engagement. I have a lot of followers on Tumblr, more than I ever had on LJ. And an awful lot of you don’t write a great deal on your own. You like posts, and you reblog stuff, and sometimes you leave replies, which usually make my day. But a lot of you have moved into being people I recognize, people I care about, people whose rare actual commentary is a thing I treasure. And that built up because I can form a mental relationship with an avatar and a series of “likes” and reblogs; I can tell what you’re interested in of my content, if it’s that you came for the fic and stayed for the cute farm pictures, or vice versa. It’s all very pleasant. Even if it’s just that you’re only into the fic and don’t care about the rest– that’s cool too! I appreciate that, and it’s part of my experience here.
And you-all are the ones I’m worried for, now. On DW, what will you do? Is there room for you? Of course I think so, I can’t help but write thousand-word essays every time I sneeze. I’m a content creator and it’s what I do and I couldn’t stop if I tried, and I have been chafing in dissatisfaction (i.e. I’ve fucking hated it) for six years on this site because it’s not really designed for me, and I’m fucking delighted to be hopefully finding enough people on a better text-based platform for it to meet my social media needs.
But, as someone said over there, it’s kind of like everyone’s coming home from war. Like… home, what a profound relief, but… we’ve lost so many and it’s been hard and some of us are pretty fucking damaged, and it’s never going to be the same.
And the casualties are going to be the people who don’t fit on text-based platforms. All of you darlings who don’t have a lot to say on your own, but love things, and curate their reblogs, and signal boost what they believe in, and like what they like and comment only rarely and with great trepidation but often with fantastic insight–
Oh, I’m just so worried for all of you. I don’t know if Pillowfort will work for you better; I’m going to look over there, worried as I am about their weird UI blind spots and their shaky underpinnings and good-natured (?) ignorance about real-world problems and why can’t i see who liked my posts why have likes– if I can get the site to load, it spun a little wheel for me for two hours last night, I haven’t logged in since mid-November– and I’ll be on Twitter and Instagram and all of that shit.
But I’m just worried. I don’t want to lose you. I didn’t really mind my LJ anons? but I couldn’t have much of a relationship with them, because I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t know who they were. And they were scary sometimes. Some of them were definitely hostile. I kept having to turn anon commenting on and off. I’ll try to turn it back on, on DW. It lets you use OpenID if you’re not willing to log in, which is a super 2005 kind of dealie, but it makes sense, I promise. I literally don’t remember how it works but it’s a thing.
(There are still hostile anons on Tumblr too! Just, the barrier for engagement is slightly higher for them, there’s no “dislike” button, and silently hatereading is as invisible as it was on LJ.)
I don’t want to go back to that. I want there to be room for everybody. I’m hoping DW brings back more nuanced discussions, sure, and Tumblr’s a hellsite I can’t wait to escape, sure. But.
I’ll miss you. I hope you find a home. And I hope that home still includes me somehow.
[me: dreamwidth | instagram | pillowfort | twitter | ao3]
(Your picture was not posted)
I was talking to @walburgablack this morning on Instagram of all places (we are all desperate not to lose one another, and some of us jaded veterans long ago started exchanging our other handles, because we have never believed any one site would stay), and while both of us are the sort of inveterate essayists who have no real problem fitting in to a largely text-and-OP-based platform like Dreamwidth, we were mourning a little about what we’ll lose by leaving Tumblr.
She pointed out that it’s not that you can’t lurk on DW; it’s dead easy to just read and not post. But she admitted, it’s a big barrier to actually follow someone instead of reading silently on their page, and an even bigger barrier to actually leave a comment– you have to be coherent, you know?– and like her, I admitted I was using the current kerfuffle as a good reason to actually follow people I’ve definitely read for a while but never actually engaged with in any way. (I am absolutely feeling weird about the social-order inversion of following handles to other sites when they are relative to me very BNF and I’ve never actually spoken to them before but here I am with them suddenly following me back when we were never mutuals on Tumblr? It’s weird. I feel like I’m presuming.)
I was on Livejournal for about a decade before it imploded (I never left, I just also never accepted the latest TOS that wasn’t translated into English, so my crossposter broke and it kicks me back an error a day)– and in that time, I know I had a substantial following of anons who never commented, never reached out to me, never contacted me, but once in a great while someone would leave an anon comment or, later, on another platform, would confess that they’d been reading me for years. Now, I was not a big f-locker on LJ, so there was a ton of stuff I wrote publicly about. (Towards the end, I started having some hostile RL anons– I never did find out who, but someone who knew me was reading my blog and copy-pasting it for non-readers. Even f-locked posts sometimes, so I had to lock down a lot of things. This is preserved in my privacy groups on DW, even though I don’t really remember the details otherwise– some of those groups are explicitly me trying to exclude the person whose account i thought was being used to read locked posts and copy-paste them to stir shit. I never did figure it out, and anyway– LJ imploded, and the RL drama changed, and nobody cared anymore, but. This involved MySpace too, for the record, so there’s some ancient shit for you.)
And what I’ll miss about Tumblr is that it lowered the bar for engagement. I have a lot of followers on Tumblr, more than I ever had on LJ. And an awful lot of you don’t write a great deal on your own. You like posts, and you reblog stuff, and sometimes you leave replies, which usually make my day. But a lot of you have moved into being people I recognize, people I care about, people whose rare actual commentary is a thing I treasure. And that built up because I can form a mental relationship with an avatar and a series of “likes” and reblogs; I can tell what you’re interested in of my content, if it’s that you came for the fic and stayed for the cute farm pictures, or vice versa. It’s all very pleasant. Even if it’s just that you’re only into the fic and don’t care about the rest– that’s cool too! I appreciate that, and it’s part of my experience here.
And you-all are the ones I’m worried for, now. On DW, what will you do? Is there room for you? Of course I think so, I can’t help but write thousand-word essays every time I sneeze. I’m a content creator and it’s what I do and I couldn’t stop if I tried, and I have been chafing in dissatisfaction (i.e. I’ve fucking hated it) for six years on this site because it’s not really designed for me, and I’m fucking delighted to be hopefully finding enough people on a better text-based platform for it to meet my social media needs.
But, as someone said over there, it’s kind of like everyone’s coming home from war. Like… home, what a profound relief, but… we’ve lost so many and it’s been hard and some of us are pretty fucking damaged, and it’s never going to be the same.
And the casualties are going to be the people who don’t fit on text-based platforms. All of you darlings who don’t have a lot to say on your own, but love things, and curate their reblogs, and signal boost what they believe in, and like what they like and comment only rarely and with great trepidation but often with fantastic insight–
Oh, I’m just so worried for all of you. I don’t know if Pillowfort will work for you better; I’m going to look over there, worried as I am about their weird UI blind spots and their shaky underpinnings and good-natured (?) ignorance about real-world problems and why can’t i see who liked my posts why have likes– if I can get the site to load, it spun a little wheel for me for two hours last night, I haven’t logged in since mid-November– and I’ll be on Twitter and Instagram and all of that shit.
But I’m just worried. I don’t want to lose you. I didn’t really mind my LJ anons? but I couldn’t have much of a relationship with them, because I couldn’t see them, I couldn’t know who they were. And they were scary sometimes. Some of them were definitely hostile. I kept having to turn anon commenting on and off. I’ll try to turn it back on, on DW. It lets you use OpenID if you’re not willing to log in, which is a super 2005 kind of dealie, but it makes sense, I promise. I literally don’t remember how it works but it’s a thing.
(There are still hostile anons on Tumblr too! Just, the barrier for engagement is slightly higher for them, there’s no “dislike” button, and silently hatereading is as invisible as it was on LJ.)
I don’t want to go back to that. I want there to be room for everybody. I’m hoping DW brings back more nuanced discussions, sure, and Tumblr’s a hellsite I can’t wait to escape, sure. But.
I’ll miss you. I hope you find a home. And I hope that home still includes me somehow.
[me: dreamwidth | instagram | pillowfort | twitter | ao3]
(Your picture was not posted)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 05:44 pm (UTC)I engaged in two different long (and polite) conversations here yesterday and I hadn't realised how I missed this. It's not about one's post anymore but about the exchange, a bit like on AO3 when the conversation strays from straight up fic appreciation.
But I see what you mean! And I guess that unless the critical mass is reached here, there will be loss of fandom activity because remembering how to interact through comments in a time where all social networks rely on viral reblogging and mass likes takes time and dedication - and also probably experience, which is why I'm worried about a generational divide in fandom.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 07:43 pm (UTC)I am looking forward enormously to real conversations. With Tumblr I got this awful kind of ADHD whiplash, where I'd still be interested in something but further replying was Not Done-- either I'd be repetitively reblogging a too-long chain, or I'd be putting replies into the ether on a post, or I'd be hassling someone with repetitive asks, and so I just had to be like, OK, shrug, let it go, and move on, and it wound up so difficult to hold anything in your head for any amount of time. I feel like it's not good for my mind to live like that, and my ability to concentrate has degraded.
But I'm just worried at all the people I'll lose. Especially people with really different POVs and perspectives. Some of it is generational, some of it class-based, some of it just-- these are really different people who live lives so different from mine, and the low barrier to entry for basic interaction meant I got to know who they were at all, instead of just. Never knowing they existed. You know?
I was getting really, really, really sick of how repetitive Tumblr was getting, though, and I probably would have had to do a massive cull of my follows-- too many people I followed were just reblogging each other without even adding tags, and it meant I saw the same thing literally dozens of times in a single session sometimes, and it was-- even if the thing was good, i didn't need to see it *dozens of times*. So I'd've lost those people anyway; it's not worth dozens of repetitions of hundreds of items just for the occasional nugget of original content or interesting insight. Those people, it's probably fine to just have them go back to invisible lurking and maybe leaving a comment once in a while. But I still mourn them on an individual level, even if collectively I probably won't miss it.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 06:39 pm (UTC)I have limited experience with fandom Twitter, but it seems like a lot of screaming hate and "my ship/character is better than yours and if you disagree you're garbage" and no thank you. (Trufax: I once did a Twitter search for my fave ship and encountered such vitriol that I had a panic attack. And I'm not prone to those.)
I do have a Discord account for chatting and I'm hoping to connect with people on there, because I enjoy wordy rambly posts but I also like chitchat.
I dunno, I'm responding to your rambling with my own. I'm not planning on leaving Tumblr because there's a whole lot of community built up, particularly for my one rarepair that took five seasons to get to its current level of attention. But it may come to that and I'm trying to get used to the thought of losing some of the relationships I built.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 07:50 pm (UTC)I use Twitter a lot, but absolutely not for fannish things. Nope.
I don't understand Discord. I joined one Discord chatroom one time, but I did not understand what was going on. I do not understand what you're supposed to do, and I don't understand how to find people. And the entire time I was in that single chatroom, I felt all of my worst social anxieties dialed to the max at once the entire time, I was both talking over people and being ignored and not paying enough attention to anyone else AND paying too much attention AND in general, it was pure, unadulterated hell. So I won't be doing that again, and anyway, I clearly don't understand it, so. No.
I don't plan on leaving Tumblr, I'm just going to stop checking it, because once a large enough percentage of people I'm interested have left, then my feed is going to be insufferably dominated by a few really prolific posters it turns out I don't care about that much. I'm just going on experience, here; the last to leave LJ were some formerly low-traffic communities I'd followed and then they just... if anyone else was still updating I couldn't find them. So no.
It just sucks to have to community-build over and over again. It happens for me that I was at the end of a long unproductive run, so I'm at kind of a low ebb for connections, so it's a good time for me to jump. I wouldn't have, but now it's opportune, so. I just hope I land somewhere there are enough interesting people to keep going, and don't wind up wandering aimlessly for a long time.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 09:16 pm (UTC)I tell you what I will miss is the queue system. I go through spurts of creativity and I loved being able to space things out. I'm still trying to figure out all the options here.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 09:38 pm (UTC)That is THE THING that I am also like. Ugh. Oh gosh.
I can get by with like. a Google Doc for drafts or something, probably.
But the queue. It has been so fantastic for me. I have more followers on Tumblr than I've ever had on any social media because, I think, in large part, I can be so much more consistent. I've got it set to post, and I leave it full, and I can stagger it out so I don't spam one particular Special Interest a lot, and then I can do things like go to my sister's house and spend 0 minutes per day online for two solid weeks, and come back and people haven't forgotten about me because I've kept posting consistently.
And yea, I sometimes go through a manic phase or whatever (nothing clinical, you know, just sometimes you're Really Up) and I don't want to post forty things in a row, but if I can schedule a few and stick some more in the queue, I can use that to kind of ramp up interest in whatever thing has got me Going, and I feel like that's so useful to attract engagement and get people to talk about your Special Interest, because you've got it spaced out but persistent and so on.
So yeah, that's. I'm sad about that.
But I'm not sad about the slam-dunk parts of Tumblr, where it was so rewarding to make snap judgements and consign things to the Pit of Problematicness and then the slam-dunk would get reblogged a zillion times-- I never ever ever ever ever searched the tags for any character ever, but I know that kind of environment really lends itself to that kind of shit like you're describing. Ugh.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-05 11:54 pm (UTC)I really feel this. It took me a couple of hours on this platform when I was still trying to remember how everything worked and it all seemed very rigid and old fashioned... and then something clicked and I had a kind of whole body sigh of relief. It really does feel like home. Tumblr was so angry all the time, and I lived in constant fear that I might put a foot wrong and wake up to discover I'd been piled on by people wanting me dead. I met some great people, but fortunately they're almost all here as well, and those who aren't I am hopeful I can persuade to try it. IDK, I just wish I'd done this sooner.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-07 03:58 pm (UTC)Wow :)
-formerly Ooooshinythings
no subject
Date: 2018-12-08 02:00 am (UTC)I am seeing a lot more engagement from a select group of users, former Tumblr mutuals, and some of them were definitely lurkers over there and are chatterers over here and it's lovely! I think while it was easy to low-effort engage over there, it was actually harder to OP because it felt so public and anyone could reblog you and make it A Thing!
I hope on the balance it winds up that more people find a voice here. We'll see how it shakes out, but I look forward to a lot of Same Hats all around. I know I'm a lot more bold about leaving a comment on a post, currently, than I used to be-- I definitely had a This Person Is So High-Traffic They'll Never Notice Me Anyway So I Might As Well Be Quiet attitude that I'm finding doesn't hold up at all here, people are much easier to engage with. :)