Algorithms killed our ability to self curate our media intake and online experience. The longer algorithmic feeds are considered the norm the more people expect content to be catered to them. This has the side effect of many people's interests, while genuine, not being discovered organically through social circles and exploration but promoted to them by a company with financial incentives to promote specific trends.
The belief that the content on someone's for you page on TikTok says something about them as a person as if it were a wall of magazine articles they cut out and glued to the plaster themselves. People have lost the will to seek out new things which leads to a small group of hyper specific homogeneous subcultures made up of already mainstream marketable advertiser friendly franchises and hobbies.
Many social medias have a search bar but when was the last time you actually used it? When was the last time a friend recommended you something without an already massive Fandom? We used to build these communities from scratch and the most recent fandom I can think of that had to put in the work to create its community was Class of The Titans, a Canadian animated Y7 TV show from the 2000s that aired almost exclusively at 5 in the morning or at noon on a school day.
Tumblr is the last true social media in a lot of ways. Even when staff decided to add a for you page or best stuff first the user base went out of their way to fix their settings to get rid of it. I can't think of a single other place on the internet where everything on your dashboard got there because someone you follow decided to put it there. The content stream is not endless by virtue of proliferation being a manual endeavor motivated by the very human desire to collect and share things that they like. On Instagram I hardly get to see posts originating from the people I follow as most of the feed is populated by Instagrams algorithm. Much less posts the people I follow didn't make themselves but tried to share with their audience because the mechanism for that doesn't even put the post on people's feed.
What makes me sad is that other platforms have changed the way we interact with Tumblr. Likes are up, reblogs are down and likes have literally never done anything on this website! It's the read recipt of Tumblr!
I long for this friendly but distant social interaction of people sharing the things they made and the clippings of things they loved and wanted to keep.
