Let’s all go back to Tumblr

https://theoutline.com/post/5811/why-tumblr-is-better-than-twitter-and-we-should-bring-it-back

by raleighm • 8 years ago

99 134 8 years ago

theoutline.com

newswriter99• 8 years ago

-self-harm glorification

-bad porn

-signal boosting for political rants

-faux moral intellectualism by social justice warriors

-cyber bullying

Let's not?

phyzome10• 8 years 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.

eahman023• 8 years ago

There's nothing inherently wrong with the Twitter platform.

1ris• 8 years 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.

philwelch2• 8 years 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.

Mediterraneo102• 8 years 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• 8 years 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-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• 8 years 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.

Grue33• 8 years ago

Tumblr is currently owned by Oath, not Yahoo.

lainga• 8 years ago

You can get all of those except the first one out of Twitter...

foolfoolz• 8 years ago

it’s there if you look for it

tomjen3• 8 years 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.

phyzome10• 8 years 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/

bena3• 8 years ago

That doesn't seem like an insurmountable obstacle.

drharby• 8 years ago

I figure any cms could offer that via privileges

chriswarbo3• 8 years ago

This doesn't sound like a use-case for a Web site to me.

How about sending yourself emails, categorised into their own maildir or IMAP folder, or even a brand new account? That would inherit security from your email setup (which is monotonically more secure than systems which delegate password resetting to your email account).

You can read and write them online or offline using a variety of readers and editors, including some self-hosted browser-based clients (e.g. RoundCube, etc.).

You also get a bunch of tooling for free, e.g. for backups (offlineimap, isync, etc.), indexing/searching (e.g. mu), etc.

genezeta• 8 years ago

I use a wiki (Dokuwiki in particular).

Some parts are public, some parts are private, and some parts are public but unlisted. Not perfect, but it works for me.

ebiester• 8 years ago

I'm on board with that, but we haven't solved the problem of notifying the world of our content. Places like reddit discourage posting your own material. HN is fine for niche but places like medium cross-promote between authors so things are more likely to be discovered.

mavhc• 8 years ago

https://indieweb.org/Getting_Started#Syndicate_Elsewhere

What if there was a reddit, but designed like a Planet Blog aggregator.

Comments would go back to your own site, but the ranking in the list would be based on votes.

philliphaydon• 8 years ago

But medium has a terrible commenting system that makes no logical sense, and a full page blocking advert.

Wish people wouldn't use medium.

Mediterraneo102• 8 years ago

I agree that individual blogs that emit an RSS feed to follow are a great thing. However, most bloggers don’t really have the skills to host their own blog on a dedicated server. So, even if they did avoid Tumblr, they would be relying on another such hosting service like Blogspot or Wordpress.com.

CM302• 8 years ago

It isn't that hard to install a blog on a shared hosting plan or VPS somewhere. Just find something with CPanel and some sort of auto installer (I think it was called Fantastico or something) and Bob's your uncle.

Don't even need to know how FTP works or how to code anything to do that...

JoshMnem2• 8 years ago

You can use a static site generator and drag-and-drop the build directory into Netlify (or deploy with Git). Hosting is free, including using a custom domain and SSL.

https://www.staticgen.com/

https://netlify.com/

geofft2• 8 years ago

Is there a good way to get my blog onto the fediverse? It sort of seems like the protocol (ActivityPub) is built in a way that it can support blog-style content as well as toot-style content, and it would solve many of the problems people have with discoverability, RSS dying, shared private posts, etc. I'd be interested in getting my blog (which is self-hosted and using a static site generator) publishing in a way that fediverse users can follow.

I guess IndieWeb is also in this space, but ActivityPub probably has the critical mass thanks to Mastodon.

eridius• 8 years ago

I don't know about the Fediverse but you could look into micro.blog, which is focused on microblogging but supports longer-form content (long-form content shows up in a micro.blog feed as the title plus a link to the full post). micro.blog is part of IndieWeb.

chipotle_coyote• 8 years ago

Plume, I think, is an ActivityPub-based blog engine. I haven't looked at it yet, though.

https://github.com/Plume-org/Plume

I'm aware that Micro.blog (mentioned elsewhere) is looking at ActivityPub support of some kind soon. I think the IndieWeb movement and the federated blogging/don't-call-it-tweeting movement are close enough that they should be working toward interoperability.

cjslep• 8 years ago

Static sites will have trouble, about the only thing I think they can support are ActivitySteam representations of their HTML content.

The ActivityPub part requires dynamic processing of messages from peers, as well as sending or forwarding messages.

habi2• 8 years ago

If you're running a WordPress blog, then the [OStatus](https://wordpress.org/plugins/ostatus-for-wordpress/) plugin connects your site to the fediverse. I don't know if there's such a thing for your static generator, though...

r3bl• 8 years ago

This is a really nasty way of doing this, but if you do have a Mastodon account, you can use feed2toot[0].

An "upgraded" version of it would be to parse another RSS/Atom feed for your blog. Make an excerpt of the content that's 496 - <link_length> and then construct the toot to be "<excerpt>... <link>".

Of course, native integration would be far better, but it would go way out of the scope of static site generators.

[0] https://gitlab.com/chaica/feed2toot/

jdormit• 8 years ago

I am writing an ActivityPub plugin for WordPress that will let you federate with Mastodon, PeerTube, etc. If you're interested, I'll be posting updates at @jdormit@mastodon.technology.

CM302• 8 years ago

Yeah. The only way things will really move forward (in terms of privacy, freedom of speech and general quality of discourse) is if people host their own stuff rather than relying on a bunch of large corporations aiming only to improve their own metrics and save their own sorry reputations.

bunderbunder• 8 years ago

Freedom of speech, sure. I don't know about privacy, though. Anything you post on your blog, or in the comments section of someone else's, will also end up getting scraped by robots and then aggregated and fed into the great Moloch idol of surveillance capitalism.

Savvy individuals could manage it themselves, by creating their own servers and encrypting the traffic and only granting access to trusted individuals. Most people, though, would have a hard time navigating that. A centralized (or perhaps semi-centralized, a la Mastodon) could help a lot on that front.

Perhaps something comparable to Google+'s Circles concept. I always thought that was a great idea which was unfortunately rendered completely unworkable by the unfortunate accident that it was implemented by Google.

nickjj• 8 years ago

That's what I've been doing for the last few years (approaching 200 posts) and highly recommend it.

phyzome10• 8 years 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.)

ObsoleteNerd2• 8 years 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• 8 years 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• 8 years 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-ta...

CommanderData• 8 years ago

I think Reddit and sites alike cause a problem with activism.

I see topics for great initiatives on sites like Reddit however everything about its engagement is just wrong.

Comments are poor - people know how to game it, posts have a limited life span affecting comment quality, when a post disappears from the front page engagement drops to what seems 0%. Re-posts are looked at negatively, reddit community gets bored of seeing the same topic even if there is an interesting change or update.

There is something fundamentally wrong about it. Forums allow for longer discussion and are a good way of promoting long term activism when needed, there are threads forums lasting years, are a joy to read and follow.

qrbLPHiKpiux• 8 years ago

I don’t mind seeing a quality dank meme resurface every once in a while. Scumbag Steve pops up in my life frequently!

spiderfarmer• 8 years ago

Reddit is not a one size fits all solution. The internet is a large place and there's always room for independent communities.

douglaswlance2• 8 years 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.

majewsky2• 8 years ago

What makes you think that neurons produce truth? Neurons mostly produce actionable thoughts.

hydrox24• 8 years ago

Neurons mostly produce actionable thoughts.

I suppose you think this is true.

api_or_ipa• 8 years 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?

douglaswlance2• 8 years 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...

pjc504• 8 years ago

neurons work together in networks to produce truth

Category error, surely? Whether or not something is true, it's truthiness or falsiness must exist outside of the brain percieving it, yes? In which case it's a process of recognition or labelling, not creation.

lrg• 8 years 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.

randomsearch2• 8 years 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.

phyzome10• 8 years ago

It's good for short-form humor. Does that fall under (2)?

wastedhours• 8 years ago

(1) and (2) I guess - depending on the status of the person sharing the joke.

randomsearch2• 8 years ago

If you want a serious answer - probably outside those categories.

summerdown2• 8 years 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.

bena3• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

Didn't they change that quite a while back?

bena3• 8 years 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.

therealmarv• 8 years 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.

woolvalley• 8 years 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.

pferde2• 8 years ago

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

intertextuality• 8 years 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

[1]: Pleroma is another decentralized, federated network that interfaces with Mastodon, GNU Social, and other Fediverse networks.

indrora• 8 years 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.

Grue33• 8 years ago

It's been literally years since reply chains stopped to be indented like in your screenshot.

blueflow2• 8 years ago

Wrong, that change only happened in the dashboard, not on the actual blogs.

bopbop3• 8 years 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?

adventured• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.

bopbop3• 8 years ago

Isn't wordpress more the technology? Or do you mean otherwise?

Who would you see as pushing it? Or do you mean it's monetizable?

It's definitely an excellent piece of software.

volkisch• 8 years 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• 8 years ago

And who decides what is "degenerate stuff"? You?

No, thank you.

jrs953• 8 years ago

Um...why should criticizing Israel be lumped in with Nazism and pedophilia?

AndrewKemendo2• 8 years 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.

dangoor2• 8 years 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.

AndrewKemendo2• 8 years 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.

b52• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.

pjc504• 8 years ago

I was also reblogged and targeted by a group of people who had decided that by "gendering" my female dog, I was a bigot.

Ah, you've run into an anti-trans false flag operation. Obviously they need to be banned for posting death threats, but they will be a hydra since their main organisation is not organic and is outside the platform.

blueflow2• 8 years ago

I was on tumblr until around 2016 and i can confirm the observations - harassment for totally misrepresented things, just to demonstrate virtue. From the few persons i met IRL it doesn't seem like an false flag.

jrs953• 8 years ago

I think you seriously underestimate the level of mental illness present on tumblr.

tinbucket• 8 years ago

What basis do you have for concluding it was an anti-trans false-flag operation in this poster's case? Nothing in their post would lead me to naturally reach that conclusion. Downplaying or instantly dismissing this kind of anecdata as the result of a "false flag" is naive at best and dangerous at worst.

Speaking from my own experience, I've seen a lot of stuff on Tumblr that leads me to think there's a very active, very angry, very threatening trans lobby on the platform. I've seen repeated threats of violence and worse from trans-identified individuals directed at feminists who want maintain female-only safe-spaces. These posts are rarely taken down and the community will often rally against the "TERFs" being threatened ("Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists").

I know one woman who'd posted about keeping changing rooms for females separated on a sex basis. Her employer and college were contacted repeatedly by a pair of people who said she was spreading hate-speech online. Their goal seems to have been to have her fired. These same people had been making threats of violence against her, culminating in a rape threat. At this point the police became involved and I'm not sure how it's since been resolved.

Obviously this is a tiny minority of people but it's a tiny minority that often aren't actively censured or disowned by the larger community, and whose extreme views are reinforced by a sympathetic echo-chamber of like-minded people. Some may be "false-flags", but I don't think they're in the majority by any means.

makomk• 8 years ago

Very much this. Tumblr has features which seem designed to actively encourage harassment. The quote-tweet feature which that post about Mastodon the other day complained about? As this points out, Tumblr's had its own version of that since the very start, and unlike on Twitter deleting your post does nothing about the quoted copy. It also allows anonymous asks by default, which are widely abused to harass and threaten. It also has an utterly toxic culture built around all this which the press seem to downplay for political reasons, just like they downplayed the Russian influence op which reached pretty much all of Tumblr whilst writing endless articles about Facebook and Twitter.

teddyh2• 8 years 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)

whywhywhywhy• 8 years 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)

jrs953• 8 years 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• 8 years 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.

androidgirl2• 8 years 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• 8 years 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

androidgirl2• 8 years 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.

stevenicr3• 8 years 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.

exikyut2• 8 years ago

You've probably tried these, but just in case...

- Internet Archive

- Googling the URL to see if anything's still in Google's cache

I wonder if you'd be up to sharing what the tumblr URL was, perhaps privately.

stevenicr3• 8 years ago

Thanks for the ideas there ex. not sure how to share privately, but I think the url was: sexchaterotic dot tumblr - I had three of them, one is still active, so it could be a different url. My open set of notes and emails only go back so far.

Since the ban of the other one I've been too paranoid to post anything there for the fear of it being destroyed with no way to do anything about it.

I did manage to export a tumblr site into a wordpress at one point, and now control whether the content stays or gets removed and have backups. Wish I could of exported that other one, it was pretty custom.

Let’s all go back to Tumblr

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