Miss Problematic

Zoë | they/she | 26

[itshype]

Yes, the fics where Ilya goes to Shane's game in his jersey are cute and romantic. But why has no one even considered:

[louiemssleepsalot]

saw this post and then read OpalApparition's fic on ao3 and well...its inspired me to to do this. My first offering to the HR fandom.

I love crack fics with Ilya just being such a Shane Hollander fanboy. Haha

[ariadne-mouse]

Took a peek at The Pitt maintag for the first time and was tbh baffled to see that Robby/Whitaker is so popular, with a strong presence in both the top and recent posts. Despite the textual possibility that Robby is bisexual, this pairing never once occurred to me in my watch of both seasons to date because it has absolutely no sauce. So I was initially surprised, and then remembered this is tumblr and in fact I cannot be surprised, only weary and annoyed. Like. to me, Robby is a solutions guy and offering housesitting to Whitaker is just applying a solution (person who wants housing) to a problem (wanting to give responsibility for his house to someone, and Whitaker needing boundaries with the farmgirl) and this and their other work interactions are simply laced with classic homosocial reproduction (this may sound like a sexy term but it is not). Robby's positive work interactions with Whitaker are more important in their contrast to say, how he treats the women he works with, as opposed to being independent queer subtext. Robby has more tension/chemistry with so many other characters up to and including Langdon and Abbott and even his motorcycle shop buddy if you want an m/m pair for him. I suspect of course the popularity is more about people adopting Whitaker as a sad baby wet cat blorbo and shopping for a big strong man for him, to which I can only sigh. I don't have a compelling pitch for a different m/m pair for Whitaker but this does not mean that this one is good.

More on homosocial reproduction actually. For those not in the know, this is a sociological concept from Rosabeth Moss Kanter describing the tendency of people in power - usually white male managers - to hire, promote, and professionally support people who are socially similar to them. Robby is planning on leaving the ER for his sabbatical (or for good...) and is anxious about it being in good hands because he wants it to be run like he'd run it. There is a key scene where Robby watches Whitaker give the exact same speech to the new students about taking a moment of silence when a patient dies; he smiles to himself and leaves Whitaker to continue. He is literally offering Whitaker his house (again, for house sitting, but like. what if Robby doesn't come back...). If Whitaker is house-sitting, it also creates an expectation that he is going to stick around. Whitaker is not a romantic interest, he is a textual mini-me that Robby is investing in. Whitaker can be a good doctor and deserving of support and still all of this be true.

A final and very petty but correct note. Every text post I have seen supporting Robby/Whitaker is bad. The shipping lens absolutely obliterates normal interpretation of the text and makes it about The Men. In 2.12, Javadi's glee in observing the conversation between Whitaker and Santos, in which Santos stubbornly will not admit to liking Whitaker as a roomie & storms away saying "have fun with Robby's plants!" is NOT about her shipping Robby/Whitaker. It's because Javadi has her own longstanding interpersonal tension with Santos and is enjoying Santos being the uncomfortable and vulnerable one for once. This is extremely obvious. Even Whitaker's acceptance of the house sitting was because he thought Santos wanted it; it's based on his relationship to her. This is about the women. Why are we making this about the men. WHY ARE WE MAKING THIS ABOUT THE MEN.

[so-much-for-subtlety]

[lesbian-moon-gf]

Girl you are an obligate carnivore

[humedetector]

but her appel

[kropotkindersurprise]

Why do I need to write two little stories of at least 100 characters (but no more than 350!) when I want to report someone calling another user a "typical savage muslim"? (or any other instance of hate speech)

What use does any of that serve except as a way to discourage people from reporting hate speech?

[kropotkindersurprise]

I was reminded of this post just now while reporting a message that was just the n-word, typing my 100 characters about what it is that I'm reporting, and my 100 characters explaining how sending slurs to people goes against tumblr's hate speech policy.

I'm sure this reporting system greatly helps streamline the process of dealing with the rampant racism and transphobia on this site.

[kropotkindersurprise]

another cool thing i noticed is that when you see a racist post, you have to click the meatball menu and then click "Report Post".

You then have to specify that you are reporting it for the reason of "Other" and then select "Hate Speech".

When you get to that point, somehow the system has FORGOTTEN what post you were reporting.

So you have to go back and click the menu again to click "Copy Link" to then paste it in the "what post are you reporting?" field.

Then you have to write your two 100 character stories to explain why someone calling Black people subhuman is against the rules.

This has to be a deliberate design choice, right? Noone could accidentally make a reporting system this bad.

[ros-sauce]

[midnightssea]

Why do I kind of want them to. They have the opportunity to do the funniest thing.

[coughloop]

A little brown bunny was so kind and sweet it stretched its whole body out and got long enough to go to sleep

[memorycycle]

can u pls leave the discussions to the scholars

[flightlessartist]

it begins where it ends, under the yew tree.

finished The Everlasting by Alix Harrow a few months ago and could not get it out of my brain. such a gorgeous story gah

✦ find me on instagram @the.flightless.artist ✦

[rustystars]

the thing is i don’t even think abbot would be pro ice. but if he’s present during the ICE scenes it raises too many questions. how would he treat them? not as a doctor, but as a fellow law enforcement agent? how would he, as someone who enlisted in swat during the trump administration, treat trump’s ICE? his being swat doesn’t exist in a vacuum. his being former military doesn’t exist in a vacuum. would he kick them out of the ER? or would he commiserate with them. would he offer them some water. awful weather, right? awful people out there. he can’t be in the same scenes because they don’t want to have these conversations, they want you to believe somehow that you can still be a cop and a good person. ICE is evil, sure, but swat? they’re cool! they’re doing right. they’re just dealing with those awful brown people. they’re SAVING us! besides, LOOK HE’S SHIRTLESS!

like don’t make me laugh!!!

[plumebeat]

the pitt women sketch dump

[chongoblog]

Fun fact, you can put the entirety of the Communist Manifesto in an ask

[chongoblog]

[redstonedust]

i think queerplatonic relationship kinda got the same treatment as nonbinary where people assume its a special third relationship status directly between the romance and friendship binary. which it CAN be but its also an umbrella for "literally anything that isnt quite friends and isnt quite romance" you can be official queerplatonic partners or you can just be something unspoken and undefinable. you can be fuckin homestuck moirails for all i care. its all queerplatonic babey. thats the point.

[iamthetruestrepairman]

women’s bodies weren’t “made” to do anything, nature didn’t “intend” anything, no human action is “unnatural” and there is no inherent “purpose” to a human life

[iamthetruestrepairman]

people weren’t designed to do anything because they weren’t designed at all. Hope this helps 🤩

[transhuman-priestess]

If you don't like the new note count idea and you want to let tumblr know that you dislike it, you can tell them at this link.

Choose category for support 'feedback' and let them know what you think. Here's some tips:

Be polite. Nobody likes getting cursed at, and you're more likely to catch flies with honey than vinegar etc.

Be Specific. Tell them the exact features you are upset about. Mention the March 16th notes count update.

Be emphatic. Make it clear that you are upset

Remind them that you can take your business elsewhere. This is probably the most important part. Tumblr wants to make money. They might not be great at it, but the key to getting money is getting traffic which means having people already on the site. Let them know you'll use other social media.

If you pay for ad-free, cancel it. Yes, some people do. If you really want to use it on mobile ad-free, Mullvad VPN lets you block ads, even on iOS.

Go forth my psionic warriors!

[despazito]

can more people frame this dumbass update as destroying the flow of communication on this platform and not "stealing" notes from people. they're made up numbers on a screen babe nobody's getting paid by the note

[bardic-tales]

The Death of the Digital Ecosystem: Why Decoupling Notes Destroys Tumblr

@staff

For years, the total note count on a post served as a universal metric of a piece of content's impact. Whether a user liked the original post or a reblog fifteen branches deep, that engagement flowed back to the source. This ensured that the original artist, writer, or editor received the full credit for the viral success of their work.

Under this new system, engagement is trapped within the specific reblog a user happens to see on their dashboard. If a massive, high-traffic blog reblogs a piece of art from a small creator, every like and reblog that occurs through that larger account stays with them. The original creator is left with a stagnant note count on their own dashboard while their work generates thousands of interactions for someone else.

Erasure of Creator Visibility

Instead of seeing one post with 10,000 notes, a creator may now have to hunt through dozens of different reblog chains to find where the conversation is actually happening.

If the notes no longer flow back to the original post, the creator loses the ability to see who is enjoying their work, what the tags say, and how the community is responding.

On a platform where engagement often dictates visibility, splitting that engagement into tiny, unlinked fractions makes it significantly harder for original works to gain momentum compared to the high-reach blogs that reblog them.

Incentivizing the "Big Blog" Monopoly

This system rewards accounts that have already established a large following at the direct expense of the smaller accounts that actually produce the content. It transforms reblogging from a method of sharing into a method of acquisition.

When a reblog functions as its own independent post with its own note count, the incentive to click through to the original source disappears. The platform is transitioning from a collaborative ecosystem into a standard social media feed where the person who posts the content last—not the person who made it—reaps the rewards.

Impact on Collaborative Conversations

Tumblr’s unique culture is built on the reblog chain: a chronological, evolving conversation. By allowing users to like or reblog "any part" of the chain as an independent entity, the platform is breaking the narrative thread.

If engagement is siloed into specific branches, the incentive to add to a conversation is replaced by an incentive to simply own a piece of the engagement. This change doesn't encourage conversation. It encourages the commodification of individual posts within a chain, making it harder for the original voice to ever be heard over the noise of the rebloggers.

The Disincentive to Create

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of this update is the psychological toll on the creative community. When the platform actively diverts credit and engagement away from the source, it destroys the motivation to share original work at all.

For many, the reward for posting is seeing how far their work travels. If that travel is now invisible or attributed to others, the labor of creating becomes thankless.

This system makes creators want to share nothing. If the platform is built to harvest a creator's effort for the benefit of curator blogs, the logical response is to stop providing the raw material. I am one leaning into this category. Without us creators, the curator blogs have nothing to curate.

By making it harder to protect and track one's own work, the platform is effectively telling creators that their presence is secondary to the conversations happening around their work: conversations they may no longer even be able to find.

[disgustinggf]