I'm finally done with my thesis, so I'm here to share some of my findings (also since unfortunately it looks like it won't be available online for a while (ugh processing :pensive:)). So to reiterate my study focused on positive experience on Tumblr, so that is most of what I'll be discussing, but I'll touch on a couple of negative and/or more company-that-owns-Tumblr-oriented.
In the interviews, people talked about a lot of things that they liked on Tumblr. Some of these are easy enough to group together. For example, community was a big big umbrella of themes. Specifically, finding community around shared interests like fandom, shared identities and/or experiences like finding other autistic or queer people, or even finding people with similar political views. Also, lots of people mentioned that communities on Tumblr can be more friendly and welcoming than on other social media sites (this is something that I will touch on more as it relates to Tumblr's creation and initial stances toward issues like explicit content and monetization).
Other than community, being able to find information and resources was a hugely positive aspect, whether this is about niche fandoms, experiences from other autistic people, or even news like food recalls. In terms of a few other things that stood out, people felt like they could be themselves on Tumblr (I won't speculate why though it could be related to community and demographics), people cared a lot about the world and wanted to make a positive difference (so advocacy and similar), people were able to find selfcare and hopeful content on Tumblr, and people were able to vent on Tumblr about negative experiences. I would personally put "feeling like Tumblr is a safe space to vent and get perspective" as a positive aspect because it's important to have that space.
Content curation also came a lot, mostly in the form of blocking, which is more accepted and used more lightly than on other social media sites both to see what you want and to not see what you don't want.
Very quickly for negative things, pretty much what is common to other social media sites, so bots and provoking people for reactions and anger as well as harassment. I call this section "negative" things but it's both negative experiences as well as strategies people use to avoid or limit negative experiences. I also put anonymity (or more accurately pseudonymity since Tumblr users have a username they go by) here because of a couple of things. Firstly, not everyone is comfortable with showing their face and government identity all over social media, and secondly, you can't be embarrassed if your online identity can't be linked back to your offline identity.
Also, Tumblr search came up both in interviews and also from personal experience as a terrible no good nonfunctional part of this webbed site.
Moving on, the last section was about more company-oriented decisions. Things like not pushing an algorithm or letting Tumblr stay more like the older internet (design or functionality-wise) are decisions that the company that owns Tumblr (variously nobody, Yahoo, Verizon, and Automattic) makes and the users just have to deal with. There are tools to change the site more to your liking, from adblock to xkit, but the default user experience is dictated by the company. So (extensive) maximum post length, multimedia support (or the lack thereof), or the one-click reblog, are also things that fall into this bucket.
The other thing about company decisions more broadly was about Tumblr's inception and early history. A lot of people talked about how on Tumblr there are no influencers and people don't make posts with the intent of going viral. That at least in part stems from early decisions regarding things like reverse chronological posts (which don't care about note count) or not allowing certain kinds of ads. Tumblr really wasn't meant to be somewhere people can earn money, and it shows in the kinds of design and functionality that carries through to today. It also ties into frustrations over enshittification and people's justified anger over it. For a lot people, using Tumblr over other social sites or only using Tumblr for social media could be because people are not happy with the direction other social media sites are taking.
As you may have seen by this point, none of the things people talked to be about are exclusive to autistic people. Some of the themes that came up are particularly relevant, such as stuff on social norms (for example, people being willing to explain jokes as well as instructions for interactions on Tumblr like you see for people fleeing from Twitter/X), but nothing was exclusive. To me that's interesting because when people talk about designing technology or social media for autistic people, it seems like it might be more about the social side of things (so explaining norms, more acceptance, more clarity) than the technical side.
The last thing I wanted to say is that. It is fascinating (deeply negative) how researchers handle (or don't handle) ethics. Naturally this varies depending on the university/institution, but "cognitively impaired" as a phrase that is a separate group than people with disabilities (which already are a "vulnerable" population), it. It gets really complicated really fast because of the definitions people are using. For example, in the US the ADA defines disability (or cognitive/intellectual disabilities) one way, the activities of daily living (ADLs) are a whole other thing, and really what ethics boards are asking is neither of those but rather "do you understand the purpose, activities, and risks involved in this study" and "can you effectively say yes or no". I didn't realize what a quagmire that was going to turn into early on but it was way more messy and nerve-wracking than I would have liked. Turns out people don't want to poke around in ethics and instructions on how to handle ethics because they are afraid of screwing up. But that just means that nobody has any guidance on what to do and we're all just improvising. And that's not great.
Anyway, since I don't have a thesis repository link, I'll just link to a google doc of my thesis. When I graduate, it might not be available anymore but eventually it should be possible to just look up the title of the thesis in the UMD repository (it's Autistic Joy on Tumblr). But for now, here is the link:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Qm0-Hcpv_Ejn6Wc2cC_r0OV5B-J53wfL/edit
Hopefully the link works, someone told me you can shave off all the stuff after the question mark because that's for tracking, but who knows if it broke something. I tested it out and it seems fine, but we'll see.
I'll be archiving this blog at some point in the future when I remember, but thank you to everyone :)
