Recently I’ve seen a lot of posts and a lot of answers & asks (including ones I’ve received myself), so I thought it might be useful to have a post with some answers to common questions and misconceptions/assumptions that get made about content creation and being a creator on Tumblr:
» Having a lot of followers means a lot of follower interaction/notes.
False.
First of all, followers are accumulated over a blog’s total lifespan- that means you can have hundreds or even into thousands of blogs that have been abandoned or dormant still following you if your blog is old enough. There are also the ever-present bots, blogs that only follow you for a specific type of content (meaning that anything else posted wil be ignored), as well as blogs that follow specifically to browse content and not interact, meaning that you can have an extremely large follower count and still experience little follower interaction.
Yes, more followers means the potential for more interaction, but this is not automatically the case. More than the numbers, posts on Tumblr live and thrive via reblogs, which exponentially increase the audience they will reach vs relying on the original blog’s followers alone.
» Reblogs and reposts? What’s the difference?
Reblogs are when you hit the little circular arrows on any given post. They turn green. You have reblogged. On Twitter, this process is the same but with retweets- not quote retweets, just plain, regular retweets. Please do this.
Reposts begin when you save any form of content to your device. You might hit save image on a gif or piece of art. You then go to your own blog, or to your account on another platform entirely, and upload that saved content. You have reposted. IF and only if you have explicit permission from the original creator before you upload their work anywhere, reposting is ok. The creator will likely have some guidelines to follow. These will differ for each person. Many creators will ask you not to repost, period, no matter what. Respect all of these creators and what they are asking.
False. This is also one of the most common reasons given for reposting (see above.)
Yes, there are many websites and services available that will make gifs almost “automatically”. You are welcome to use any of them that you would like. There is no form of a gif that is “better” or “worse” than another- however, your perceived simplicity of this process does not excuse you nor give you the right to take someone’s content.
If gifs are easy to make, please make your own.
Don’t have the time? Then you acknowledge that they are time-consuming to create. Can’t make them look the way you want? Then you now have a sneak peek into the process required by the creator who made it look nice to you.
Is your gif under the upload limit for the site you want to put it on? Do you have the source material on hand already, or can you easily get it? How are you going to split up a scene that you want to gif? Do you have that part clipped? Do you want to change or adjust the colors? Did the gif come out with strange banding? There are a lot more things to take into account than these, too.
Recognize that not every giffer goes through every one of these steps, but many go through all of them. Please respect this whether or not you believe it to be the case based on the gif.
» “It is ok for me to repost someone’s gif, because they don’t own the source material anyway so it’s not really theirs.”
The other most popular reason given for reposting. Yes, this is a tricky and convoluted subject- however, there are several points that should be made about why it’s still not ok nor excusable:
Firstly, there is no precedent set for whether or not gifs would be ruled illegal if challenged in an actual court case. This is unknown territory, so it’s equally as incorrect for someone to say “it’s illegal” as it is for me to definitively say “it’s not illegal.” According to Forbes and Fortune, gifs can be considered “transformative” under copyright law because they do not undermine the market for the original work. Obviously this is not a catch-all, but it is a real factor to consider.
Secondly, Tumblr’s own reporting feature has a section dedicated to misattribution, with options for “someone reposted my content instead of reblogging it” as well as “someone reblogged it and interjected a link back to their own blog” (which yes, self-promotion is against the TOS and reportable, but that’s a different subject). This form and process have been used successfully for gifs of a huge variety of subjects hundreds of times (maybe more!)- therefore, in practice Tumblr itself recognizes (and has set a precedent) that the gifs are, at least for these purposes, the “property” of their original creator.
Finally, if it was actually the case that a gif of something specific is illegal and the original creator may face charges and/or fines for it- why would you repost it and therefore open yourself up to prosecution also?
» The written word is less of a form of content creation than something like fanart, gifs or graphics.
100%, absolutely false.
Have you ever had to sit down for hours to write an essay? Paper? Thesis? Difficult and takes an outrageous amount of time and energy, right?
Did you have a cool thought about something that happened in fandom but just couldn’t figure out how to phrase it? What about conjecturing about future plot points in a series you love, or meta about what’s happened so far? If I asked you to, could you put down in writing the way your favorite character talks, moves, dresses, the way their thoughts switch from subject to subject, how they behave when they’re sleepy, what their room looks like, the way they interact with their best friend, their parents, their boss? Not as easy as it sounds?
Writing is an irreplaceable form of content creation. Who do you think is one of the most crucial parts, the backbone of the stories that are the reason your fandom exists? Those plot twists? That one line that made you lose your mind? The callback in season 3 to something from season 1 that perfectly showcases character development? Surprise! It’s the writers.
» Influence, inspiration and copying
This is consistently a hot topic. I am not an expert nor would I wish or attempt to claim that I have never taken inspiration from another creator’s works to fuel my own, but my thoughts on the matter are these:
Being influenced by another content creator should create inspiration, not imitation. A starting point to check yourself on this could be as simple as this: do you find yourself going back to a creator’s original work to reference or “get further inspiration”? Instead, ask yourself: what is it about this work or this person’s body of work that inspires me? Colors, style, composition? Try to take time to identify these and then start fresh with them in mind. One of my favorite suggestions is also the idea that if you are creating something based on multiple influences, you are much likelier to create something new and original, and much less likely to create a copy/imitation (even an unintentional one) than if you are pulling from only a single source of inspiration.
I’ve also seen “Do you feel the need to hide who or what influenced your drawing?” used as a sort of conscience gauge, and I would personally take it even one step further than this. On Tumblr, “hide” could mean many things, including “shove their username somewhere in the tags”. On Twitter, it could be “credit the original creator in a reply that no one will see.” Most importantly with this point however, is that this is still taking into account that you were influenced by someone or something, not that you are copying or directly imitating them. If the original creator could come across your work and be taken aback, or if someone else familiar with their work could potentially send them a message saying something like “Do you have an alternate account?” or “I thought this was your work!”, then even if you’ve plastered “inspired by so-and-so” all over the post, it’s still a copy, and that’s not cool, for the original creator or for you and what your work could have been.
My final thoughts: There will be times when creators just naturally have similar styles, there will be times when you are unconsciously influenced by another creator and produce something similar to them, and there will be times when you will have the same idea as another creative- particularly with giffing, there will be many posts with very similar content. This much is inevitable, and there’s nothing wrong with it when it occurs honestly. If however something happens where a creator is consistently “accidentally” or “unintentionally” creating content that is an obvious or direct imitation of other creators (be it in style, concept, composition, whatever), then there’s no way to brush it off as anything but intentional. Don’t do this. Don’t be that creator. Please respect other creators- you should know what they put into the content they make! Please respect yourself and the content you are capable of!
» It’s ok if I just want to like posts instead of reblogging them. It still shows the content creator that I enjoy their work.
This subject has been addressed a number of times very well, so I’ll just summarize as best I can.
Yes, you are obviously free to like a content creator’s work. However, when you do not reblog, the reach of the content stops there.
Yes, content creation should not be solely note-driven. And yes, content creators appreciate likes. It is wonderful to have an indication that something that made you happy to create makes other people happy also. But if you were the creator, would you not want to attempt to reach as many people as possible, in case they might also appreciate your content?
Likes alone cannot do this. For content creators who base their livelihood on the spread of their work via social media, this is actively harmful. For those creators, a like instead of a reblog is effectual lost revenue. It is true that this obviously does not apply to every creator- but the fact that the mindset of like, don’t reblog seems to be increasingly common, especially compared to several years ago in the same spaces on the same platform, means that this is a real threat for them.
Have you seen creators self-reblogging their own creations? This is a huge reason why. Aside from the fact that timezones exist and that it’s impossible to reach all of your audience with a single posting time, this is one small way that creators are trying to extend their reach to as many people as possible (and creators, you should never feel bad- or made to feel bad- for doing this).
If, as a content creator, you felt that your content was not reaching and more importantly could not reach a wider audience, would you be surprised if your motivation to continue began to disappear? Creators have stressed this over and over- in order to keep fandom spaces thriving on Tumblr, it is crucial to circulate the works that have been put out there. If things keep diminishing at the same rate they have been, there will simply be so little creative content to reblog that it won’t matter if you “like” it or not any more.
