REMINDER for fandom sanity’s sake:
Tumblr does NOT equal the whole of your fandom.
People forget, just because tumblr has a lot of active fandoms, it’s not THE fandom. Tumblr is a bubble, and very few populate it in comparison to everyone else out there.
The Majority does NOT tag every piece of their content, they often leave it untagged, or hidden. Or, if they do tag something, say: “Only my partners/friends/these URLs can reblog.” Therefore, it doesn’t get mileage. MOST fans do not agree with the things they see in tags, and have chosen to NOT add content to the tags anymore, because they do not want discourse on their posts, they don’t want toxic people seeing them or their content, they don’t want hate and false accusations sent to them for disagreeing, and they of course, want to preserve their content without worry, theft, or bastardization.
Fandom has changed A LOT over the past decade. 90% of people hide their stuff and only show it and discuss it with people they trust.
A lot of things “get milage” in the tags SEEM popular. 100, 500, 700 notes.
But quite a few of those notes are JUST likes which means a person may just be bookmarking that post, nothing else. “Likes” don’t always mean they LIKE LIKE it. Sometimes they hate what they see, but want to watch that post JIC it affects their blog, or want to show it to someone else later.
A lot of those notes are multiple reblogs from the same person over and over, many times a person with multiple BLOGS reblogging it again and again to all their url’s. But it’s still the same person.
A lot of those notes are deleted reblogs, or deleted blog reblogs/likes. But tumblr STILL counts the initial like or reblog, regardless if they kept it on your blog.
Percentages don’t lie. Tumblr has 60 million active users. ( to date ) 1000 notes on one post is the equivalent of ABOUT 4% of tumblr seeing it. That is SO SMALL. Which means, as “popular” as a bothersome idea may seem, it’s only a fragment of TUMBLR’S gaze. Never mind the real world, where the pool is even bigger, and far less people agree with the discourse in your tags.
