Reblogging again because I've had nap since I first saw this and have decided I Have Things To Say.
What annoys me most is the implication that you need to post videos of yourself online to 'develop into a personality'. As if Glumshoe and Gaud and Systlin and any fucking number of other big blogs, who CONSTANTLY get screenshotted and posted to other social media, aren't developed, recognizable voices who are beloved by legions of tumblr users.
Tumblr takes more effort, is all. The author wants to passively consume entertainment. And while they admit to laziness, not all internet users want to be spoonfed content created for clout. Numbers don't make for personality, just celebrity. Tumblr requires you to engage, at least to some extent, and while obviously a lot of people just can't be bothered, a lot of people can. Tumblr requires you to *gasp* read because the original content is not often purely visual, and the exception to that is art, of which there is plenty, but it's often niche.
Not being able to appeal to the broadest of audiences does not mean there is no audience. And yet, tumblr does that, too.
Truth is, the best content on the interwebs is being produced right fucking here. And we see the best of that breach containment to be plastered ALL OVER other social media all the fucking time. Why scroll facebook when anything worth seeing there is just a screenshot of a post that's crossed my dash here more than once? I get to see it in its original form and context on tumblr. Most of it is so limited when shared to other sites. Here, it's grown and developed, and I get to watch it evolve in real time. Brilliant threads with multiple iterations, whole fucking conversations, get reduced to what can fit into a screenshot for easy consumption by less challenging social media sites.
Tumblr doesn't have a problem. Or rather, the problems it has don't have anything to do with an inability to 'compete' with sites like TikTok. Tumblr and TikTok are apples and oranges. We're here for different reasons, and tumblr fulfills its function just fine. In fact, the problems tumblr faces are because people expect it to function like other social media, and it's just not. They are caused by staff trying to make it more like other social media and it's just not. The like/reblog issue is a symptom of users trying to utilize it in a way it's not meant to be used, or not utilizing it in the way it is meant to be used. But that's not a flaw of the site itself.
We talk about mindless scrolling, and you can do that here, certainly, but a lot of posts require something of you. They require you to apply some level of effort and reading comprehension, and even the shitposts require some measure of previous knowledge, of cultural understanding. They can't exist in a void. My mother and sister would not understand 90% of the one liners that makes me gigglesnort here. You have to curate a tumblr experience. You have to cultivate a tumblr sensibility. But just because it requires more effort doesn't make it less than. Just because it can't be appreciated by a more general internet audience doesn't mean it's without value, and just because some people are too lazy to invest in it doesn't mean it's dying or that it should.
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