A Digital Miscellany @cthelmax - Tumblr Blog

cherryhatter-deactivated2015072

KICK THE CAN!

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

To kick the can, reblog it. I wanna see how long this can go on for.

the oldest reblogs for this post that i can find are from january 2nd of 2013. this can has been getting kicked around tumblr for almost 13½ years now

drtanner

And yet somehow this is my first time kicking it!

bronzewool

Saw the Backrooms yesterday, and I really liked it as a standalone instalment that explores what the backrooms do to the people exposed to it for long periods of time and how those very same people also alter the interior and summon things into existence.

It's probably not gonna please the deepdive lore folks who wanted to know more about Async and the rest of the research facility. They're still in the movie as this background observer watching our characters via security cameras as they get lost in the backrooms, but none of the named characters from the lore videos make an appearance as far as I'm aware.

It's very accessible to people who only know the concept and want a fun horror movie.

#Can confirm #was only vaguely aware of concept #had no problem watching the movie

After encountering the Skiitari Fisheye Freakout event in Mechanicus 2, it was obvious what I needed to do.

Get in the Titan, Shinji

#digital art #sci fi #warhammer 40k #mechanicus 2

Occasionally I'm gripped with the urge to do some 2D animation.

Thankfully, it usually passes quickly...

#digital art #animation #2d animation #my ocs #animation practice

is-the-battlemech-cool-or-not

nelc

LGBTQ rights enforced by battlemech

#reblog #mecha #not my art

#tumblr snek

depresseddisneyprincess

reblog this if your blog is a safe space on april fools and won’t have any jumpers, screamers, or anything scary or anxiety inducing

the-liars-art

Fuck yeah this is important

ctheldraws

#digital art #digital sketch #mortal engines #stalker fang #headcanon #sci fi #robot #hungry cities

bardic-tales

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

@changes (Edit: I already sent this to Tumblr Support under the feedback option. I encourage everyone to send feedback on how bad this feature actually is).

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.